The streets of downtown Pagosa Springs were reasonably quiet, early on Thursday morning, following another busy July 4th weekend. The vendors were gone from Town Park; the highway traffic seemed back to normal?
Many of the downtown stores were still closed at 10am.
A pleasant opportunity to walk through downtown and do a quick visual survey, to see how our perfectly good town is unfolding in the summer of 2023.
One significant detail. Very few of the commercial spaces facing on Highway 160 — aka Pagosa Street, aka Main Street — are vacant.
If you happen to be interested in shopping, downtown Pagosa has a limited selection available.
For those with money to burn, we have real estate.
We have clothing.
Especially, T-shirts and swim wear.
Who doesn’t need T-shirts and swim wear?
You can work up a hunger, shopping.
Luckily, restaurant food is available.
You can purchase marijuana…
…and related paraphernalia.
Mostly, though, we have gift shops, catering to tourists.
Also, second-hand items that might still be attractive to the right person.
Used books, for example. Second-hand guns, jewelry, guitars. Used furniture.
Apparently, in 2023, you can make a decent living, selling stuff that someone else no longer wanted.
I find it hard to believe that a store on Main Street can survive selling old discarded toys, license plates and kitchenware. But that seems to be a feasible retail choice here in Pagosa Springs. If the tourism development folks at VisitPagosaSprings.com can keep advertising Pagosa effectively, we might be able to keep downtown economically viable for second-hand stores and souvenir shops.
Uptown, you can still purchase a wide range of brand new retail items — at Walmart or ACE Hardware, for example. While downtown serves mainly the tourists, uptown serves mainly the locals. Two different economies, you might say.
But as anyone who needs employees to help run their business or agency will tell you, employees can be hard to come by, here.
Prop 123 to the rescue?
Local government to the rescue?
As mentioned yesterday in Part One, the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners heard a presentation by County Development Director Pamela Flowers on Wednesday morning — discussing numerous changes to the County’s Land Use Regulations that would appear on the BOCC agenda that same afternoon. Seated beside Ms. Flowers was Pagosa Springs Community Development Corporation executive director Emily Lashbrooke.
The proposed changes were officially adopted by our three commissioners later that day, at their afternoon meeting. You can download the changes here. The red text indicates the changes. (‘Struck-through’ red text was deleted.)
Hundreds of millions of dollars in state grants and subsidies, for affordable housing, will be distributed to Colorado communities later this year, thanks to Proposition 123, approved by the voters last November with hopes of addressing a statewide housing crisis. The crisis is particularly apparent in tourist/retirement communities like Pagosa Springs — where, in our case, hundreds of residential homes have been converted into mini-hotels. Vacation rentals. Short-term rentals. STRs.
This is on top of a local economy that failed to build the necessary amount of moderately priced housing — especially, rental units — following the crash of the local construction industry during the Great Recession.
We’re playing catch-up?
The 20 pages of Land Use Regulation changes approved by the BOCC on Wednesday are aimed almost entirely at providing workforce housing in a community that has far too little of that particular commodity.
While the Town of Pagosa Springs (a separate government) has been struggling for the past two years to get some privately-funded workforce housing built on three publicly-owned parcels — thus far, to no avail — the BOCC has managed to gift a dozen County-owned tax-lien parcels to a local developer (Julian Caler) and a couple of non-profits (Habitat for Humanity and Community Development Corporation) in exchange for promises that the homes will be ‘affordable’.
But there’s the rub. What’s affordable? We can’t seem to come to an agreement about that, locally.
The state of Colorado, meanwhile, has a rather clear definition of ‘affordable housing’, in connection with the Proposition 123 grant program.
Non-profits, local governments and private entities can apply for state assistance if the housing will be rented to families or individuals with a household income of no more than 60% AMI (Area Median Income), as defined by the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority (CHFA). Here’s how those rents would look in Archuleta County. As we see, in order to qualify for Proposition 123 subsidies from the Department of Local Affairs (DOLA), the rent charged for a two-bedroom unit can be no more than $1,174 — including (I believe) heat, water, sewer, and electricity.
Development Director Pamela Flowers:
“The key thing to remember, for Prop 123 money, anyone can apply for money. A non-profit, a for-profit contractor, a private property owner, anyone who wants to apply for grants can do that. And those grants will be ‘per project’.
“And the other thing to note is, they can’t do that at all, unless the County ‘opts in’ to the program.
“So, for us to opt in, which we have to do by November 1, we have to start by defining our baseline. And Region 9 has been doing a lot of work to help the State understand our situation and kind of… adjust? But what we have seen written is, we absolutely have to use [DOLA’s] tables. We can’t use additional data to flex the numbers.”
How serious is the housing crisis in Pagosa Springs, compared to the rest of Colorado? Did we ignore the situation while other communities were taking steps to address their growing crisis?
Did we take the wrong steps? Did we actually dig the hole deeper over the past 20 years?
For example. In 2010, our community leaders looked around at the economic problems in Archuleta County and decided that we needed to create a government-funded Community Development Corporation. In most places in America — typically — a Community Development Corporation focuses specifically on housing issues.
But here in Archuleta County, our leaders decided that the new CDC ought to focus on tourism. Perhaps they thought the housing market would simply take care of itself?
Curiously enough, the Pagosa Springs Community Development Corporation has become, in 2023 — under the guidance of its director Emily Lashbrooke — one of the main organizations working to address the housing crisis.
Bill Hudson began sharing his opinions in the Pagosa Daily Post in 2004 and can’t seem to break the habit. He claims that, in Pagosa Springs, opinions are like pickup trucks: everybody has one.