Map: The 26-acre parcel facing on Highway 84, proposed as the site for a 40-unit tiny home village.
A particular sentence caught my attention, in the op-ed posted yesterday here in the Daily Post, about the ‘rights of nature’.
It’s hard to swim against the current, inside institutions — like government — that reward sticking with the status quo.
It’s tempting to do what you’ve always done, even when conditions have obviously changed. Sticking with the status quo can feel safe. Going out on a limb, on the other hand, can feel like… going out on a limb.
At the April 15 regular meeting of the Archuleta Board of County Commissioners, Veronica Medina, Warren Brown and John Ranson could have been innovative and daring and willing to go out on a limb, while considering two requests from Travis and Sarah Troxtell in connection with a proposed ‘tiny home village’ along Highway 84. The proposed development would accommodate up to 40 tiny homes on the site of a former RV park. The Troxells are building their new house on the same parcel, which will allow them to supervise the village.
Their two requests were rather simple:
1. Allow the tiny home village to have a gravel drive, rather than requiring the driveway to be paved.
2. Rezone the 26-acre parcel from ‘agricultural ranching’ to ‘mobile home park’.
The commissioners tabled the two requests. Their discussion suggested that they wanted legal advice on the decisions.
The BOCC is currently without a full-time County Attorney; former County Attorney Todd Weaver resigned earlier this month.
How did we arrive at this place in our community’s development? Where working families and individuals are seriously struggling to pay for — or even find — safe, comfortable housing? And where our thoughtful and intelligent BOCC is nevertheless hesitant to make decisions that will help address the crisis?
If our community leaders want to be daring, and innovative, and take the bull by the horns, it might help to consider how we arrived at the current “status quo” in the first place.
Prior to 1970, Archuleta County survived on an agricultural economy centered on ranching, sheep herding, and lumber mills. None of these industries paid high wages, so the community relied on close family ties, modest homes, and gravel roads.
The developers began to arrive around 1970, and gradually fostered a vibrant construction-and-real-estate industry that had not existed before. Some of the new developments reinforced their residential strategies through property owners’ associations and restrictive covenants.
But the vast majority of the county remained ‘undeveloped’ in the form of larger, agricultural properties.
Around 2006, the Archuleta County government determined that, for a number of reasons, agricultural properties ought to remain agricultural, and residential properties ought to remain residential. This led to the ‘zoning’ of Archuleta County. The County instituted regulations where none had previously existed.
All of the vast agricultural properties that had been converted into subdivisions between 1970 and 2006 were zoned mainly as ‘planned unit developments’ or as ‘residential’ or as ‘rural residential’. In essence, the Archuleta County government made a determination to ‘freeze’ land uses as they existed in 2006. That is to say, they decided to halt the community’s continuing evolution, in the service of preserving ‘property values’. The book of Land Use Regulations that enforced this commitment to the ‘status quo’ gradually grew and grew. The creation of new residential units, to serve a growing population, became ever more expensive and impractical.
We might pick 2006 as the year that our housing crisis began.
Within ten years — by 2016 — the cost of housing had grown beyond the means of most working families. Anyone who hadn’t purchased their home prior to this rampant price inflation was pretty much out-of-luck.
In particular, the Town and County governments made a concerted effort to discourage new mobile home parks. The general idea was to leave behind the impoverished past, and aim for a new, more affluent future.
But things have gotten complicated. As businesses and governments have lost employees to retirement or to the search for a more affordable community, it has become ever more difficult to replace them. The employees who have remained sometimes find themselves expected to work double shifts, and through the weekends.
The BOCC knows about this problem. They know that housing in Pagosa Springs is priced beyond the means of the average working household, and that the construction industry is not building enough dwellings — that is, dwellings for full-time residents — to begin solving the problem. Last week, the BOCC hurried to adopt the new Housing Needs Assessment, in hopes of facilitating more state housing grants.
But even when we’re awarded state grants, the resulting homes are too expensive for average-income households, and absolutely out of reach for below-average-income households.
Enter, stage left, Travis and Sarah Troxtell, with a plan to create a tiny home village. Their requests were simple. But despite the support for the project from the County Planning Department, the BOCC got cold feet on April 15.
Could they legally allow a tiny home village to have a gravel drive, when the Land Use Regulations specify pavement? Pay no attention to the fact that the County itself has 300 miles of gravel roads.
Could the BOCC legally change the zoning from “agricultural ranching” to “mobile home park”… or would that constitute “spot zoning”? We can note that the parcel once served as an RV park, housing workers at the lumber mill located across the highway… and that the community’s commercial Wildlife Park and several of the community’s larger subdivisions are a mile or two away.
But… the parcel was zoned “agricultural” in 2006.
I’ve driven past this site for many years, and I cannot recall ever seeing cattle or sheep on any of the surrounding “ranches”.
At any rate, the BOCC tabled the decisions that would allow the tiny home village project to move forward.
If our community leaders want to seriously address the worsening crisis, they will need to think outside the box called ‘status quo.’
If you keep doing the same thing you’ve always done, you’re going to get what you’ve always gotten.
Read Part Five, tomorrow…