The Pagosa Springs Community Development Corporation, a private non-profit corporation, has announced a public presentation today, Wednesday January 31, at the Tennyson Event Center on Navajo Trail drive at 3pm. The CDC has invited two finalists in a competition to build 10 ‘workforce’ homes on CDC-owned parcels in the Trails and Chris Mountain subdivisions. The finalists — BWD Construction and Fading West Development — will present their ideas for constructing the 10 single-family homes during 2024, to be priced below $340,000.
The public is invited to attend, and will be allowed to submit written questions to the presenters.
Yesterday in Part Four, I quoted — very briefly — Pagosa Springs Mayor Shari Pierce speaking about workforce housing at the Town Council’s January 25 work session:
“I’ve always felt that, to build wealth in your community, you want people to ‘own’ versus ‘rent’. And a lot of times, a mortgage payment is less than rent…”
The Mayor had continued her comments.
“So if we can help families get into homes, that will help build community wealth, because they will have something to pass on to their children, and stuff. And I think that’s good.
“And then we have to look at what restrictions we need to place on stuff like that.
“I just don’t want us to be afraid to look at the Servitas project in a different way. There’s a prime example there…”
I can help unpack these comments.
The Servitas project, which the Town initiated in September 2021 in collaboration with Dallas-based student housing developer Servitas, as from the beginning aimed at rental housing aimed at workforce households. Servitas had — at that time — never built a workforce housing project, but was eager to try their hand, and their first pro forma, in spring 2022, indicated their intention to build about 64 rental units, to be made available to families at various income levels.
The general idea had the Town donating free land, Servitas doing the profitable development work, and a separate non-profit corporation managing the project long-term.
In November 2022, Servitas published a new pro forma showed 98 rental apartments, evenly spread between 80% AMI (Area Median Income) and 150% AMI. Please note that you can likely count on the fingers of one hand the number of Pagosa workforce families that earn 150% AMI. Average working families here typically earn less than 100% AMI, and thus, cannot afford the average $500,000 Pagosa Springs home.
Thus, recent options for a workforce family, hoping to settle in Pagosa, have been few. 1) Find an affordable rental. 2) Live in an RV or in your vehicle. 3) Move away.
In January 2023, however, a new Servitas pro forma had eliminated nearly all of the rental units under 100%, and had added in 12 ‘for-sale’ townhomes.
At the January 25 work session, Community Development Director James Dickhoff described the challenges.
“I think we can actually pencil out the townhome projects, the ‘for-sale’ units… but apartments are really tough,” unless some grant funding can be acquired from the state.
In her comments above, the Mayor is suggesting that rental units do not build community wealth, but for-sale units do.
The Mayor makes an accurate assessment of ‘community wealth’ if she is talking about, specifically, the privately-held wealth of individual families. America set sail on a massive ‘private wealth building’ campaign following World War II, when the federal government created a home mortgage guarantee program as part of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, better known as the GI Bill. Between 1944 and 1966, one fifth of all the new homes sold in the U.S. were guaranteed, with no required downpayment, through the GI Bill. The VA currently guarantees about 20 million single-family homes, out of a U.S. total of about 82 million.
Two groups have benefited from this loan guarantee program. Veterans and their families. And mortgage lenders.
At any rate, Director Dickhoff and Mayor Pierce are correct, in stating that ‘for-sale’ homes are beneficial, and do create ‘wealth’ for the families lucky enough to qualify for a $500,000 mortgage. An average Pagosa household can qualify for a $250,000 mortgage. That means half our families cannot qualify for that even much.
Which suggests that , as wonderful it might be for every family to own their home, the financial facts suggest that traditional home ownership is nothing but a pipe dream for much of the Archuleta County workforce. Especially, newcomers.
But there is another type of “community wealth”, and we have quite a bit of it in Pagosa. I’m talking about publicly-owned “community wealth”.
Water reservoirs. A county airport. Numerous parks. Streets and roads. A modern hospital. A well-stocked library. Fire trucks and ambulances. Low-income housing projects. Public schools and athletic fields. A municipal geothermal heating system. Publicly-owned fiber optic cable. 700 square miles of publicly-owned National Forest.
Many of the most-loved features of our community are jointly owned by all of us. (I am not talking about roads, of course. Yes, we love our roads, but not their current conditions.) Without all of these publicly-owned amenities, life in Pagosa Springs would be much less pleasant.
When the Archuleta County Housing Authority facilitated the construction of 34 townhome units at Rose Mountain on Hot Springs Boulevard, they greatly added to our “community wealth”. That wealth didn’t belong to a single family; it belonged to the whole community. The families living at Rose Mountain pay a reasonable rent in exchange for a safe, comfortable home. True, they are not building private wealth from “home ownership” the way many of us lucky homeowners have done, but they are also not living in an RV or a tent.
Our local leaders sometimes act as if it’s perfectly natural to spend millions of public dollars upgrading and maintaining a County airport that serves a few dozen very wealthy pilots, and millions more, annually, subsidizing the motel and STR owners in our community, and millions more maintaining difficult roads that, in some cases, access a handful of ranch properties that are visited by their owners a couple of times a year.
But where is the real wealth?