Travis and Sarah Troxtell and their three kids were waiting for me at The Lift Coffeehouse a few days ago, to share information about their ambitious vision.
A tiny home village.
A small step, perhaps, in Pagosa’s overall effort to rescue its economy from a worsening housing crisis. But a huge step for the Troxtell family.
They had brought along a big roll of plans, and I asked if they would unroll it. So they did.
We can see, here, two loops of road will someday be able to accommodate about 40 “tiny homes on wheels” in sizes up to about 400 square feet each, if everything goes according to plan. Each parcel will have a small storage shed, utility hook-ups, two parking spots for vehicles and a longer parking spot for the tiny home itself… also a tiny ‘back yard’ and access to walking trails and generous common areas.
The ‘village’ will take up about 8 acres of a larger 26-acre parcel adjacent to Highway 84, The parcel was once the site of a mobile home park, long abandoned. The remnants of the access road is still evident, but currently in poor shape.
Here’s Travis:
“It’s a very interesting property… This housed the sawmill workers in the 1970s and 1980s, maybe into the 1990s. Bob Sivers, who owned Bob’s propane… it’s his old property.”
I’m pretty sure that, when my family relocated to Pagosa in 1993, the sawmill across the highway — Wolf Creek Industries — was still in operation. I have no memory, however, of the old mobile home park.
In the screenshot below, Highway 84 runs diagonally from top to bottom. The old oval-shaped mobile home park is visible at the north end of the 26-acre parcel. The site of the old Wolf Creek Industries sawmill — now a residence and a business that sells wood mulch — is visible to the right, on the opposite side of the highway. The Loma Linda subdivision is located to the west, and the small purplish roof, top center, is a Pagosa Fire District facility.
This map is from the Archuleta County website, and the parcel boundaries are not quite accurate, but you can get a rough idea.
Here’s Sarah Troxtell:
“So three years ago, we were living in Dallas, Texas. You know, deep in suburbia. We both had full-time jobs and three little kids… and as the kids were getting bigger, I was just noticing how sterile the are was getting in our neighborhood. Like, no rabbits allowed, no bugs allowed. And I just wanted something more for my kids. So, I grew up coming to Pagosa, and I’d brought Travis out here once. My parents were retiring and building a house out here, and we started thinking — we were working remote and we could move out here.
“So after we were starting to make that happen, I was looking at — what more could we do, as a family? To live and work together, more closely.
“And it’s funny… we were researching Pagosa to come and live here, and I came across some of your Daily Post articles about the housing crisis. And it really pulled at my heartstrings, because we were actually part of the problem at that time…
“We had a short-term rental property out here, that we had built, and we were renting it out to tourists, coming and going. And I really saw what you were talking about, and how it could impact Pagosa. And how Pagosa could become one of those little mountain towns that is only for the wealthy.
“I grew up coming here, and loved it. And I didn’t want to see that happen. I knew that we have to live together, you know, with people who work here and need an affordable place to live.
“And I thought, well, maybe we can be part of the solution…
“We had saved up money since we began working, so we had a little bit we could use to do something. So we just started looking around… talking to the [County Planning Director] Pam Flowers… and actually, Pam told us about this property. She said, ‘You should look at this. This could actually work for what you’re talking about doing.'”
I want to pause here for a moment, and sketch the landscape of a national, and local, housing crisis.
Not every community in America has been hammered by the current housing crisis, but the article we shared yesterday, by housing advocate Chuck Marohn, included a helpful graphic showing the average price of an American home in the years since 1945 — the end of the Second World War. The graph is based on the Case-Shiller Home Price Index, and shows the inflation-adjusted price of an average single-family home.
During the 1950s and 1960s, America’s construction industry was developing ever-more-efficient ways to build homes, and the inflation-adjusted price of a single-family home was on a slow decline.
But this was a period of history when a “house” was still considered to be “the place where your family lives”.
Around 1968, the American financial industry — in collaboration with the American real estate industry — began aggressively promoting the idea that, in fact, a “house” was an “investment”. An investment that — like the stock market — could be expected to make you wealthier and wealthier the longer you held it.
According to this graphic, the average American family will now spend twice as much of their income — percentage-wise — buying a home, compared to 1968.
Which implies, of course, that the banks and mortgage lenders and real estate agents are making twice as much profit, compared to 1968.
But these are “averages”.
The situation in Pagosa Springs appears to be much worse — for a young family — than in most of the U.S.
I mentioned in a previous Daily Post editorial that Clarissa and I bought a funky three-bedroom house on Lewis Street in 1993, for $52,000. That same downtown house sold last year for $460,000.
Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!
Read Part Two, tomorrow…