The Master Plan Advisory Committee — the MPAC — met on Monday evening for another 90-minute work session, our third 90-minute work session since the beginning of the year.
The photo above was taken during a clever game called “Schoolopoly” designed by the school district’s consultants, RTA Architecture, to help the committee better understand to financial aspects involved, in planning the future of our community’s school facilities.
The volunteer committee was assembled from concerned local citizens, for a specific purpose: to advise the Archuleta Board of Education on the wisdom and feasibility of abandoning one or more of the community’s three of older school buildings and replacing them with one or more brand new school buildings…
…or alternatively, repairing, upgrading and improving the existing buildings.
About half of the committee are retirees… and about half are middle-aged parents with kids currently attending ASD schools or who recently graduated.
The three buildings in question are not currently overcrowded, and according to the January 2025 report by demographer Shannon Bingham, the school district can expect the enrollment to decrease over the next few years.
There are a number of reasons why the Archuleta School District can expect a declining enrollment over the next decade, and I don’t want to get into all of them this morning.
What I want to discuss instead is a proposed ‘tiny home village’ that may be developed south of downtown, by the Troxtell family, over the next decade, and the reasons why ‘tiny homes on wheels’ might be part of a solution to the ongoing disintegration of the Pagosa Springs economy.
Prior to Monday’s MPAC meeting, I sat down with one of my fellow MPAC committee members, for coffee at Higher Grounds, to throw around ideas related to the future of our local school facilities. But prior to our meeting, my friend had sent me a link to a TED Talk by educator and thinker Scott Galloway.
He suggested that Professor Galloway’s lecture represented how my colleague was feeling about America’s future.
You can watch that TED Talk here.
Professor Galloway is highly entertaining, if you are a fan of cynical humor. (I am.) He’s also informative… but not necessarily appreciated by the folks who run the American economy.
He started off his lecture:
OK, I start us with a question.
Do we love our children?
Sounds like an illegitimate question, right? Well, I’m going to try and convince you otherwise.
Essentially, as we go down generations, we’re seeing that for the last two generations, people are making less money on an inflation-adjusted basis. In addition, the cost of buying a home, the cost of pursuing education, continues to skyrocket.
So the purchasing power, the prosperity, is inversely correlated to age…
…For the first time in the U.S.’s history, a 30-year-old is no longer doing as well as his or her parents were at age 30. This is a breakdown in the fundamental agreement we have with any society, and it creates rage and shame.
The Professor here mentions two topics that we’ve tried to address here in the Daily Post on a regular basis.
The cost of buying a home.
The cost of pursuing an education.
Skyrocketing.
And creating rage and shame.
Essentially, America slowly developed a culture over the past 75 years that discounts the economic success of its younger generations. Speaking in general terms, the Baby Boomer generation — without really thinking what we were doing — has gathered an obscene amount of wealth unto itself, and decided not to share it with our children and grandchildren.
The resulting rage and shame may be partly responsible for what’s happening in Washington DC in 2025: a movement to further consolidate the nation’s wealth into the hands of the richest Americans, and withhold economic benefits from anyone who is not comfortably rich.
The transfer of wealth away from America’s youngest adults and their potential offspring (if they even feel safe having children) has apparently received a shot of steroids, as the wealthiest of the wealthy have taken control of the federal government.
Presumably, we’ve been teaching our children to hold the same beliefs? To view addictive consumption and the acquisition of wealth as the end goals of human existence?
Prior to attending the MPAC meeting on Monday night, I participated in a discussion at Town Hall. The Town and County governments are making an effort to address Pagosa’s housing crisis. Maybe a timid effort, but an effort nevertheless.
As part of that effort, the Town and County have contracted with one of Colorado’s foremost experts in affordable housing for resort communities: Jennifer Kermode — formerly director of housing programs in Summit County and then in Gunnison County, and now an independent consultant. She is helping the Town and County leaders develop a menu of government incentives that might help private industry build more housing to counteract the skyrocketing price of housing in Pagosa Springs — now officially the most expensive community in southwest Colorado, in terms of a “Livable Wage”. (As calculated by the Region 9 Economic Development District.)
The problem is fairly simple to state.
Basically, if you’re trying to earn a living in Pagosa Springs, and you didn’t buy a house prior to about 2012, you cannot afford to live here, unless you can find a roommate situation or you’re willing to live in a vehicle.
Many things have combined to bring about this situation, including the creation of a massively subsidized tourism industry, the growth of the STR (Short-Term Rental) industry, the general direction of the national economy, and plain old human greed.
Tomorrow, in Part Six, I will outline some of the ideas that are currently being tried in Pagosa Springs to remedy the housing crisis…
…and why ‘tiny home villages’ might be our best hope for the future.
And also, why they won’t, by themselves, solve the problem.
Read Part Six, tomorrow…