The photo above shows a ‘tiny home village’ near Seattle, created to accommodate a homeless population.
We don’t have a large homeless population in Pagosa Springs, but do we have a large population that are “severely cost burdened” by housing costs. “Severely cost burdened” is a government term for a household that is paying more than 50% of their income for housing expenses, including the rent or mortgage, plus utilities.
And those utilities aren’t cheap, nowadays. As Pagosa Springs residents may have noticed.
The Town of Pagosa Springs was incorporated on March 18, 1891. We don’t have a record of the population in 1891, due to some problems with the U.S. Census records. (I believe the records were destroyed in a building fire.) But the population in 1880 was estimated at 223, and in 1900 at 367.
So we might guess that about 300 people were living within the Town of Pagosa Springs when it got incorporated.
“Incorporated”. Formed into a single, corporate body.
A corporation. Sort of like an association or club, except with a significant difference. A corporate town has the ability to impose and collect taxes and fees, hold public elections, and make laws.
One of the laws that the Town of Pagosa Springs waited about 70 years to make, was the requirement to connect to a municipal sewer system. I’m not sure what that system looked like in 1960, but when my family arrived in 1993, the sewage from downtown homes and businesses flowed into some lagoons at the south end of town, where certain bacteria stayed busy ‘purifying’ the wastewater before the town pumped the effluent into the San Juan River.
When Clarissa and I bought our house downtown, we began paying a sewer bill to help fund the operations at the sewer lagoons and the maintenance of the underground pipelines. As I recall, the bill was $24 every three months. So, about $100 a year.
The sewer bill is now $71 a month. About $850 a year. And projected to possibly increase.
Tiny homes, to the rescue?
I’m mentioning sewage in an editorial series about tiny home villages for a couple of reasons.
For one thing, the Town’s sewer system is in poor shape. At recent Town Council meetings, we learned that the system needs an estimated $40 million worth of repairs. To pay for those repairs, the Town would need to increase the sewer fees.
$150 a month, maybe?
But the Town’s financial consultant, Joey McLiney, has proposed a different solution to the Town Council. The Town could ask its voters to approve a half penny sales tax — or maybe a one penny sales tax — to generate $2 million or maybe $4 million per year to fix the sewer system, and possibly even build a new sewer treatment plant in the future, (The town sewage is currently pumped seven miles uphill to the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District [PAWSD] treatment plant near the Vista mobile home park.) At the Town Council meeting this week, I heard considerable support for this kind of ballot measure, possibly in November 2025? Or 2026? The Council seemed confident that such a sales tax would ultimately be approved, if the ballot language didn’t frighten the voters.
The measure might even include a promise to lower the monthly sewer fee.
Most of the residents in Archuleta County are not served by the Pagosa Springs Sanitation General Improvement District, however. Only about 15% of the community’s population live within the Town limits. About 60% of the county population, in the uptown area, pays their sewer bill directly to PAWSD. ($47 a month.)
The remaining 25% of our residents use a neighborhood wastewater treatment system, or an OWTS — an Onsite Wastewater Treatment System, better known as a septic system.
If an ambitious couple — like, say, Travis and Sarah Troxtell — were interested in creating a tiny home village south of town along Highway 64, they would be required to create a wastewater treatment facility of some type, and the residents of the village would need to fund the operations of the system.
We would hope the cost would be less than $850 a year.
When I met with the Troxtells for coffee last week, they seemed confident that they could affordably create such a treatment system to serve up to 40 tiny homes on their 26-acre property.
The village envisioned by the Troxtells would be very different from the photo at the top of this page. Each rental plot would include parking spots for two vehicles, plus a place for a storage shed, and a small ‘back yard’ where the resident family or individual could plant a garden.
While the Troxtells are planning their tiny home village, other people in the community are working on different solutions to our local housing crisis.
Last year, the Pagosa Springs Community Development Corporation (PSCDC) began building ten new homes in the sometimes-geologically-challenged Pagosa Trails/Chris Mountain neighborhood at the west end of the Pagosa Lakes area, where Habitat for Humanity is also installing new homes.
The homes that Habitat is ‘installing’ are built in a factory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, trucked in and set in place. They are sold to local families at a lower price than most new homes in Pagosa.
The PSCDC homes are custom designed and built locally by BWD Construction.
A drawing of a BWD home:
The ten homes built by PSCDC/BWD last year were supposed to be sold to local families that have less-than-average Pagosa incomes. As I recall, the buyers were supposed to be qualified and have their bank loans approved by December, so they could move into their new homes in January.
We’re now approaching the end of March, and only two families have so far met the qualifications, obtained their loan and purchased their home.
Two more families might be close to getting their loan and completing their purchase.
But six homes have, as yet, no qualified buyers.
PSCDC has plans to build another 25 homes. But can’t seem to sell the ones they’ve already built.
It’s a problem.
Read Part Seven, tomorrow…