Trade them for a package of sunshine and flowers;
If you want the things you love, you must have showers…
— from the 1936 hit song, ‘Pennies from Heaven’ by John Burke & Arthur Johnston
When Bing Crosby encouraged folks, in the midst of the Great Depression, to collect pennies from heaven in upside-down umbrellas and then trade them for a package of sunshine and flowers, he seemed to be ignoring scientific evidence that a shower of metal coins, falling from a great height, would be potentially harmful, even deadly.
Luckily for everyone, the song refers to a make-believe situation.
The situations we’re dealing with here in Pagosa Springs in 2021, on the other hand, have every appearance of reality. Or, of potential reality.
I had a chance to listen to nearly six hours of potential reality on Tuesday night, during a Zoom meeting of the Town Planning Commission that began at 4:30pm and lasted until 10:20pm. The first hour of that meeting concerned a potential re-write of the Town Land Use and Development Code (LUDC) — a 400-page document that places legal limits on what people within the Town limits can do with their real estate property.
Most of the limits are relatively inconsequential, because we Pagosans tend to be rather unimaginative about what we would potentially do with our property, even if the LUDC didn’t exist. I’ve never run across anyone in Pagosa who wanted, for example, to install a rocket-launching complex on their property, even though such complexes exist in other places. (Now that you mention it, I’m not sure the LUDC actually prohibits a rocket-launching complex, but it probably should.) Pagosans typically view their property as suitable for either a house or some kind of ordinary commercial installation… like a motel, perhaps, or a second-hand store, or a real estate office.
We briefly discussed, yesterday in Part Three, two potential projects that received preliminary approvals (with contingencies) from the Town Planning Commission: a 330-square-foot expansion at the ‘Riff Raff on the Rio’ brewery, and three potential two-unit townhomes proposed for South 6th Street, overlooking the River Walk trail and the San Juan River.
At that point in the approval process, the Planning Commission was about half-way through its six-hour meeting. Next up on the agenda was a potential lodging complex intended for the east end of downtown.
The Pagosa Domes — if they are finally approved by the Town Council — would be located on the northwest side of Highway 160… just east of Bob’s LP and the Highway 84 intersection. The domes are being proposed by Tony and Annie DeMille, who have spent the past couple of years converting the former “Pinewood Inn” into a boutique motel called the “Nightingale Motel” — which features an artistically hip bar, the Neon Mallard, popular with Pagosa’s younger crowd.
Would a dozen cozy geodesic domes overlooking the San Juan River, be likewise popular with younger tourists? Or even old hippies, now retired from corporate jobs? Tony and Annie seem to believe so.
But one little problem with this potential project. A previous owner of the 5-acre parcel granted the Town government a trail easement that runs along the northwest side of the parcel, near the river. Annie and Tony would like to relocate the easement, and the trail, slightly to the southeast — so that the domes can be situated closer to the river.
This map shows the new proposed trail through the property, outlined in pink. The small circles near the river are the lodging units — the Domes.
Like the existing trail easement, the proposed new trail easement would allow the pedestrian public to walk from the property’s southwest corner (near Bob’s LP) to the northeast boundary of the property. The Pagosa Springs government has spent considerable time, energy and money creating walking trails these past 30 years, and this trail, across a privately-owned parcel, is envisioned — by the Town government — as part of the River Walk trail that currently starts at the Town’s very southern limits, 2 1/2 miles away.
To a practical person like myself, the idea of switching the old easement for the new (potential) easement seems like a no-brainer. But the Planning Commission beat the dead horse for what felt like an hour before finally endorsing the idea. (They were being careful.) Town Council will have the final say on the easement relocation… and then the DeMille’s will have the final say on whether to move ahead with the potential project.
By now, I think the commissioners was already a wee bit weary from arguing about trail easements, but they still had another piece of potential reality to consider: Legacy Alliance’s proposed tiny home park near Walmart.
This was not going to be a mobile home park. Not exactly. Although it would indeed be a ‘park’… and all the homes would be ‘mobile’.
For the past 30 years, both the Town and County governments — like so many local governments across the country — have discouraged mobile home parks, as part of an ongoing effort to “upgrade” the overall community. That policy, as it played out in Pagosa Springs, contributed to the overall lack of affordable housing in the community, and has helped to bring about our current serious housing crisis.
But “tiny homes on wheels” have become ever more trendy as the housing crisis has spread across the US. In a sense, a “tiny home on wheels” is not all that different from a mobile home, except for its tiny size. Both types of housing are typically built in a factory, hundreds of miles distant from their final destination, and then towed to their final destination by a truck, using the US highway system. And there they stay. Typically.
The main difference, physically, is living space. A “tiny home on wheels” (THOW) usually measures less than 400 square feet — often, considerably less. A double-wide mobile home typically measures about 1,300 square feet — three or four times the size of a THOW.
Another difference is price. A brand new median priced THOW in Colorado runs about $70,000. A brand new median priced mobile home runs maybe $110,000. In terms of ‘price per square foot’, the mobile home wins the contest, hands down.
But as we noted… tiny homes are trendy.
Mobile homes are not trendy.
So let’s hear what the Town Planning Commission thinks about a proposed tiny home park on Alpha Drive…