by Daniel Smith
It’s a phenomenon affecting communities from Denver to small mountain towns – a lack of affordable housing for lower-income workers often employed in service industries vital to a community’s economic health.
Many political candidates are voicing concerns over the need for affordable housing, but assessing and addressing the issue is a lengthy process.
What is affordable housing? Definitions vary, but experts embrace the concept of appropriate housing that is obtainable with around 30 percent of the household income.
That 30 percent concept is a far cry from what many workers and families face. Some residents work two and three jobs and face tough living conditions as rents skyrocket, housing inventories shrink and owners see huge monetary advantage in offering vacation rentals by owner (VRBO), nightly rentals and others, presenting complex tax and fairness questions.
It also reflects broader issues: a fair minimum wage; escalating housing and rental prices; even social and political hot buttons like growing income inequality.
Dan Osborn, Salida Director of Community Development said locally, with a more service-oriented economy, some residents are definitely under pressure.
“Oftentimes it becomes hard to hit that 30 percent threshold,” he said, “and for many folks in our community, they’re a little bit more housing constrained, where they’re looking at half of their income going to their home.”
Salida’s lone specific affordable housing complex, Riverbend Apartments, opened in 1997, thanks to city and county efforts to obtain federal tax credits and funding from the Colorado Housing Finance Authority.
The need for more affordable housing for workers who are key to the economic stability of a community has been called a crisis in Buena Vista.
Town Administrator Brandy Reitter expressed disappointment recently when the town missed out on a $995,000 low income Colorado Housing Finance Authority (CHFA) tax credit for a planned and ready project. The complex was a public/private partnership with political support, had funding been won. The city plans to apply again next year.
The stakes are high. A community’s economic viability partly depends on an available workforce for businesses, affecting growth, taxes, infrastructure, availability of needed services and the economic clout to survive future challenges.
Steve Westbay, Director of Community Development in Gunnison, spoke of creating affordable housing in Crested Butte and Mount Crested Butte, using developer “linkage fees,” meaning new housing, often second homes, creates demand for additional employees or service workers in the community that need to be housed.
“So that (linkage) fee is to help offset or provide housing for the service workers in the community,” he said.
Gunnison itself does not utilize linkage fees. Westbay said their approach is multi-faceted: provide substantial financial support for Habitat for Humanity projects and changes in city codes to promote lower -cost housing.
That might involve increasing the density limits on a property being developed, for instance, to allow for including smaller, lower-cost units in the larger project. Another strategy is reduced minimum square footage. Westbay said Gunnison allows much smaller units, down to 450 or 500 square feet, with certain restrictions.
Even the relatively new phenomena of “tiny houses” enters in – the subject of even reality shows. Westbay said he recently heard from a university student with a tiny house that he wanted to put on a wheeled chassis. He was told it could only be located in an RV or mobile home park.
The question of how residents may view so-called “affordable housing” doesn’t often come up. Do some fear the appearance of complexes reminiscent of “the projects” of past decades or have a “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) attitude? Not generally, said Westbay, and modern architectural design is certainly a counterweight.
“We have a pretty progressive community as a whole, and they recognize that housing needs to be addressed …” Westbay added.
Another option proposed is a town campsite for temporary workforce housing, especially during the busy tourist season.
Other approaches for communities can include density bonuses, reduction of costs such as water tap fees and community-provided workforce housing.
All of this, it should be noted, is outside federal housing offerings for the poor, such as multiple HUD programs.
State Rep. Jim Wilson of Salida may have been out in front of the affordable housing issue when he was the Salida School District Superintendent nearly a decade ago: he promoted a proposal to build 32 single-family homes on Holman Avenue property owned by the district and, in effect, rent them to employees. It would have been a useful teacher recruitment tool, he said, but some board members didn’t agree.
[InContentAdTwo]
Legislatively, Wilson said, there isn’t much relief on the horizon.
“Everybody talks about it, but as you well know, affordable housing is a relative term – affordable housing in Aspen is different than affordable housing in Salida, and different than affordable housing in Alamosa … unfortunately, Salida’s caught up in this thing of expansion of the tourist trade, and the cost of living and the cost of housing is skyrocketing, and the workforce can’t afford to live.”
In Salida, Osborn said while concrete approaches to the problem are well underway, it’s critical to adopt a definitive policy on the need for affordable housing and build relationships with stakeholders, from developers to state and federal agencies, and that takes much staff time and effort.
“My personal opinion is, if the market would provide it, it would have happened by now,” he said.
One important aspect in Salida, Osborn notes, is that the need for affordable housing means there’s a need for market rate housing as well.
He hopes that a workforce housing project can be undertaken in the near future, probably involving the city’s Vandaveer property, that could come to fruition, likely in the spring of 2017. Planning is already underway.
Naturally, that won’t be the only focus for creating more affordable housing opportunities around Salida. Osborn said he wants to encourage and assist individual one-unit projects involving both existing housing and new construction within the community.
“We’ve been given direction from council to go down this road, and so we’ve started the engagement process with developers,” he said.
Next is fleshing out developer proposals, bringing them back for city council review, then selection and an agreement to get a project off the ground.
“I think we’ve got the horsepower in house to make this happen; we definitely have the will within the community – the larger community understands that we have this need, and we just need to be sophisticated in our conversation so that we can have an honest conversation to make these things happen,” he added.
Next month: Tiny homes. One solution to a housing crunch?
Daniel Smith divided his time between newspaper and broadcast journalism for more than 35 years before moving to Salida to semi-retire, and apparently still hasn’t learned his lesson.
