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Our View: Hearth and home

At Issue

The community’s ability to provide workforce housing

Our View

Down valley growth may be our fate

One could approach the news this week that Routt County Habitat for Humanity is dissolving from several points of view, but we find ourselves focused on the implications the news holds for Routt County’s attainable housing market.

At Issue

The community’s ability to provide workforce housing



Our View

Down valley growth may be our fate



The Habitat board called out, in a letter to the editor, the challenges of finding affordable building sites for new Habitat homes as a factor in their decision to hang it up. They also cited the difficulty of meeting Habitat income guidelines for households making more than $45,000 annually (depending upon family size). Livable incomes here don’t mesh well with income standards that don’t take into account the cost of living and wages in resort towns.

The Habitat dissolution letter pointed out that building lots in Steamboat begin at $120,000 and go up. Our search of buildable lots in Steamboat this week revealed one small lot on Penny Lane in West End Village listed for $125,000. After that, it jumped to a lot in a luxury subdivision with fancy design guidelines for $189,000, then to $194,995 for a couple of the smaller lots in Barn Village at Steamboat.

Stepping away from the Habitat story, we think the stated reasons for the local chapter’s dissolution should grab the attention of community leaders, institutions and employers in all sectors of the local economy that depend on realistic housing options in order to attract and retain a work force.

At its recent annual retreat, the board of directors of the Steamboat Springs Chamber Resort Association identified workforce housing as one of its priorities for 2015.

Combine the tight rental market with the scarcity and cost of buildable lots in the city limits, and one quickly grasps that we rapidly are approaching the market conditions that fueled our last grand experiment with affordable housing programs in 2002.

The problem is we’ve been around this merry-go-round before and got bucked off. The city of Steamboat Springs made a well intentioned and determined effort in the early 2000s to put a variety of tools, including deed restrictions, in place to compel developers to provide affordable housing to offset the demand created by their luxury projects.

That didn’t work out so well. City Council still is wrestling with the most equitable ways to dissolve old restrictions so that people who have been unable to find qualified buyers for their deed-restricted homes can move on.

It’s difficult to imagine the community revisiting those years. It’s also difficult to imagine the Steamboat residents approving an expansion of the city limits into the West of Steamboat Springs Area Plan after the drawn-out and difficult debate over the Steamboat 700 project.

One likely outcome of the cyclical nature of our construction and housing industry is that the Yampa Valley will fall into line with other mountain resort economies and come to terms with down valley growth. It has its downsides, including the social ills that families with children who make long commutes inevitably encounter. But it’s workable. The Roaring Fork Valley, where people use well-funded mass transit to commute from Glenwood Springs to jobs in Aspen and the new shopping complex in Basalt, is a case study.

We can assure you that there are affordable home lots as nearby as the town of Hayden. The entire balance of the Dry Creek Subdivision on the town’s southeast side is for sale — 38 lots for $570,000, or an average of $15,000 per lot. The subdivision is complete with utilities and a park. Similarly, the unbuilt 72 lots in Lakeview Village on Hayden’s southwest side are for sale at a bulk price. Everything is turnkey.

If down valley growth is our fate, we may as well get busy with planning for it. We could stop worrying about how to squeeze a few more affordable homes out of the Steamboat market and start working on a full-fledged transit authority that would span the valley.


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