The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
81 percent of people satisfied with housing options
Gunnison County residents are happy with where they live, unless they would rather own a home instead of rent, according to a draft of the Gunnison County Housing Needs Assessment. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that every house has a happy homeowner or renter.
Heidi Aggeler, an analyst with Denver-based BBC Research and Consulting, which was hired by the county to do the Housing Needs Assessment in January, told the Gunnison Board of County Commissioners at a regular meeting on Tuesday, October 13 that an overwhelming number of people—81 percent—were satisfied with their housing.
“I expected that to be more severe,” Aggeler said, “that there would be a lot of people wanting to live in the resort area. But that wasn’t the case.”
The assessment, however, does not paint a picture of people lining up to buy houses. It reports that population growth since 2000 has been “modest, especially relative to other resort communities,” averaging about 1 percent annually.
Ironically, the number of new houses being built in the county is substantial compared to the number of people moving here. Since 2000, census data shows that the county’s population has grown by 7.8 percent and the number of housing units has increased 19.6 percent.
The result, according to the assessment, is that 43 percent of homes in Gunnison County are “vacant,” meaning they are empty or only used seasonally.
Home ownership at the north end of the Gunnison Valley has also become extremely difficult, and in the rest of the valley it has just become tough. Aggeler told the commissioners that a person who moved to the Gunnison Valley and purchased a home in 2000 would have to make nearly $65,000 more annually in 2009 to afford the same home.
If they moved farther north to the Crested Butte area, their income in 2009 would have to be about $150,000 higher than it was in 2000 to afford the same home.
“Seasonal homes have driven the new home construction and the price increase,” Aggeler said. “You can see that since 2000, the county has added more than 1,200 new seasonal homes. Price increases have been extreme in Crested Butte. The median home value has gone up by more than $500,000 since 2000.”
Even with the high prices of homes in Gunnison County, the assessment shows a homeownership rate of 63 percent, which Aggeler said was as good as expected.
“Considering the college population [in Gunnison], that’s very good,” she told the commissioners. “You’ll never get above 70 percent unless you get rid of the college.”
But there is still work to be done to provide adequate housing for everyone in the county, Aggeler said. If the county population continues to grow at a consistent pace over the next five years, Gunnison County will gain 720 permanent households over the next decade.
During her research, Aggeler found a handful of people unable to pay their rent and manage other household costs. For those, the assessment suggests the county develop a rental assistance program that would help those families make ends meet.
The assessment also predicts that there will be 250 households in the county over the next 10 years that could be potential homebuyers, but are priced out of the housing market. For this, the assessment suggests adding to the supply of “affordable attached housing products and small lot single family homes.”
As for housing needs right now, Aggeler said most of the employers she has talked to over the course of her research say that it is relatively easy for their employees to find housing, especially if they are in the rental market.
The cost of rent has not gone up nearly as fast as home sale prices and renters need to make only $24,000 to cover the median rental price in the county, according to the assessment.
BBC largely based the assessment on 924 housing needs surveys that were completed by county residents in March, as well as income and census data they collected.
The Board of County Commissioners’ chairperson, Paula Swenson, said the county would use the assessment to inform future housing policy decisions.
Aggeler said she was still looking for information from the County Assessor’s office and an accurate survey of college students to include as a separate set of data in the final Housing Needs Assessment, which the Board of County Commissioners will be discussing at a work session December 8.
