The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
“It was property management at arm’s length at best”
Karl Fulmer, the new executive director of the Gunnison Valley Regional Housing Authority, stopped by the Mt. Crested Butte Town Council meeting earlier this year to talk about some of the changes coming to the revitalized organization.
Fulmer has worked in both the public and private realms in real estate and development, from Traverse City to Sun Valley, before coming to take on the local organization in November.
The Gunnison Valley Regional Housing Authority is charged with providing “affordable housing, support and advocacy services to low and moderate income residents,” for the Gunnison Valley’s working families, according to the organization’s website.
After becoming what was essentially a County department over time, the Housing Authority was reconfigured last year with a new intergovernmental agreement that gave equal board representation to the county, Crested Butte, Mt. Crested Butte and Gunnison.
Administratively, Fulmer is trimming the staff from four people to two and a half positions, including a change to the housing specialist position.
“When I first came on board, there was very little contact with the residents—little responsiveness to resident complaints,” Fulmer said of the Housing Authority prior to his arrival. “It was property management at arm’s length at best.”
“Our focus is going to be to run the properties more like market-rate property management companies would run these. I think too much in the past the Housing Authority, because they serve low-income, didn’t need to focus on quality property management—and that’s going to change.”
Fulmer is also going to tackle the concern he’s heard related to deed restrictions on properties and what it takes to get a deed-restricted property in the Gunnison Valley. Deed restrictions are meant to keep housing costs low for people living in what can be an inflated housing market but who are still earning a worker’s wage.
Fulmer said his office is working on a master deed restrictions document and considering changes that would tie the deed restrictions to a set of guidelines that would be more easily manipulated to respond to housing market conditions.
“The nice thing about tying the deed restrictions to the guidelines is that the guidelines can be adjusted annually by the board to respond to market trends in the area,” Fulmer said. “Presently we have deed restrictions in place … that didn’t really take into account a possible downturn in the market. So we’ve got deed-restricted properties with a maximum sales price, by my estimation, that might be 20 percent above the market price of an equivalent free market property. Obviously you don’t want to be in that situation.”
But people living in deed-restricted properties are in that situation and last year the council heard from more than one person asking for the deed restriction to be lifted so they could sell their unit on the free market. The town, however, has spent time and money trying to build up its stock of affordable housing and has been reluctant to make the changes.
“I’m not promising to do any magic … but we’re going to try to do it right this time, focusing on the fundamentals initially,” Fulmer said. “The deeds that are faulty right now will be hard to deal with. Sometimes time is the only way to work those out.”
