Brainstorming the housing crisis

Lots of ideas, still no solution

By Adam Broderick

The availability of affordable housing in town is such a popular current issue that KBUT live-broadcasted last week’s public meeting on the subject, hosted by the town of Crested Butte. More than 100 people attended, sharing challenges and ideas for the near future. Crested Butte town manager Todd Crossett facilitated and other local decision makers, including the Town Council, were present.
Crossett and others who helped facilitate the meeting presented some statistics to the audience. Towns like Aspen, Snowmass, Vail and other places in Summit County were referenced for their efforts toward resolving the housing crisis found in most resort towns these days. Not only are they working on housing issues in town, they’re looking at transportation and finding ways to get people to and from where they can afford to live.
But this community is trying to avoid displacing the locals so they can commute from more affordable towns nearby. Still, this is the reality of a resort town. Lower than average wages + high land values + high cost of construction = low affordability. It was reported that resort towns everywhere are hurting, neighboring non-resort towns are hurting, and in resort areas everything is amplified. The good news? This community is still “affordable” compared to towns along the I-70 corridor.
Some interesting facts presented to the room included home occupancy rates being at 95 to 100 percent and roughly 85 percent of accessory dwelling units are being used in compliance with town codes. Professional jobs at WSCU are not being filled because of housing costs, and there are 9,468 potential buildable lots in the county—though they are not necessarily deed restricted, there could be opportunities to develop creative strategies to provide more affordable housing.
Karl Fulmer, director of the Gunnison Valley Regional Housing Authority, has been in the housing development business for about 17 years. He says the regional community needs to work together because together we are stronger. He also said real estate is heating up in the south end of valley, but not as extremely as up north. Still, properties are taken off the market almost as fast as they’re put on it, even down in Gunnison.
Gunnison County’s director of community development Russ Forrest has worked on affordable housing projects in other towns, and said that compared to similar mountain communities, local poverty rates are higher. “The income we have, typically with tourism, is lower than in other communities,” he said. “Residents here also have less buying power due to the lower work wages. Still, properties under $500,000 are going quickly.”
Forrest presented several charts to the audience. One chart showed a significant change in terms of the average price for homes under $500,000, which has gone up quite a bit since 2012, when it was at the lowest it’s been in a decade or more. The average price for a condo or townhome has dropped by about $.5 million since 2007, and the average attainability for housing in Crested Butte requires $130,000 annual income.
During the public comment period Chad Reich of KBUT ran back and forth across the room passing the microphone to anyone wanting to be heard. One concerned resident addressed Rentals By Owner (FYI: RBO, not VRBO, which means Vacation Rental By Owner). “People move to this valley because they’re enchanted with the town of Crested Butte, not Mt. Crested Butte or Gunnison. How will we manage RBOs in the future so more local residents can have long-term rentals,” he asked.
Some argued that RBOs are not a significant reason why vacancy rates are low here and said other factors are to blame, not short-term rentals. There is a growing trend across the country for vacation rentals, not just in this valley. Property manager Steve Ryan owns a property management company and said he surveyed his in-town homeowners. “Nobody came back and said they don’t want to long-term rent their home. The reason they don’t do it is they bought a home here because they love it here. They made the investment and they use their homes,” he said.
Another local resident sucked up her pride and announced that she ate one meal per day last winter because she couldn’t afford to eat more. Jeremy Rubingh said the Denver Post listed Crested Butte in February as one of the ten fastest growing communities in the nation for short-term rentals. “The death of the local is the death of the local community,” Rubingh said. Crested Butte-raised Anne Moore expressed the dire need for decent help in the service industry since most locals can hardly afford to live where they work. “We can compare ourselves on graphs and charts, but we’re going to feel a big crunch this summer,” she said.
Only because I still hadn’t heard a more practical solution, I suggested a sliding scale luxury tax that would tax full-time residents the least, tax non-residents who short-term rent their homes the most, and anyone who occupies their home for the majority of the year or long-term rents their home would be taxed somewhere in the middle of that scale.
The scale would slide so that anyone at least making a partial effort to rent to locals gets a break.
One of the short-term solutions is “glamping” (glamorous camping). People could pay a monthly fee to the town so they can camp, either within a community of other campers or at select spots around town. But that would mean borrowing or renting showers and bathrooms. Members of the Town Council are currently working with an idea that aligns closely with this.
Other solutions that have risen during brainstorm sessions since the public meeting—an informal meeting at Kate Seeley’s house, a plethora of Facebook comments in response to a blog I wrote, potential solutions presented at Monday’s Town Council meeting, and conversations with others in passing—though not all immediate—include but are not limited to:
—Develop communities of earthships or shipping container homes just outside of town limits.
—Relocate the “historical” accessory dwellings to a large, empty lot and create the ultimate housing plot with small cabins that best resemble the town’s history. Call it Pioneer Plot.
—Put empty, seemingly obsolete town buses to good use by turning them into dorms for displaced locals.
—Move away from being a “historical” town by lifting housing regulations to create a “sustainable” and “memorable,” town.
—Stop spending $1 million here and $1 million there on new art centers and advertising to get more people here when the town can’t even house its workforce.
—Start a “1% for Local Space” nonprofit and collect 1 percent from participating businesses wanting to keep their employees in affordable housing. Donations would be tax-deductible, and the money would go into a pool used to buy housing for locals. New restrictions would be imposed on those properties so they would always be available for locals to rent or purchase, not like the so-called “deed-restricted” properties in town that have had such restrictions lifted for whatever fiscal reasons seemed justifiable at the time.
—Put a cap on short-term housing, similar to the options the city of Boulder is exploring: Either allow anyone in a primary residence to rent short-term as long as they also live in that residence, or put a cap on short-term rentals so only a certain percentage of rental properties are eligible for short-term rent.
Crossett closed the Thursday community meeting after recognizing the immediate need for at least a temporary solution and committing to prioritizing the issue. An RBO report is being compiled for the towns to determine their effect on housing, as well as a study to determine how “accessory dwellings” could be better utilized. Crossett says the Town Council should have results from those reports within the next couple of weeks and plans to use those statistics to help expedite a means to an end of the so-called “local housing crisis.”