Make your voice count in housing discussion with county survey

Housing Needs Assessment results will be used in budgeting and planning

By Alissa Johnson

If you have a stake in local housing, the time has come to make your voice heard. Two surveys were launched this month as part of a Housing Needs Assessment, the results of which will inform affordable housing efforts across the Gunnison Valley, including Crested Butte.

One survey (residentsurvey.gvrha.org) is geared to residents. The other (employersurvey.gvrha.org/s3/housing) is geared to employers. Melanie Rees of Rees Consulting, Inc. is helping spearhead the assessment, and hopes that local residents will take the time to fill out the appropriate survey—even if that means filling out both because someone lives here and runs a business.

“[The surveys are] both very distinct and serve very distinct purposes,” Rees said.

The survey for residents will gather information such as average income levels across households, what people can afford for housing, where people want to live, and whether they are trying to own a home or prefer to rent. It will also quantify the problems that people have been facing, whether that means being forced to move, housing being too expensive or other factors.

“That tells us about people who are already here and living here. It doesn’t tell us how many people have not been able to move here and accept a job because of housing, because they couldn’t find a place to live,” Rees said.

That’s where the employer survey comes in—to identify missed opportunities to offer additional jobs or even additional hours of service because of a lack of housing for employees. And that, according to Rees, will help address the question of how the cost of housing is affecting the local economy.

The goal is to use both surveys to project and quantify the demand for housing. “Not only what gaps there are in housing, but trying to quantify them and identify strategies in terms of how they need to be addressed,” Rees said.

According to Karl Fulmer, executive director of the Gunnison Valley Regional Housing Authority, the valley’s last needs assessment was completed in 2009. “We’ve seen a huge change in our housing market over the course of time since that was last published,” said Fulmer.

“We’ve gone through a major recession in regards to housing… We’re seeing the real estate market recover now and the agencies helping pay for the needs assessment all agreed that now is the time to dig in and collect the data we’ll need to make decisions on what types of housing to build and where to locate it,” Fulmer said.

Six entities are paying for the needs assessment, the contract amount for which is $77,500: the towns of Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte, the city of Gunnison, Gunnison County, the Gunnison Valley Regional Housing Authority and the Gunnison Valley Housing Foundation.

“Certainly any time you’re devising a plan for building housing throughout a regional community, you need baseline information, and a needs assessment is a way to gather and publish that information so that not only the Housing Authority has it, but everyone, especially elected officials. When they make budgets, rather than saying it’s a crisis, it’s better to have foundational information and data,” Fulmer said.

Crested Butte town planner Michael Yerman said that the town hopes to have a high participation rate so the survey provides a clear picture of the current housing situation. That will be important for more than deciding which projects to pursue. “The study is instrumental for leveraging and raising funding from outside agencies for work force housing into the future,” Yerman said.

Though many people looking for housing in the north end of the valley seem to prefer living there, the thinking behind the needs assessment seems to acknowledge that the valley’s housing needs cannot be solved by one entity alone. The emphasis is being placed on a valley-wide approach, looking at three regions: Crested Butte/Mt. Crested Butte/north valley; Crested Butte South/mid-valley; and Gunnison/south valley.

According to Fulmer, it’s no longer realistic for a municipality like Crested Butte to meet its housing needs on its own.

“We have a significant need throughout the valley, and Crested Butte is a relatively small community. They will not be able to deal with the housing demand over time by strictly trying to build in Crested Butte. They don’t have that much land… and so if the economy continues to grow and tourism numbers continue to increase, the town will not be able to meet the demands of even its own businesses,” Fulmer said.

The regional approach and growing complexity of meeting housing needs is a trend that Rees sees across the west, including the Gunnison Valley. A local resident, she has worked on workforce housing for 25 years, including the Gunnison Valley and communities across the mountain west.

“Most communities started with a single project like accessory dwellings or an apartment property. They didn’t need that much information to do one thing. Over time they realized that it’s no longer a low income problem but stretches much wider, throughout the community into and often through the middle class, that it takes both ownership and rental housing and takes both the upper end of the valley and down valley,” Rees said.

That means that solutions are growing more complex. “It’s only gotten harder and the solutions have only become more and more difficult, and yet also more innovative. There’s a lot of innovative stuff done out there and a lot of successes to build on,” Rees said.

First, however, information must be gathered to help make those decisions. The surveys will remain open throughout August, after which preliminary findings will be shared with elected officials in mid-October to inform budgeting processes for 2017. Final data and recommendations will be shared with the entities in mid-November, with plans to present them to the Crested Butte and Mt. Crested Butte Town Councils jointly on November 14 and the county commissioners and the city of Gunnison on November 15.

As Crested Butte town councilmember Jim Schmidt said in a press release, “We have heard a lot of second- and third-hand stories about the lack of housing and businesses unable to find employees because of the lack of housing. This is your opportunity to give it to us straight. Please help by taking the survey. This is very important.”