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what Colorado mountain town housing officials have to say about the term ‘aff
| Mainlining the $ecret Truth of the Univer$e | 05/05/25 |
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Date: May 5th, 2025 11:06 AM Author: Mainlining the $ecret Truth of the Univer$e (You = Privy to The Great Becumming™ & Yet You Recognize Nothing) what Colorado mountain town housing officials have to say about the term ‘affordable’
One of the sturdiest threads tying Colorado’s High Country communities together is a decades-long sentiment held by many locals that affording to live in the communities they work in is a growing struggle.
It has resulted in officials shifting significant resources toward housing and locals taking to the polls to approve tax hikes to create more substantial funding streams to go toward solutions. Across Colorado’s mountains, hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into the problem, and affordability issues continue to fuel the relocation of locals who might be considered middle class elsewhere.
School districts have even found themselves participating in the housing game to keep their teachers around. For instance, Summit School District and Breckenridge are considering a deal where district employees will have first dibs on some units in a neighborhood being planned by the town.
High Country housing leaders discussed the affordability woes, as well as the initiatives being worked on to provide workforce housing, at the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments Regional Economic Summit on May 1. During the summit, officials opted to avoid the term “affordable” and instead used the term “workforce” housing.
The town of Vail’s director of housing Jason Dietz said, in part, the word “affordable” is used less and less because its definition is subjective. He said in the housing world, a measure of affordability is a person putting 30% of their income toward housing expenses.
“In the mountain regions, it’s a supply side issue where there’s not enough housing for the workforce or the low income, for the moderate income. There’s primarily enough housing for the higher income,” he said.
Entities in the Roaring Fork and Colorado River Valleys, including Pitkin and Eagle counties’ governments, joined municipal governments like those in the cities of Glenwood Springs and Aspen to form a tax-exempt nonprofit in 2022. The intent of the nonprofit, called the Western Mountain Regional Housing Coalition, was to increase accessibility to housing for locals. While Eagle County is formally a member, the municipalities in Eagle aren’t, according to the nonprofit’s website. Executive director April Long shed light on the shifting housing landscape the organization is working with that makes using the term “affordable” tough.
“Now, these communities that used to be the bedroom communities for Aspen and Snowmass, Carbondale and Basalt, are now incredibly out of reach for local income earners,” she said.
She said if a local family of four was looking for a $500,000 house in the area, they wouldn’t be able to find one.
“There are none. There’s nothing there,” she said. “(Let’s say a local couple) probably both work in the medical industry, earning $300,000- $400,000 a year (they still) can’t afford a home in this area.”
She said prior to the pandemic, around 40% of residents in the region her nonprofit represents were cost burdened, and now that number has grown so rapidly they can’t “gather the data quick enough to keep up with how fast it’s growing.”
The town of Basalt’s planning director Michelle Bonfils Thibeault said her community, around 12 miles away from Aspen, once had a median home price of $300,000. It is now around $1.5 million. She said the town has deed-restricted housing for only around 10% of its population, and many of those deed restrictions are a result of stipulations baked into development agreements for market-rate housing.
Long said the High Country is up against limited buildable land and “the free-market housing being gobbled up by outside income earners,” meaning the introduction of more outside investment as opposed to local investment. She said one of the most sustainable paths forward to remedy the area’s housing issues are public/private partnerships.
“If you want to solve the affordable housing problem by building it out yourself and not allowing new growth, then you need to come up with a lot of money and a lot of land,” she said
Housing officials said they have taken to multi-pronged approaches when it comes to providing solutions to the housing problem, including building workforce housing and deploying mechanisms on existing housing units to ensure some level of attainability.
Dietz said the town of Vail is currently working on bringing around 600 units geared toward the workforce. He said the town also has programs that place deed restrictions on market-rate units to make them more affordable. The town also now has a program where businesses can purchase these units for their employees.
He said he thinks building workforce housing will need to remain a key solution.
Eagle County Housing Department Outreach Coordinator Matt Andrews said his organization, a branch of the county government, invested around $13 million into a program flipping market-rate homes into deed-restricted ones since its creation in 2021. He said this assisted over 147 households. Additionally, he said his department is currently building dozens of workforce housing units and has program to aid in rent and incentives the usage of accessory dwelling units as long-term rentals.
The Western Mountain Regional Housing Coalition places focus on what its website calls “development neutral programs,” or those that do not require the purchase of land or the constitution of new units and uses a similar deed restriction model to Eagle County.
Summit County and many of its municipalities have very similar deed-restricted programs that flip market-rate housing into workforce housing. The county’s housing authority also saw a record year for a down payment assistance program in 2024.
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