Housing: Where social justice confronts economics

Schwartz, a former Colorado state senator, has been a leader in affordable housing in western Colorado for a half-century. Her vocation began more than 50 years ago when she worked for Snow Engineering, a community planning firm that focused on mountain resorts across North America.

With then-Aspen Mayor Stacy Standley, Schwartz worked to gain recognition for housing as a crucial issue for Aspen in the early 1970s, when the writing was already on the wall. “We created a metric for resorts that when you sell so many lift tickets, you need services and employees and housing,” Schwartz recalled. “It was about finding what creates a balanced community.”

Toward that end, Schwartz helped to initiate the formation of the Aspen/Pitkin County Housing Authority (APCHA), where, in four years, she said the agency brought 800 homes online, housing units that are foundational to the APCHA program, which today oversees about 3,200 units.

“I know we can do this,” said Schwartz, who took the helm of the local chapter of the nonprofit Habitat for Humanity in 2020. “We work with families as partners and build homes. We started out one house at a time, building with volunteers. Now we’re building whole neighborhoods. It is something I’m absolutely passionate about.”

Housing as a moral issue

Schwartz is not alone on an issue that has gained traction as the foremost moral challenge facing the Roaring Fork Valley and beyond. April Long, program director at West Mountain Regional Housing Coalition, is equally passionate about housing the valley’s workforce and community.

“Our community,” Long said, “would be better off if we can alleviate the stress for those within it who want to own their home, which for most means living farther away and accepting the commute. Having to accept that level of stress in your life and the time away from your family or your own needs for mental and physical health is unfair. It is a moral obligation to take care of each other and those who are struggling to care for themselves.”

Long recalled growing up in a rural Alabama community that was struck by a tornado when she was 15. “It tore down homes and churches,” she said. “People died. That was a coming-of-age experience for me where I recognized the collective suffering of a community from loss.”

Long differentiates “workforce housing” from “community housing.” The former, she said, is “housing made available or accessible for those who are working in the community, while the latter is about housing the entire community, like family members who may not be part of the local or regional workforce. It wouldn’t be the community it is without those people, like retirees. If I work here, but also need my mother to be nearby to either help with my children or for me to help with her, then she’s part of this community, too. And that allows this community to be robust and to thrive.”

Long pointed out that housing must include all social strata: “If you’re thinking about your own employees, you also need to think about your employee’s teacher and other members of the larger community that make this a livable and enjoyable place.”

A valley resident since 2008, Long has lived in Aspen, Carbondale, Missouri Heights, Basalt and, currently, Glenwood Springs. She owned a home in Missouri Heights and sold it at what she thought was the best time, at the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020. After renting in Basalt, she realized she was suddenly priced out of buying a home in that area again.

“That happened really quickly, and was such a shock. I felt very disappointed having lived here for 15 years. I was making a fine living, but I was priced out of my community that I felt very close to. Luckily, I was able to buy in Glenwood Springs where I love living, but I was still commuting up and back to Aspen in a constant pull. My work was upvalley, but my life was downvalley, and there was a large commute and a lot of time spent between those two places.”

Regional commuting is not a hardship for all, as Long, a frequent passenger on Roaring Fork Transit Agency buses, explained: “When that worked for me, I was able to relax, read the paper, and get some work done on the bus. But if you’re not able to use public transportation, it’s pretty stressful to sit in traffic that long and know that there is a life waiting for you at home.

“With small kids, I couldn’t get home fast enough to make dinner, run the bath, do the homework, get them to bed. You’re constantly waiting for the cars to move. It’s comparable to traffic in any of our big urban areas where commutes are horrific. You expect it less here, but you make some trade-offs because you want the quality of life that this place offers, and traffic jams are incongruent with what you’re expecting.

“So, housing is important to me, something I’m passionate about, and it’s also important to our entire community. Without addressing it, I’m afraid our community could begin to collapse. I want this to be a place where my three children are able to work and live. I see the complications and struggle that housing places on families, and I’m hoping that this coalition is one of the tools that helps ease that.”

A sobering picture

Meeting this moral obligation requires overcoming multiple roadblocks, as the Aspen Daily News reported in a Jan. 25 story about a housing forum put on by the West Mountain Regional Housing Coalition in Willits. “Speakers … last week presented a sobering picture of housing availability in the Roaring Fork Valley,” staff writer Austin Corona wrote.

At that event, Long stated a harsh truth about free-market housing: “If you are an income earner in our area, you can’t afford a home in our area.”

She explained that the area median income (AMI) for a three-person household currently sits at $103,000 in Pitkin County and $89,000 in Garfield. Average individual salaries in 2023 were $76,000 in Pitkin County and $61,000 in Garfield County, according to data from labor market analytical firm Chmura. Even a household earning three times the AMI cannot afford the county’s median free-market home price, presented as $3 million in 2023, said Long.

“The issue of housing affordability in the valley has significantly worsened in recent years,” reported the Daily News, quoting Long, who said, “The percentage of home sales affordable to a Pitkin County household at median wage decreased from 23% to 9% between 2015 and 2022. The same number dropped from 78% to 37% in Garfield County.”

The picture for rental housing is similarly dire, according to Mary Coddington of Cappelli Consulting. Quoting a regional housing availability study contracted by West Mountain, Coddington said that “increased stock of affordable housing is essential to support working locals in the Roaring Fork Valley.” However, high rents have put secure, long-term housing beyond the budgets of many workers who are spending more than 36% of their incomes on housing, which the Colorado Housing Finance Authority considers financially unhealthy.

“One of the appealing parts of this job is knowing how critical housing is,” Long said. “When I was renting and my landlord was increasing my rent to a price that I couldn’t afford, the daily stress of trying to figure out how I was going to stay in the community that I love with the sacrifices I’m going to need to make in order to afford it here only grew.”

Long was faced with a profound choice: “Was I going to have to move and get a new job in a community I’m not familiar with and a place where I don’t want to live, and to move my children? That daily stress affected me. And I can’t imagine how that stress affects someone with even less means than I have. It affects your mental health and your physical health, your children’s health, their stress, and your ability to help them with their homework. It is so foundational and has tentacles that touch everything if your housing is not stable and secure.”

No-growth affordable housing

Recently retired attorney Dave Myler founded what would become the West Mountain Regional Housing Coalition in 2018 with the late Bill Lamont, both as a humane gesture to working commuters and as a practical step toward addressing regional economic stability. The nonprofit coalition applies donated funds to subsidize and stabilize housing for qualified buyers who accept deed restrictions in order to keep affordable housing sustainable. 

“The region is really one community connected by a very mobile workforce,” said Myler. “That workforce is mobile because of Highway 82 and I-70. That’s why it makes sense to take a regional approach to the housing problem like we did with transportation with [the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority]. We are one community. Do we have differences? Of course: political differences, economic differences, all kinds of differences. But we’re basically one community connected by a workforce that drives up and down the valley every day.”

Myler recalled a propitious meeting with Lamont, an influential and far-thinking community planner. “I was in City Market in Carbondale in 2018, and ran into Bill. He was standing in front of the Cheerios and said, ‘We’ve got to do something about this housing problem in the valley.’ We talked, had a meeting, did some thinking and agreed to form a regional, multijurisdictional housing authority made up of all the local governments in the valley that could raise taxes to pay for housing solutions. We didn’t think at that time of going past Glenwood Springs, but that would come later.”

Ideally, said Myler, the coalition would derive taxing power to raise funds for housing solutions. “Think of where we might be today,” he mused, “if we had started taxing the billionaires of Pitkin County in 2018 — or a decade earlier.”

Although the idea of a regional special taxing district to fund housing proved politically untenable at that time, Myler and Lamont succeeded in bringing local governments to the table, fostering a collaboration that resulted in a landmark 2019 greater Roaring Fork Valley housing need assessment. In 2022, the West Mountain Regional Housing Coalition incorporated as a nonprofit and today, its membership is made up of representatives from the city of Aspen, Pitkin County, Snowmass Village, Basalt, Carbondale, Eagle County, Glenwood Springs, Colorado Mountain College and RFTA. Myler serves as at-large director, with Long, program director, as the first hired staff. Each entity donated $10,000 for 2022-23, with more funds on the table this year. The coalition is also applying for grants.

Since growth and development are hot-button controversies throughout the region, the coalition is pursuing a buy-down program in which existing housing units are purchased, converted to affordable units and deed-restricted in order to maintain price control. “The program not only provides homes working residents can afford,” Myler said. “It preserves workforce housing. Buy-downs make sense.”

Long said the coalition aims to officially launch the buy-down program in July 2024 as they continue work to secure funding. To date, Long said the coalition has secured commitments from Carbondale ($100,000), Snowmass Village ($250,000) and Glenwood Springs ($200,000). In February, Pitkin County commissioners signaled support for contributing up to $2 million, but on May 28 lowered that commitment to $1 million for what Long has dubbed the ���Good Deeds” program. The county’s potential pledge was reduced in part based on discomfort some commissioners felt with spending county funds on housing purchases beyond their boundaries. The city of Aspen is considering a $450,000 contribution.

While that’s a start, Myler noted that enough money to acquire a substantial volume of buy-downs remains a still-missing ingredient. “To make a serious difference,” he said, “we need hundreds of millions.” A coalition-initiated survey underwritten by the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority (CHFA), released in 2019 and reflecting pre-COVID-19 market conditions, revealed a 4,000-unit housing shortfall in the region, which included Gypsum.

“It means there are 4,000 individuals and households that are paying up to 70% of their income for housing and not the 30% that is an agreed-upon standard based on income,” Myler said. “They are driving too far to get to and from work, and they are living in garages and substandard conditions.”

Like Schwartz, Myler is a housing advocate veteran who began in 1979 as town counsel for Snowmass Village, where he advocated for worker-housing mitigation when the Creekside development was built. “I was sitting across the table from Jim Light and Jim Chaffin,” Myler said of the Creekside development team, “and they were extremely supportive, and that piqued my interest.”

Later, Myler was appointed to the APCHA board, then received an appointment to the CHFA board from then-Gov. Bill Ritter. “I learned a lot during that mission,” said Myler, who was involved with numerous affordable housing projects. 

“It’s an obvious need,” he said. “You can’t have a healthy community with a workforce that’s not content with where they live. It’s just essential. The objective is to build healthy communities. Providing an adequate supply of affordable housing is a key ingredient in that. Everyone benefits — employers, employees and our guests.” 

Besides the public support, the coalition aims to attract donations from practically and socially minded philanthropists who recognize housing buy-downs as a benefit to stabilizing workforce and community housing. That could include “anyone who wants Aspen to maintain its status as a world-class resort and a healthy community with someone who’s smiling at you when you order a drink at the bar, with first responders and people at the hospital, with people who are teaching our kids, and more,” Myler said. “In order to keep this, we need to house the workforce. Here’s a chance to be part of the solution. Write us a check.”

West Mountain Regional Housing Coalition is also working to develop a program it hopes to launch next year that would help renters cover the often crippling expense of coming up with a deposit plus first and last month’s rent when signing a new lease. A recent survey of the rental market commissioned by the coalition found that “deed-restricted tenants showed greater satisfaction with their housing and landlord responsiveness. However, the survey also showed that Hispanic tenants were disproportionately absent from deed-restricted rental housing in the valley where benefits fall largely to white households.”

Build big or go home

A profound testament to disproportionality came from Aspen in March, when two real estate sales records were broken in rapid succession. First, the sale price of a vacation house topped $77 million. Just two weeks later, the ceiling was raised to $108 million in what mirrored a Boardwalk/Park Place property quest where the wealth spent on top-end housing is far in excess of anything measurable by normative standards within the regional housing sphere.

Evidence of this Grand Canyon-scale economic rift between the American aristocracy and the working class is nothing new. Thorstein Veblen coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption” in his 1899 book, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” in which he lampooned wealthy elites for parading their material excesses as a self-inflating measure. 

“The motive that lies at the root of ownership is emulation,” wrote Veblen. “The possession of wealth confers honor; it is an invidious distinction … where the possession of property becomes the basis of popular esteem. It also becomes a requisite to that complacency we call self-respect. … The basis on which good repute in any highly organized industrial community ultimately rests is pecuniary strength; and the means of showing pecuniary strength and so of gaining and retaining a good name, are leisure and a conspicuous consumption of goods.”

Blatantly visible displays of wealth have a long history that is reflected in today’s local housing situation. During medieval times, “the wealthiest lived in impressive castles and had lots of people who worked for them,” states investment blog Investopedia, “whilst the poorest worked on landowners’ farms.” If that sounds familiar, it is because Aspen’s escalated housing market smacks of medievalism.

Veblen’s more damning indictment is what he labeled “conspicuous waste” of both resources and human labor. To waste resources, one had only to exceed corporeal needs to feed insatiable appetites. Veblen deemed the wasting of a laborer’s time on nonessential, status-building displays as the most odious use of pecuniary power.

The outrageous rise of Aspen’s housing prices and a willingness to spend it higher is attributable to the “Veblen Paradox,” a phenomenon in which the demand for a product increases as its price increases, contradicting the typical laws of supply and demand. That someone would spend $108 million for a 22,000-square-foot mansion would have made even Veblen blush.

That record sale elicited the following description in the April 17 edition of The Aspen Times: “The 22,405-square-foot property includes 11 bedrooms and 17 bathrooms and sits on 4.5 acres in the coveted Red Mountain neighborhood of Aspen … making it the highest price residential sale ever in Aspen and the state of Colorado.”

The Times offered a community perspective on the record-breaking sale, in which the buyer made the cash purchase for $4,820.35 per square foot: “The quality of life in Aspen is exceptional,” one of the real estate brokers who had negotiated with the buyer and the seller was quoted as saying. “The real estate prices aren’t high here just because of the really nice houses. It’s because of the community, and it’s because the city of Aspen is a really special place.”

Earlier in this series, Aspen Journalism reported on the great divide of income versus real estate sales corroborating sociologist Jenny Stuber’s findings in her 2021 book, “Aspen and the American Dream: How One Town Manages Inequality in the Era of Supergentrification.” “The conventional wisdom,” wrote Stuber, “is that a place like Aspen should not exist. That is, a place should not exist where the median income is $73,000 per year, but the median home price is over $10 million. … These dynamics should make it impossible for a community to exist where the incomes earned by local residents are fundamentally at odds with the housing prices.”

Habitat for Humanity’s Schwartz wrote of housing price disparity in a May newsletter, saying, “The ever-increasing cost of free-market housing is significantly diminishing the ability of our businesses, institutions and communities to function and deliver services.”

What would Jesus do?

The New York Times wrote a striking headline for an April 27 story: “What Would Jesus Do? Tackle the Housing Crisis, Say Some Congregations.” Empty pews in Inglewood First United Methodist Church of Inglewood, California, prompted the Rev. Victor Cyrus-Franklin to determine that housing prices were threatening his flock, prompting support for the “Yes in God’s Backyard” movement, which aims to build affordable housing on faith organizations’ properties.

Reported the Times: “Inglewood First United Methodist is one of a growing number of churches, mosques and synagogues that have started developing low-cost housing on their properties. In interviews, faith leaders said they hoped to help with the growing housing and homeless problems that were most acute in California but have spread across the country. Virtually every major religious tradition teaches the importance of helping those in need: The idea fits the mission.”

Some universities are also facing housing pressures, stated another Times headline from Dec. 18, 2023: “How College Football Is Clobbering Housing Markets Across the Country.” Instead of a focus on God, it’s all about football. The Time article described how “short-term rentals are taking over college towns, fueled by wealthy fans and investors who turn homes into hotels for a few weeks out of the year” and leave them to stand empty the rest of the year.

Providing accessible, affordable housing has become a matter of virtue for some community members and organizations that foster care for their citizens. That’s why Schwartz has undertaken a nearly messianic mission to move the needle on accessible housing for people in the Aspen-to-Parachute region whose lives are deeply touched by her work with Habitat for Humanity, as testimonials shared by the organization proclaim:

Dear Friend of Habitat RFV,

My name is Jessica, and I am the proud mom of my 3 1/2-year-old daughter and a new Habitat for Humanity homeowner! I am writing today to thank you for helping my family during an incredibly challenging time filled with so many struggles.

My daughter is such a happy, outgoing little girl that has many struggles due to health concerns in her life. As a mother, it is incredibly difficult for me to continue residing in an old apartment complex that has continued to develop more and more issues that make me concerned for the health of my daughter and me. I have struggled daily worrying about my daughter’s health and our safety that living in the apartments has brought to our lives.

When I applied for a Habitat for Humanity affordable home in Wapiti Commons, I hoped and prayed that we would be blessed, and we were! I have met the other new homeowners and worked with the Habitat for Humanity build crew and Restore workers and felt from the start that this was a community of people that would benefit my daughter and myself by providing the family-type atmosphere we have craved! Being selected has allowed me to work alongside the experienced team of builders as our new home is built from the ground up.

Thanks to you and your generosity, I am now a proud owner of a new, safe home for my daughter and me to grow together alongside an amazing new community of friends. I can proudly tell her that we are home and surrounded by safe people. I get to see the smile on her face as she grows up happy and healthy with new friends close by. Our lives have been changed for the better, thanks to you!

Sincerely, Jessica

Or consider the change of life in another Habitat for Humanity recipient as stated on the Habitat website:

Before buying a Habitat for Humanity home, Karla lived with her two small children in a concrete-floored garage, paying $850 monthly. Her daughter is 3 and her son is 12. They had a single bed, a toilet, a small sink, a small fridge and a single burner on which to cook. There were no windows to provide light, and temperature regulation was nonexistent.

Karla is a local banker and an essential, hard-working community member. As a single mother, Karla does everything she can to provide for her children. No mother wants to live in this situation, but, unfortunately, these are the housing options that were available for her to make ends meet. However, this is not where Karla’s story ends! Karla has moved into her beautiful new townhome with three bedrooms and two bathrooms for her children to grow and flourish.

Part two of this installment of the “In search of community” series, which delves into housing solutions, continues on June 9. Read all the stories here.