Speakers at the West Mountain Regional Housing Coalition’s housing forum in Willits last week presented a sobering picture of housing availability in the Roaring Fork Valley.
“If you are an income earner in our area, you can't afford a home in our area," said West Mountain’s program director April Long.
Dozens of people attended the forum at The Arts Campus at Willits on Jan. 18. Attendees included representatives from local governments and nonprofit organizations throughout the Roaring Fork Valley. In addition to presentations on housing and wages in the Roaring Fork and Colorado River valleys, West Mountain staff used the events as an “official coming-out party” in which they shared details about the fledgling coalition and its plans for future programs.
West Mountain, officially founded in 2022, is a local 501(c)3 nonprofit committed to supporting housing availability for working locals on a regional basis. So far, coalition members include seven local governments, as well as the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority and Colorado Mountain College.
Presenters at the event said West Mountain’s debut is arriving at a time when affordable free-market housing is practically unattainable for local workers in many parts of the Roaring Fork Valley.
Long told attendees that a household in Pitkin County making three times the area median income, or AMI, still cannot afford the county’s median free-market home, presented as being $3 million in 2023. For Garfield County, a household earning the same amount would just barely be able to afford a typical home, which cost $885,000 in 2023. (Data from Eagle County included the Vail Valley and could not be isolated to apply specifically to the Roaring Fork Valley.)
The “affordability” of a home in this case was calculated using data from the Colorado Housing and Finance Authority. The AMI for a three-person household currently sits at $103,000 in Pitkin County and $89,000 in Garfield. Average individual salaries last year were $76,000 in Pitkin County and $61,000 in Garfield County, according to data from labor market consulting firm Chmura.
Carolyn Tucker of the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, who presented the individual salary data, added that the high cost of living in both counties reduced the effective U.S. purchasing power of both salaries to around $54,000.
The issue of housing affordability in the valley has significantly worsened in recent years, Long 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, according to Long’s presentation.
Mary Coddington, a principal at Cappelli Consulting LLC, which participated in a regional housing availability study contracted by West Mountain, said increased stock of affordable housing is essential to support working locals in the Roaring Fork Valley. According to a rental survey conducted as part of its broader study, Cappelli and other participating firms found that tenants in deed-restricted housing are half as likely as free-market tenants to spend more than 36% of their income on rent. CHFA considered spending even more than 30% of income on rent as financially unhealthy.
The survey also 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 and that benefits fell largely to white households.
Coddington said that more than 2,000 housing units are currently planned or in development in the Roaring Fork Valley area, though more than half will be listed or rented at market rate.
To support greater housing availability in the area, West Mountain board member and Pitkin County Community Resilience Manager Ashley Perl said that rather than constructing new units, the coalition is seeking “development-neutral” approaches. Perl offered details of three pilot programs the coalition plans to roll out this year.
In one program, West Mountain would fund households’ first and last months’ rent payments to help them enter new leases. These payments, often rolled up with other costs into an initial deposit, can sometimes add up to around $10,000 for a single household.
In another program, West Mountain plans to financially incentivize homeowners throughout the region to build additional dwelling units on their properties and rent them as deed-restricted housing.
Third, West Mountain’s largest program will be a yet-to-be-named “deed-restriction program” or “buydown program,” in which the coalition will partially subsidize home purchases for working locals in the Roaring Fork and Colorado River valleys under the condition that buyers place their new homes under deed restrictions.
To fund the programs, the coalition hopes to rely on donations from private citizens and employers as well as contributions from member organizations and governments. West Mountain treasurer David Myler said the coalition has already received contributions between $100,000 and $2 million from local organizations for the deed-restriction program in 2024. In the future, more funding may be available through state or federal grants and additional contributions.
“It takes everybody working together to create a package that helps with this problem,” Long said at the end of the presentations.