ISSUE #256: Let's Get Honest About Growth (8/14/23)

"We don't want a plan based on land uses. We want a plan based on experiences. Who visits downtown to see land uses?"

-- Mitchell Silver

As The Aspen Times re-arranges the deck chairs, this week's column ran today instead. Read it HERE as I continue to press for a broader community conversation on growth. 

We cannot continue down the intellectually dishonest path of attributing the real and perceived impacts of "growth" solely on the free market without first defining them, attributing them (with data beyond just opinions), and addressing the root causes.

** Today there is a work session focused on the financials for the Lumberyard. If you can make sense of THIS perhaps you can enlighten me. City staff will tell council anything to get this ill-conceived project approved. One thing is for sure, if given the opportunity to spend $450+ million dollars we don't have, spending it on 277 subsidized housing units we can't prove that we need is likely not the most broadly effective use of such funds, especially given our other community needs.

If you're a developer and know a thing or two about RMF development and public-private partnerships, I encourage you to write to council. Only one of them understands the business and the others could stand to hear from you. HERE is a link.

In other (shocking) news, the saga of 205 W. Main (the first "unintended consequence" of the new zoning rules that enable subsidized housing development in any zone district, even "atop" cherished historic Victorians on Main Street) continues. The Historic Preservation Commission voted 4-3 in defiance of their own guidelines to narrowly approve the relocation of this historic resource close to the lot line in order to shoe-horn a dense housing project onto the lot. The basis for this grievous decision? Apparently the swing voter (and new member) erroneously felt that more space for the housing would make it less dense. It won't. The developer will continue with his ginormous and inappropriate plans as drawn. HPC has been rendered all but irrelevant by the new land use code. 

 If you're concerned, please write to city council (HERE is a link) prior to their August 22 meeting and request that they "call-up" this decision because there appears to be great confusion among the HPC as to whether to follow the Historic Preservation Guidelines or just blindly approve subsidized housing. 

 You have all been VERY helpful and effective with your letter writing. Your voices matter and I, for one, appreciate your ongoing commitment to civic involvement.

*****

It seems the solution to every local problem is to “build more housing.” Mind you, this does not mean free-market residential development or redevelopment, it means subsidized housing. Pitkin County recently joined the fray with the extensive report of its Community Growth Advisory Committee.

For a committee that was intended to contemplate “growth,” much of its work focused on values-based desires to maintain the rural character and open lands that define our community, less reliance on fossil fuels and more energy efficiency for climate action and the reduction of the sense of “overwhelm” that so many residents and visitors are feeling. I read it through three times and there wasn’t a peep about “carrying capacity” nor the acknowledgment of  strains on existing infrastructure.

The group took a deep dive into the county land use code because this is where you can really sock it to the free market, and three key conclusions emerged:

• ·      The committee’s work was largely focused on managing the types of development that are inconsistent with community values, however, more subsidized housing is the type of development we do want and it should be incentivized.

• ·      A 15,000 sf maximum house size in the county is not reflective of any of our community values.

• ·      While important to our local economy, the residential sector needs “steering” toward “acting more like homes rather than workforce-and-vehicle-trip micro-economies.”

In other words, big homes are at the root of all evil, but even bigger multi-family subsidized housing developments within the urban growth boundary or along transit lines are exactly what we need and are not considered “growth.” As a datapoint, just 159 homes in the county are larger than 10,000 sf.

Critical to the report is a discussion of a workforce and housing imbalance. The analysis is spot-on. “Businesses, schools, non-profits, healthcare providers, police and fire departments, and governments all face a critical inability to hire needed people for key jobs. Big houses that typically hire large staffs (cooks, house managers, gardeners, cleaners, physical trainers, maintenance personnel, etc.) siphon employees away from the ‘public facing’ economy and into the ‘privatized’ economy. To compound the problem, if a worker who has transitioned into the residential employment sector lives in APCHA housing, their former employer must replace both the worker and potentially restore the new employee’s housing needs.” 

Bingo, this is exactly what I’m talking about when I say we have a labor shortage, not a housing one, and our public housing regulations need to change to properly address this.  At the rate we’re going, without new rules, we will continually be housing fewer essential resort and community service workers, and forever crying for more housing until that too is usurped by those who leave the non-essential workforce.

A recent report from the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments (NWCCOG) outlines a local trend that has been all but ignored: the increase in higher paying jobs in Pitkin County. This is not just remote work, but also reflective of growth in the professional and technical services sector (legal, accounting, architectural, engineering, investments) which has created vast opportunities for upward mobility in Pitkin County. When we do not prioritize our taxpayer-funded subsidized housing for essential workers and instead allow workers to keep their APCHA units when they move up to higher paying jobs, it’s the lower paying resort service jobs that go unfilled for lack of available housing. 

The NWCCOG report also illustrates that while jobs such as property management of large homes have indeed increased, they have not offset the loss of construction jobs over the past decade. Therefore, it’s beyond a little dicey to conclude that large Pitkin County homes are solely responsible for negatively impacting the local workforce. The numbers just don’t pencil out.

The growth committee repeatedly refers to a “sense of overwhelm” in its report, attributing this and other negatively perceived quality of life issues solely to big homes, which sounds markedly like the latest version of a desire for wealth redistribution because of its political expediency rather than because the data supports it.

That’s the problem with these community committees. Long hours and well-intended work can often lead to highly biased work product. The actionable conclusions such as massive changes to the county’s land use code will likely not change a thing because these focus on political biases rather than identifying true causes.

It is critical that we have a robust community conversation on growth. And there very well may need to be some changes to the land use code. Equally important, however, is to determine the essential services we must provide as a community as well as those services deemed essential to the functioning of our resort-tourism economy. From there, we will have identified the jobs that should be prioritized for publicly subsidized housing. It’s rather straightforward.

Continually developing subsidized housing for anyone and everyone who wants to live affordably in Aspen is uncontrolled growth on its face. It’s time to admit this. The local governments can attempt to curtail the free market at every turn, but when cause and effect are not aligned, nothing will get solved.

It’s time for some intellectual honesty about growth, and how our housing program must prioritize community and resort service workers. Contact TheRedAntEM@comcast.net