ISSUE #265: APCHA Renters: Second Class Citizens (12/20/23)
January 5 "Total ghettoization, because they were in charge of public housing, the local council, they deliberately located people in a ghetto situation in order to ensure that they maintained control."
-- John Hume
Apologies for the delay in getting this one out to you. This week's column illustrates yet another unintended consequence of enabling our housing program to grow unwieldy without proper oversight. It turns out that the program greatly prioritizes owners while relegating renters to a far lesser class of citizen.
Read it HERE.
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Living in an APCHA rental can be a blessing or a curse. Some renters have figured it out: amid the outlandish cost of maintaining a property in Aspen, the freedom of simply paying rent without the financial responsibilities of home ownership has served them well. Others have fallen prey to a system that relegates them to a lesser class of citizen.
Picture two identical families, each with two parents and two formerly school-aged children. Both long-time local families live in APCHA housing in similar 3-bedroom units. The only difference is that one family won the lottery and owns their unit while the other still pays rent according to an income category that is assigned to that unit.
Since winning the housing lottery, the owner-family is set for life. The parents still work locally while the kids, each with their own bedrooms, attended Aspen’s top-notch schools. It only mattered on the day of purchase where Mom and Dad worked and what their combined income was. Once in ownership housing, income and assets are unlimited and employment is verified as a mere checkbox on a biennial affidavit.
For owners, household repairs are a dreaded cost burden at free market prices, but there is 3% annual appreciation (or CPI, whichever is less), and after just 10 years of work history and four years of ownership, the couple is eligible to retire in their unit. Each child has gone away to college but can forever come home to their childhood bedroom. And down the line, the parents can pass the family unit along. It’s practically a Hallmark movie.
The renter-family outwardly appears the same. With similar employment to the owners, they pay rent based on income according to their unit category, and when something goes awry with the disposal or the dishwasher, a call to the landlord usually results in a fix. But at least every other year, as renters, they are stringently re-evaluated. Have their salaries increased beyond their unit’s income category? Has a performance bonus made them ineligible? What is the size and makeup of the household?
Housing insecurity for local workers who have lived in rental housing for years is very real. Success is punished. Earn too much and you’re out. Another way to lose your rental housing is when your children go off to college. After age 19, the oldest kid’s empty bedroom became a no-no. Time to down-size. The couple kept a 2-bedroom after the second kid left since they are both working adults, but had this been a single-parent household it would have been time to downsize again.
This snapshot illustrates how APCHA owners have become a protected and entitled class while renters are held to far different standards. Owners are the first to assert their “property rights” when existing policies are questioned or challenged. They don’t want the increased scrutiny. There are even incentives offered to owners who might consider downsizing to smaller units.
Meanwhile, renters’ employment and incomes are closely scrutinized. When household make-up and/or income changes, so does everything else. And mandatory downsizing in no way implies simply stepping into a smaller unit. It’s often a matter of moving out and starting over.
The question is do we or don’t we care about under-utilization of our publicly subsidized housing inventory? In other words, are empty bedrooms ok or not? The answer is unclear as APCHA policies promote having it both ways.
On one hand, we care deeply about empty bedrooms. They’re essentially forbidden in rentals, and extensive effort is undertaken to right-size, even if it means kicking long-time locals out. Yet in ownership housing, no one asks because no one cares. Countless cases of numerous empty bedrooms abound because it’s entirely legal. The most famous example is APCHA’s assistant director who lives alone in her 3-bedroom ownership unit.
In short, we give lip service to maximizing utilization. We enforce it upon renters because we can. But it’s not fairly applied across the portfolio. And that’s just not right.
The concept of maximum utilization is an important consideration in the current environment where housing supply will never meet demand. But as a practical matter, the fixes won’t be easy, popular nor pretty. The precedent for ownership has been set and today there is zero political will to make any changes. But at a minimum, we must rectify the horrible inconsistency of having two separate and unequal classes of subsidized housing beneficiaries. This was never the intent of the housing program.
Critical to a productive workforce is housing security, and not just for owners. We must find the middle ground. There are many benefits to renting in Aspen. Our workforce should not be punished for doing so.
It’s time to establish one central waitlist for rental housing, with APCHA coordinating the approval process, qualification, employment verification and determination of appropriate unit size. Eliminate the income categories. Charge rent according to unit size and income. When empty bedrooms open up, people are rational, they’ll choose to pay less rent when presented with a smaller, less expensive units to easily move into.
APCHA rentals comprise 42% of our inventory. Those 1368 households deserve the same housing security and opportunities for advancement as everyone else. Contact TheRedAntEM@comcast.net