Voters in Steamboat Springs on Tuesday will decide on the city’s plan to annex 420 acres to build a community of affordable housing for more than 6,000 workers.
The Brown Ranch plan illustrates the challenges with building affordable housing in Colorado’s high country as communities grapple with the scope and cost of building homes for workers who cannot afford living in mountain towns. The vote in Steamboat Springs will decide if the city of 13,000 can move forward on a plan to spend hundreds of millions on a new community that could grow the city’s population by nearly half.
The size of the Brown Ranch plan “reflects the magnitude of the problem we are trying to solve,” said Jason Peasley, the head of the Yampa Valley Housing Authority. “Lots and lots of communities are dealing with a problem of this scope or larger. However almost none have opportunities and resources to address this housing problem in the way we can.”
The Yampa Valley Housing Authority acquired the 534-acre parcel west of the city in 2021 using $24 million from an anonymous donor. After a steering committee spent two years gathering public input from 4,000 Routt County residents, the authority sketched a plan for 2,264 new homes for local workers in the next 20 years. The parcel, a portion of which the city council voted to annex last year, is inside the city’s urban growth boundary and has been identified for expansion in the long-term plans of both the city and county.
Since its inception in 2003, and the passage of an affordable housing mill levy in 2017, the Yampa Valley Housing Authority has built 210 affordable units for locals with low and moderate incomes. The authority is building an additional 275 units. But that’s not enough.
A 2022 study commissioned by the housing authority — conducted by Washington, D.C.-based RCLCO and Seattle-based architecture firm Mithun — showed an immediate need for 1,400 units for Steamboat Springs workers. By 2030, that need grows to 1,960 new homes and by 2040 the area will need 2,300 new units for workers earning between 60% to 128% of the area median income. Most Routt County residents fall in that range of income, which is about $44,000 to $94,000 a year.
Brown Ranch would help with that, with 1,218 new units by 2030 and reaching 2,264 units by 2040. All the homes would be priced below market value, with 677 for low-income workers, 968 for locals earning 60% to 128% of the area median income and the rest for workers earning $94,000 to $189,000 a year.
The plan — one of the largest-ever affordable housing development plans on the Western Slope — calls for the city to invest in parks, improvements to U.S. 40 and police and fire stations. A committee studying the annexation proposal last year for the city projected using more than $240 million in revenue from taxes on the city’s short-term rental homes, $26 million in grants and $25 million in municipal debt to cover the estimated $483.7 million for public improvements. Add in the cost of building homes and the project’s cost reaches $947 million, with 41% of that going to construction workers, according to an economic analysis of the annexation agreement the Steamboat Springs City Council approved last fall.
“No other community has done something like this. It’s just too big,” said Jim Engelken, a former Steamboat Springs councilman who formed the Steamboat Citizens for a Better Plan group that helped gather support for the vote on the city’s annexation agreement.
The group wants to see fewer homes and a larger mix of homes for sale at market prices to help offset the cost to taxpayers for more than 2,000 subsidized units.
“We are not opposed to affordable housing and we are not opposed to growth. We just don’t see how this thing will work,” he said. “We have major traffic problems. Our park systems are pretty much filled up as it is. And people here, just like they were in the late ’90s, they’re not anxious to see our town boom. We like our small town. And a development for 6,113 people is just too big.”
Peasely said the early projections are being misconstrued as a set-in-stone plan. If grants don’t come or short-term rental tax revenue drops or the city balks at spending millions, the pace and scope of development at Brown Ranch will slow. The only thing that is fairly established is that the homes at Brown Ranch will be affordable and the housing authority’s decision-making process is transparent.
“We are going to have challenges that present to us that we may be able to anticipate today and some we don’t see coming. The important part for us is to have the decision-making process clearly laid out,” he said. “The community will have needs every year moving forward and we own this incredibly important resource and land within our urban growth boundary. We wanted to design for the needs of the next generation, thinking about where our kids might live at some point. We wanted to focus on developing this very smartly to accommodate the growth that is going to occur in this community over the next two decades.”