My Eight Priorities on Affordable Housing
Photo courtesy of Jackson Hole Community Housing Trust.
Friends,
Among my goals during my first year as a county commissioner was to address one of Teton County’s most intractable challenges: workforce and affordable housing. I am writing today to report on some good news, express appreciation, and summarize my eight priorities for our housing program.
Good News
A significant amount of workforce housing is on its way, largely due to investments and decisions made before I joined the commission. This includes a total of 747 residential units, of which 277 are deed restricted. It takes a long time to plan, finance, and build new housing; however, more workforce housing is in the pipeline than ever before.
Kudos
A wide range of people and organizations deserve credit for making headway on the critical challenge of supplying affordable workforce housing, including:
The Jackson/Teton County Affordable Housing Department and its director April Norton.
Local planning staff, planning commissioners, and elected officials past and present who crafted effective regulatory incentives for housing.
Teton County voters for approving SPET funds in 2019.
Private landowners who have responded favorably to regulatory incentives.
The Jackson Hole Community Housing Trust and Habitat for Humanity, nonprofits working diligently to build workforce housing. Habitat just welcomed eight new families to the Grove – Phase 3 (with $1.6 million in land and infrastructure provided by the housing department) and the Housing Trust will break ground on 24 affordable condos this spring.
Local employers who have invested in housing for their employees, including St. John’s Health, Grand Teton National Park (which specified employee housing in their new concessionaire contract), Jackson Hole Golf & Tennis (which recently gained approval for 11,000 square feet for employee housing), Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, Wyoming Game and Fish Department, Wyoming Department of Transportation, and Lower Valley Energy.
My Eight Priorities
1. Don’t dig our housing hole deeper.
Around the nation, real estate speculators often use the banner of “affordable” housing to drum up public support for development proposals that won’t actually provide workforce housing. Our community is not immune to this misleading salesmanship. In our real estate market, the imbalance between the local supply and global demand for housing almost always produces new houses at prices well beyond the reach of local workers.
Unless new housing has permanent deed restrictions, the workforce is still left out, and the housing shortage is made worse. I will continue to closely scrutinize housing proposals that look helpful on the surface, but only worsen our workforce housing situation, and I will prioritize proposals with effective, permanent deed restrictions.
2. Maintain a balanced, multi-faceted housing program.
We must protect and build upon our local housing mitigation program, which requires new development to fund housing for a portion of the workers they will employ. The county and town have started the process for improving the program. A big thanks to State Representative Andy Schwartz for working diligently to defeat proposed Wyoming legislation that would have eviscerated our housing mitigation program.
3. Launch a workforce housing investment and loan fund.
The housing department recently proposed a new program to purchase deed restrictions and sunset clauses on existing houses in order to make them permanently affordable or reserved for local workers. The housing department is also developing a loan program for homeowners and renters that supports:
Building deed-restricted accessory dwelling units (e.g. backyard apartments);
financing rehabilitation of disinvested residential property for housing;
financing rental deposits (first month and last month deposits) and;
financing residential down payments.
While there are many operational details to work out, these types of financing tools and partnerships hold great promise for making housing available beyond building new apartments and houses. I encourage the county and town to fund these initiatives in the next budget.
4. Invest in housing for county employees.
The county has recently started to secure houses for county employees and the town has a similar program. Providing housing for county employees improves emergency response and government services, promotes employee recruitment and retention, enhances morale, and enables the county’s workforce to be a full-time part of our community. For these reasons, I am pleased that the county is expanding this program, including construction of 15 to 20 employee homes in the pipeline.
5. Balance jobs and housing.
The community should dial back large-scale developments that generate more jobs than housing. Case in point: The Café Genevieve block. The Save the Block campaign protected valuable greenspace and historical structures. It also eliminated the potential for a 90,000-square-foot hotel with some 100 employees, while providing only a small fraction of the housing for those employees.
6. Relax parking regulations that unduly increase the cost of housing.
We should rewrite our antiquated parking regulations that require more residential parking spaces than reasonable or desired in today’s market. This forced over-parking increases the cost of housing, undermines community character, and creates unnecessary environmental costs. Instead, we should adopt flexible parking requirements that are tailored to the local site.
7. Ensure that new housing respects other local priorities.
We can build housing while protecting wildlife, reducing congestion, promoting energy efficiency, and enhancing local character by building the right density in the right places and balancing new housing with protection of existing workforce housing.
I am pleased that recent developments such as the county’s proposed 30 condos at 105 Mercill Avenue have generated little if any opposition, while I remain disappointed that the town and county decided to cram too much density (48 units per acre) onto a small parcel on West Kelly. The community has many sites that are well suited for housing, so we don’t need to build sites that divide the community.
8. Emphasize housing for those most in need.
The housing pipeline currently favors middle-income residents. I support providing housing opportunity for the full spectrum of local workers and am pleased that the pipeline includes two projects priced for lower-income residents. These projects generally require creative partnerships and low-income tax credits, and they require more public funds per bedroom than middle-income housing, which is an investment that the community should make.
Thank you for reading my perspectives on housing. I made a resolution for 2020 to provide updates more frequently, so please let me know what you think. Your feedback is welcome and I will respond to your questions, comments, and ideas.
Many Thanks,
Luther