Aspen’s housing plan, by the numbers

Austin Corona, Aspen Daily News Staff Writer
A section of the city of Aspen’s Burlingame Ranch housing development is pictured. Its third phase was completed in late 2023. Jason Charme/Aspen Daily News

The city of Aspen’s affordable housing strategic plan is a 43-page document first approved in 2022. The document guides the city’s efforts to secure more affordable housing in a real estate market far too expensive for working locals.

The Aspen City Council officially updated the plan during a regular meeting last Tuesday. The updated document describes how the city plans to add 183 affordable housing units by 2028. The plan also aims to maximize the use of existing units.

According to the plan, the city aims to accomplish its goal almost entirely through the construction of new housing. The city will secure the rest through “development-neutral” tools, by which it converts existing free-market housing to affordable units.

Most of Aspen’s full-time occupied housing (70%) is legally restricted as accessible or affordable for the local workforce, according to a 2023 study. Nearly all of the affordable housing in Aspen is managed through the Aspen-Pitkin County Housing Authority, a publicly funded entity jointly established by the city and county. APCHA manages more than 3,100 units within Pitkin County.

At the same time, Aspen’s affordable housing serves less than one-fifth of the city’s workforce. The rest of Aspen’s workers commute for hours in a daily pulse of traffic that extends up to 90 miles away.

Below is a snapshot of Aspen’s affordable housing plan, illustrated in numbers:
1. $1 million: The estimated cost to develop a single unit of affordable housing in Aspen. The estimated per-unit construction cost at the Lumberyard affordable housing project, where construction is planned to begin this fall, ranges from $1.3 million to $2.7 million, depending on building costs, budget allocations, and city debt.
2. 105: The number of affordable housing units the city has added in the Aspen area since 2022. The vast majority (79) of these are units in the Burlingame III development, completed in 2023.
3. 183: The number of additional units Aspen hopes to add by 2028.

In total, the plan’s “housing goal” is to add 328 units between 2022 and 2028. Many of the units included in this number, however, will not actually expand APCHA’s stock. Instead, they involve maintaining existing units and/or maximizing their use. The plan’s goal reflects what city staff expect their programs to reasonably yield within the timeframe, according to Community Development Director Ben Anderson.

Rather than continue adding units at the maximum pace possible, critics have argued that the city should quantify Aspen’s affordable housing “crisis” through research and then develop a unit number that corresponds with the area’s observed need.

For Anderson, though, the idea of quantification is fraught.

“That might be an interesting number to understand,” he said. “But it's a complicated number to get at. And different methodologies could lead to different sets of outcomes.”

In the meantime, Anderson said the demand for affordable housing already exceeds the city’s ability to provide it. High construction costs, long timelines and a formidably expensive housing market limit the city’s ability to meet high demand for workforce housing, he said.

“There's such demand and such a shortage of supply for employee affordable housing that we can continue to build X number of units per year, and it's still not gonna be enough,” Anderson said.

More housing numbers
1. $311 million: The total revenues for the city’s housing development fund between 2000 and 2023. The fund contained $78 million at the beginning of 2024. It is the city’s largest pool of money, sustained by a real estate transfer tax, a short-term rental tax and a quarter of the city’s regular sales tax.
2. 1 %: The amount of every Aspen real estate purchase the city collects as a tax to fund its housing projects. Aspen voters approved the real estate transfer tax in the late 1980s to address what was then described as “the current housing shortage.”
3. 74%: The percentage of the city’s 2028 goal that will come from new construction. City staff say the plan relies heavily on new construction because while development-neutral options are the most appealing, they are also the most difficult. When a market-rate unit is converted to affordable housing, Anderson said, other factors can keep the unit inaccessible for many working locals.

“The deed restrictions are then subject to HOA assessments and other HOA costs that start making those affordable units unaffordable,” Anderson said. “They're being asked to pay the same HOA rates, and they've got amenities that are expensive, or they've got capital reserve requirements that are pretty expensive.”

Liz Axberg, housing policy analyst for the city, said development-neutral options are also more time-consuming and unpredictable.

“It just tends to be a slower process versus development,” Axberg said.

Nonetheless, the city is exploring development-neutral options. In addition to funding nonprofit partners that support development-neutral affordable housing, the city is exploring the possibility of its own process for subsidizing free-market housing purchases by working locals.

The Lumberyard will account for 100 of the newly constructed units envisioned in the plan (the project also will include up to 200 additional units as construction continues after 2028). The Lumberyard will be the largest affordable housing development in the city’s history.

Developers may build additional affordable housing with incentives from city programs.

Still more numbers
1. 1: The number of successful “swaps” that have taken place through APCHA’s “rightsizing” program. The program incentivizes affordable housing residents in units with empty bedrooms to move to smaller homes, allowing the housing authority to fill the empty bedrooms and house more people. APCHA and the city launched a pilot program in 2023, meant to encourage five swaps, but struggled to find willing participants.
2. 200: The units Aspen hoped to secure in the original 2022 plan by updating soon-to-expire deed restrictions. According to Axberg, over 300 Aspen housing units have deed restrictions with expiration dates, while the rest are restricted indefinitely. Deed restrictions are legal agreements that limit the occupancy, sale price and/or rental rates of housing units, making them available to working locals. To keep those units from dropping out of the affordable housing pool, the city planned to replace their deed restrictions using a blend of policy tools such as incentives for property owners and deed restriction purchases.

The updated plan, however, slashes that goal by 90%. Since 2022, the city has changed its strategy. Now, staff say they will allow expiring units to re-up their deed restrictions through “natural means” in which property owners choose to maintain the restrictions without government intervention. That process is somewhat slow. Since 2022, only five of these units have updated their expiring deed restrictions. At that pace, the city can’t expect to secure expiring units by 2028.

“We're thinking it’ll happen slower, and we'll still be able to capture most, if not all the expiring deed restrictions,” Axberg said.

Courtesy of the Aspen Daily News