A recent leasing snafu at Breck’s newest affordable apartments shows the pitfalls and the promise of a workforce housing boom.
At least four people were told they could move into Vista Verde Two, and then told they make too much to live there. At least one person showed up with all his things.
“We were very obviously concerned and frustrated,” Laurie Best with Breckenridge housing tells Krystal 93. “We have seasonal employment, we have overtime, we have commissions, we have all sorts of things that are really challenging in terms of applying a standard sort of income cap.
Best has been working on affordable housing for decades and she knows the system is not perfect.
“We keep pushing on the state and on the Federal programs to eliminate income caps as much as possible,” she says. “But on the other hand you do want your lowest priced units going to the people who really need those units.”
Affordable housing itself is nothing new in Summit. The first local projects went up in the late ‘90s. As far back as 2006, voters have approved five tax measure for housing.
But a boom in need and investment has more than tripled our housing stock in the past decade.
“Our workforce is so diverse, you need to have a variety of price points and housing types and housing sizes,” Best says.
And the need remains. When a lottery opened for Summit County’s newest project, 430 people applied for 24 units.
Managing these lotteries and listings is not an exact science. But there is a model – childcare.
“We had all these different waitlists. Everybody was on all of them and that made them look excessively long,” says Corrie Burr with Summit Combined Housing Authority. “We moved childcare to one waitlist that put (people) onto every waitlist at every property. If we could mimic that process and have a universal waitlist for the community (housing), that would be amazing.”
It seems easy. But rentals, like those Breck apartments, play by different rules.
“(We need) a lot more front-end transparency,” Burr says. “The projects coming on board with Gorman (at Vista Verde Two) or any other private developer that has restrictions from Federal dollars, state dollars, what have you, that is another part of this that we would like to see in the future.”
This is how the Breck snafu started – a third-party property manager running its own lottery and approvals – but this is also how it might be prevented.
“Being the clearinghouse, or being this one location for workforce housing, all the goals that we currently have for the housing authority all roll up to that thought,” Burr says.
The authority is testing this clearinghouse concept right now with every for-sale affordable home in the county – more than 1,500 units.
“We went to what the community was asking for,” Burr says. “It was to have one application that can be used for multiple properties.”
Burr hopes that system will be ready for Summit’s next big housing boom, when as many as 1,200 more units open up between Breck, Silverthorne, Lake Hill at Frisco, and the nation’s first U.S. Forest Service land partnership above Dillon Valley.