Steamboat Springs — Willie Samuelson is looking to settle down. A maintenance mechanic at Colorado Mountain College, Samuelson lives in the Fish Creek trailer park with his wife and 6-year-old son. He wants to move into a more permanent home, but when he went to a bank to get a loan, the bank offered him only $117,000.
“That meant I only needed a $100,000 down payment,” Samuelson said, laughing at the idea.
Beneath his youthful flip of blond hair, Samuelson’s graying sideburns betray the fact he has lived and worked in Steamboat Springs for almost 18 years. His $31,200 salary is above the county average, but he still can’t come close to affording a home in Steamboat Springs. He works during his vacations, playing bass in a number of bands, to make ends meet. And, though Samuelson’s wife has worked in the past, she had to spend a large portion of her salary to pay for day care for their son.
“It gets frustrating,” Samuelson said. “Everything keeps going up in price. I’m working all the time and I still can’t get anything.”
In the past 30 years, about 30 reports and recommendations have been written by various entities, numerous committees have been formed and surveys taken, all in the name of finding a way to provide low- and middle-income residents of Steamboat Springs with better access to affordable housing.
But until the Regional Affordable Living Foundation was created at the end of 1997, no specific plans had been implemented to deal with the affordable housing issue, said Rob Dick, RALF’s executive director.
RALF is a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to coming up with solutions for affordable housing. And in their three years of existence as a board, members of RALF’s leadership believe they have hardly made a dent in the problem.
Dick has helped acquire Hillside Village apartments in the past year and now is trying to push West End Village, which would provide almost 150 units of affordable housing in west Steamboat Springs, through the planning process. It goes before the Steamboat Springs Planning Commission on Nov. 9.
Samuelson is one of the people who has expressed interest in finding a home in West End Village to Dick. Unfortunately, Dick said, the 150 units will not be nearly enough to address the shortage. He said the city needs to provide between 700 and 1,000 units of affordable housing just to address the current demand. Those are his estimates of the number of people in Steamboat Springs using more than 30 percent of their income to pay for housing.
The Excise Tax
Dick’s most notable project, however, is a ballot initiative that would put an excise tax on new development to fund affordable housing.
The excise tax, or Referendum 2A, would be levied on new construction on a per-square-foot basis with the revenues dedicated to purchasing land and leveraging loans for affordable housing projects.
Dick said the city can’t afford to wait any longer to start solving this problem. Land prices have risen by 49 percent in the past year, according to figures from the Steamboat Springs Chamber Resort Association.
“My guess is in 20 years, people will say ‘God, I’m glad we bought land for affordable housing,'” Dick said. “Or they’ll say, ‘I wish we would’ve bought land for affordable housing.'”
Much of the opposition to the tax comes from the ranks of Steamboat’s Realtors and developers, who say they believe they and their customers would be unfairly taxed if Referendum 2A passes. Some, such as local Realtor and developer Herald Stout of Elk River Realty, say the tax would unethically place a burden on people who have not yet moved to Steamboat or those who have already spent years building up money to build a house. Those people, some of whom have pinched every penny to afford to buy a house, would be subsidizing their neighbors, say the members of the “No on City Referendum #2A Committee.” Those in opposition to the tax agree there is an affordable housing problem in Steamboat Springs but say they don’t think the referendum is the way to solve it.
Curt Weiss, who rode into Steamboat 28 years ago with long hair and some money for food in his pocket, is now the owner of Walton Pond Apartments. He said the key to affording a home in Steamboat Springs is working hard and being thrifty. Weiss said he bought his first house in 1973 for $22,000.
“A lot of us lived in trailers or less than desirable housing and saved enough money to go to the next level,” he said.
Weiss said that he doesn’t think the city should get involved in subsidizing housing.
Dick himself agrees the excise tax may not be the best or the only way to create affordable housing in Steamboat Springs. Other options, such as a Real Estate Transfer Tax, however, are not available to the city because Douglas Bruce’s Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) forbids it. Other towns, such as Aspen, started levying the real estate tax before the TABOR legislation was passed in 1992. Aspen dedicates a portion of its revenue from the real estate transfer tax to affordable housing and day care. That portion added up to $3,411,000 in 1999.
Aspen’s plight
But even in Aspen, where they do have a dedicated funding source for affordable housing, it hasn’t been enough. A recent study produced by Clarion Associates, which is also helping complete the Steamboat Community Development Code, found that despite what was initially “one of the most aggressive (affordable housing) programs in the country,” new development in Pitkin County, which includes Aspen and Snowmass, has not payed for itself. That’s left the county’s workers, many whose jobs were generated by the needs of new development, unable to afford housing.
The study found that only 49 percent of Pitkin County workers actually lived in Pitkin County in 1998. The rest had to commute to work. Aspen had 5,253 units of housing provided by the market and the public sector when the study was released this year.
“We still have over 200 people on our waiting list who don’t have affordable housing and would like some,” said Victoria Giannola, the assistant director of the Aspen/Pitkin County Housing Authority.
Wages and Land
“But what of the family whose income depends on one or at the most two wage earners? These family units, who could and would add much to our community both in permanency and stability, cannot afford to reside here. So we lose talented and trained individuals and the employment market then becomes one of untrained and transient workers.”
This could be a letter to the Steamboat Pilot published last week or an ad run by RALF in support of the excise tax, but it isn’t. When this editorial was written by Steamboat Pilot staffer Dee Richards in 1972, Rob Dick was only 23 years old, and the average house in downtown Steamboat cost about $70,000, according to Steamboat Coldwell Banker owner and RALF board member Karen Beauvais. Five years after a company called Ling-Temco-Vought bought Mount Werner, land values had already begun to jump.
In the past five years, the county has experienced monumental growth, with the median house now costing more than $100,000 more than it did in 1995. In Routt County, the median housing price was $326,439 in 1999, according to a community indicators project done by the Yampa Valley Partners. Meanwhile, the average annual wage for Routt County residents was $26,939 in 1999, according to the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment.
Tom Ihrig of Community First Bank said that homeowners would not likely receive a loan if the cost of the payments exceeded about 30 percent of their gross monthly income. Although mortgage brokers look at a candidate’s full profile, including other debt issues when reviewing loan applications, they usually follow the Fannie Mae guidelines that recommend applicants ask for, at most, about 28 percent of their monthly income.
Although there are a number of homes for sale on the market in Steamboat Springs, many are units in condo complexes that have only one bedroom or also offer nightly rentals in the same complex. Of 48 Multiple Listing Service listings for homes in Steamboat or Heritage Park that cost no more than than 120 percent of the average median income in Routt County, only 23 were deemed livable by RALF. “Livable” units did not include either single-bedroom condos, condos in complexes with nightly rentals or condos with high association fees.
Working where you live
Affordable housing, Dick contends, would also help employers keep employees in Steamboat Springs. A large percentage of the people who work here have to commute from towns such as Hayden, Oak Creek and Craig. Others turn down jobs because they can’t find housing.
A recent survey completed by the Steamboat Resort Chamber identified a growing problem of workers having to commute for lack of affordable housing in Steamboat Springs. To the question “If you commute to Steamboat, would you live in Steamboat if there was more affordable housing?” 55.8 percent of the 1,105 respondents answered in the affirmative. When asked “If you commute, why do you live outside of town?” 50.2 percent answered “affordable housing.”
And while new development has been created at an alarming rate, prompting talk of growth control among City Council members and county commissioners, families looking to live in Steamboat Springs are not the ones buying up the market.
While building numbers have risen dramatically in recent years, school enrollments have hardly inched upward. Almost 3 million square feet of new development were built in the past three years (1997-1999), according to the county building department. At the same time, school enrollment figures rose by just less than 2 percent in the past year. The enrollment figures for Soda Creek Elementary, where Willie Samuelson’s son goes, actually dropped this year.
Out-of-towners owned more than 50 percent of the residential homes, condominiums and mobile homes in Steamboat Springs as of this summer, according to Routt County Assessor Amy Williams. A full 75 percent of the county’s land parcels belong to people who live outside the county.
A few businesses in Steamboat Springs do provide low-cost housing for their employees to rent. Steamboat Ski and Resort Corp., for example, which employs about 1,500 people, provided housing last winter for 432 employees at Walton Pond Apartments.
So why not rent?
The rent Willie Samuelson has to pay every month is $15 more than it was last year. He said he thinks that if he were paying off a mortgage rather than paying rent, he would have more control over his financial destiny.
Beyond rent increases, living in a trailer park in Steamboat Springs has been an unstable proposition in recent years.
In Trailer Haven trailer park, the landowner sold the land out from under the residents. The former owner of Trailer Haven, Sue Oakley, said investing in mobile homes can be precarious for homeowners, in the case that they have to move when the land gets sold. It is often physically difficult to move trailers that have remained in one spot for a protracted period of time.
With escalating land prices, there are no guarantees a piece of land will remain in an owner’s hands long enough for a family to settle down, Dick said.
“A community that’s made up of only rentals is not a community. It’s a motel,” said former Routt County Planning Commission member Jean Garren. Garren published an extensive report in 1996 on affordable housing, or as she dubbed it, “un-affordable housing,” in Routt County.
Garren said she thinks the city needs to help provide homes that cost about $100,000 and lots that cost around $35,000 in order to allow residents to own single-family homes.
“The city should be proactive rather than reactive if it’s going to be effective,” she said.

To reach Avi Salzman call 871-4203 or e-mail asalzman@amigo.net