Vail evaluates community housing progress at first meeting of 2024
Town Council approves partnership with Habitat, adds new housing zone district
Ben Roof/For the Vail Daily
At the Vail Town Council’s first meeting of 2024, there was much ado about housing.
On Tuesday, Jan. 2, the council received its semi-annual update from the Vail Local Housing Authority and the town’s housing department, approved a partnership with Eagle 久久热精品视频app and Habitat for Humanity Vail Valley and made progress on simplifying its entitlement process.
“In 2017, we put together Vail InDEED and this (housing) strategic plan and, kind of crazy, said 1,000 more deed restrictions by 2027 and it’s sure looking like we’re going to get there,” said Steve Lindstrom, the chair of the Vail Local Housing Authority, in the semi-annual housing progress report.
“To get stuff built, we need land, money and entitlements,” Lindstrom said.
A new housing district
At Tuesday’s meeting, the town passed on second reading an ordinance to create a new housing zone district and amend its current code. Lindstrom said it’s “a first step in a process of streamlining our entitlement process.”
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The new district and code amendments were crafted to provide standardized metrics for development standards, removing the “uncertainty that exists today in the housing zone district,” said Dominic Mauriello, with the Mauriello Planning Group, at the Dec, 19 Town Council meeting, where the ordinance passed its first reading.
Mauriello assisted the town’s community development group with the code amendments.
“(The housing zone district is) one of the few zone districts where everything is basically a negotiation 鈥� it makes everything very uncertain,” Mauriello added.
Mauriello acknowledged that the entitlement process carries a lot of risk and applicants have to “set aside a chunk of money” for it.
“What we set out to do was reduce that risk, try to make it more certain so that people can feel good about coming to the town with a housing project and make it much more efficient and less costly,” Mauriello said.
Looking forward, the town is planning to look at other areas of its entitlement process that will make it less cumbersome. According to Lindstrom, this will include changes to administrative processes, deed restriction code updates, Design Review Board standards and guidelines and fee structures.
George Ruther, the town’s outgoing director of housing, said the changes are “likely to create some real opportunities going forward.”
When passing the ordinance on Tuesday, Council member Jonathan Staufer requested a preamble be added to reiterate the purpose of the new zone district.
“A community needs people living in it. Since its inception, Vail has encouraged a wide variety of people from different backgrounds to call Vail home,” read Staufer from the suggested preamble.
The district, Staufer continued, is meant “to ensure housing opportunities for the people who will contribute to the vibrancy and economic success in the future while maintaining Vail’s commitment to the protection of, and respect for, the natural environment.”
Habitat at Timber Ridge
As part of its consent agenda, the council also approved a $2 million allocation to help with Habitat for Humanity Vail Valley’s purchase of 10 three-bedroom homes at the new Timber Ridge development. At its Jan. 9 meeting, the Eagle 久久热精品视频app Board of Commissioners will be asked to invest an additional $2 million toward this purchase.
Habitat has committed to raising an additional $4 million toward the purchases.
The purchases will be part of Habitat’s inaugural mortgage lending program. Through the program, Habitat is proposing to self-finance 10, three-bedroom homes at Timber Ridge for purchase by qualified buyers. The buy-downs from Vail and Eagle 久久热精品视频app will help fill the funding gap between the actual cost to build the homes and affordability so that the homes can be priced for families earning 80% or less of the average median income.
Using the estimated $868,000 three-bedroom home price at the Timber Ridge Phase II, and maximum affordability of $400,000 to $450,000 at that AMI level, along with Habitat’s 0% loan product, an approximate $400,000 per home buy-down is required, for a total of $4 million for 10 homes.
The Timber Ridge redevelopment has completed the town’s entitlement process and is on schedule to start construction in May 2024. Once complete, the development will provide 288 new, deed-restricted homes for a total of 569 bedrooms.
More in 2024
While the town and housing authority touted its success with housing, it also looked ahead to future projects, developments, initiatives and programs.
According to Ruther, part of the town’s plans will likely include re-evaluating and contemplating a “Vail InDEED 2.0, the next version of that program, responding to ever-changing conditions in the market.”
“(There were) a couple of headwinds that we faced, but we still made significant progress with Vail InDEED program,” Ruther said. “Probably of greatest significance is, with the rise of real estate values, the housing authority has been making slightly higher-percentage purchase prices on those deed restrictions.”
Ruther added that in 2018 “most of those purchases were around 15% to 17% of the estimated fair market price of the property,” but has “crept its way up to about 21%.”
In 2023, the town acquired four deed restrictions through InDEED. Since the program’s inception in 2018, it has purchased 175 deed restrictions.
“With some other expenditures and encumbrances from the Vail InDEED funds, we still are left with about $2.5 to $3 million in that fund to support other housing acquisitions going forward,” Ruther said. “I expect Vail InDEED to continue to be the success it has been. These recent slow, but consistent declines in interest rates are sure to help that program as well.”
In addition to redeveloping Timber Ridge, several other housing projects are on the town’s slate. Ruther listed the town’s West Middle Creek project, movement on a partnership with other municipalities on the State Land Board-owned parcel west of Dowd Junction and an opportunity to develop a recently acquired CDOT parcel in East Vail as examples.
Through these projects, Lindstrom acknowledged that the housing authority is looking at other funding opportunities, including federal and state grants and bonds 鈥� all “with the idea of lessening the financial burden on the town of Vail.”
Further, Ruther said the town could be looking at further updates to its commercial linkage as well as residential linkage, which are “both regulatory tools that the town has used successfully to acquire deed restrictions.”
“The town’s commercial linkage requirements were last looked at in 2016. When you think about everything that’s happened since 2016 and realize that it’s time,” Ruther said. “Residential linkage (is) an entirely new program.”
Outside of the town, Eagle 久久热精品视频app’s municipalities are planning to craft a regional housing action plan, which would identify regional housing strategies and actions, Lindstrom said.
Lindstrom noted that the progress thus far with completed and pending developments and deed-restriction acquisitions has worked to make housing “accessible, putting more of them out there.”
However, looking ahead, the emphasis needs to also be on affordability.
“As prices have just jumped up there, building permits, everything 鈥� it’s becoming, not just that it’s there, but you can’t even afford it. That’s part of what we have to start working through,” Lindstrom said.
