The need for affordable housing remained apparent this summer in Summit County. Here’s what housing officials saw.
Summit County saw a lot of movement in its deed-restricted housing market this summer, making it a busy few months for the county’s housing authority.
Summit Combined Housing Authority Executive Director Corrie Burr updated Breckenridge Town Council at a Sept. 24 meeting, saying “lottery management (had) just gone crazy this summer.”
Burr said the authority saw an uptick in lotteries for deed-restricted units across the county this spring and summer. The lotteries drew hundreds of applicants, signaling to the housing authority that many locals were in search of housing below market rate.
The housing authority helps jurisdictions manage lotteries in two capacities: When a new neighborhood with deed-restricted units comes online, the authority helps put on a lottery to fill the units. The authority also helps put on a lottery for singular deed-restricted units that open up in neighborhoods that have a lottery requirement.
While the authority saw new deed-restricted neighborhoods open up, it also saw a migration out of deed-restricted units in neighborhoods that are now a few years old. Burr said the migration out of some of these units can be attributed to growing families needing larger units.
“We’ve seen a lot of movement between neighborhoods and between types of properties,” she said. We’ve had people “moving from a townhome to a duplex or moving to a larger property.”
Breckenridge’s Housing Manager Laurie Best said her staff saw a similar trend in Breckenridge this summer, with people moving out of deed-restricted townhomes into deed-restricted or market-rate single-family homes.
Alongside growing families, Burr said, residents are moving for other reasons, such as getting a job elsewhere or the high cost of living.
Smith Ranch in Silverthorne saw some of the most migration this summer, Burr said. The workforce housing neighborhood is a phased project that features for-sale units, including single-family homes, duplexes and townhomes. The first phase included 60 units and people began moving into those in 2019.
Burr said right around now is when the housing authority anticipated resales for these units beginning, and that proved to be true. In the past four months, she said the neighborhood has had five resale lotteries. That compares to six total resales in all of 2023.
She said these units saw crazy high demand this summer, with each of the resales seeing about 100 applicants in the lottery.
Burr added that the West Hills workforce housing development in Keystone also saw a decent amount of resales this summer. West Hill is similar to Smith Ranch in that it is a mix of unit types, including duplexes and triplexes, and came online about five years ago.
For resales on deed-restricted units that have appreciation caps, limiting what they can be sold for, lotteries serve as an equitable protocol that can limit opportunities for people to bend the rules, she said.
The purpose of deed-restrictions is providing below market-rate housing inventory to the workforce. Unlike market-rate units, there is not a bidding process where the person who offers the most money gets the unit. Yet, housing officials say they hear of instances where people try to provide different incentives under the table to be the one chosen.
Best said people looking to skirt the rules is something the town is keenly aware of and looking to mitigate. With buyers desperate for a place to live and sellers often getting an overwhelming amount of interest, she said the resale process can be hard for all parties involved.
“We’ve always thought if we could better manage that resale process, that would be great, and lotteries give us a way to do that,” she said. “There’s not this pressure on the buyer or the seller.”
On the flip side, there’s also issues with incentivizing owners with deed-restricted properties to upkeep maintenance on their homes because of the limitation for what they can sell for.
In certain cases, Breckenridge allows owners to make capital improvements that can be added onto the price of appreciation-capped units. In these instances, Best said there are still caps on how much the seller can charge for the home. Breckenridge is also launching an incentive program where people can recoup some costs of maintenance they perform on their deed-restricted properties.
Summit Combined Housing Authority also offers grants owners can use toward maintenance on their deed-restricted properties.
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