The question came, as it always did, just as Jason Peasley finished making his case for Brown Ranch, a development that would grow the size of his city by one-third and finally provide some affordable housing for the hundreds of people doubled up in trailer parks and hotel rooms in the ski town. The development, as Peasley pitched it to the room of residents gathered under thick wooden beams in the local community center, would use density to solve the housing problemmainly by building apartments and attached homes.

"What about single family homes?" a woman standing in the back of the meeting room asked. "Because I would like to buy one someday."

Steamboat Springs, Colo.where Peasley serves as the head of the Yampa Valley Housing Authority, providing affordable housing to all of Routt Countyis a mountain town that draws people for its wide open vistas and outdoor space. The idea of living in an apartment on what is now green rolling hills jarred people with visions of their own porches and yards, who had seen their neighbors amass hundreds of thousands of dollars in equity just by owning a single family home during the pandemic.

"Personally, I would take a very, very small house," another resident said.

"So would I," the woman in the back said quickly, so as not to be left out.

Peasley sighed. Nine months ago, he'd been given an opportunity that most urban planners dream ofan anonymous donation of 536 acres of land to build long-term affordable housing for people who live and work in Steamboat Springs. But it's difficult to get buy-in to use hundreds of acres to build multifamily homes in Steamboat, which currently has 1,400 fewer housing units than are currently needed. Residents might support density in theory, but what they really want is a single-family home to call their own.

How Steamboat solves this conundrum could have implications for communities across the country that are struggling with affordability as their populations grow. Home prices have soared in the past two years in cities like Austin and Phoenix as well as in ski towns like Truckee and Sun Valley. Adding more dense housing units would help keep prices affordable, because many of these places have natural boundaries like mountains or oceans that prevent developers from sprawling out. But proposals like Peasley's are usually thwarted by neighbors who complain about their views being blocked or their parking becoming limited or their beloved townwhich they themselves moved to years or decades beforegetting too crowded.

Many communities like Steamboat are reaching a breaking point. Here, the need for more housing had been abundantly clear even before the pandemic, as investors turned condos and apartments that had once provided workforce housing into cash cows on Airbnb. Then, in 2020, remote workers flocked to Steamboat. For all the urban planners proclaiming density to be the solution to America's housing needs, the majority of Americans still dreamed of a single-family home, with a yard, a tree, and room to grow, and the pandemic only whetted that appetite as families spent more time at home and looked for private outdoor space and extra rooms to double as offices. The median listing price of a single family home in Steamboat is now $829,000, up from $529,000 in 2019. Rents for a one-bedroom apartment are hovering around $2,100, about one-third higher than the national average.

By July of 2021, 60 percent of Americans said they'd prefer to live in a place where the homes are large and farther apart, even if schools, stores, and restaurants were a few miles away, up from 53 percent before the pandemic, according to a Pew Research Center survey. In contrast, 39 percent preferred a community where homes are small and close to each other but where schools, stores, and restaurants were in walking distance, down from 47 percent in 2019.

That's even though half of Americans say that affordable housing is a major problem in their community. As Peasley has tried to explain time and again, affordability and density go hand in hand. Single family homes are much more expensive to build than attached homes or apartments, and they take up more room, and need more resources to maintain. Steamboat could build seven attached homes for the amount it would cost to build one single-family detached home, according to projections by Mithun, a consulting group helping with the project.

"We have an opportunity that maybe no other community has to really thoughtfully address our housing issues in one massive development," Peasley, a tall redheaded urban planning guru who could be mistaken for an Olympic skateboarder, told me recently. "This could really be a template for our 21st century live, work, and play."

Peasley is uniquely suited to helping convert Steamboat to pro-density. He was a city planner for Steamboat Springs for five years before taking over the Yampa Valley Housing Authority a decade ago; his tenure has created hundreds of units of affordable housing. His success in getting tax credits to build some affordable housing in Steamboat is what motivated anonymous donors to give him the money to buy Brown Ranch and build even more. Peasley hopes to build 2,300 units at Brown Ranch, which would meet the demand projected for the next two decades.

But no matter how many times Peasley explains this all to the community, even the most self-aware residents of Steamboat are having a hard time letting go of their vision of a home and yard to call their own. "The disconnect we're having is that everyone wants the American dreama single-family homeand economists tell us it's not possible," Peasley says. The surest way to wealth in America has long been to stake claim to a plot of land and a home, but places like Steamboat are discovering that if they are dedicated to welcoming everyone who wants to live there, they're going to have to pioneer another way.

MOAR

America needs to kick these people out.

Yep. As of now they have the freedom to get out and go somewhere else that practices this commie crap.

The rent is too damn high

Hey, this is how the communists roll.  
You'll take your Section 8 housing, your weekly chocolate ration, and you'll like it.  

Hey, if someone wants to bring chaos into their life by having other families live with them in the same house, more power to them. But I won't be one of them. My house is MY house. My property is MY property. And no one is going to tell me what to do with it.

They want everyone to live in a shitty high rise apartment building across the street from their assigned work place.

Stop putting constraints on america

A nation of karens, communist, and selfish fucks

Wrong

I'm sure he lives in an efficiency apartment for the betterment of society.

I’m sure he does not. I’m thinking a 5K sq/ft pad with pool on acreage to keep distance from the riff raff. I know you know this.

Get off my lawn.

Look at that first post sailing past the fence and into the bleachers.

"Gentrification"

it's bad enough with your evil gated communities

acreages are evil, you hear me? E-V-I-L-!-!-!

Now it's communal housing projects next year it'll be barracks in the work camps.  Anytime a lib wants something look at the next step worse to see what they wind up getting.

and donates his bedroom closet to a mexican family of 9 who uses it as an apartment

No one is telling people they have to live in this housing. Kind of like we say here all the time, move to a cheap state (instead of a free state)

I have considered a job or two in Summit and Eagle counties, and there is no way in hell I could afford to live there in a single family home, the land values and building costs are too high. I'd be in a condo or apartment, and that's just reality. Getting to ski a couple runs before or after work, and the abundant recreation opportunities mere steps from your door are the benefit you gain from sharing a wall or ceiling. Hell if I wanted to take a job in the Denver metro it would be the same story for me.

I chose to live in El Paso county (Colorado Springs), I have a small single family house on .2 acre, and if I want to go skiing I'd better be ready to drive 3 hrs, likewise a good hike is going to be a 30-40" drive first at least.

Maybe I'm a commie, but I feel that planner's pain. He's trying to enable poors to live in an area that few can live in, and they are choosy beggars.

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Kharn

I thought it said single parent families…yes, they’re a huge problem like obesity

Get in your brutalist gray concrete highrise - where every 500 sq. Ft. Home is a multifamily home - and eat your bugs, citizen.

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And that way you don't even need a EV

Since nobody else has said yet: You'll own nothing and be happy.

The govt. we’d to stop forcing single family homes on everyone.

That’s true.


We need to stop subsidizing cars and rural living and single family homes.

Yes.

but more importantly, you can be evicted down to a windowless closet until you get in step with the party and earn an apartment again

eh, komrad?

That's not what the article is talking about. They are talking about building apartments or condos.

Having lived in townhomes, duplexes, and stairwell housing in the Army, I can say that it is not a desirable situation. All it takes on one bad neighbor to ruin your whole night, weekend, or life.

Internet is amazing,  quick search shows he lives in a 3/2 1500 sq ft townhouse,  worth about a million.

Using Steamboat Springs is a scam

Thats Marie Antoinette shit right there.

"I want to live in a beautiful, remote, small Colorado mountain town, and I want to buy a 3bd/3bath ranch house on a barista salary."

I wanted to live in Steamboat, shit was too expensive, so I didn't.  Easy easy

And my EV only has enough juice to take me to the bug commissary and back.

When I lived in Steamboat Springs (1961-4; 1968-69 & 1975-77) it went from a town of 2K to 6K but it was 90% + single family homes.

Sounds like they know what the problem is.

So they’re going to build more apartments, only for the same investors swoop in and turn them into AirBnbs?

AirBnbs are a plague in lots of places. We have areas down here where hundreds of properties have been scooped up and turned into short-term rentals. Results are the same complaints about skyrocketing costs for the working-class.

I don’t know the solution as “muh free country”, besides stricter zoning. I personally know folks who settled in nice neighborhoods only to have the house next door turned into a kind of hotel/party house.

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They'll just keep jacking up your property taxes, until you give up or can't pay.

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Mega City One, come to a neighborhood near you soon.

ETA: Beat by 13 seconds.

I am curious as to what Peasley calls home.  Apartment?  Duplex?  Single family on a nice lot?

ETA: Answered above

I don't want to live in NYC.

Mixed use zoning has its place.

I get all these videos on youtube that pop up about how much American cities suck compared to European ones. They are right about everthing thy say except for the elephant in the room. Nobody wants to live in an apartment when you can afford space. And nobody wants to ride a bike if you can afford a car.

Euthanize the homeless.  We do it to animals, humans should experience the same.

Leftists think the Pruitt-Igoe housing project was a massive success, and wish that everyone lived in similar housing.

They can fuck off to a socialist/communist shit hole if that's what they really want.

But they never really want that for themselves, they want it for you.

I read the article a little differently.  The planner is trying to "solve" the problem of where to put the little people who support everyone who moved there and own multi million dollar properties.

Living in ski towns be expensive yo.

I don't know who the idiots are at those meetings, but most of them need to pull their heads out and realize there isn't a feasible way for most people to own a house or even live in the Boat.

The solution is don't try to shoehorn people into a place they can't afford. Ultimately once the rich folks can't get their Starbucks in decent time something will give.

Populations are easier to control when herded into cities. Liberals hate independence of their tit.

Steamboat has the same problem as all the moutain resort towns have.

Terrain locked with limited building area. Need housing for resort workers and associated industries. Long term residents that don't want change.

Without the resort job market would be tiny and housing would be dirt cheap since no easy commute to jobs. As the long term residents die off the town dies.

The cocksuckers address is listed on Spruce street and they all appear to be single family homes in a neighborhood. I didn't take the time to look him up but there is a gis map that lists property owners.

Pic from the article.  Low quality "housing authority" construction.

The City planner youtube sphere is very cancerous. Most of them are leftist redditors, and it shows. There are valid reasons for things like mixed use zoning and mass transit, but very few of them are willing to present both sides of it when they make videos. It's usually "American cities suck and here's what NEEDS to be done about it."