Affordable Housing and Short-Term Rentals in Colorado Mountain Resort Communities

This is a bit off our standard topics (yet federal employees need housing as well and many of these resort communities are neighbors to National Forests), but it is a really thorough and comprehensive post-election review by reporter Jason Blevins in the Colorado Sun of a variety of policy tweaks that different communities are trying to deal with the affordable housing problem and short-term rentals.

“What we learned … is that the animosity — the us-versus-them, winner-take-all philosophy — that does not work,” Minardi said. “Communities across Colorado are trying to experiment with different solutions and ultimately the answers will come through consensus.”

Summit County Commissioner Tamara Pogue told the task force last week that while her county’s tourism economy is dependent on the nearly $80 million impact of short-term rentals, “the burden on our infrastructure is unfathomable.”

“We have entire neighborhoods in Summit that have gone from being owned primarily by locals to being owned by people who do not designate their primary residence as Summit County,” said Pogue, whose county is building workforce housing, leasing hotels for local workers and offering up to $24,000 to owners of short-term rental homes who ink year-long leases with locals. “As a county we simply do not have the tools to mitigate the financial impacts. We can’t keep up with building at the pace that it would take to mitigate the impact on our workforce housing that short-term rentals have created for us.”