The Longmont Leader accepts contributions, photos, letters to the editor, or LTEs, and op-eds for publication from community members, business leaders and public officials on local topics. Publication will be at the discretion of the editor and published opinions do not represent the views of the Longmont Leader or its staff. To submit a contribution, email [email protected].
The Longmont Housing Needs Assessment is a step in the right direction toward building awareness and support for solutions to the housing crisis in Longmont.
Longmont is ahead of many of our neighbors in attacking the crisis and should be a leader in creative solutions that we can share with our neighboring communities, since the housing shortage can’t be addressed without wide scale adoption of different approaches. I would love to see more concrete recommendations to facilitate or incentivize the actual construction of for-sale, attainable homes in Longmont.
Supply and demand are still the primary factors in the cost of housing in Longmont.
It’s clear that we need to build smaller, more affordable homes to take the pressure off the current supply of purchasable homes. Purchasable homes are further limited by high interest rates locking existing homeowners into their current homes rather than being able to downsize without actually increasing mortgage payments.
In the recent Housing Assessment Report, land costs were presented in a graphic showing that land costs constitute 25 percent of the cost of a new home. This leads me in two different directions.
One, land trusts and other mechanisms that reduce or eliminate land costs from the actual cost of a home are tools that could be used to increase accessibility to ownership.
And two, higher density developments can be used to reduce land cost per unit. This means smaller homes, condos, townhomes, and courtyard homes. Denser development has the added benefit of concentrating city services and making them more efficient for the city to provide.
I think the suggestion outlined in the Assessment to “encourage on-site build option for rental projects (as well as ownership projects) and reduce process-related barriers to this compliance option” is desirable, but the how is what is missing. The goals of the Affordable (and now the looming Attainable) Housing Programs should be to actually get more homes built. Up until recently, it seems that success in the Longmont Affordable Housing program has been measured in dollars collected from Payment in Lieu. The number of homes actually getting built in the Attainable/Missing Middle by developer builders outside of nonprofits is basically zero.
Hearing the philosophy behind Payment in Lieu calculations further caused me to question whether the current program is addressing the imperative that affordable and attainable homes actually get built. We were presented with two approaches to Payment in Lieu. The first was based on The Affordability Gap Method - the gap between a market priced home versus an Affordable priced home. The second was a based on The Development Cost Method which would equal the full cost of an Affordable home. If I understand economics and the market, adding costs to the price of homes being built increases the cost of those homes. It seems to me that unless we can effectively use Payment in Lieu fees in an effectively leveraged way, we will just continue to exacerbate the Missing Middle housing hole that we can currently see in the Longmont housing market.
What is getting built by market price operators are higher end homes, due to risk in the entitlement process and the cost of an ever-dwindling supply of land combined with ever-increasing construction costs.
If we are to have meaningful impact on addressing our housing needs, multiple solutions will be needed to address the shortage collectively and comprehensively. We will all need to participate, wherever in town we live, and accept and support additional density and infill if we are to continue to have a sustainable financial model for our infrastructure (which directly impacts every single resident’s tax bill). This includes public transportation viability, provision of critical public services (think healthcare, public safety, education), community amenities (stores, restaurants, day care, other small businesses), and protection of the open space and natural areas surrounding our city.
I don’t believe the math that Payment in Lieu funds can address housing needs works without a significant piece of the housing gap also being addressed by market forces and commercial builders. It seems to me that our ability to tax our way to building enough housing is doomed to fail and the private market needs to be influenced and incentivized to more fully address our housing needs. This will require a partnership in which Payment in Lieu funds are effectively deployed to help developer/builders actually build Affordable and Attainable for purchase homes in the face of ever-increasing pricing pressures.
Many of the Assessment’s initial conclusions and assertions are by now generally accepted, in terms of the lack of affordable and attainable housing’s negative impact on vehicle miles traveled (increased traffic), GHG emissions associated with that traffic (and ongoing single house detached development across ever greater sprawl), public health impacts of those emissions and lack of access to health services, negative economic sustainability due to increased turnover and inability to hire for primary employers, loss of workers to less expensive communities, decreasing quality of life as workers leave Longmont, and the increasingly negative impact of housing affordability on building generational wealth and exacerbation of historical inequity, and more.
I would add to the Assessment’s non-comprehensive list, the continuing successful perpetuation of exclusivity engrained within our planning and development process that allows NIMBYs to prevent projects that conform to stated strategic community goals to increase density, affordability, diversity and attainability, and improve the financial viability of community infrastructure. Housing projects are repeatedly delayed, modified and blocked by arguments that the provision of housing for an ever-increasing population should happen in someone else’s neighborhood because of traffic, incompatibility with adjacent existing un-affordable homes and inaccurate and exclusive assertions of the purported impact on the environment impact/traffic/taxes/crime/life-style of practically every new development within or adjacent to existing neighborhoods. I have witnessed testimony against a variety of projects both in person and in writing that (to paraphrase ), “those people living in – condos/townhomes/multi-family/apartments/smaller homes decrease our property values and increase crime.” These sentiments, whatever their motivation, echo historically exclusive development and zoning rules rooted in racist and economically exclusive policies.
Let’s work with those that build homes to identify and remove roadblocks at both the local and state level to clear the way to increase the number of homes for sale of all types.
Eric Wallace
Co-Chair
Prosper Longmont
*The writer repeated The Affordability Gap as both approaches to Pay in Lieu. He meant to include The Development Cost as the second approach.
