Sunday, July 22, 2018

Employers pay for housing? Jackson Hole is trying it.


            A radical approach to providing affordable housing in pricey Jackson Hole, Wyoming including the town of Jackson and all of Teton County, might be debate fodder in Bend and Central Oregon as rising real estate prices hit buyers and renters alike.
            For the past few years Bend has  proscratinated over how to shift a longstanding local mindset of single family homes on larger lots to accepting more multi-family and mixed used residential bulding.
            The state’s more recent approval of the city’s Urban Growth Boundary plan has essentially pointed the way—indeed, mandated--higher residential density projects on infill land within existing boundaries.
            Now the discussion is how to balance the economics for builders accustomed to generally higher margin single family homes on lots, against more dense development with lower profit potential, whether the latter results from greater building costs or smaller market demand.
Courtesy Jackson Hole News&Guide
            In Bend developers pay system developement charges, or SDCs, to offset impacts on infrastructure such as roads and services. With certain projects, single and multi-family, builders now agree to include a percentage of affordable housing, with eligibility depending on buyer or renter income in relation to the regional median. One idea has been to offer reduced SDC fees as incentives for multi-family projects.
            In Jackson and Teton County, Wyoming a new approach requires developers of commercial projects to pay for a ratio of housing units indexed to the estimated number of fulltime employees a project would generate. Residential builders are also on the hook to pay for units in some way, although recent decisions have shifted the burden more to the commercial sector.
            As might be expected, not everyone is joining hands singing, “We are the world...”
            The new regulations eliminate a moratorium imposed in March of this year on new development proposals in Jackson. But opponents argued that the new requirements would hurt small businesses and non-profits more than big box retailers such as WalMart.
            One opponent quoted by the Jackson Hole News & Guide said the rules would result in some developers opting to build “$1,000 a night” luxury hotels instead of housing or other commercial space.
            Prior to the new rules, as an example an apartment developer was required to provide 20 affordable units in a 90-unit building. The new rules reduce that requirement to 2.490 units, while raising the previous requirement for a 10,000 square foot office building from only 0.222 units to 4.924..
            The prevous rules were also more lenient on commercial developers whose projects generated only seasonal employment.
            The rules were adopted separately by the City of Jackson and Teton County, each which have their own mitigation requirements.
            While Bend and Jackson Hole are both heavily reliant on service sector employment, Bend is considerably more diversified economically. And Bend's population of nearly 95,000 according to the 2017 Census dwarfs Teton County, with only 23,265. 
            But Bend's median rental cost, as reported by Trulia, is about $1,800 compared to the $3,200 for Jackson.