The Roaring Fork School District hopes to take the first step toward fulfilling its goal to secure another 300 units of staff housing over the next 10 years through a partnership with a Colorado affordable housing developer.
Earlier this year, the district selected Colorado Rural Homes to carry forward a plan to build 60 homes on 8.6 acres of district-owned property on JW Drive near the Blue Lake neighborhood in El Jebel.
The project would be solely intended to provide homeownership opportunities for RFSD staff with a mix of single- and multi-family housing units at price points ranging from $300,000 to $500,000.
It would be the first housing available for purchase by teachers and other staff since the completion of Habitat for Humanity’s Basalt Vista project four years ago. That 27-home development, located directly behind Basalt High School, included 14 below-market homes designated for district employees.
Combined with the school district’s 117 rental units spread across Basalt, Carbondale and Glenwood Springs, RFSD’s housing program has gone a long way to help hire and retain teachers and other critical staff in recent years.
But not far enough, according to a district housing master plan completed late last year. That study quantified just how many units would be needed over the next 10 years — 326 — to stabilize staffing, said Ben Bohmfalk, chief operating officer for the district.
The El Jebel project is the new starting point as the district enters the next phase of meeting its staff housing goals.
“What the study recommended is that we do this project first, using district-owned land and working with an outside developer to build housing,” Bohmfalk explained.
The district has made strides on the rental housing front, using $15 million in dedicated funds from a 2015 bond issue to build new rental units and convert several existing units to below-market rental units meant for district staff.
“We don’t have enough capital financing to do another rental project, so it makes sense to get a development partner to come in that has the resources and can sell the units directly to staff,” Bohmfalk said. “We’re contributing as much as we can for the planning part of it, but nothing like paying for a whole project.”
All 117 of the district’s rental units are occupied, with a waitlist of about 20 currently, he said. The rental stock includes a single-family home in Carbondale’s River Valley Ranch that had originally been intended to house the district superintendent. It didn’t end up being needed for that purpose, at least not immediately, but it has proven valuable in the district’s recruiting of district-level staff, Bohmfalk said.
The vision with the rental housing program as a whole was that staff would be able to rent for a few years at below-market rates based on their household income, and save up to be able to buy a home.
“The market has changed so much even since then, though, where we’ve had people in rentals for almost 10 years now and they’re feeling stuck there,” he said. “This represents our first big expansion of our home ownership opportunities.”
Rural Homes has a strong track record of building workforce housing across Colorado, including 59 units recently completed in Ridgway, Ouray and Norwood.
“By leveraging modular construction and affordable financing, we can deliver high-quality homes quickly and cost-effectively, which means we can build homes priced for those who work in the community,” David Ware, CEO of Rural Homes, said in a June news release announcing the partnership with the RFSD.
It won’t happen overnight, though. The project must first be submitted to Eagle County and go through its land-use review process, where it will likely face scrutiny from the public over a variety of development-related impacts, including traffic.
The 8.6-acre proposed project site on JW Drive was purchased by the school district in 2019 when it was thought a new school would soon be needed for the Basalt attendance area. Declining enrollment, especially in the Basalt-area schools due in part to higher housing costs in that area, have meant there’s no immediate need for a new school, Bohmfalk said.
“The schools aren’t growing, but the staff we do need can’t afford to live there,” he said.
The site is adjacent to another smaller parcel that was dedicated to the district for a future school site when the Blue Lake subdivision was approved in the 1980s. That parcel, which has some park amenities, is not included in the housing plan.
“We see this fitting into that neighborhood well,” Bohmfalk said, noting the planned 60 units is well short of the 194 units the site could accommodate.
“It was never our plan to max out that site with hundreds of units,” he said.
Bohmfalk counters any growth-related concerns, saying the school district project, and even the 163-unit Aspen 1 workforce housing project that’s being proposed across JW Drive, are geared toward housing existing workers and residents, not adding to the population.
For the school district’s part, the new project could allow current renters of district units to buy a home at an affordable price, thus freeing up a rental unit for another staff member, he said.
If approved, the El Jebel project would be phased in over several years, with the first units possibly coming online in 2028.