This is the sixth story in a six-part series for The Colorado Dream: Housing Wanted. The stories in this series are part of the KUNC podcast The Colorado Dream, airing on Fridays beginning October 6. The podcast is available for download wherever you may listen to podcasts and on KUNC.org.
Nyles Strey is the general manager of Slope Style Ski + Bike shop in Breckenridge, Colorado. He moved from Littleton to Summit County about a decade ago seeking a change.
“I never really identified with the Front Range quite so much, so as soon as I got out of high school, I pretty much came up here,” Strey said. “Just the avid skier and biker, and that's all I've ever really wanted to do.”
The 32-year-old has a bachelor's degree in sustainability studies from Colorado Mountain College, but has always been employed at Slope Style right on Main Street in Breckenridge. He started off as a part-time shop hand and worked his way up.
Strey said no one is a stranger in his small mountain town.
“You’re walking around Main Street and you just see people, you know, and you say ‘Hi,’” Strey said. “I just love the community here.”
Strey and his wife rent a one-bedroom condo in town. But over the past couple of years, they've been trying to buy a house.
Finally, they found one. Strey’s old boss, the former owner of Slope Style, was selling his two-bedroom, deed-restricted townhouse in the nearby town of Frisco. He had promised it to the couple, who financially qualified for the home at the time.
But then Strey got a raise at work. Suddenly, the couple made too much money to buy the townhouse, which could only be bought by people who fall within a certain income bracket.
“We ended up making, like, $1,000 too much to be within the Area Median Income, (which) is the metric that they use," Strey said. "It was just like the most gut wrenching thing ever.”
At that point, Strey and his wife pivoted. They put a $10,000 deposit down on a new $475,000 two-bedroom, two-bathroom house under construction in Fairplay, about a 40-minute drive south of Breckenridge on a good weather day.
While Strey and his wife have now achieved their dream of buying a home, he would still prefer to live in Breckenridge, the community he’s grown so fond of.
“Obviously, I'd like to be in Breck. But it's not entirely realistic anymore unless you can find a deed-restricted home,” he said.
Many residents in Breckenridge and other parts of Summit County struggle to find housing, a crisis that’s affecting people at nearly every income level. A recent survey of county residents shows just how dire the situation has become. According to the survey, the county will need over 2,500 additional rental and for-sale units to meet the housing demand.
A neighborhood for the local workforce
Megan Matza and her partner Grant Bigler own a deed-restricted house in the Wellington neighborhood in Breckenridge.
“To me, it kind of looks like Pleasantville. You know, white picket fences, everyone has pretty green yards, you know, cute houses with white trim,” said Matza, the professional development coordinator at Little Red Schoolhouse, a local Montessori-based preschool and early learning center.
Wellington is the brainchild of a local developer named David O’Neil. In the late '90s he wanted to build workforce housing and approached local leaders about buying the land, which needed to be annexed into the town. They gave him the green light under the condition that 80% of the units would be affordable and reserved for area residents. O’Neil agreed, and Wellington became Breckenridge’s first planned workforce neighborhood.
Over the past two decades, Wellington and the adjacent Lincoln Park have been transformed into one neighborhood with 226 deed restricted and 56 market rate single family homes and duplexes. The neighborhood is very walkable, with lots of communal green spaces and amazing views of Breckenridge Ski Resort and Tenmile Range.
“We do happy hour walks. We take wine with us, we walk, we talk to people. It's great,” Matza said. “In the summer—even in the winter—you see kids running around and playing, riding bikes out with their friends. You know, kind of how a lot of us grew up a long time ago.”
Every summer the neighborhood hosts a garage sale. It’s an opportunity for residents to get rid of old things, especially kids stuff, and hang out with their neighbors.
Jen Horne was selling a lot of items, including games, bikes and a rug. In less than a month, Horne, her husband and two young daughters were moving to North Carolina to be closer to family.
The Hornes have owned their deed-restricted house for eight years. When they decided to sell it, the price was fixed by the town, which made the process pretty easy. They didn’t even have to list the house. Through word of mouth, they sold it to a young couple who are both elementary school teachers.
“We were very fortunate. We were able to sell the house without even putting it on the market, because this neighborhood is so popular and people want to move here so badly,” she said.
A few streets away, Pamela Veeneman stands outside her house next to rollerblades, skis and other outdoor gear sitting on her driveway and lawn for sale. Veeneman moved to Breckenridge over three decades ago to ski, and she never left. She ended up marrying a local, and they now have two kids. Since 2001, her family has lived in a market rate, four-bedroom house in Wellington.
Veeneman is a labor and delivery nurse at Centura, St. Anthony Summit Hospital and has helped bring a lot of the neighborhood kids into the world.
“During Halloween, especially, I get to see all my children that I've delivered come around and trick or treat, and see them grow,” Veeneman said. “That's just been magical.”
Wellington has been the best place to raise a family, she continued, and she loves living here. But eventually, Veeneman and her husband will move on.
“Both of my kids have recently graduated from high school, so you know, the winters get long the older you get. The cost of living here just increases without the pay matching. So it's hard,” she said.
Lincoln Park is on the other side of the neighborhood. That's where Christy and Matt Vawter live in a market rate three-bedroom house with a rental unit above the garage.
Matt, who grew up in Summit County, is the chef and owner of Rootstalk and Radicato restaurants in Breckenridge. He's had a hard time staffing his kitchens in the past because of the housing crisis.
“It was becoming frustrating because going through the interview process, committing to a candidate, them committing to us, and then things falling through because they couldn't find a place to live,” he said.
To solve this issue, Matt leases three multi-bedroom homes and then rents out rooms to his sous chefs, line cooks and other back of house staff. This is a common practice among business owners in the county, he said.
“The idea was really, once people get here, they have a place to call home, a place to hang their hat and get their feet on the ground,” he said. “Get comfortable in the work environment.”
Matt thinks the town has done a great job of creating “stepping stones” for locals to buy their first homes. A lot of his coworkers own deed-restricted homes.
“These are all opportunities for people that are, you know, working folk to be able to own their own home in paradise and where we want to live,” he said.
A deed-restricted home is what kept Summit School District employees Tai and Kristin Sposato in Breckenridge.
“(We were) ready to move out of state. We were pretty discouraged,” Tai said. “And then this house fell into our lap.”
Their three-bedroom house sits on a corner lot and has a spacious two-car garage. It works for their family of four, most of the time. It’s nice during the summer, when they can take advantage of the long, hot days.
“We're maximizing our house this time of year. The yard adds, you know, 500 square feet. But the wintertime, it gets tight. And this last one was brutally cold,” he said. “We could use a little bit more space.”
The Sposatos would love to buy a four-bedroom single family home. They entered the housing lottery for a new neighborhood being built next to Lincoln Park called Stables Village.
The lottery to become a homeowner
Stables Village is a sustainable, carbon neutral workforce housing development with 61 for-sale units. The single family homes, triplexes and duplexes range in price from the upper $300,000s to the low $800,000s. The developer, Suzanne Allen-Sabo, owns an architecture and interior design firm in the town of Frisco.
Allen-Sabo has lived in Summit County for three decades and spent most of her career designing high-end homes for clients all over the world. Her firm has expanded into workforce housing, which she said feels 'right.'
Allen-Sabo had been interested in affordable housing for a long time, and even focused on the topic while getting her masters degree in architecture.
“It's been a dream that I've had almost my whole life, helping people with housing," she said. "I have so many friends who need housing—and need affordable housing, or have employees who need housing.”
Stables Village fits into a housing category called the “missing middle,” which provides housing that falls between a single family home and a big apartment building. The missing middle includes structures like townhomes and duplexes that can sometimes be difficult to build due to local zoning laws.
These units give people priced out of the market a chance to become homeowners, Allen-Sabo said, like executives, nurses, or the architects who work for her.
“Those kinds of folks, they need housing too," she said. "They want their own house or their own duplex unit and can't afford to buy one.”
To qualify for one of the homes in Stables Village, residents must work in Summit County at least 30 hours a week and make between 80% and 140% of the Area Median Income.
Stables Village will be built in four phases. Phase one broke ground this fall, and a lottery was held in June to determine which residents could buy the first 13 units.
A new federal partnership could be a ‘game changer’
Summit County has five strategies designed to increase the amount of affordable workforce housing. One is initiating new development, and that includes a groundbreaking housing partnership between the Dillon Ranger District and the U.S. Forest Service.
The Dillon Ranger District is one of five districts in the 2.3 million acre White River National Forest, the busiest national forest in the country. White River is home to some of the most popular recreation areas and ski resorts in the U.S.
While tourists flock to the high country seeking adventure, Adam Bianchi, district ranger for the Dillon Ranger District, said his roughly 25 ful-time and 40 seasonal employees can barely make ends meet.
“There's only a few employees that make over $58,000, which is sort of that HUD line for what's considered low income. And because of that, most of my employees, they struggle with finding affordable housing,” Bianchi said. “A lot of my employees have multiple jobs, second jobs, third jobs beyond just working here for the U.S. Forest Service.”
In September, Summit County signed a 50-year lease with the White River National Forest. It’s the first step towards building affordable housing for service employees and the local workforce. The development will be a partnership between the national forest, the town of Dillon and Summit County.
This lease agreement is a first for the Forest Service and was signed under the authorities in the 2018 Agriculture Improvement Act, also known as 2018 Farm Bill, which recently expired. It gave the Forest Service new authority to lease certain administrative sites like the one in the Dillon Ranger District.
Dillon Ranger District’s administrative site serves as a work center and provides temporary employee housing. The new pilot project will renovate the property, including infrastructure and utilities, and build a new work center and at least 162 long-term affordable rental units. The project also includes a community center, residential parking and a public transit stop. Construction is expected to begin in 2024.
“We are very excited about this project. We think that it has huge potential to be a game changer,” Anna Bengtson, White River National Forest land conveyance manager, said.
The pilot program could lead to more partnerships between the Forest Service and other communities with housing challenges. Dillon Ranger District has already fielded requests for information from national forests in states like New Hampshire, Montana, California and Alaska.
‘Connect to the community’
In June, the town of Breckenridge oversaw the Stables Village lottery. It garnered a lot of interest, and 191 residents entered for a chance to buy one of the 13 available units. Some people received extra tickets if they worked in a certain neighborhood or had lived and worked in Summit County for more than 10 years.
One of those lottery tickets belonged to Slope Style Ski + Bike manager Nyles Strey. He and his wife, Callison, already had a contract on another house in Fairplay, but decided to enter the lottery anyway.
Their number was chosen ninth, and they got the house they wanted: a three-bedroom end unit in a triplex. Strey heard the good news from Callison.
“She called me and she's just like, ‘Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God. We got the one we wanted,'” he said. “For the first couple of weeks, I was just like, I can't believe this is actually happening."
Strey is grateful that he and his wife won the housing lottery, but has concerns about the selection process. With so much housing demand, he thinks these lotteries should be reserved for longtime locals who have lived in the area for at least a minimum set number of years.
“We've been putting into this community for 12 years now and trying to build ourselves into a position to be able to buy a house and stay here. Just to see someone else get in and they've only been here for five months,” he said. “It’s just kind of a little bit of a bummer.”
When Stables Village is completed, it could be a haven for locals, just like Lincoln Park and Wellington already are. A place where kids can roam in packs and neighbors can meet up for happy hour walks.
Strey is looking forward to being a part of it.
“This neighborhood is not only going to be awesome for us," he said in an email to KUNC, "But also as a way to further connect to the community.”
Credits
The Colorado Dream: “Housing Wanted” is a production from KUNC News and a member of the NPR Podcast Network. It’s hosted by Stephanie Daniel with reporting by Stephanie Daniel and editing by Sean Corcoran. The theme song was composed by Jason Paton. Michelle Redo sound designed and mixed the episode. Digital editing and social promotion by Jennifer Coombes, Jenn de la Fuente and Natalie Skowlund. Photos by Stephanie Daniel and Jennifer Coombes. Artwork by Ashley Jefcoat and Jennifer Coombes. Music from Epidemic Sound.
Special thanks to Rae Solomon, Scott Franz, Robyn Vincent, Robert Leja, Mike Arnold and Tammy Terwelp, KUNC’s president and CEO.
Editor's note: Nov. 17, 2023 this story was updated. The story corrected the spelling of Pamela Veeneman’s name.
