Basalt is considering lowering affordable housing requirements for developers. Town officials have taken a step towards reducing the required number of affordable housing units in new developments. Right now the general rule is 35% of a project’s residential square footage has to be affordable housing. If approved, it would drop to 25%.
Basalt’s planning department says the goal of giving developers more breaks on affordable housing costs is to make building affordable housing cheaper and thus more inexpensive for workers. The move is partly in response to neighboring Eagle County slicing down its requirements to below Basalt’s.
Basalt officials have also initially approved adding requirements to make sure affordable housing units are a good place to call home. “A lot of it relates to kitchens, minimum amount of kitchen space,” says BasaltAssistant Planning Director James Lindt, as well as “minimum amount of cabinet space, minimum number of bathrooms per number of bedrooms. Just to make the units more liveable.”
