The Aspen-Pitkin County Housing Authority has decided against making changes to its rightsizing program, after earlier this year weighing ways to incentivize the program that has been used only three times.
The program launched two years ago as a way to improve utilization of deed-restricted ownership units. It allows homeowners who want to downsize their units to swap with homeowners who are looking for bigger units in the APCHA inventory.
The APCHA board wanted to explore ways to get more homeowners to use the program, but after examining retirement trends and open bedrooms in APCHA’s inventory, Liz Axberg, city of Aspen housing policy analyst, recommended maintaining the current program parameters and facilitating housing swaps when they work for both homeowners.
“At the end of the day, we know that there are families who are trying to grow, figure out how to stay here and have houses to grow into,” she said. “But we also know people are aging in place more and people want to stay in the home that they raise their family and be able to have their kids visit the place that they grew up in as well.”
The APCHA board wanted to find ways to incentivize rightsizing because a large swath of APCHA homeowners will reach retirement age in the next 10 to 15 years. But Axberg said while more people are choosing to stay in their APCHA homes after they retire, people also leave the program after retiring, sometimes to move closer to family or to a warmer climate.
APCHA is averaging 62 sales per year. About 13% of APCHA homeowners are retired and 6% are semi-retired.
There also aren’t many units available with multiple spare bedrooms that could allow for rightsizing, Axberg said. A majority of APCHA homeowners who filed their biennial affidavits with the housing authority — 465 households — said they don’t have any spare bedrooms in their units.
A small number of units have more than one spare bedroom — 43 households have two spare bedrooms, 10 have three spare bedrooms and one has four spare bedrooms. When there are open units that could lead to rightsizing swaps, the categories for which the homeowners qualify might not always match.
“This did help to inform like, just because this person has three spare bedrooms and this household needs three of those, doesn’t necessarily make them a good match to swap,” Axberg said.
It is also difficult to get people to move from their homes, especially when they’ve raised families in those homes and lived there for long periods of time, APCHA found.
“If you’re a homeowner and you’ve lived there for a while, even though it might be efficient for you to swap to a small condo, it’s just not the lifestyle that you’ve built for yourself and so it’s hard to picture,” said Pitkin County Commissioner Francie Jacober. “I think people become attached to their homes, and they’re their homes, you know? It’s more than just a house; it’s their home and so I think that’s an impediment to rightsizing.”
When the APCHA board discussed rightsizing incentives in July, board members considered a moving assistance program to help bolster rightsizing, in case there were people who wanted to leave their APCHA housing but didn’t have the means to move.
While it might help some homeowners move and open up new units, it would require a lot of considerations to build such a program and might not be worth the cost APCHA might spend on it, Axberg said.
“First of all, it’s money expended that doesn’t really create new units. That’s a concern,” she said. “What else could we use those funds for in other ways? Capital repairs, maintenance, other types of programs and then also we just think it’s really hard to actually know how many people would take it up.”
The APCHA board approved changes to the rightsizing program to make it easier to downsize when it reviewed its regulations in April.
The new regulations allow any owner who downsizes to purchase a unit of any category. When the program launched, both the downsizer and upsizer could only move into a unit that was the same category as their current unit, or one category above or below such a unit.
