The city of Aspen will take a new approach to preserving local businesses in town through a community land trust meant to keep commercial properties affordable.
The city is in the process of receiving approval from the Internal Revenue Service to declare the Aspen Area Community Trust as a nonprofit organization. It was a project that started in 2023 as a way to tackle affordable housing in Aspen in a new way, but evolved into an initiative in which the main goal is to protect and preserve locally serving businesses who are increasingly getting priced out of town.
“We have housing for people — we need more housing, obviously — but … commercial businesses have been chased out of town and we’re losing it by the bucket,” said Tim Sack, executive director of Buckhorn Public Arts and a member of the Aspen Area Community Trust board. “So we’re trying to find a way to preserve some of this land so that you can get an affordable meal in town, you can find a local craftsman or someone that’s selling goods … the culture of this town has always been that balance.
“I think this last post-COVID era has really been the push and that balance has really been offset,” he added.
A community land trust, or CLT, is a nonprofit that acquires and holds land for stewardship purposes. It can come in multiple forms. The Aspen Valley Land Trust which conserves land in Western Colorado, is one example.
Across the country, communities have established CLTs to address affordable housing concerns, acquiring residential property to maintain affordability for those tenants. They are formed as nonprofits that purchase land or take land donations, establish ground leases and sell the properties at a restricted price.
The city received a $135,000 grant from the Colorado Department of Local Affairs in 2023 to explore the potential of establishing a CLT for affordable housing purposes. It hired consultants from Burlington Associates to explore what creating a land trust in the valley would look like.
It was one way the city wanted to explore creative affordable housing projects without the opportunity to build on large swaths of land.
Through months of interviews with dozens of community stakeholders, the city and its partners determined the community wanted to prioritize safeguards for local businesses.
“We are filling a gap,” said Ann Mullins, president of the Aspen Area Community Trust board. “The city has, for years, tried to create spaces that work for affordable commercial [use] and for some reason, it just hasn’t worked. Our thinking is that as a nonprofit, kind of a go-between between city policy and the consumer, we can be more successful at preserving these businesses, promoting new affordable commercial businesses, and just in that way help the city.”
It’s a model of the CLT that hasn’t been put into practice in many places across the country. The effort will require some learning as the project goes along, Mullins said.
Haley Hart, a long range planner for the city, said the land trust will explore property acquisitions and establish lease agreements for affordable business tenants, providing protections and use restrictions in the agreements to maintain affordability.
It will also explore deed restrictions for some properties.
“Especially as we are sort of leading the path here in standing up this new CLT, I think the deed restriction is going to be a really important component, just because we know that they work for our community,” Hart said.
The land trust will focus on locally serving businesses that offer necessary goods and services in order to maintain a year-round community, Hart added. She declined to name any local businesses or properties as examples because the land trust hasn’t had formal conversations with them yet.
But Hart said there are a lot of locally serving businesses that “our community feels would be a high priority to engage in a conversation with to make sure that they remain part of Aspen’s ecosystem for the future.”
Mullins said the board will put together an inventory of properties in town that could potentially house affordable commercial businesses. There will be a broader larger community conversation, Hart said, about what spaces the community wants to prioritize.
The land trust will be funded through a mix of rental income, city funds, federal and state grants, private foundation grants and donations from private citizens. The land trust will request Aspen City Council approval to spend additional funding from the city’s long range budget to continue working with Burlington Associates.
As the CLT progresses, Mullins said she wants it to serve as a model to other mountain communities struggling to maintain affordable local businesses.
“You’re always talking about the towns that are 10 years behind Aspen or five years behind Aspen,” she said. “How cool if we could get this going, and we could go and present this model to some other mountain towns.”
Some of the land trust’s revenue could come from consulting services in the future, Mullins added.
The land trust wants to hire an executive director by September. A finance committee is working to refine the Aspen Area Community Trust’s operating budget projects for 2026-2028 and implement a fundraising plan.
“I think this is a big thing for community outreach of, what are we missing? You know, it’d be great to have a seamstress in town, it’d be great to have a cobbler that could fix my shoes … the laundromat used to be a huge asset to the community,” Sack said. “So there’s things like that that are just general necessities that we’re losing because you know multinational [companies] are happy to take over that space at [a higher price], but that doesn’t help out the locals who just want to grab a sandwich.
“How do we solidify some of those spaces and also do the community outreach to be like, what do we need? What day are you driving to Glenwood or Carbondale in order to get what we can bring here and help essentially establish in our town, knowing that we have the buildings to do so,” he added.
