Housing is tight in the Roaring Fork Valley, but building new units can be controversial or prohibitively expensive.
Carbondale’s Board of Trustees recently updated the town’s regulations on Accessory Dwelling Units, hoping to encourage residents to build additional housing on their existing properties.
Carbondale’s board of trustees says ADUs can fit well into the fabric of some streets and alleyways around town. They can look like a converted basement, a studio apartment above a garage or a standalone tiny house in the backyard.
It’s an individual-level solution to the housing crunch.
In discussions on the new regulations in March, multiple trustees pointed to the mixed-density neighborhood around Lincoln Avenue, north of Carbondale’s main street, as a source of inspiration.
“Neighborhoods in Carbondale are not as well-designed as the Lincoln [Avenue] area,” said trustee Colin Laird at a March 10 meeting. “But when you think of when it works well, that's what we get. How could we encourage people to do that?”
For years, Carbondale’s regulations on ADUs have been governed by a mosaic of codes and regulations, overseen by multiple offices, boards and committees, which trustees acknowledged have made it cumbersome or confusing to obtain a permit.
About two dozen ADUs have been permitted and constructed in Carbondale since 2014. A little more than half of those required land use permits.
Others were built in areas of town with more lenient land use restrictions.
The town hopes updates to its ADU regulations will streamline the process.
“We see accessory dwelling units as a really flexible type of structure that can be used in lots of different ways over the course of its life as a structure, and we're just basically trying to make it easier to get there,” said outgoing Mayor Ben Bohmfalk at an April 14 board meeting.
The regulatory updates allow ADUs to be about 150 square feet larger and include more rooms. The new regulations also soften parking mandates associated with new units, by not requiring a dedicated parking space for each ADU. Additionally, ADUs can be built in the Old Town historic area of Carbondale, with review by the Historic Preservation Commission.
The updates also create a two-tiered review system, in which ADUs in an existing structure require a building permit, and ADUs that require external construction require an administrative site plan review.
Some areas of Carbondale — like Crystal Village, Crystal River, and River Valley Ranch — are Planned Unit Districts, governed by a different set of land use rules, and would require code amendments to allow ADUs. Half of a PUD’s residents have to sign on to initiate a regulatory change. But Carbondale’s Board of Trustees clarified that the Board or the town’s Planning and Zoning Commission can also initiate an amendment in those communities.
While the goal of the updated regulations is to ease the housing crunch, ADUs in Carbondale aren’t entirely barred from being used as short-term rentals.
The short-term housing market — ADUs and otherwise — is overseen by separate regulations. Carbondale caps the number of short-term rental units at 50, but as of mid-April, there were only 23 authorized units in town.
