The city of Aspen is still working through details of an employer partnership program for some units of the Lumberyard affordable housing project.
The Aspen City Council chose to reserve 50 of the 277 Lumberyard rental units to use for a program that would give local employers priority in a lottery for some of their employees. After months of employer outreach, the city council reviewed a proposal during a work session on last week, but determined it needed more refinement before finalizing the terms of such a program.
The city proposed charging annual fees per employee housed in the Lumberyard based on the employer’s size and nonprofit status. The fees ranged from $3,000 annually per employee for small nonprofits (zero to five employees) with a maximum of three employee sponsorships, to $6,500 for large for-profit businesses (with 50 or more employees) for up to eight employee sponsorships in the Lumberyard.
The city council wanted to see the fees increased, potentially even higher for larger businesses who can afford a higher annual fee to house their employees. Councilwoman Christine Benedetti suggested priorities for smaller nonprofits with smaller budgets.
“I would like to see priorities for small and small-medium employers in this partnership program versus the larger employers because they already have so many more resources, and I think that this will really be meaningful for smaller businesses and smaller organizations than the larger ones in the long run,” Benedetti said.
The partnership program does not guarantee all employers a unit. In engagement sessions with area employers, some acknowledged that the program may not be best suited for every employer, Aspen Affordable Housing Project Manager Chris Everson said.
“That’s one of the drawbacks is that the housing is not guaranteed, so it’s difficult to plan for, particularly when there’s a new season,” Everson said. “Some employers have employees who’ve been working with them for years, they have housing downvalley, wherever. If they’d like to relocate up, it’s difficult to do and so that employee can move up on a more flexible timeline than someone who’s bringing in 19 new employees tomorrow.”
Councilman Bill Guth wanted to amend the program so that the employers themselves would hold the leases to give them more certainty that they could house their workers.
But doing so would be complicated; the current deed restrictions with Gorman & Co., the Wisconsin-based developer of the Lumberyard, don’t allow the units to be leased to companies, and incoming Middle-Income Housing Tax Credits for the next phase of the Lumberyard construction would likely also make it difficult for the leases to be signed with employers.
Mayor Rachel Richards also worried about what that would mean for an employee’s housing if they lost their jobs while living in the Lumberyard.
“If an employer decides they really don’t like [their employee], they’re not working up to par, there’s not been any harassment issues, anything like that, it’s just, ‘You’re just not good for us anymore, we’re terminating you,’” Richards said, “that is totally different from eviction of an apartment, and evictions take time through courts … so giving all these employers the ability to go to court and do eviction cases, I just see that as not particularly valuable to the program either.”
If the lease is signed with the employee who leaves a company that paid for an employee priority, they can keep their unit as long as they still meet Aspen-Pitkin County Housing Authority qualifications, and the employer would only pay a pro-rated portion of the annual fee for that employee.
The proposed fees were also lower because the employers are not guaranteed a unit.
The city still has time to refine the employer partnership program. The first of three buildings of the Lumberyard is under construction and won’t be ready to open until mid-2028.
Lumberyard construction update
On a rainy afternoon on Oct. 21, a group of city employees, contractors and city council members gathered at the Lumberyard construction site to see the progress on the project and watch as several newly-delivered modular units were placed for building one of the Lumberyard buildings.
The three buildings will house a mix of one-, two- and three-bedroom units.
Construction on the first building, which will house 104 units, started this spring.
Kimball Crangle, Colorado market president for Gorman, said during the site visit that they expect all of the modular units for the first building to be placed by Thanksgiving. That’s the placement of 191 boxes, which each span two units separated by a hallway.
“The building will go up quickly, but we’ve got still a lot of the phase zero infrastructure work that we’ll have to meet,” Crangle said. “But I will say, thanks to Deneuve [Construction] and our Gorman architecture team and all of the subcontractors and engineers that are working on this project, we are on time.”
“Every week is an exciting week for us to see what’s going to come about from a schedule perspective that could either cause us a delay or a hiccup, but we’ve been able to manage,” she added.
The modular units for the Lumberyard come from Autovol, a modular construction company based in Idaho.
After the city previously experienced significant delays and construction defects with the modular units for Aspen’s Burlingame Phase III development, Everson told the city council that Gorman is inspecting the Lumberyard’s modular units carefully to avoid a similar situation. The BG3 units that were constructed, delivered and installed by Idaho-based Guerdon LLC had significant defects to the unit windows, in the construction of domestic water lines in certain units and in electrical wiring.
Gorman has sent employees from its contractor Deneuve to the Autovol factory “on numerous occasions” to review the modular units, Everson told the city council during an Oct. 6 work session.
“They’ve been back and forth [to Idaho], and they’ve had someone there for a significant amount of time during this production, and they will continue to do that,” Everson said. “We did have a sit-down with them to tell them all about our experiences, and we couldn’t recommend to them enough to have eyes on the product being built, so they heard us loud and clear on that.”
“[The city’s previous experience] was also during COVID, all kinds of labor problems as well, so it’s also a different time, but we did relay our experiences to them,” he added.
Crangle said Gorman anticipates starting construction on buildings two and three of the Lumberyard in the spring of 2027.
The city plans to contribute $95 million to the project in 2027, up to $70 million of which will come from bond financing that Aspen voters approved last November.
In 2028, 2029 and 2030, the city will contribute about $15 million each year.