Matthew Anderson, who is now 28, grew up in Basalt — helping out at his parents’ pharmacy in town, playing soccer after school and spending time outside.
“I wasn’t like a ‘river rat’ as a kid, but it’s all about rivers here in Basalt,” Anderson said. “The teachers I had in high school and the classes I took with them — that was my first introduction into rivers in an ecological sense.”
After graduating from Basalt High School, he went on to study environmental science in college and returned home in the summers to intern at the Roaring Fork Conservancy, a local water conservation nonprofit.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Anderson moved home to finish his college degree remotely before starting a full-time position at the conservancy in downtown Basalt. He now works as a water quality technician helping the nonprofit monitor the health of local rivers and streams.
Anderson hopes to continue building his career, and eventually buy a home, in the community where he grew up — a dream that only recently began to feel more attainable.
He spent the last six years living with his parents in his childhood home in the Blue Lake neighborhood near El Jebel, saving up money as the cost of housing continued to rise.
“When I was growing up here as a kid, there were certainly new developments and people moving here, and an affordability crisis already entrenched,” Anderson said. “But when I came back during the pandemic we saw so much acceleration in housing prices.”
According to a regional housing needs assessment recently conducted between Parachute and Aspen, the price of condos in Basalt rose by about 80% and more than doubled for single-family homes and townhouses from 2015 to 2024, with a noticeable rise since the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020.
Homeownership rates in Basalt also shrank from 67% in 2018 to 58% as of 2023, according to the regional assessment.
When Anderson’s boss at the Roaring Fork Conservancy offered him a chance to rent a deed-restricted studio apartment the organization purchased last month in the newly-built Midland Residences development in downtown Basalt, he jumped at the opportunity.
“I'm not sure you could ask for a better situation, right? It's a brand new building, and most importantly, I'm right here,” Anderson said. “I get to walk to work, that's wild — I don't know anybody, any of my friends who walk to work, so the opportunity is almost indescribable.”
‘A full circle’ opportunity
The new apartments in Basalt are located at a site that was formerly occupied by Clark’s Market. Anderson said his family’s pharmacy used to operate in the market and later moved to its current location.
“I'm going to be sleeping right above where I used to walk every day after school for about 15 years,” Anderson said. “It is almost eerily full circle.”
The old grocery store space sat vacant for years before it was purchased by locally-owned development company LP-West. In 2022, Basalt approved the company’s proposal for a major mixed-use development at the site that also included adjacent commercial space where local businesses like Jimbo’s Liquor and the BLT Taqueria were located.
The recently finished development has 65 residential units (a mix of studios, one-bedrooms and two-bedrooms), along with space designated for a liquor store, a small grocery shop and a locally-owned restaurant group.
A quarter of the condo units are deed-restricted, with varying income limits. Sixty-five percent are required to be occupied by primary residents.
Of the 17 income-based, deed-restricted units, 10 are designated for people earning up to 80% of the area median income and another seven are for people earning up to 120% of the AMI. In Basalt, that median income is about $97,770 for a one-person household in 2026.
The income requirements for the deed-restricted units are roughly in line with the recent regional assessment, which found housing in Basalt is most needed for residents making 51% to 130% AMI. That translates to yearly income between $49,863 and $127,100 for a one-person household.
Employer invests in housing
On Aug. 25, the Roaring Fork Conservancy held a ribbon-cutting with town officials, project developers, and donors outside the Midland Residences to celebrate its purchase of a deed-restricted studio unit.
“We're excited about this opportunity, and hopefully, it’s part of a paradigm shift in employee housing here in the Roaring Fork Valley,” said Rick Lofaro, the conservancy’s executive director. “Let's build real workforce housing here, real employee housing, and house the people that work and live here and make a difference in this community.”
According to Lofaro, most of the employees at his small organization have stable housing, but some still have long commutes to the office.
“We still have an employee who lives in No Name and has that commute every day, and we have an employee in Silt who has that commute every day,” Lofaro said. “If we could somehow wave a magic wand and move everybody right here to Basalt, it would be wonderful.”
Lofaro acknowledged that purchasing employee housing can be an expensive endeavor, especially for smaller organizations like the conservancy. Outside funding can make a huge difference.
The total cost of the studio condo that the nonprofit purchased last month was $340,000. The conservancy paid about half of that through $60,000 of its own funding and money raised from local donors.
“We have a mortgage and a loan through Alpine Bank here in Basalt for the remaining $171,000,” Lofaro said. “And we will continue to fundraise around that amount in an effort to obviously pay that mortgage down in several years, and then be done and own it free and clear.”
Local business leader and philanthropist Jim Light — a founding board member of the conservancy — helped the nonprofit raise money from local donors, with the largest contribution coming from Atlantic Aviation. The company operates a large network of fixed-base operators across North America, including the private airports in Aspen and Rifle.
“This is just one unit, it's one studio, it's one person, and in the broad scheme of things it’s not a big deal,” he said. “But we need to be doing this one step at a time.”
Shaping workforce housing
Close to half of the units in the new Midland Residences are now owned by local organizations and businesses who plan to rent the units to their staff or students, according to developer LP-West.
The town of Basalt, Colorado Mountain College and the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies purchased deed-restricted units and other employers like Aspen’s school district and fire department bought free-market condos.
Andrew Light, who grew up in Snowmass Village and is one of two managing partners at LP-West, said they worked closely with town officials to come up with a project that would support full-time residents.
“We have always had a goal of this project being an active, living community,” he said.
Though the town now requires about 25% of new housing developments to be deed-restricted, the Midland Residences ultimately exceeded Basalt’s requirements at the time of its approval.
“It became clear in the approval process that just meeting the town code wouldn't be enough — we had to exceed the town code,” Light said. “The code was 15% of the units needed to be rent capped, and we agreed to go to 25%.”
According to the regional housing assessment, about 18% of Basalt’s total housing stock was deed-restricted as affordable as of 2023.
Basalt Mayor David Knight, who also attended the recent ribbon-cutting at the Midland Residences, said he hopes the town will continue to increase deed-restriction requirements for new developments as housing costs rise.
“We saw a steep acceleration after COVID that is continuing now,” Knight said. “We are trying to meet the moment and deal with the situation the way it is, which is increasingly imperative and urgent.”
As a developer, Light said it's helpful when local governments set clear municipal codes so that his team can come up with a realistic budget in the early stages of a project.
Unforeseen costs can still occur, like when rising interest rates forced LB-West to change the Midland Residences from rental units to for-sale condos with town approval in 2024.
Light said mixing free-market units with deed-restricted housing can also help developers balance affordability and keep the project financially viable.
Free-market condo prices at the Midland Residences started at $599,000 for studios, $995,000 for one-bedrooms and $1,490,000 for two-bedrooms.
“There's a lot of voices that say we should only approve affordable housing, and what that means is that nothing will get built because you can't have 100% rent-capped housing that pencils,” Light said. “I think that’s why you're seeing towns like Snowmass and Aspen funding extremely expensive workforce housing projects since that's the only way those will get built.”
But Light sees promise in a growing effort to come up with creative solutions and strengthen public-private partnerships to build more affordable housing.
“The key mix is having people that have the expertise and the ability to bring in a project on time and on budget with the appropriate government funding and incentives,” Light said.
Meeting a diversity of need
Jennifer Steffel Johnson is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver’s Urban and Regional Planning Department and co-director of a certificate program where students help design real affordable housing projects.
According to Steffel Johnson, more towns like Basalt have been implementing affordable housing requirements for new developments ever since the state passed a new law in 2021 allowing them to do so.
“This is often called an ‘inclusionary ordinance’ or ‘inclusionary zoning,’” Steffel Johnson said. “It was previously considered to be rent control, and that wasn't allowed in Colorado, but that's since been reinterpreted.”
Steffel Johnson sees the Midland Residences in Basalt as just one example of how housing projects are creatively mixing together various strategies like inclusionary zoning to address affordable housing needs.
“We just need more and more diverse housing for all kinds of people and I think there’s absolutely a place for creative development models in that,” she said. “This one in Basalt that is mixed-income as well as mixed-use and mixed tenure, … that takes a lot of skill and savvy to be able to do that, and it needs to be in the right place.”
Though Steffel Johnson still sees value in projects that are focused on housing the most vulnerable residents, including those with lower incomes, she said there are also benefits — beyond just financial viability — for projects like Basalt’s that include both free market and deed-restricted units.
“If a development includes market rate, it has to have more amenities and parking and a good location,” she said. “And there’s a lot of value in economic integration of not having, you know, ‘the lower income side of town,’ but to enable all people to access the good parts of communities.”
As towns like Basalt see an increase in housing need at higher income levels, Steffel Johnson said people are also beginning to question harmful stereotypes about who benefits from affordable housing.
“The scope and the scale of the affordability challenges is changing the conversation,” Steffel Johnson said. “We're no longer talking about creating housing for, you know, ‘those people’ — we're talking about how we can house our whole community.”
In the case of Basalt, housing the whole community includes securing a place to live for local residents like Anderson, the water quality technician at the Roaring Fork Conservancy.
As a beneficiary of a new deed-restricted unit at the Midland Residences, Anderson agrees that all kinds of housing are necessary to meet the diverse needs of communities like Basalt and towns throughout the region.
“I am more secure now, which is very fortunate,” Anderson said. “I just hope that the community continues to recognize how important these housing initiatives are, and that we do it in a responsible way.”
Though his new studio apartment is tied to his job and he may one day have to move out, Anderson sees it as a major step toward achieving his long-term goal of owning his own home in the community where he grew up.
