It’s expensive to live in Colorado mountain towns, so much so that many servers, ski lift operators, teachers, first responders and construction workers can’t afford to live where they work.

The median sale price of a home in Summit County is $1M, while the median household income is $109K, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. In Eagle County, the median sale price is nearly $1.2M. In Pitkin County, it jumps to $1.8M, nearly triple the cost of a home in Denver, which is about $618K, according to Zillow.

Attainable and affordable housing has been a challenge in mountain communities for years, but the pain point has become more evident since the pandemic and as home prices continue to escalate, panelists at Bisnow’s Colorado Mountain Developments Summit said.

“Any project that I see moving forward in Summit County [and] the mountain communities is going to have to have some sort of component of employee housing, market-rate housing, however you want to call it,” Foote’s Rest developer Kelly Foote said at the Aug. 26 event held at Copper Mountain Resort. “That is a necessary need in this community, and, unfortunately, it’s a cost that has to be borne by the developer and sometimes the community.”

The cost to build, the price of land and the availability of land are obstacles developers run into when trying to build affordable homes in the mountains. 

“Ten years ago, some subsidy made a project work. Then it was land contribution that made the project work,” Mountain Valley Homes founder and co-owner Brad Hagedorn said. “We’ve gotten to the point where land contribution alone doesn’t even make a project pencil. And so that bar keeps moving.”

From mobile home preservation to deed restrictions, mountain developers, architects, municipalities, nonprofits and employers are turning to creative solutions to address the region’s critical housing needs.

Due to a lack of developable land, redeveloping old inventory from the 1960s and 1970s and preserving Class-C properties with affordable housing components are becoming increasingly important in mountain communities, panelists said. 

Another preservation tool is saving mobile home parks from being purchased by private equity groups or investors who want to redevelop the land. 

A large percentage of the Roaring Fork and Colorado River Valley’s workforce live in mobile home parks, West Mountain Regional Housing Coalition Executive Director April Long said.

The region had two mobile home parks with more than 500 members and 140 housing units hit the market for $42M last year. Nonprofit West Mountain Regional Housing Coalition, in partnership with local governments, philanthropists and private employers, helped the parks’ residents raise $16M in subsidies to preserve the affordable communities. 

This year, the nonprofit is helping preserve a 100-unit mobile home park listed for $23M. The community has raised $11.6M of its $12M subsidy goal to keep the property affordable, Long said. 

“The reason that we’re doing that is not necessarily because we believe that preservation is the better option. It’s just the option,” Long said. “... We have a lot of affordable housing being developed in new construction, but we also recognize that we need preservation.”

Preserving these properties also keeps them with local ownership, something Pitkin County has lacked since the pandemic. About 40% of homes sold in Pitkin County before the pandemic went to out-of-towners. That number has jumped to 70% since the pandemic, Long said.

“We’re doing whatever we can to preserve anything that’s really under $1.5M,” she said.

Organizations are also turning to buydown and payment assistance programs to preserve affordable housing in mountain communities. 

West Mountain Regional Housing Coalition is helping people buy homes in the free market by providing 30% of the purchase price at closing. In exchange, the nonprofit requires a permanent price-capped deed restriction on the home moving forward, locking it in at a more affordable price, Long said. 

Over the last two years, the nonprofit’s program has helped purchase 25 homes for an average of $235K, Long added.

“A lot of our buyers take advantage of those down payment assistance programs, that in exchange have a deed restriction that come with them, and that kind of weaves the affordability and attainability into a market-rate neighborhood,” Hagedorn said. 

Helping working families buy a home is also much faster than waiting for new affordable housing to develop and become available. 

“We can buy a home off the free market in a month, two months, whereas construction in our area … can take five to seven years just to get the approvals before you can break ground,” Long said. 

Another solution discussed at the Bisnow event is adding a tax to real estate transfers. 

Pitkin County has a 1% tax on real estate transfers, which generates more than $25M each year and goes toward dedicated affordable housing. Other nearby communities, such as Basalt and Carbondale, don’t have access to a tax like that but could benefit from it, Long said.

Implementing a similar tax in other communities must be approved by the state legislature.  

Even though the cost to build or develop a property can be hard to pencil in the mountains, it’s still an option, and modular building methods can help make the numbers work. 

But modular builds are not a silver bullet, Hagedorn said.

His real estate development and construction company has seen the delta between stick builds and modular builds decrease over the years, but modular builds give developers cost certainty, a force multiplier and speed, Hagedorn said.

Speed can be especially important in areas with short building seasons due to weather. 

SAR+ Architects worked on a $60M, 332-bed workforce housing complex in Winter Park that used modular construction. The project broke ground in late 2022 and welcomed its first employee residents in early 2024. Modular construction allowed the team to build parts of the project and the site to rest until winter passed, and then the team was able to “stack components” of the complex when the snow melted, SAR+ Architects principal Jesse Adkins said.

The economics of modular construction depends on where the project is located, NHP Foundation Senior Vice President Neal Drobenare said. In Summit County, he didn’t find any savings doing modular versus stick builds. However, in Telluride and Aspen, where the costs are double that of Summit County, modular “really does start to make sense,” he said. 

Another solution to affordable housing is employee housing, but it isn’t for everyone.

Large employers in the Roaring Fork Valley, such as Aspen Snowmass, Pitkin County and Aspen Valley Hospital, have built and managed their own employee housing, but smaller employers typically can’t afford to participate. 

“We have a lot of smaller employers who can’t do the same things that these large employers can do, and so we’re trying to think creatively [about] pooling these resources,” Long said. “The struggle with that is the employer really wants to see it benefit their bottom line,” something that can’t be guaranteed, especially for smaller businesses.