Ah, Teton County’s housing dilemma. No one wants to talk about it. But everyone does, from positions of abstractly pitying or wild-eyed desperation, depending on the speaker’s income.
Our county’s approach to housing could be described like this: A person with a little watering can is following behind a person with a can of gasoline and a blowtorch. Not only is the watering can — our traditional approach to housing — wholly insufficient, but everyone is ignoring the real problem: the guy with the blowtorch, aka new development.
If we’d really like a resolution instead of nattering on ad nauseum from various socioeconomic perches, it’s long past time to treat the source of the problem. Can’t we do better? We’re supposed to be stewarding a globally renowned but increasingly endangered ecosystem.
Nonetheless, development roars along because Teton County is a gold mine. Each project packs the Town Council and County Commission chambers with lawyers, developers, project managers, real estate agents. The public doesn’t even show up anymore.
Our housing department has built some homes for working people in the last couple of decades: useful affordable units and (unaffordable) market-rate units known as “workforce housing,” a tragic misnomer that itself needs to be evicted from the “affordable” housing conversation. There’s job-attached housing, like the Town of Jackson recently subsidized by allowing a failed “workforce” project at 440 W. Kelly Ave. to be purchased by businesses because no one in said “workforce” could afford its market-rate prices. In this scenario, and all employer-linked housing, you can lose or change your job and lose your home, too!
Luxury condos and high-end, short-term rental units squat hollowly where residents and contributors to our community once called home. Hotels spring up like fungus. There is an incessant pocking of the landscape with more and more trophy homes.
Our elected officials are like a rubber stamp factory for developers: Apply, pressure, never give up, and eventually you will succeed, no matter how bad it is for our existing community.
In fact, market-rate and workforce housing creates more jobs that don’t pay enough for the real workforce to live here. Thus we have disaffected, harried people driving 80, 100 miles to serve in households and businesses. Each way! The worker influx adds to increasingly miserable, clogged roads and pollution. Every day more and more of our so carefully conserved wild animals die an abrupt, ignoble death by callous bumper.
Yet the biggest news is that “hope” for housing has arrived with last week’s approval of a massive development in northern South Park on soon-to-be-former ranch lands and open space. Four commissioners disregarded the Planning Commission’s recommendation and voted to approve the northern South Park land development regulations.
After a bizarrely rushed and reckless vote, one commissioner offered insipid quotes to this newspaper wondering if he had voted the right way. Another commissioner spinelessly excused his vote to capitulate to the landowners’ pressure by saying “the community has stepped up in the past and they can do it again.” One commissioner seemed more interested in launching her re-election campaign. One couldn’t wait to rush the motion.
A brilliant PR move by the developer was to “gift” 45 acres and saddle the community with fundraising to pay for housing on them, estimated at $400 million. The two families that own the land received a tremendous construction upzone, from 118 homes to 500, or 600. Or who knows! It is dizzyingly confusing and opaque. What is clear? The developers got a $100 million gift from Teton County.
Since every 100 new market homes create a need for nearly 40 new “worker” homes, the community now gets to fundraise and pay to offset the burden for the new high-end homes people from other places will be purchasing. Someone’s toilet and shower must be cleaned, laundry done, garden planted, roof shoveled, lights strung for a party. More people need more schools and teachers, nurses, doctors, tutors, plumbers, hot tub helpers, floor moppers, vets, hairstylists. Is there even a net gain of affordable housing, or will it be a net loss? This isn’t even clear, yet the land development regulations were hastily approved by four commissioners.
And although our housing nonprofits walk on hallowed ground, it may not be so deserved. Our housing nonprofits are also — and only — developers. That’s their only tool. Build new housing. This is, a myopic blanket approach that has proved over and over again that it may help a few individuals but overall worsens the problem.
This one-tool toolbox could solve the housing problem in Teton County. But it would have to be a world in which new pressures weren’t constantly being created by other developments, adding slews of low-wage jobs. We don’t live in that world.
If our housing nonprofits actually could raise $400 million, they could do a lot to solve the housing issue without building, paving and adding more weight to the human impact by expanding their missions. How many existing homes in Teton County could be snatched from the jaws of luxury redevelopment, bought and deed restricted into the affordable market?
Nope. We’ll continue to pretend we can use the little watering can to catch that person with the gas can and blowtorch. Four. Hundred. Million. Dollars.
