Lemmer: Around two dozen community members attended the Plan-Jam in Rifle on Tuesday to hear the results of the housing needs assessment. The study was done by Points Consulting Rifle Planning Director Zach Higgins discussed the assessment, which details possible solutions to the housing challenges the city faces.
Higgins: We've got some challenges. So some of the things are that 85% of first-time home buyers can't afford to buy an average-priced home. Also, we've got some rents that are rising. And we need to address some of our housing issues in multiple different ways that could include accessory dwelling units.
We're also going to be doing a comprehension plan, reconfirmation, and a zoning and development code update. Over the next 18 months, we're looking at form-based code, where we're basically focused on what the building façade, the street, and the build-to-building façade looks like; and less about what happens inside of private homes and private property. We're going to be concerned about preserving community and neighborhood character while allowing for flexibility of development. So you could have a scenario where you have a duplex or a quad adjacent to a detached single-family house in a neighborhood while still keeping the character of the neighborhood.
I think one of the things that makes Rifle unique in housing right now is that we're seeing a lot of pressure come from up-valley. We've got a lot of folks who have probably either lived up-valley or worked up-valley for a long time and decided to relocate to Rifle where it's more affordable. And so we've got an issue where our housing has been on the more affordable side for many decades. And it's starting to increase because we have less stock. So with less stock and higher demand, we're going to see higher prices. And so we've got a population that can't necessarily afford the houses that they live in today if they were to turn around and try and buy them again.
And so the thing that we're trying to do is address... the trying to have more housing supply while not blowing up as a community, and making sure we still keep our Rifle roots. And so, one of the things I talked about is addressing the zoning code so that we don't change too much too quickly. I think that's the thing that we need to focus on.
Other unique challenges are going to be that we have, I think it's like 40% of our population is Spanish speaking. One of the challenges that I'm having is getting the engagement from those folks to know what it is that they need to have to be successful in our community. That could be housing, that could be transit, and anything else in the mix.
We're going to be looking to engage with that community, specifically and intentionally over the next 18 months to make sure that those folks are heard and we can try and address the problems that help all of our citizens, and not just the folks that speak English. We need to diversify our housing stock.
You know we're really good at developing single-family detached homes, and we've been doing it for quite some time. And, that's what I see come across my desk most often in the last, uh, you know, few months. And so I think one of those things is going to be doing pre-approved ADUs that we're looking at.
We're going to be looking at other financing options that we can do for ADUs. Those accessory dwelling units, I think are going to be able to capture a rental segment that isn't being done by the free market to this moment. We've also, one of the things that was in the housing needs assessment that we should look at, is a partnership with Grand River Health and the school district to look at ways that the three of us entities can look at having a partnership in developing affordable housing whether that's deed restricted or some other unique way that we haven't come up with yet, but we are going to be looking at some solutions that are out of the box for Rifle. At the moment, we're going to need to be more intentional about housing. The council's been talking about it more often, and I think that there's some good movement around that space.
We'll bring something to the table that we just haven't done yet. We're going to be looking at infill, which is, building within spaces within the city, and trying to infill those locations instead of sprawling out to the outward bounds of the city. We want to make sure that infrastructure stays affordable, and it also stays sustainable in the sense that we're not building out something that we can't maintain fifty to a hundred years from now. Rifle's been doing a great job at building out infrastructure in a sustainable way for a number of years now, and we're going to continue that tradition as long as we can.
Lemmer: Higgins says that Rifle residents should keep an eye on the city's website and Facebook page for more information, as well as upcoming surveys on housing. He says that city officials will also be going out into neighborhoods soon to gather community input.
