Planning conversations within La Plata County in regard to land use, the housing predicament and commercial and residential permitting circle back to one word: growth.
It’s on governmental officials’ minds as they revise comprehensive land-use plans, land-use codes and zoning, consider business parks and plan for the future use of Camino del Rio.
Since Durango’s founding in 1881, growth has endured and become exponential through economic recessions, local policy changes, legislative action, incentives for and restrictions on growth, and several key developments that reconfigured the housing landscape.
Many of those occurrences were just in the past 30 years, and developers, real estate agents, housing industry professionals and governmental leaders weighed in on the most formative ones.
“I didn’t want a gated community,” said developer Gene Fisher, who purchased the Jenkins Ranch property, the Skyridge site, in 1998. “In ‘old Durango,’ and on Third Avenue still, you see big houses and little houses. That’s what makes Durango eclectic. My vision was to recreate that in Skyridge.”
At the time Fisher purchased the property, the fact that Durango had few available lots worked to his advantage. And while skepticism surrounded Fisher’s idea, it worked for two reasons: He sold a range of lot sizes at a range of prices, and he built in an area with no offsite costs.
Fisher, who said he is finished with development, said subdivisions like Skyridge are now lacking in Durango, though the need for starter homes hasn’t gone away.
The development did come with complications.
In the late 1990s, the city voted against a critical arterial roadway that would have relieved Camino del Rio and North Main Avenue of some Skyridge traffic.
Sixty lots were developed in the first phase; today, there are 430, with only three vacant.
This summer, Three Springs reached 100 percent capacity at The Confluence, its 100-unit apartment complex. Nearly half of the units were leased within three weeks.
In April 2005, following discussions until 1 a.m., more than two years of negotiations and an initial approval of the project in 2004, Durango City Council approved plans for the sprawling community, which is regarded as a model for future development in La Plata County.
The project was unprecedented. Plans accommodated town homes, apartment units, single-family dwellings, commercial space and enough land to build two schools.
Under the agreement with the city, Three Springs would build 10 percent affordable and 15 percent attainable, commit an initial $30 million to utilities and infrastructure and pay more impact fees than any other development in the county had ever paid.
At that time, the city agreed to allow 2,283 residential units, 159,000 square feet of light industrial space and 705,000 square feet of retail or office space on 621 acres in the Grandview area. Development is moving steadily.
The city has also approved four metropolitan districts within Three Springs – another first for Durango – to tax properties within district boundaries to help pay for street and sidewalk infrastructure, landscaping, utilities and other services.
A change to state annexation laws in 1987 was also integral to the eventual development of Three Springs, as well as Mercy Regional Medical Center. Under the old statute, contiguity was required between city limits and one-sixth of the boundary of land to be annexed. When the law changed in 1987, municipalities were allowed to ignore public lands standing between city limits and acquirable land, which made annexing the Three Springs property possible.
Another large-scale project, Edgemont Highlands off Florida Road, was conceptualized in the early 1980s, and its lots continue to sell today. The development was lauded for its design, which offers both a community sense of a subdivision as well as open space.
Before developer Tom Gorton took the reins, others eyed the property but never realized any projects there.
In the mid 2000s, Gorton’s initial plan for more than 2,000 units was scaled back to just over 1,000 over 1,400 acres.
The 2016 real estate forecast predicted Edgemont, as well as Three Springs, Spring Creek and Twin Buttes, would be the leading developments this year.
In the early 1980s, a 1,100-unit development called Falcon Heights was proposed for just over 300 acres of land west of town. The project was greatly downsized and ultimately only a fraction of the project was developed, but it led to the emergence of the city’s open space acquisition program.
“I wrote the staff report for this in 1984, and the city resisted this,” outgoing Durango Community Development Director Greg Hoch said. “It was proposed for an area with shale hillsides, steep slopes, and it was huge. But because it couldn’t be developed, it became possible to purchase it for open space.”
In the 1960s and 1970s, unless you were a farmer or rancher, most residents lived in town, in Bayfield, Durango or Ignacio, recalls John Wells, a local broker since 1979. That began to change in the 1980s, as an interest in larger lots and the accompanying privacy began to rise.
As central sewer access was introduced to the Animas Valley, it opened up the fertile stretch of land north of town, once virtually just for agriculturists, to development and a specialized planning district to balance agricultural, business and real estate interests.
“It was an interesting movement, where we saw a percentage of the population deciding they wanted to live more rural than urban or suburban,” Wells said. “Now that trend has shifted to where there are more and more people that want to be close to work, services and activities in town.”
This bill, enacted in 1972, was the advent of the “ranchette” era in Colorado. Under the law, which legislators attempted to dismantle in 1999, lots over 35 acres are exempt from county land-use regulations. Anything smaller needs county approval to be subdivided, and it resulted in a rise in transactions of properties sized just over that threshold.
“The 35-acre ranchettes were a major transformation,” Wells said. “If a farmer or rancher owned the lot, he could sell it to a developer for more than he could to another farmer.”
This reconfiguration and regulation of land could create complications: 35-acre lots are too small for some farmers, yet too big for some home lots. And the bill has also invited lawsuits throughout the state over the years between counties and developers.
jpace@durangoherald.com
