Efforts to solve a housing crisis in La Plata County received a boost this week.
La Plata County commissioners signed an agreement Tuesday that would restart the Regional Housing Alliance of La Plata County. The signing makes official an agreement that was reached in July between La Plata County, the city of Durango, and the towns of Ignacio and Bayfield.
“I’m excited for this. It’s the next step,” said Commissioner Matt Salka during the public meeting. “We are in desperate need of housing and this is a very large tool in our toolbox that we can use to help address those issues in La Plata County.”
La Plata County joins Ignacio, which has already signed the agreement, Commissioner Marsha Porter-Norton said. The three county commissioners passed the motion unanimously.
Once Durango and Bayfield sign the agreement, the reconvened Regional Housing Alliance will release a request for qualifications seeking staff members for the housing authority.
“What we want to get is capacity,” Porter-Norton said. “We have two to three to five ideas that come at us every week, and we need somebody with the expertise and the bandwidth to take those ideas and prioritize them into a work plan.”
The Regional Housing Alliance already has the money to hire a person or a firm, Porter-Norton said.
In 2004, La Plata County, the city of Durango and the town of Ignacio created the Regional Housing Alliance to address local affordable housing and other housing initiatives. Bayfield later joined, and for several years the multi-jurisdictional housing authority worked together to tackle the housing challenges in the county.
In 2017, the governments agreed to let the coalition go dormant, but with the organizational framework intact and a 2020 date to reassess.
Officials from La Plata County, Durango, Ignacio and Bayfield met last June at a two-day retreat to sort out if the Regional Housing Alliance would permanently disband or restart.
They agreed to re-establish the commission, and over the last few months, the governments and their attorneys have reconfigured the alliance’s original agreement.
“We decided the sole reason to stay as an organization is to get housing built,” Porter-Norton said.
Housing remains a critical issue across La Plata County. An August 2021 report by Root Policy Research showed La Plata County needs 453 new housing units between 2021 and 2023 to accommodate employment demand. That total makes up more than half of the housing needed in Southwest Colorado, and it is more than double Archuleta County’s demand for housing, which requires the next most housing in the region.
Another study by the Denver-based Root Policy Research found that almost a third of Durango households are cost burdened or severely cost burdened, meaning they are paying more than 30% of their income toward housing.
“We’re going to need a plan that says, ‘Here are the low hanging fruit where we can start to get some housing,’” Porter-Norton said.
The return of the Regional Housing Alliance signals the start of renewed efforts to address La Plata County’s housing crisis.
“We are recommitting to one another as the four governments,” Porter-Norton said. “We want to put together a very pragmatic, practical plan for starting to chip away.”
ahannon@durangoherald.com
