How a Huge Affordable Housing Initiative Divided Steamboat And What Comes Next
West of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, beyond the famous ski town, where the sky opens and the Yampa Valley’s ranchland rolls out over scrub and sage, things seem quiet, even serene.
Once the summer hunting grounds of several Ute bands, all of whom were forcibly removed from the treaty-promised land in the late 1800s, this idyllic mountain oasis has evolved in modern times from a low-key ranching community to an international skiing destination. But the fitful, often problematic evolution of the community is far from the minds of most as Steamboat holds a certain mellow allure. Less swept up or busy than more luxe towns, and seemingly more down to earth than many hard-skiing meccas, Steamboat seems every bit the peaceful community that it projects.
But under the surface, mirroring many towns the Mountain West over, Steamboat Springs has endured growing pains and archetypical divisions wrought by the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. And the community finds perhaps its most pronounced divide here, on this expansive, wind-whipped parcel just outside of city limits, a plot called Brown Ranch.
Brown Ranch’s 534 acres, which were purchased for the local housing authority in 2021 with an anonymous donation of $24 million, was slated for a massive, if fraught, affordable housing initiative of the scope seldom if ever realized in mountain communities. And Steamboat seemed to need it. Amidst skyrocketing living costs and an influx of second home owners, the local housing board—the Yampa Valley Housing Authority—estimated a coming ten-year shortfall of nearly 3,200 affordable housing units, something market-rate real estate seemed little poised to alleviate.
But the debate over how, or even if, Steamboat Springs should grow has been complicated, mirroring larger issues faced the West over. While the housing authority has steadfastly pushed for a bold, large development here, others have been less keen on the proposal, with a rising, often internet-bound cohort questioning the motives of the government entity, often in ways not substantiated by evidence.
But while the debate has evolved, the question of how Steamboat Springs might tackle its affordable housing shortfall is certainly nothing new. Affordability has long dogged resort and mountain towns; a cliche ski bum refrain here revolves around which of someone’s three jobs they’re off to next. The topic of affordability has become all the more pressing as real estate prices have reached staggering heights amidst a COVID-induced boom in short term rentals and second home ownership that has not only displaced renters, but created a demand for real estate that supply can’t quite meet.
The scope of Steamboat’s affordability crisis has even reached viral proportions, when in March of 2024 multiple news outlets, including The New York Post and Business Insider, picked up the juicy story that the municipality couldn’t seem to find a head of human resources who could afford to live in town, regardless of the $167,000 a year salary offered for the position.
The role that affordable housing will play in Steamboat’s future—even how this particular parcel might—has long been debated, and has long been divisive. The previous development proposal on the land now slated for Brown Ranch, then called Steamboat 700, put forth a vastly different vision for growth. Encompassing some 2,000 market rate homes and 380,000 square feet of commercial space, including large format retailers, the project and its twenty-to-thirty year buildout was thought of as the single largest change to the town since the base of the ski area was incorporated into city limits decades prior.
It seemed this shift would indeed come when city council approved the development on October 19th, 2009, with a four-to-three vote, but Steamboat 700 would experience a fate that would presage that of Brown Ranch years later. After being narrowly approved by city council, the annexation of Steamboat 700 into city limits was subject to a petition, which eventually brought the measure to a city-wide vote, where Steamboat Springs residents rejected the incorporation by over twenty percentage points.
A vague if determined purpose to preserve the community seemed at play in the wake of Steamboat 700’s defeat. Tim Rowse, the spokesman for the committee that spearheaded the opposition effort, told Mike Lawerence of The Steamboat Pilot “I think the voters made a great choice.”
“We have a fabulous community. This vote shows our community cares about its future.”
More than a decade later, a new, hopeful vision for the future of the community coalesced as the land once slated for Steamboat 700 was sold to the Yampa Valley Housing Authority for use as the massive affordable housing initiative christened Brown Ranch.
But, as Dylan Anderson wrote in The Steamboat Pilot in October of 2022, for the ambitious project to succeed, much of the community would have to agree on its implementation.
“There are millions available for housing from the state and federal government, and officials at both levels have signaled the Brown Ranch would be a strong candidate for this funding,” he wrote. “But this alone will not build Steamboat’s housing future, as the Brown Ranch will require a significant investment from the community it hopes to preserve.”
Amidst lofty goals, rumors, and online vitriol–and a community and wider culture dramatically shifted by the COVID-19 pandemic–that consensus would prove slippery. Strikingly similar to the demise the Steamboat 700 development faced, Brown Ranch’s annexation would be approved by city council in late 2023 only to be voted down in a city-wide referendum the following March.
“We Don’t Want To Be Aspen”
The story of how Brown Ranch evolved from an idealistic, even redemptive affordable housing dream to the foil for a sizable, disillusioned local electorate touches on myriad factors that have pressured mountain town life over the last several decades. Ever subjected to over tourism, influx, and unaffordability, mountain communities have often struggled to maintain a working-class population that makes a working-class wage. And, in modern times, the solution often put forth is subsidized affordable housing.
The prototypical example of affordable housing in mountain towns is unequivocally Aspen, Colorado; a community now perhaps more famous for its Hollywood-esque citizenry and tabloid-worthy real estate than its world-class skiing. By the late 1980s the average cost of a single family home in Aspen city limits was already over $1 million. In May of 2025, it was $13 million.
But the town of Aspen had a certain foresight. As the community quickly evolved into a destination sought by skiers and stars the world over, plans were put in place not only dedicated to maintaining the historical personality of the town, but also a portion of the town’s working class via affordable housing.
In part referencing the April, 16th, 1966 edition of The Aspen Times, Ryan Movsowitz of Emory University notes that “in the 1966 Aspen Area Master Plan, the Council sought to preserve Aspen’s unique character, while encouraging economic development. Its plan recommended revisions to the city and county zoning codes that regulated construction, the preservation of public parks and open spaces, and the development of affordable housing.”
Twelve years later, in the fall of 1978, Aspen would open its first government-funded affordable housing initiative, an eight unit complex known as Midland Park Place Condominiums. It was the culmination of more than a decade of ideation that would become crucial to Aspen’s vision of affordability, and their use of a housing authority to apply for grants to build subsidized units would create a blueprint for other mountain towns.
As Catherine Lutz of the Aspen Sojourner wrote in 2014, “four years before Midland Park was completed, in October 1974, the Pitkin County commissioners had authorized a $25,000 budget to fund a housing authority. The idea of this new office…was to study the housing needs of the community, to come up with a set of requirements and incentives to build affordable housing, and to apply for any pertinent state and federal housing program funds.” Today, the Aspen Pitkin County Housing Authority manages over 3,100 units in Pitkin County, though this sum is thought to account for only one-fifth of the city’s workforce, with many commuting into town from the bedroom communities of Basalt, El Jebel, Glenwood Springs, and beyond.
Other ski towns were not as quick to pick up on the coming need for affordable housing, including Jackson in Teton County, Wyoming, which later grew in a fashion similar to Aspen.
Jackson also had unique circumstances tied to development, crucially that only 3% of the county, which includes parts of Yellowstone National Park and nearly the entirety of Teton National Park, is private, developable land. By the 1970s, when the county established its building department, codes were put in place that, while aiming to create a path to affordability, also incentivized low density buildout.
As a Jackson Hole Workingpresentation outlines, “the 1978 Comp Plan provided density bonuses for subdivisions that provided 50% or more dedicated open space. The goal was to create smaller, more affordable lots for locals to build their homes, and at the same time dedicate open space for migratory and view corridors.”
But as time went by Jackson would take a more direct approach to its affordable housing issue. In 1991, the Jackson Hole Community Housing Trust was founded, presaging the creation of the Jackson/Teton Affordable Housing department. Still, like other mountain communities, Jackson would unavoidably become subsumed into the rising culture of affluence, complicating future efforts aimed at affordability.
“A huge discussion point in the 90s here was ‘we don’t want to become Aspen,’” says former Jackson Hole Guide reporter and editor Dave Simpson. “Guess what, this place, in a lot of ways, became Aspen. In its own way. But by that I mean there was a huge influx of wealth in the community, so not only was there a small amount of private land, there’s people with inordinately high incomes who can afford to compete for that land against average people who have average jobs in a place like this.”
In 1994, Teton County established its own affordable housing plan, known as Chapter 5, with the stated goals of, “1. To provide a variety of quality affordable housing for Teton County’s socially and economically diverse population, [and] 2. To establish a balanced program of incentives, requirements, and public and private actions to provide affordable housing.”
Notably, Chapter 5 referenced the chief cause of unattainable housing costs in Jackson as “the influx of nonresident households,” stating that “the prevalence of this type of home buyer has pushed up housing prices to the extent that an average wage earner cannot afford housing in Teton County.”
This evolution—the rise of the second home owner—would soon be operative in most, if not all ski towns, including those long thought of as mellow, working class, and perhaps not subject to the rising luxury tide. Including Steamboat Springs.
“Okay. We can do bold.”
Steamboat Springs has long carried the reputation as a down-to-earth community; a place where strangers—though more likely acquainted locals—race to say hi as they pass each other by, and where visitors come for the laid-back ambiance instead of the typical ski town glamour Steamboat long eschewed. Moreover, the town’s atmosphere–and real estate prices–always seemed more modest than that of other destinations.
Still, the town’s relationship with affordable housing is a long one, though official efforts on the matter are more recent. A November 1st, 2000 Steamboat Pilot article written by Avi Salzman detailed the long running demand for such housing in the community. “In the past 30 years, about 30 reports and recommendations have been written by various entities, numerous committees have been formed and surveys taken, all in the name of finding a way to provide low- and middle-income residents of Steamboat Springs with better access to affordable housing,” the article notes.
Only three years earlier had any sort of body been created to address affordable housing in the Yampa Valley when the Regional Affordable Living Foundation was launched. “But until the Regional Affordable Living Foundation was created at the end of 1997,” the Steamboat Pilot article reads, “no specific plans had been implemented to deal with the affordable housing issue.”
By 2003 the Yampa Valley Housing Authority (YVHA) was established jointly by the Steamboat Springs City Council and the Routt County Board of County Commissioners, subsuming the directive of the non-profit Regional Affordable Living Foundation, and later incorporating the assets of the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity.
As Dylan Anderson of the Yampa Valley Bugle, a local alternative news source led by the former Steamboat Pilot reporter notes, “when formed, a major upside expressed by the city and county of a housing authority over a standard nonprofit was the potential to ask voters for funding in the future.” Given that statutory power, like Aspen and Jackson’s housing authorities, the YVHA could bring measures to vote asking the community for more resources, though it would be barred from engaging directly in election politicking, both of which would be influential later in the debate over Brown Ranch.
In 2021, in the midst of an influx of second-home owners, instigating a 15% rise in home prices in 2020 alone, Steamboat suddenly seemed to reach an affordability singularity. But then, with a multimillion dollar donation, the Yampa Valley Housing Authority received an asset perhaps no mountain community has ever had: a 534 acre parcel slated for affordable housing, just west of city limits. The acquisition seemed at first to grant the YVHA a mandate to alleviate the community’s affordable housing issue not just piecemeal, but in its entirety.
After acquiring the parcel—now known as Brown Ranch—the Yampa Valley Housing Authority quickly got to work, viewing the opportunity as a magic bullet to once and for all solve Steamboat’s affordable housing puzzle.
“We were given this amazing gift; 534 acres that is in the growth area for Steamboat. It’s been identified for the last 30 years,” Jason Peasley, the executive director of the Yampa Valley Housing Authority says, referencing the urban growth boundary as set forth by local government decades earlier. “This is where Steamboat’s growing, given to us under the premise of ‘go build affordable housing. Go tackle this issue. Go do something bold,’” remembers Peasley, smiling.
“Okay. We can do bold.”
A few months after the sale of the parcel, the YVHA named a twenty person steering committee whose purpose was to give Brown Ranch sizable input from the local constituency for how the project should materialize.
“What we chose to do was make it as open a community process as we could. So, we created the steering committee. We sort of more or less ceded control to this steering committee,” Peasley says.
Peasley notes that on top of surveying the community, the steering committee spent nearly a year and nearly a million dollars studying the community’s housing need before the Yampa Valley Housing Authority presented the detailed final plan in October of 2022; what originally was to include three alternatives was simplified to one final proposal–a flexibly initiated buildout over twenty years that included over 2,000 units to house over six-thousand people at completion. All whose infrastructure was estimated to cost $400 million.
After months of ideation and planning that the YVHA says included over 250 meetings engaging with some 4,000 individuals, city council approved the annexation of the Brown Ranch project into city limits on October 18th, 2023, on a second reading of the measure; the first reading which voted to send the project to a city-wide referendum.
But almost immediately a petition to bring the approval to a city-wide vote began collecting signatures. Routt County Republicans quickly mobilized behind an annexation petitioner’s committee they called “Let Steamboat Vote-Brown Ranch.” The committee explicitly put forth several reasons for the pursuit of a public referendum while implicitly campaigning for its defeat, specifically that the project’s size made public input necessary, and that the project was too large in scope and budget, referencing a supposed $52 million capital funding gap.
A key member of that petition process—a local small business owner who is now running for city council—is Kelly Phillips. Speaking in passionate bursts, Phillips’ details his platform based on ideals of trust and transparency, tenets he feels both the current city council and the YVHA lack.
“Through that whole process I never met anyone who was for Brown Ranch, that knew about the project, that was excited about the project,” Phillips asserts.
“In Steamboat everybody kind of goes about their business, they’re going to ski, or they’re going to do this, and they read something in the paper and it’s just gone,” Phillips says. “What I found from my interactions was people didn’t understand what the development was. Or that there wasn’t any money put to any of the…it was a pretty picture that they put out.”
Misinformation, Social Media, Heartache
Furthermore, a group called Citizens For a Better Plan, led by former city council member Jim Engelken (who was also listed as a member of the “Let’s Vote Steamboat-Brown Ranch” committee), was initiated, spreading word through their now shuttered website and on social media.
Moreover, a seemingly anonymous Facebook group entitled ‘Vote No on Brown Ranch’ materialized, asking community members to sign the petition while also providing a platform for those opposed to the development. While the site illuminated that a sizable opposition to the Brown Ranch proposal existed, some found the group put forth information that was hyperbolic, or even purposefully deceptive.
One March of 2024 post on the group’s page claimed “transit at the Brown Ranch is limited to two vans for 6100 people,” while others seemed to imply that the parcel would be developed with high rise apartment buildings. The group also referenced the project’s apparent $52 million shortfall in a Facebook post, insinuating—without evidence—that each household in the community could be subject to a $9,062 debt for a project. “Are you ready to pay that?” the post concluded. Within just six weeks, the effort would eventually garner over 1,500 approved signatures, instigating a referendum.
The nature of the social media debate surrounding Brown Ranch would prove not only impactful, but divisive. Peasley and the YVHA were often referred to in politicized, derogatory terms. One user—who noted they did not live in Steamboat Springs—referred to the authority as feeling like “a sinister grift run by an incompetent nonprofit.” And in April, another user noted that a paid sabbatical taken by Peasley was “standard Democrat stuff. They vote themselves HUGE pay checks then pile on benefits to ‘ease burnout.’”
“Honestly, I did not see this social media misinformation campaign coming,” says Peasley. City Council candidate Kelly Phillips, who played a key role in the petition, characterizes the campaign against Brown Ranch differently.
“As for misinformation,” Phillips says “for myself, and me being involved with that, everything that we put out, I vetted it myself. Anything that I put my name to I wanted to make sure that I could find in writing, and it was actually true. And it was,” he claims.
Moreover, YVHA, as a government entity, was barred from directly engaging in the debate as stipulated by Colorado’s Fair Campaign Practices Act, something the housing authority would be reprimanded on, further diminishing trust in the organization from those opposed to Brown Ranch.
On February 20th, a complaint was submitted by Phillips and local resident Dave Barnes–both of whom are running for city council in 2025–alleging that the YVHA had violated “Section 117 of the Colorado Fair Campaign Practices Act,” according to a Pilot article.
By early March of 2024, just weeks before the referendum, the city clerk, while initially waiving the first two allegations, “accept[ed] the latter two categories for additional review.” While the city clerk found that a set of fact sheets dispersed by the housing authority had not violated state law, the office found that a community presentation by the housing authority likely broke election code as “the purpose of the community presentation is election advocacy and not project planning.” The opposition would spring on that news, with the Vote NO on Brown Ranch Facebook group running a post stating “if we can’t trust YVHA to play by the rules, how can we trust them to develop the largest housing project in our community’s history?”
Peasley becomes animated speaking of the topic. “One of the sort of nuances of all of this is that the housing authority is a government, and we were the proponents of a ballot initiative and governments cannot politic on ballot initiatives,” he notes.
“Any bit of information that was not correct, if we attempted to correct that information, it would have been seen as us from a legal standpoint violating the Fair Campaign Act. And so we, as an organization, we had to literally sit back and listen to people lie about the project that we had developed,” Peasley says.
Asked how he would characterize the dissemination of information on the development, including if the social media discourse related to Brown Ranch contained misinformation, Phillips laments the Colorado Open Records Act process, while also accusing the YVHA of secrecy. “First off, the information on Brown Ranch was hard to get to. We had to pay the CORA requests to get information from YVHA. So how would you feel if you wanted the master developer agreement, right?” Phillips notes. “I would think that should just be public, like here you go. When we went in there to go get it, [Peasley] wanted a check for it, and when we dropped off a check, he wanted to wait for the check to clear, to give us the MDA.”
Anecdotally, Kelly insists Peasley’s actions were duplicitous, saying “that was because it was getting so close to the election, he was just trying to just push it off to where we couldn’t get any information. At least from our perspective that’s what it felt like.”
On March 26th, just months after the community had approved a measure to allocate 75% of the city’s short term rental taxes to the Brown Ranch development, Steamboat voters went to the polls to decide the entire project’s fate. And after months of debate–some fruitful, much of it online and vitriolic–Steamboat Springs voters decisively struck down the annexation of Brown Ranch into city limits.
“My heart aches when I think of the people who told us the Brown Ranch would be their first legitimate opportunity to own a home, and they compared it to the good fortune so many others had over the past decades to buy a home,” Peasley told the Steamboat Pilot after the referendum. “With this vote, that same opportunity for those community members is two to three years further out of reach.”
Jim Engelken, leader of the group Citizens for a Better Plan, told the Pilot in the same article that “I can tell you what I want to happen next: I want the housing authority to take a close look at their own goals and re-evaluate their perception of this community and come back with a plan that is more reflective of the values of the existing citizenry.”
The ‘Vote No on Brown Ranch’ Facebook group simply reposted the Pilot’s article, saying “Thank you, Steamboat!!!!”
The Airbnb Of It All
Regardless of what seemed like the Yampa Valley Housing Authority’s mandate to provide affordable housing to the community, the Brown Ranch vote became a referendum not only on a specific city initiative, but on the very ideals surrounding affordable housing and local government. And the cultural landscape surrounding the vote, framed by a community made more guarded by a recent, fitful evolution, was unavoidably affected both by the local cultural topography and broader tides. Most acutely, the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and a growing distrust in public institutions was operative, a legacy that perhaps affected mountain communities disproportionately.
For his part, Peasley speaks to the natural leaps of faith a development like this requires, and how that may have diminished trust in the project. “There was this expectation that everything needed to be figured out and that everything could be figured out. What’s the situation with water? What’s going to happen with transit? What’s going to happen with the city’s budget?,” Peasley says. “All of these [are] legitimate questions. There were not satisfactory answers to a lot of them. Either we didn’t spend the time to dive in and do the analysis to present to people the realm of possibilities that could exist or there was literally just not the ability to project those types of things,” he says.
But opponents of the original Brown Ranch project, like city council candidate Kelly Phillips, characterize Peasley—and the housing authority—in a different light. “I’d like to see it overhauled altogether,” Phillips says of the department before noting how a less than glowing report on the soil conditions at Brown Ranch was commissioned in January of 2024 but wasn’t shared with the YVHA board, nor the public, until May of 2025 and continues to be a contentious, possibly expensive issue for the affordable development.
“My thing is transparency,” Phillips says. “What I’m running on is transparency.”
“I know we have an affordability challenge here in Steamboat, and we have to do something about it,” Phillips says, noting that his vision for a smaller, perhaps more industrial and commercial oriented development at Brown Ranch could be married with dense residential development in town.
But in addition to strictly local conditions, the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent cultural shifts that radically and swiftly disrupted mountain communities in the West was perhaps the great accelerator that both made affordable housing an urgent need and crystallized the polarization of how these towns should evolve.
The pandemic—with its whiplash of stay at home orders followed by the influx of wealthy city denizens looking for an alternative in leisure and residence—accelerated two already in-progress evolutions: the rise of affluent, location-neutral workers, and the continued proliferation of second home ownership. Both phenomena increased the population of Steamboat, and more toward a higher income populace, and further skewed the supply and demand balance of real estate in the community, damaging affordability all the more, in short order disrupting the community.
The YVHA’s Housing Market and Demand Study Executive Summary notes this phenomenon, saying that “homeowners who moved to the Yampa Valley region in the past five years have higher incomes and higher rates of remote work. The survey responses are consistent with data from the ACS that show that the region is becoming older and more affluent.”
Moreover, short term rentals, especially on online platforms like AirBNB, have been another forcing that for years has been a topic of debate in tourist destinations the world over. While Steamboat eventually instituted an overlay map defining where short term rentals were allowed, and city voters approved a 9% tax on the units in 2022, all existing short term rentals were allowed to remain in operation.
And as a May 21st, 2025 Steamboat Pilot article by Suzie Romig notes of a presentation by former Pitkin County Commissioner Mick Ireland and Yale University Professor Justin Farrell, that short term rentals have already had a sizable impact on the community. “Steamboat is showing trends similar to Aspen, leading to a reduction in middle-class residents,” Romig wrote. “Data in both cities shows declining voter registration numbers in short-term rental housing zones, increasing non-local ownership of homes leading to skyrocketing housing costs and decreasing birth rates by families pinched by tough economics and costly housing.”
In all, this influx of affluent remote workers, second home owners, and the changes wrought by the proliferation of short term rentals together marked the latest turn in Steamboat’s long evolution toward world-class real estate prices, marking a fitful, sudden chapter in the evolution of the town.
But perhaps the most loosely definable but most impactful legacy of COVID-19 is how the pandemic itself, and the perception of how government bodies reacted to it, shifted ideals of community and government, where a milieu of distrust became entrenched, especially public trust in government. And several city council candidates–including Kelly Phillips–have not only been skeptical of the Brown Ranch project, they have based their candidacies on fighting for transparency against the ostensible secrecy of the local housing authority.
It Won’t End With Brown Ranch
As Steamboat Springs voters go to the polls to elect a new city council this fall, Brown Ranch closely follows. Several leading candidates, including Phillips and Dave Barnes, have centered their candidacy around not only what they characterize as a pragmatic approach to affordable housing, but have used both Brown Ranch and the Yampa Valley Housing Authority as foils against which to identify their own campaigns.
In a Facebook post, Barnes noted that after being asked at a candidate forum about what challenges lie ahead for the Yampa Valley Housing Authority, he responded that “the first being they are a FOR-profit development company and NOT a nonprofit.” Barnes further noted that “the current council leadership continues to blindly support YVHA leadership and its abuse of tax dollars!”
Candidate Kelly Phillips notes a range of grievances—many of which are conjecture—that point to a perspective that distrusts both the existing city council and the Yampa Valley Housing Authority.
Speaking of the authority’s partnership with The Michael’s Organization, a large developer of affordable housing initiatives who was slated to develop Brown Ranch—and whose CEO was indicted on racketeering charges in June of 2024, leading the YVHA to terminate the relationship—Phillips elicits an unholy alliance. “It’s not conjecture that Michael’s Organization that was YVHA’s partner in [Brown Ranch] needed to have 2,264 units to make it viable for them, and that’s what they kept pushing,” he asserts, using as evidence only that YVHA executive Jason Peasley interrupted an October 2023 city council meeting to say that the authority would not approve of a project scaled back to 1,100 units.
As distrust swirls this election season, with unsubstantiated social media posts even fanning the rumor that the anonymous donor may benefit financially from the development, voters in Steamboat Springs may not simply influence how the community will allow for growth, but how affordability–and the Yampa Valley Housing Authority itself–will fit into that.
Through survey and community outreach, the YVHA is currently in the beginning stages of creating a revised development proposal on the Brown Ranch parcel. That has included what the YVHA has called the Brown Ranch Deliberation and Stewardship Team, a forty member committee tasked with conceptualizing how a rethought Brown Ranch development should materialize.
On August 29th, the Stewardship Team voted unanimously to move into the second phase of the process, what will be “a more detailed conversation about how land long identified for growth in Steamboat Springs should be developed to address the Yampa Valley’s lack of housing,” Dylan Anderson of The Yampa Valley Bugle reported.
Notably, Anderson noted certain divisions in the committee, saying that “just one member of the community volunteers making up the Deliberation and Stewardship Team felt that there is not a viable path forward at Brown Ranch. Roughly half a dozen of them agreed to move forward with the process while noting they still have concerns about Brown Ranch’s viability. Another 27 people said they were sure Brown Ranch was a viable project.”
Still, distrust of the YVHA is endemic even amongst some on the Stewardship Team. And that includes Jim Engelken, a member of the committee who also spearheaded the effort to not only have the Brown Ranch annexation go to a vote, but to be overturned.
Talking to the Steamboat Pilot in July, Engelken said “there are serious lingering trust and credibility issues from the perspective of the community at large,” before saying “the reputation and the public relations problem with that group, from the housing authority perspective, is big enough that it’s going to prevent anything happening at the Brown Ranch until the housing authority can improve itself.”
For his part, housing authority executive director Jason Peasley feels that Brown Ranch will be developed, though in a much different scope than the initial proposal.
“For Brown Ranch in particular, I think it’s going to take some time for the community to come around to what will likely be a smaller more incremental development of that site; something that doesn’t see the sort of headline of like ‘2,000 more units immediately,’ that type of stuff,” he says.
Asked if he believes Steamboat has a large anti-growth contingent, Peasley responds in the affirmative. “Yeah, for sure. I mean, as an example, when’s the last time you had a direct say in changes that happen in this community?,” he says, referring to the failed measure.
Whether the thus far tabled Brown Ranch project, or the vast, completed assets of the Aspen Pitkin County Housing Authority—whose 3,100 units would still outnumber their Yampa Valley counterparts’ even with a completed Brown Ranch—the fitful progression of affordable housing in mountain communities mirrors the spasmodic evolution of these towns both lately and historically.
Ironically, the development of a private community on an abandoned ski area south of Steamboat Springs has been proposed by the same firm that developed the billionaires retreat at the Yellowstone Club, leading to an opposition not dissimilar in tactics to that which successfully resisted Brown Ranch. Though the new proposal—called Stagecoach Mountain Ranch—would not be subject to annexation into city limits, creating a complicated route to a successful opposition. Nor would it help the housing insecure in the community in a meaningful way, save for the 95 workforce housing units the developers plan to build.
From the displaced, original inhabitants, to the current growing paradigm of exclusiveness and opulence in these communities, how people of differing backgrounds, economic privilege, and more might fit into mountain communities is as present as ever.
It’s also an issue framed by the modern ascendence, often online, of distrust and divide, bringing to light questions of inclusion and equity these locales time and again have struggled to answer from on high.
And it surely won’t end with Brown Ranch.
This article was written by POWDER writer Jack O’Brien for his bi-weekly ‘Brave New World of Skiing’ column. Click below to learn more about what Jack has planned for the column throughout the winter season.
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