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Affordable housing in Minturn looks likely

Dustin Racioppi
dracioppi@vaildaily.com
Minturn, CO Colorado

MINTURN ” The Minturn Town Council has entered into what it anticipates to be a lengthy year of detailed discussions and policy changes on one of its goals for 2009 ” getting affordable housing into Minturn.

“We need to move forward with it and get it done,” Mayor Hawkeye Flaherty said. “If we don’t get it in place, the opportunities to do this slip by.”

The council broached the topic at its meeting Wednesday night and expect it to take the rest of the year to hash out the details of what the town wants to see, and how the development will be implemented.



“This one, particularly, is going to be an intense process,” Town Planner Victor Villarreal said.

Flaherty said there are two major factors to chip away at: Having a place to build and having a housing program. But the council didn’t start there Wednesday night. Instead, it had preliminary discussions on what the rules would be and how to zone areas of the town. Flaherty brought up the idea of having inclusionary zoning ” meaning it requires a developer to dedicate a portion of its project to providing affordable housing.

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The council also discussed the idea of incentivizing business owners and developers by allowing “density bonuses”. If, for example, a developer wants to build a certain amount of homes, the town would allow them to build even more, but with the caveat that a certain amount of the homes must be affordable. The same would go for business owners looking to expand, if that were the model the council adopts.

But there’s no telling what it will adopt or come up with just yet. The only sure thing is that it will be a detailed process and that it’s what the council wants for the future.

“This is going to be a tough nut to crack,” Councilman Jerry Bumgarner said. “We’ve got to get started on it or we’re never going to get it cracked.”

Dustin Racioppi can be reached at 970-748-2936 or dracioppi@vaildaily.com.


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