Avon refines community housing plan to make things easier for those trying to find affordable housing in town

After bringing its community housing policies up to date last year, Avon is homing in on the details to improve the document that dictates the purchase, ownership, sale and (soon) rental of community housing units in the town.

At its Nov. 19 meeting, the Avon Town Council took a thorough look at the revised Avon Community Housing Plan, conducting a line-by-line analysis of the document. While the council gave approval to some changes, no formal actions were taken, and council members pulled out a handful of specific parts of the document they want to see examined further in the future.

The Avon Community Housing Plan will serve as the “secondary governing document” to all deed restrictions moving forward, said Patti Liermann, Avon’s housing planner. Any new deed restrictions will point to the newest version of the plan.

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The Avon Community Housing Plan received a full overhaul last fall for the first time since it was created in 1990. Since then, Avon has onboarded Liermann, as well as Nina Williams, the town attorney. Both have lent their expertise to making changes in the document.

During the Nov. 19 meeting, Liermann presented the updates she and Williams made to the plan. The best practice is to review the document yearly, and “a lot has happened since 1990,” Liermann said.

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The updates address five broad categories within community housing policy: Owner, buyer and occupant eligibility for community housing; permitted capital improvements for price-capped units; the resale process for price-capped and resident-occupied units; the selection process for reselling units; and creating a template for future deed restrictions.

Updated capital improvement regulations will permit and incentivize people to make improvements to their homes as they age, within relative price limits set out in the document. “It helps people maintain their homes and not feel like they’re going to lose money in the end,” Liermann said.

What kinds of changes are included in the plan?

Liermann’s updates revised definitions to align with current standards and created new language and policies to govern affordable housing forms the town has not yet seen, like deed restrictions on rental units.

The town currently has no for-rent deed restrictions, but this could change in the future. The updates create a policy document before a developer approaches the town with a proposal for a rental-based community housing project, streamlining the process from the start. The rental rules could also apply to future situations in which owners of community housing units in Avon might rent their units to other qualified residents.

For example, the Mi Casa Avon program doesn’t require the unit owner to live there, so the updates could allow the town to revise the Mi Casa deed restrictions to limit the rental rate for those purchasing homes through the program in the future. 

“We prohibited short-term rentals, but we didn’t prohibit exorbitant rentals for a weekend warrior every winter, and I think the intention of Mi Casa is to keep workforce housing and community housing in our community,” said Mayor Amy Phillips.

Why is Avon working on its housing document?

Free market housing prices soared in Eagle County during the pandemic real estate boom and never returned to pre-pandemic levels. The effect was that many who might have been able to afford to live locally before were suddenly priced out of almost every housing opportunity.

“The demand for these price-capped units is so far exceeding any supply that we have right now and so it is crushing people when they don’t get it,” Liermann said.

Mayor Pro Tem Tamra Underwood asked that the document be revised to make it easier to understand for those unfamiliar with housing language and policy.

“I know I’m being exceptionally hard over these policies, but I’ve heard from people in the community who just throw up their hands at this whole process and are so disheartened and feel like they’ve been treated unfairly or whatever because they just can’t get it, they just can’t understand even how to get started,” Underwood said.

Part of why the process is so confusing is because each deed restriction is different, and involves a different application, different required documents and has a different selection process.

“When we saw what happened in 2021, we realized that there is a reason that we should have different processes in different locations, because people who couldn’t get into Miller Ranch could get in in Eagle or Eagle Ranch or town of Avon,” Liermann said. However, “it is so confusing when someone applies at Chapel Square and then the process is just slightly different over at Grandview. When you’re that buyer, that is confusing.”

One goal of the housing document updates is to help clear some of the confusion.

“The sale process needs to be very transparent,” Underwood said. “All cases are to make it a completely clear and transparent process.”

While the Avon Community Housing Plan is a public document, it is designed to mostly serve as an internal-facing answer key to all community housing-related questions Town Council or staff might face. Based on council feedback during the meeting, a more user-friendly version will be created specifically for members of the public sometime soon.

Types of home ownership in Avon and who qualifies for community housing

There are three basic categories of home ownership in Avon. From most restricted to least restricted: Price-capped, resident-occupied, and free market.

This can be confusing because the first two forms of housing, which are both deed-restricted, do need to be occupied by the resident unless otherwise stated in the deed restriction. The difference is that the resale value of price-capped housing has a ceiling set by the town, whereas the resident-occupied housing, while still community housing, does not have a resale price limit. 

Phillips highlighted chapter four of the document, which focuses on the requirements of buyers, owners and renters, and had received minimal updates at the time of Liermann’s presentation to the council. “This is so not fair or transparent right now,” Phillips said.

Phillips framed the home resale process in three categories: Requirements for the owner who wants to sell, requirements for those who want to apply to purchase a unit, and requirements that dictate how the decision is made for which applicant receives the unit. Phillips asked for more clarity on the decision-making process, which is deliberately complicated due to various weighting systems that vary by applicant for different reasons.

Council members also highlighted several other areas of confusion throughout the document that Avon’s housing and planning staff will revise going forward, including placing deed-restricted units in trusts, revisiting homeowner’s association dues caps for deed-restricted units participating in free market HOAs and ensuring Avon residents who have never been able to work due to disability qualify for community housing in the town.

The Avon Town Council is scheduled to continue the discussion during its Jan. 28 meeting.