Mick Ireland, a panelist for the upcoming forum on affordable housing, penned this essay prior to his successful election as Aspen’s mayor last year.

The issue of affordable housing for me is personal. I live in affordable housing, and have for most of my time in Aspen.  So does my sister, Molly, and her family. For all of us, the housing program has made the difference between punching the clock as temporary workers and being real, permanent members of the community.  For the kids, it's meant that they will graduate from high school in the same district where they started kindergarten, with the same friends. They are children with a hometown.

I work for affordable housing because it is part of the glue that keeps our community intact. I'm not a developer; I don't require private sector incentives to do it; and I don't own any property other than my 800-square-foot unit. The bargain is simple. The return on investment in the housing program is the friends, neighbors, and maybe the nurse who'll resuscitate you from your heart attack. 

All affordable housing is not created equally, and my support for local housing is neither indiscriminate nor uncritical.

Burlingame Village, for instance, is a nugget of community endeavor - an environmentally-designed enclave for locals with jobs, roots, and families.  It took our community eight years to go from owning the land to building the houses and it was worth every bit of effort. That includes the time I gave to walking, calling and campaigning in two elections to have it approved. 

The W/J project, on the other hand, which was proposed some years ago for a ranch on McClain Flats, was never built, never approved, and shouldn't have been.  I opposed it from the beginning because it was an ill-conceived monstrosity of environmental and social impacts that violated every norm of reasonable land use.  Like many locals, I could tell the difference.

Our housing program is not without its problems.  Affordable housing in Aspen is not cheap. You need to work and save to get there and there is much more demand than supply.  The lottery is discouraging to many who have entered repeatedly and failed to get a unit.  Add to that the fact that sometimes the elected officials who set sales prices are sometimes a bit cavalier about what people can afford. As someone who lives in affordable housing and has argued consistently for lower-priced units that serve those working in lower-paying jobs, I understand what affordability really means.

And there is often political opposition to the housing program.  Some say, on purely ideological grounds, that government shouldn't provide housing at all.  Others say we have enough, even as lotteries draw a hundred times more applicants than the available units. 

As more and more of the homes that locals live in are redeveloped into larger homes, many of which are vacation homes that demand upkeep and care, the demand for labor will continue to accelerate faster than we realize. We don't want to further increase our economy's reliance on the importation of workers from distant locales. We have a chance to partner with private sector businesses that increasingly find themselves unable to hire anyone at any price.   

I believe our affordable housing should be as integrated into our downtown and existing developed areas as money and opportunity permit.  I believe that, while we need housing for a wide range of incomes, we shouldn't act as if money and land are unlimited; we should focus our efforts where the greatest need is and insure that sales prices of units are indeed affordable.  Where prices are too high we should use some of our ample housing fund to bring them down to a level people can afford. 

I also believe there are real opportunities right in town for buying down some free-market units to make them affordable and to rehabilitate, upgrade and, in some instances, expand existing units. Much of this will not interest private developers, but we are not bound and limited to housing underwritten by the profit motive.  This work should be undertaken anyway and this is a place where our Housing Authority has the ability to help.

It took the threat of condemnation to save the Woody Creek Mobile Home Park. It took a lot of time and money and a huge amount of political will to make Burlingame Village happen.  There is nothing about affordable housing that comes easily and the housing program needs the constant support of interested elected officials.  Affordable housing in Aspen is the legacy of decades of serious work by many uncelebrated locals. We are respected around the nation for our program - the first question asked by visiting officials is "How can we do what you have done in our own town?"

As Aspen's mayor, I'll continue to focus on productive solutions to the housing problem and you can count on me to be there to supply that political will.

Mick will describe recent efforts to provide more affordable housing in Aspen at the Our Future Summit forum, scheduled from 7:00 to 9:00 pm this Thursday evening at the Summit County Community & Senior Center near Frisco.