A mindset shift transforms community building in Alamosa

Make your town a great place to live and everything else will organically follow.

Five years after the City of Alamosa and its partners attended our Building Better Places Training (BBP), this mindset still permeates City Hall.

“BBP solidified for us that quality of life is the primary economic driver,” explained City of Alamosa Development Services Director Rachel James. “People want to live in cool, special, beautiful places. People will move to these towns and shape them.”

When the City attended BBP, just one month before the COVID-19 pandemic reached Colorado, local leaders were grappling with a range of interconnected community challenges. Housing costs were rising, downtown storefronts sat empty, and abandoned homes were continuing to deteriorate.

The makeup of the Alamosa team reflected the intersectional nature of these issues, bringing together the Mayor, City and County staff, and nonprofit and business leaders working across housing, economic development, and infrastructure. Despite their different roles and areas of expertise, BBP helped the group coalesce around a shared commitment to their community:

We commit to bringing our community together to create a housing strategy that expands housing choices in strategic locations. We will learn, educate, and engage the community and build key partners, and build the resources and capacity to act. This will result in a more vibrant community and economy.

Above: Alamosa’s interdisciplinary team at Building Better Places 2020 included the Mayor, City and County staff, and nonprofit and private sector leaders working across a number of topical areas including housing, economic development, and infrastructure.

This commitment, which prioritizes housing as a community and economic development strategy, speaks to Community Builders’ core belief that jobs follow people, and people are drawn to great places.

“We were seeing all these things we needed to get done but we couldn’t quite figure out how to combine everything,” recollected City of Alamosa Planning and Development Specialist Deacon Aspinwall. “The training helped us put together how we synergize and coordinate.”

Above: A flowchart created by City of Alamosa Planning and Development Specialist Deacon Aspinwall reflects how Community Builders helped the City connect the dots between interconnected community challenges and goals.

Housing as the key

For Alamosa, BBP solidified the importance of housing in ways the City had not previously considered.

Before the training, the City thought of housing as something to be left to the private sector, a challenge too big for the municipality to take on directly. Ever since, the local government has taken what staff describes as an “aggressive” response to the community’s housing needs. The thinking is simple – if jobs follow people, people need quality places to live.

Just a month after BBP, the City launched an RFP for a Housing Needs Assessment (HNA), which was formally adopted in January 2021. By acting early, Alamosa positioned itself ahead of the curve as a competitive applicant for American Rescue Plan and Prop 123 funding. Since adopting the HNA, the City has received more than $10 million in grant funding to support housing initiatives.

In 2025, Community Builders and Alamosa’s paths crossed again, this time through the Colorado Department of Housing’s Technical Assistance program. Working alongside Enterprise Community Partners, we helped the City develop an action plan aimed at bringing neglected properties back to life. 

By assisting owners with funding to renovate abandoned homes and turn underutilized buildings into much needed rental housing, the City hopes to expand housing options, elevate the look and feel of neighborhoods, and improve public safety.

Investing in place-based assets

Quality housing is just one element of place-based economic development, a strategy focused on leveraging local community assets, culture, businesses, and people to strengthen economic wellbeing. Creating and maintaining a vibrant built environment is also central to this approach.

When the historic Walsh Hotel was severely damaged in a fire in 2020, creating an eyesore and public safety hazard in downtown Alamosa, the City knew it had to act. Alamosa soon purchased the property, taking on the prospective burden of asbestos remediation and demolition.

Thanks to James and her team, the City secured U.S. Environmental Protection Agency funding for the building’s demolition and cleanup. With a path to demolition cleared, the City could finally start dreaming up redevelopment opportunities for the site.

Above: City of Alamosa Development Services Director Rachel James participates in an activity at the 2020 Building Better Places Training.

In 2023, Alamosa once again partnered with our team to gain a deeper understanding of the local market context, as well as the feasibility of and community support for different potential uses of the site. Together, the City, the public, and Community Builders collaborated to hone in on four suggested uses: a hotel, a specialty grocery store, a coworking space, and multi-family housing.

Two years later, a SpringHill Suites Hotel is now under construction on the former Walsh Hotel site. The 90-room hotel, paired with a smaller boutique hotel under development one block over, will serve as the City’s first commercial lodging options in the downtown area.

Looking back on the five years since Alamosa attended BBP, James and Aspinwall noted a distinct paradigm shift in how the City approaches community development. Though much has changed since the formal roadmap was created at BBP, its core concepts, such as jobs follow people, people follow places, are internalized for the long-term.

“We are now focused on building great public spaces and focusing on our community assets like the river and downtown,” James reflected. “These things are not superficial, these are the things that build a community.”