Housing Hits: 4 Recommendations from Past Plans

Community Builders has completed over 34 technical assistance projects, each one of them focusing on a specific priority of ours (housing, land use, transportation, and economy). While our projects may be focused, we believe a livable community exists at the intersection of all of these priorities, and therefore, our plans often include recommendations about all four of them.

For today, we’re focusing on housing recommendations. We’ve highlighted four “housing hits” from past projects and check in on those communities to see how they have implemented their housing solutions.

Victor, Idaho | 2016
Adaptive Reuse to Support Community Vision

In hopes of preventing unwanted development in Victor and activating their city through housing and development, participants of a workshop charrette explored concepts for adaptive reuse of the old elementary school building. In that discussion, the participants expressed a desire to incorporate housing within the concept. One of the key finings was to approach the site as a catalyst for redevelopment. The town is currently in the process on updating their master plan in order to move to develop more input of the future of this project that was also addressed in the Activating Downtown Victor strategic plan.

Although Laramie is still in the planning process, they are working toward developing a strategic plan to support attainable and affordable housing in their community. One of the key housing issues in Laramie is the lack of available housing inventory. This creates scarcity and high housing cost in the market. A key solution was to evaluate the zoning code to identify barriers in achieving the housing development they want. After a code audit, a major outcome was to update the City’s land development code to reflect the code changes recommended for specific districts. As the plan is wrapping up, the city is currently in the process of taking these changes to council for approval in 2021.

The Gunnison Downtown Vibrancy project set out to determine a community- based vision for the city of Gunnison, Colorado’s future. One identified goal in this vision was to create a vibrant and authentic downtown, of which, increasing housing in the downtown would play an important role. To make that happen, Gunnison began a regional partnership with the Gunnison Valley Regional Housing Authority to identify sites for housing in the downtown. This collaboration between the City and Gunnison Valley Regional Housing Authority continues today as they rely on each other to problem solve key housing issues in their community.

In generating an updated Plan of Development for the downtown, the Grand Junction, Colorado community identified housing and development as a key component. The community felt that in order to reach their vision for downtown,  they needed to offer a diversity of quality housing choices for all price points downtown. To support this goal, the project team worked with several partners to identify opportunity sites for housing, while also gaining a better understanding of potential barriers to this development. These opportunity sites cultivated major interest from local developers, and one opportunity site has been sold as a result of this project.

*This blog was produced for Day 3 of the 12 Days of Housing. To access content from this holiday housing campaign, click here.