In the ever-growing challenge to make homes in the mountains affordable for our Coloradans, one couple set out to make a place for Buena Vista residents to live affordably, and to create a sense of community, along with a housing development that would last for years to come. They say they accomplished two of those goals.
"We'd hope to be able to hit a price point for the smaller units, sub thousand dollars ... we did not succeed in accomplishing that," Jerry Champlin admits, alongside wife and partner in the project Tania McEvoy. "Even when we lower our return fairly dramatically from what we'd originally hoped for, we still can't hit it."
The pair have created a small mountain community space for BV, BV Basecamp, offering 16 units, ranging from incredibly efficient living spaces of 160 square feet up to 640 square feet for the largest home in the complex (that one comes with a bathtub!) The spaces come with a on-site laundry room, multiple fire pits, an ADA compliant room, as well as parking and office space, as the two were hoping to create a neighborhood feel that would inspire community between neighbors. Still the lowest price those units can rent for is $1,050 a month, which is not unaffordable but it's not in the ballpark the couple had aimed for.
Thinking back on the project, developers McEvoy and Champlin said to achieve their goal of creating affordable housing, their shipping container housing complex should have been cottage-core tiny homes, which was sort of their first attempt. But the couple said the town was not interested in their tiny home idea, so they switched to something they thought could also be affordable and stylized at the same time. As they began to construct the project, things like attaching the project to the sewer line, adding windows and infrastructure to the shipping containers, as well as efforts to abide by town code, like the installation of a fire suppression system (into metal containers) ended up ballooning the cost for the two. Suddenly renting the places out for anything less than $1,000 became unprofitable.
"We need to reduce the cost of building, not continuously increase it," Champlin said. "We need to start removing some of the lobbying influence from our ever-evolving code."
He believes the complications in building code directly related to their inability to build the affordable housing project they initially envisioned. He believes the project will still be successful, between its modern, artistic style and the fact that mountain dwellers are sometimes more focused on the proximity to outdoor amenities than the kind of folks who are going to spend all day indoors. But he said it shouldn't have been as hard as it was to get the project across the finish line, and with the kind of end result that they felt could help out the working class of residents more.
"They made us do some jumping through some hoops that became very expensive to clear that could have easily been cleared," Champlin said.
A spokesperson for the town of Buena Vista shared the following comment about the project: "The Town and County continue to evaluate ways to support affordable housing in our community while staying within the confines of land use and building codes. Utilizing shipping containers as a building material certainly poses its unique challenges in meeting building code requirements but tackling the issue of affordable housing has and will continue to require creative solutions."
You can look at the units and their prices here.
Spencer Wilson
Spencer Wilson is CBS News Colorado's mountain newsroom reporter. Read his latest reports or check out his bio and send him an email.