TMR changes plan, partners with Housing Trust

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

By Ben Cannon

Jackson Hole, Wyo.-The team proposing to build a 500-home South Park development announced last week it would drastically change the proposed way a large portion of the subdivision’s homes could be dispensed at a sub-market rate to help meet middle class housing needs in Jackson Hole.

What’s more, the developer has partnered with Teton County Housing Trust, which would oversee dispersal of the homes, and, ostensibly, lend some favorable support to a development detractors had called too dense and flawed in its radically socio-economic designs.

Teton Meadows Ranch a few months ago submitted to the county an application to build 75 percent if its 500 units as deed-restricted to create a micro market intended for Jackson Hole workers that would hover, the developer contended, somewhere well below the valley’s exorbitant free market.

Critics of the proposal – including Jackson Hole Conservation Alliance, Save Historic Jackson Hole and a handful of active neighbors – cited, among other concerns, the lack of a transparent pricing model to indicate how much homes would sell for and how the project could effectively target the demographic – medical personnel, young professionals, emergency workers, teachers – it had identified from the outset.

The developer, James Reinert, a Chicago man who moved to the valley with family a year ago, now has changed his tune. He is, along with the support of the private Housing Trust, offering a different approach targeting a segment of Jackson Hole’s working population. Reinert’s hope is that the idea will pass muster with the county to allow for an upzone for an affordable housing planned unit development (PUD-AH) and the density bonus it would carry with it. Currently the 288-acre Roger Seherr-Thoss property is zoned for about 50 homes.

With the idea of “Homestead Affordable” – the project’s original, deed-restricted designation – out the window, the team is calling the new bulk product “Gap Housing.”  275 units – or 55 percent of the development – would sell under that moniker for between $440,000 and $740,000, with appreciations of either 5 or 6 percent (one and two points above the Consumer Price Index). The fixed price point range, a representative said, is based on foreseeable construction costs and market value, but could increase if the project stalls in the application process.

“Time works against us in this project,” Housing Trust Executive Director Anne Hayden Cresswell said.

Those 275 units would be managed for sale and resale by a yet unformed, for-profit arm of the Housing Trust. The for-profit motive would help recapture and offset costs for the trust, Cresswell explained. The Housing Trust has built 85 affordable homes.
“What I was hearing was a concern about growth, how this could be employment-based, how it could be abused,” said Cresswell, who said she first approached Reinert a few weeks ago. “I wanted to make sure that, to the extent humanly possible, we could guarantee these homes will go to someone living in Jackson and it will serve the people who are not being served in the community right now.” 

The new plan carries a 20 percent free market component the developer said would help offset the costs of offering 400 sub-market units.

A spokesperson for TMR, Kari Cooper, said the Teton Meadows Ranch-Housing Trust partnership was formalized last Wednesday.

That was a week after the development team sans Reinert met a not overly receptive crowd with neighboring Rafter J subdivision homeowners, and two days after a meeting with Melody Ranches, to which the press was not invited. 

“We put it out there and said ‘tell us how to make it better,’” Reinert said last week. “The constructive criticism we listened to.” He said his team has listened to community input “more than any other developer in the history of Teton County.”

One Melody Ranch resident, Rich Bloom, who said he had spoken one-on-one with Reinert and individually with county commissioners, met last week with Cresswell to review the new plan. 

“The changes acknowledge that the [original] plan was fatally flawed on multiple fronts,” Bloom said Monday. He added he was “glad the Housing Trust has stepped in to amend the plan to set defined price points,” but called the PUD-AH “an incomplete planning tool” that gives “no direction” to an appropriate scale of density for a location.  Bloom said he and “scores” of neighbors continue to oppose the density sought in the project.   

The Teton Meadows Ranch proposal will first go before county with a planning commission meeting scheduled for Jan. 28 at 6 p.m.

Illustration by Teton County resident, Fred Whissel.

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TMR changes plan, partners with Housing Trust | Planet JH News Article: County News

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