Workforce Housing

History and Motivations for Workforce Housing

Although the idea of providing housing to workers is arguably as old as housing policy itself, the term workforce housing is of relatively recent vintage. It is most often traced to the mountain towns of Aspen and Telluride, Colorado. These communities grew rapidly as exclusive ski and resort communities after World War II. By the late 1960s, rapid growth coupled with housing policies geared toward maintaining the exclusive resort image meant that low-wage workers who lived and worked in the community and previous employees who sought to retire there were having difficulty finding affordable housing. The communities responded with a policy to provide more housing specifically for those who currently held jobs or had been employed in the community.

The problem in these resort communities was akin to the “spatial mismatch” between jobs and low-income people identified by the 1967 Kerner Commission, which was tasked with proposing ways to address the causes of the urban unrest during that decade. Noting high levels of unemployment and underemployment in affected inner-city neighborhoods and the suburbanization of jobs, the commission concluded it was necessary for society to link these potential workers with job locations. At all levels of government, policymakers sought to improve public safety and the welfare of poor communities by providing urban populations with access to jobs through housing as well as transportation and community development projects.

While the Colorado resorts’ workforce housing policy was also a reaction to a mismatch between the locations of workers’ housing and their jobs, the focus was on those already employed and the continued economic vitality of areas already rich with jobs. The current mission for the workforce housing program for Aspen is to ensure the existence of a supply of desirable and affordable housing for persons currently employed in Pitkin County, persons who were employed in Pitkin County prior to retirement, the disabled who have worked or are working in Pitkin County, and other qualified persons of Pitkin County.

In general over the 1970s and 1980s, the relationship between wages and housing costs deteriorated. To highlight the national difficulties faced even by those with full-time employment, in 1989, the National Low Income Housing Coalition published statistics on the housing wage, the hourly wage [Page 781]a household would have to earn to afford a two-bedroom apartment at the Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) Fair Market Rent price. In most metropolitan areas, the housing wage far exceeded the full-time minimum wage, a novel realization for many at the time.

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