The proposed housing development for the western half (Area 1) of Northern South Park (NSP) is a huge, consequential development. But denying it could have even bigger consequences. Detractors blocking the proposal by imposing impractical, possibly illegal, conditions are missing the forest for the trees.

Land-owners in Area 1 are applying for approval of a Master Site Plan (MSP) to receive entitlements to build up to 600 units on 76 acres in NSP Area 1. 480 of those units are required to be restricted to local workers. To receive approval for the re-zone the owners must relinquish up to two-thirds of the 76 acres for parks, school needs and the restricted housing. That leaves less than a third of their land for their beneficial use, primarily for unrestricted, free-market units.

Notably, the land they’re permanently relinquishing for public benefit is worth millions if sold as a single ranchette, something they could do at no risk, tomorrow, without any public process. Just as notably, squeezing the market units onto the remaining, unrelinquished property means that the largest houses will be just over 2,000 sf, hardly a mansion by today’s standards, and many of the market units will be townhomes and condominiums. Those aren’t exactly units sought after by the one-percenters buying up multimillion dollar estates throughout the rest of the county. Indeed, many of the market units could likely end up housing local workers, just like the restricted units will.

NSP has generated several hundred comments, including conditions for approval that create economic conditions that no bank would ever finance. Other proposed conditions likely aren’t legal and disregard private property rights. Collectively these conditions could push the applicant to the point where they just walk away. Taken as a whole, they are a way to get to “No.”

Consequences include:

1. Subverting the community’s vision to reduce rural development and focus housing in and near town. Inexorable job growth will create ever more pressure for housing. Town can only meet so much of that demand, and most units built in town will be smaller one and two-bedroom units. NSP is the only green space next to town to build housing where workers won’t have to live stacked on top of each other four stories high. Taking NSP off the table would put pressure on open spaces well outside of town historically eyed by developers. If we kill development in NSP, those zombie developments might rise from the dead, creating dense neighborhoods farther away from town.
2. Laying the foundation for even more development in NSP than is currently contemplated. Mitigating transportation impacts and addressing safety along High School Road is essential. But requiring a road across land that is not owned by the applicant isn’t legal in this situation and destroys its value as ranch land. That increases the probability that the land trapped between Highway 89, High School Road and the so-called East-West connector would get upzoned at some point in the future, and, situated as it is near a highway at the corner of High School Road, that the upzone would look much like the land right on the other side of High School Road: a shopping mall with three stories of housing on one end.
3. Lowering the probability of procuring land and easements for beneficial future transportation improvements. If, when and how the community might benefit from these easements will be up to the private property owners of what is now intact, highly productive ranch land. Threatening to condemn that land now and throwing obstacle after obstacle in the way of this application probably doesn’t instill confidence in those landowners that development applications they might submit in the future would be given a fair shake.

Yes, the current Master Site Plan proposal in front of the commission envisions a big development. But development will occur in phases, much like the development of Cottonwood Park that similarly generated large amounts of construction traffic as houses were built throughout that neighborhood in the late 80’s and 90’s, development that to this day generates large amounts of residential and commercial traffic as residents go about their lives. Existing conditions on the application currently in front of the board require pathways to separate bikers and pedestrians from vehicles and expansion of infrastructure for public transportation—substantial improvements over existing conditions.

Stepping back, sensible conditions will protect public health and welfare while allowing this important development to move forward. Stifling it with unnecessarily burdensome conditions would subvert the community vision for removing second-home type density from the rural areas, transmogrifying it into small-unit workforce housing near town, preserving open space where it’s most valuable, disincentivizing single-occupancy vehicle use, reducing congestion and reducing emissions.

How Housing Happens, Part 1: Public/Private Partnerships versus the Private Sector

I believe the community needs housing that’s 100% for local workers and 100% not for wealthy out-of-towners. Sound impossible? It’s not. But it does require a delicate balancing act of policy, zoning, private philanthropy, public financing, community outreach and thoughtful leadership. I’ve been on the front lines of zoning for 14 years and housing policy for six. I’ve helped put in place policies that built 411 units in the past few years with 358 more planned. Every one of these units is conveniently located near transit and services and available only to local workers.

There are two categories of housing in Teton County—housing that can be purchased by anyone in the world, and housing that can be purchased only by someone living and working full time in Teton County. The first category, free-market housing, is comprised of a dwindling pool of housing for local workers and an expanding pool of second homes, short-term rentals, and houses owned by hedge funds and creative ownership structures that essentially turn them into resort lodging (Pacaso, for example). At a median value of $3.1 million, the vast portion of free market single-family housing is out of reach of local workers. The second category, deed restricted housing, can only be bought or rented by local workers. It includes a supply of housing stratified by price to meet demand from various income levels. Deed restricted housing provides housing for local workers, period. The median price of a single-family deed-restricted home is around half a million dollars.

Preserving community character boils down to increasing the ratio of deed-restricted housing to free-market housing. The town and county currently deploy four strategies.

1. Preserve our existing stock of housing by compensating homeowners for placing a deed restriction on their home. That leaves them the right to sell to a qualified local worker regardless of income level but not to the absolute highest bidder.
2. Buy free market property where market housing or commercial development would otherwise get built and lease the land to a housing developer for almost nothing in return for guarantees that housing built on the site is deed restricted.
3. Use zoning incentives to expand the earning potential of a property in exchange for the provision of “bonus” housing units, at least some of which must be restricted to local workers.
4. Require developers to build some amount of deed-restricted housing to partially mitigate the need for new housing resulting from new development—a so-called mitigation requirement.

Each strategy has its plusses and minuses. The first two strategies are the most effective at improving the ratio of deed-restricted to free-market housing because they eliminate potential market housing while adding 100% deed restricted housing. But thus far preservation is rare, likely because the current maximum level of compensation, $200,000, is insufficient compensation for a deed restriction. And the second strategy costs a lot up front because the land must be bought at free market prices, funded by philanthropy and public funds (tax revenues and mitigation fees).

The second two strategies cost less because developers pay for the new housing units. However, they only add new housing when new development takes place, and the new development might generate the need for yet that much more new housing and thus do little to positively influence the final ratio of deed-restricted to market housing. Two new developments utilizing incentives to add bonus units in town, for example, are adding 62 units of housing, but only 16 of them will be deed restricted while the remaining 46 are available to anyone in the world who desires to live here, including highly paid remote workers.

A new project, the 57-unit Jackson Street Apartments, is the largest 100% deed-restricted housing project in our history. Because it’s on land that could be used for lodging and high-end housing, it’s a good example of the second strategy. It’s also the gold standard for building housing that will preserve our community by adding deed-restricted workforce housing and eliminating potential free market housing.

First, the Mayor and Town Council, through a rigorous public process, adopted zoning standards that allow for multi-family development where it makes sense within town. The Cumming Foundation purchased lots within areas newly zoned for multi-family housing that were adjacent to lots purchased years before by Teton County for county employee housing. Land and capital combined, the Cumming Foundation brought $21.5 million to the table and Teton County brought $10.5 million to the table. First Republic Bank contributed $14 million in financing at 2.5%, and a private developer will build the units. To get shovels in the ground, April Norton and Housing Department staff artfully steered the project along a narrow legal alley where public funding could leverage private philanthropy.

The county is going through its own process to rezone land, known as Northern South Park, to create opportunities for similar types of projects. The county commission, including me, denied past, well-intentioned but market-oriented efforts to build housing in this area largely because all the units would have been detached single family homes. We do need deed-restricted single-family homes, but we also need an array of housing types, including multi-family, to meet a range of incomes. Moreover, allowing the proposed subdivisions to proceed would have eliminated the opportunity now before us to create a neighborhood with a variety of deed-restricted housing on a scale that meaningfully alters the ratio of workforce housing to free-market housing in the community.

Northern South Park will push limits. [SS1] Stay tuned for my next article about how to get it right in Northern South Park.

Maximizing our opportunities to build housing that’s 100% for local workers requires thoughtful, experienced leadership. Early voting began September 23. Ballots can be cast through election day on November 8.  This fall, please vote to re-elect Mark Newcomb for County Commission.

I am thinking about equality, especially for women in the “Equality State,” and how many must feel after the Supreme Court’s recent ruling stripping women of constitutional protections to control their reproductive health. The ruling does not jive with my take on equality and freedom for all. Nor does it jive with my life experience, having grown up among and worked with men and women who, usually for professional reasons, chose to have children later in life. To me, these words, “We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union” and these words “promote the general welfare,” and these words, “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” protect women’s reproductive rights, including whether to terminate a pregnancy. 

I don’t deny that those very same clauses also protect rights of a viable fetus. Yet for over five decades a tenuous balance protected both the rights of a mother and the rights of a fetus, granting an adult woman the right to protect her health and welfare up to a point when the rights of the fetus prevail. Granted, there is no bright line when that happens. But the Supreme Court could have carved out ground leaving the decision about whether to have an abortion during some period of a pregnancy, up to a woman and her closest family, friends, religious leaders and trained medical advisors. Instead we are left with a draconian interpretation of the constitution that essentially applies rights more strongly to men, who will never face the excruciating decision about whether or not to terminate a pregnancy, because the right to an abortion is not “deeply rooted in [our] history and tradition.”

We are now left with a political and legal morass that strips women in many states of their right to make choices about their health and well-being and puts health care professionals who provide care for pregnant women at legal risk. And if anyone wonders how that’s going to go, one glance at the map showing precinct level results in 2018 makes it clear—the bulk of the nation’s geographic area leans Republican, and the Republican Party has evolved to become almost monolithically opposed to abortion and by extension to male and female health equality. The structure of our electoral system, the structure of the senate, and gerrymandering shift laws and policies right of center, sometimes far right of center, across most of the nation, meaning a minority demographic would impose the will of the state on a women’s freedom to health throughout much of the nation, including Wyoming.

I have read comments such as this one in a retort to a blog post by Andrew Sullivan defending abortion as “a subject for democratic deliberation:” “No mention of the 63 million babies who were murdered in the last 49 years, but oh how well you stand up for women and their right to have as many one-night stands as they want without consequences, guilt, or their morality even being questioned.” This type of comment ignores the spectrum of pregnancies that range from intentional with all the hopes and dreams of carrying a fetus to term and raising a child to completely unwanted pregnancies due to rape or other circumstance out of a woman’s control. Granting the State the power to mandate that every pregnancy along that spectrum must be carried to term feels Orwellian. After all, we’ve moved away from the notion that the state should have the power to even require a vaccination during a global pandemic. Granting the State the power to dictate that a woman will bear a child, especially any and anyone’s child, while restraining it from mandating basic health precautions in my mind just doesn’t jive.

The Constitution at its core is empathic towards the individual. Striving for a more perfect union in 2022 can only mean that equality applies to all, men and women of all races and ethnic backgrounds. We shouldn’t stop striving to ensure that all men and women may equally participate in society and, importantly, the democratic process. The constitution, its authors, and those who amended it, sought to firmly establish equality among all citizens capable at the time of participating in the democratic process (“all men are created equal.”) We fundamentally understand that concept now to include men and women equally, of any race or creed. In its most minimal interpretation, it refers to all able to vote, or all qualified electors. It’s unfathomable to think that, if we wrote the same constitution today, we in any way would not apply the rights it enumerates equally to all men and women, including equal protections of health and reproductive rights. In this country, a woman, with her partner, her loved ones, her priest or minister, and her doctor, should have the final say over her own health for at least the early period of a pregnancy.