Will the 1,500-unit Harvest Roaring Fork development planned between Carbondale and Glenwood Springs alleviate or exacerbate the valley’s affordable-housing crisis?
It’s a key question being debated across opinion pages and at community meetings in advance of the first public hearing scheduled for Feb. 25 in front of the Garfield County Planning Commission.
Supporters claim the proposed development is ideally located, will make a considerable dent in the valley’s dire need for affordable housing and will bring the workforce closer to workplaces.
The Cattle Creek Confluence Coalition, a group formed in opposition to the development, is raising environmental and traffic concerns and making the argument that the added units — the vast majority of which will be rented and sold at market rates — will actually worsen the housing crisis.
The 283-acre swath of land, formerly Sanders Ranch, was purchased in 2024 for $31 million by Texas-based Realty Capital and is located on the west side of Highway 82 at the confluence of Cattle Creek and the Roaring Fork River.
“We believe that Harvest presents the last realistic opportunity to significantly provide a positive impact on the housing crisis,” according to a preliminary version of applicant Harvest Roaring Fork’s workforce housing plan, which is archived on the coalition’s website.
“We want to build a wonderful community that is effectively a workforce community,” said Richard Myers, landowner and managing director of Texas-based Realty Capital, the developer behind Harvest. “We want every residence we have in there to be attainable to people in the workforce.”
The Cattle Creek coalition, however, argues that the 150 deed-restricted “housing mitigation” units — 10% of the total — required for inclusion by the Garfield County Land Use and Development Code don’t go far enough to mitigate affordable-housing demand created by the development itself, much less mollify the region’s existing needs.
“It’s important for people to understand that this project will result in the demand for the creation of more workforce housing than it will address,” panelist Wes Gardner said at a Jan. 6 standing room-only community meeting hosted by the coalition in Carbondale.
The Harvest development also proposes 55,000 square feet of commercial space and a 120-room hotel overlooking the Roaring Fork River.
Gardner described the “hamster wheel” effect of new developments creating a need for additional affordable housing for the additional people required to build structures and service those structures, as well as provide services to the new residents.
Also, Gardner questions how the need for new employees generated by Harvest could impact the valley’s existing labor shortage.
The required 150 units “isn’t really getting it done,” Gardner said. “Make it 20%.”
Unit breakdown includes “RO” homes
Myers said his proposal goes above and beyond by designating an additional 300 deed-restricted units as “Resident Occupied” (RO), meaning the units will be for sale or rent only to people working at least 30 hours a week in Garfield, Eagle or Pitkin counties. Those units would not be constrained by an income limit or a price cap.
The remaining 1,050 units would be rented or sold at market rate, according to Harvest’s planning documents, which posit that the target market for the homes will be the local population, as opposed to second homeowners. “Their design will not generally be attractive to second homeowners,” says the workforce housing plan.
“It will be a wonderful place to live,” Myers said. “We will be providing workforce housing, which everyone says is desperately needed. And there’s not another place to do it as economically.”
According to the developer’s “project narrative,” Harvest Roaring Fork is “designed to address Garfield County’s housing shortage while preserving its rural character and natural landscape.”
The coalition disagrees on every front, stating on its website: “This project, a small urban city along the banks of an invaluable stretch of the Roaring Fork River, would jeopardize our already compromised traffic flow, threaten water quality, disrupt wildlife habitat and destroy the rural character of unincorporated Garfield County.”
The site has long been considered for large-scale development, including past proposals with an 18-hole golf course and a 70,000 square-foot shopping center.
In 2005, Bair Chase Property Development Co. tore up the topsoil and sparked public outrage after bulldozing the big red barn with a white-lettered U76 logo before succumbing to foreclosure.
Myers’ plans include building a replica of the red barn for use as a cafe and public gathering space adjacent to a community farm.
“From a planning standpoint, this is exactly where housing belongs — close to transit, jobs, schools and services,” public-relations agent Kathleen Wanatowicz wrote in a Jan. 6 guest column in the Glenwood Springs Post Independent. “If we are serious about reducing traffic, cutting long commutes and placing workforce housing where people can realistically live, the Harvest project deserves a fair review.”
Myers said hundreds of people — many living west of Glenwood Springs — have expressed interest in moving to Harvest through an online contact form on the developer’s website.
In a Jan. 27 guest column submitted to the Post Independent in response to Wanatowicz, coalition member and Glenwood Springs resident Siri Olsen wrote, “Growth that outpaces and stresses infrastructure, fails to provide affordable workforce housing, degrades the environment, and diminishes quality of life is not the answer — it is the problem.”
Myers said the intent is not to build large homes or market to second homeowners. There are no plans for a golf course, he said. The Harvest plan calls for a “varied mix of housing, such as detached single-family homes, townhomes, cottages, bungalows and apartments” ranging from 450 square feet to 2,800 square feet, with prices ranging from $400,000 to $1.5 million for the free-market units, according to Harvest planning documents.
Myers said he plans to build about 75 units per year, with the market and consumer demand informing the more precise composition of the development in terms of the ratio of rentals to home sales and studio apartments to three- or four-bedroom homes.
The 300 RO units would be “restricted by incomes of people in the valley,” Myers said. “If only workforce can buy them, then we can’t charge more than the workforce can earn.”
An RO example in the planning documents describes a 1,100-square-foot, three-bedroom cottage listed at a sale price between $475,000 and $575,000.
The target price for the RO units range from $2,750 in monthly rent for an 800-square-foot apartment to for-sale options ranging from a $480,000 bungalow to $864,000 for a 1,800-square-foot detached home.
Gardner expressed concern about enforcement of the RO stipulation, questioning what prevents someone from getting a job for two weeks for the local pay stub needed for the purchase or lease agreement. “I think it’s more an idea for marketing,” he said.
The RO designation doesn’t guarantee that local workers can qualify for the mortgages required to buy those units or can earn income needed to rent those units, added Gardner, a trucking industry executive who lives near the Harvest site and is involved in a nonprofit on the Front Range that helps low-income workers enter homeownership.
According to a 49-page memo prepared for the Garfield County Planning Commission by county staff that was posted Thursday and recommends denial of the planned unit development (PUD) application, “[RO units], while they may appear to add to the affordable housing stock in a development, they can become burdensome on the entity enforcing the ownership restriction. In addition, it is not clear as to the price points these units will fall under.”
According to Myers, the 150 deed-restricted units and 300 RO units are more than sufficient in terms of “mitigation housing,” because he considers the entirety of the project to be targeted at the workforce.
Asked about the additional needs created by the development itself, Myers said that “100% of our project mitigates that.”
The project also carries the potential for a maximum of 375 accessory dwelling units (ADUs) that could be built on the lots of detached single-family homes.
Studies say
Without a comparable local study, Gardner and land-use attorney and coalition member Rick Neiley point to a 2024 study from Blaine County, Idaho, home to the Sun Valley ski resort and a valley with relatively comparable demographics.
The “Nexus Study of New Commercial and Residential Development, Employee Generation, and Demand for Community Housing,” conducted by Economic & Planning Systems, estimates that for every 100 units of new residential density, an average demand of 8.67 workforce/employee housing units is created. For every 1,000 square feet of commercial space, one new employee housing unit is required, according to the study’s assumptions.
Applied to Harvest, Gardner and Neily put forth the following analysis: The construction of 1,500 residential units creates a demand for 183.5 workforce/employee housing units. The 55,000 square feet of commercial development adds the need for another 55 units, and the 120-room hotel adds a demand for 20 more units. That adds up to a need for 258.5 workforce/employee units just to house the new employees and workers that will be needed by the creation by the Harvest development alone, Gardner and Neily estimate.
“The reality is that it actually makes the problem worse because the project’s mitigation doesn’t come close to meeting the housing demand it will create,” Neily concluded, given his belief that the RO units don’t represent true mitigation of workforce housing needs.
Pitkin County uses a calculator to assess impact fees related to the need for employees generated by new houses over 5,750 square feet. The Pitkin calculations, which don’t specify how many units are needed to house the employees generated, also vary depending on whether a unit is occupied by a local or not.
However, if 1,500 units averaging 1,500 square feet are plugged into Pitkin County’s calculator, it would generate the need for 54 new employees for locally occupied homes, or 201 new employees for homes not locally occupied.
Commercial development under Pitkin County’s calculations creates a greater employee need. If all 55,000 feet of that commercial development was general office space, it would generate a need for 247 new employees. If all 55,000 square feet were restaurants and bars, it would generate a need for 407 new employees.
In a referral letter from the town of Carbondale regarding Harvest, Planning Director Jared Barnes writes, “Carbondale Staff supports the increase in restricted housing units; however, Carbondale and Glenwood Springs both require more affordable housing (deed-restricted units) than is proposed or is required by Garfield County. The application focuses on unit types that are attractive to the local workforce, but those same housing types are attractive to second-home owners as well. Carbondale encourages Garfield County to be more aggressive with affordable housing requirements to ensure the project goals meet the project outcomes.”
April Long, executive director of the Western Mountain Regional Housing Coalition, said she agrees that 150 units are not enough to mitigate the demand created by the development, but she notes that the 10% mandate is Garfield County’s requirement. She emphasized that for RO units to be beneficial, they must be restricted to those who are employed locally, and not simply someone who may live here but earns their income from a job based elsewhere.
A new town
The sheer size of the proposal is cited as both the development’s biggest asset and most egregious offense.
Harvest Roaring Fork would bring essentially an entire new community to the valley with as many as 3,000 to 5,000 people occupying nine neighborhoods and a “village center” with a hotel, shopping, restaurants and “limited professional services.”
A 2000 Roaring Fork Conservancy conservation easement governs 54 acres along Cattle Creek and the river.
“There are a lot of issues and consequences in plopping a town down in the middle of a relatively rural area,” Neily said, speaking as a panelist at the Jan. 6 coalition meeting.
The coalition’s projected population estimate of 4,800 people is calculated by averaging 2.6 people in each of the 1,500 units and 375 ADUs. The developer’s traffic study projects nearly 12,000 daily weekday car trips from the project at build-out.
“Adding some 12,000-15,000 daily trips to an already over-crowded Highway 82 is a clear and present safety issue, not to mention the additional inconvenience to those who must use the highway on a daily basis,” Olsen wrote in her guest column. “Impacts on emergency services, hospitals and public safety, loss of wildlife habitat and degradation of our rivers and water quality all need to be clearly and objectively considered when evaluating the propriety of a new town larger than Basalt and only slightly smaller than Carbondale.”
Myers estimated a population closer to 3,000 or 3,500 people. He agrees that it is akin to adding a town, but contends that a large-scale project is the only thing that will make a dent in meeting the valley’s housing demands. “Where else are we going to solve the housing challenge? If we are going to have a small town anywhere, this would be the spot to put it.”
With a 15- to 20-year build-out plan, Myers also said traffic on Highway 82 will see an increase of only about 1% a year — an increase he describes as negligible.
However, county staff found that traffic generated by the project would be “significant,” with peak-hour traffic in the 20% to 21% range of total Highway 82 volumes near the Harvest site.
Myers said the hope is to reduce commute times for people currently living in New Castle, Silt and Rifle and working in the upper valley. “We want to give them the chance to live closer to work and not have to drive two and a half hours each way.”
According to Myers, it is the large scale of the project that will allow him to build more economically and, as a result, to be able to pass down the cost savings to future renters and homeowners.
The “emphasis on smaller building footprints and maximizing construction efficiency [will] bring down the cost of the home,” according to the Harvest planning documents.
But it is that density that has the opposition very concerned.
“We are talking about a very large development in a very small area,” Neily said. “And there are very significant impacts. The coalition doesn’t oppose development on this property. We want smart development.”
Now expired, a 2011 River Edge plan for the property called for 366 residential units with a larger percentage of open space. The current approval process will require a revocation of the River Edge PUD application and rezoning of the Harvest PUD to Residential Suburban.
The meeting was hosted by the Cattle Creek Confluence Coalition, a group formed in opposition to the proposal. Credit: Cattle Creek Confluence Coalition
Is market-rate housing workforce housing?
“We don’t have so much of a housing crisis as an affordability crisis,” Gardner argued at the Jan. 6 meeting.
But according to Myers, “Every one of our homes should be affordable to someone who works in the valley.”
As described in the Harvest planning documents, “These homes will generally range from $400,000 to $1.5 million and will be designed to accommodate the entirety of the workforce — from nurses, firefighters and police officers to doctors, bankers and executives.”
The target rent for a market-rate apartment with an average size of 900 square feet is $2,950.
The Garfield County planning staff memo states that with the developer’s introduction of the “new term ‘Market Rate Workforce Units,’ … the description of these fully free market units implies a smaller size for these units to make them more affordable for the valley’s workforce. Further clarification on this unit type is needed.”
In a Roaring Fork Valley Regional Housing Needs Assessment commissioned by the city of Aspen and released in December, the analysis of Garfield County’s needs through 2035 shows an existing shortage of 1,805 housing units and a projected need of 3,030 units, equating to a 10-year gross need of 4,835 housing units.
Even if not a single new person moves to the valley, Long said, “We would still need 3,500 units to be able to adequately house who is already here,” referring to the report’s analysis of the combined existing unit shortage in both Pitkin and Garfield counties.
Seventy-two percent of the regional housing needs are concentrated in Garfield County, according to the assessment.
“There is a real supply-and-demand problem, and there’s no easy solution,” Long said.
“We want as much affordable housing as possible,” said Jason Schraub, chief external relations officer for Habitat for Humanity Roaring Fork Valley. “But building a home on the free market also reduces stress on the undersupply. We need to increase the supply of housing in order to have any chance to create a market that works for all people.”
In theory, increasing housing supply should drive down rents and sale prices.
However, despite adding more market-rate and subsidized units to the housing stock over the past 10 years, the Roaring Fork Valley has seen only increasing costs in both home-sale prices and rental rates, especially acute since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
From 2010 to 2023, Pitkin County added 1,124 housing units and Garfield County added 2,176 housing units, according to the needs assessment.
Myers acknowledged the post-COVID rental increases, but he said rent is up “generally in line with income. Otherwise, how would we have a workforce living here?”
Myers said that “a lot of major employers” he has talked to in Glenwood Springs were not interested in the deed-restricted units and were more interested in housing for the “missing middle” — those who earn too much to qualify for the deed-restricted units but are looking for smaller, lower-priced options.
In the Roaring Fork Valley, however, median incomes do not fall in line with median home prices.
“In a traditional community, if you make a median income, you can generally afford to buy a home at a median home price,” said Long. “But in our community and other resort towns, the housing market is responding to global wealth — it’s not responding to local wealth. The housing market is responding to what people are earning and can invest in all over the world. Those of us earning a median income in this community cannot participate in the housing market. If you are a worker, you can’t afford a home.”
Schraub echoes the reality described by Long. “The truth is everyone who is working — who is a W-2 employee — has a housing problem, with the exception of those fortunate enough to buy something 20 or more years ago,” he said. “For anyone who did not secure housing 15 to 20 years ago — everyone is struggling. It doesn’t matter income, family size or age. It is an everybody problem.”
The basic equation goes as follows: In order to afford a $400,000 home, Schraub said, you should be making an annual salary of about $100,000.
In Glenwood Springs, if you are making the median annual income of about $75,000, then you should be able to afford a $300,000 home, he said. But the median home sale price in Glenwood Springs is just under $1 million.
“There are very few income earners allowed to participate in the free market right now,” Long said.
Forty-seven percent of all housing sales in Basalt and Carbondale in 2024 were affordable only to households earning more than 400% of the area median income (AMI), according to the needs assessment.
Only 2% of home sales in Basalt and Carbondale in 2024 were affordable to households earning between 80% and 150% of the AMI.
The median sales price for a single-family residence in 2024 was $1.8 million in Basalt and $1.5 million in Carbondale.
Myers calls the new heavily subsidized Lumberyard project near Aspen a “Band-Aid” on the affordable-housing crisis — not a solution.
Subsidized housing, however, has long been Aspen’s solution.
In 2023, according to the needs assessment, there were close to 4,500 units of affordable (deed-restricted) housing in the region (from Aspen to Parachute), with 90% of those located in Pitkin County.
Of Pitkin County’s affordable housing units, 70% are in Aspen.
In 2023, affordable housing accounted for 30% of all housing units in Pitkin County, and 1.4% of all housing units in Garfield County.
If housing was not heavily subsidized in Pitkin County, it is hard to imagine how Aspen — arguably the valley’s primary economic engine — would keep running.
Myers describes the 196-unit Tree Farm Lofts (across from Willits Town Center) — which is his company’s other market-rate housing development in the valley — as attainable housing for a wide range of professions among the valley’s workforce.
Realty Capital also built the 250-unit Lofts at Red Mountain and L3 apartments in West Glenwood Springs, but it has since sold those two developments to new owners.
Realty’s more upscale Kodiak Club and Residences are under construction within the Tree Farm development, both located in Eagle County.
At Tree Farm, a studio apartment ranges in price from $2,795 to $3,483 a month, a one-bedroom ranges from $3,271 to $4,465 a month and a two-bedroom apartment ranges from $4,648 to $5,990 a month.
Myers said Tree Farm is 96% filled, and that he has the data to show the complex is primarily filled with local workforce employed across a wide variety of occupations with “income ranges all over the place.”
There are 40 deed-restricted units at Tree Farm.
For those who spend more than one-third of their income on rent, “They make it work,” he said.
Schraub said building more market-rate housing options – modest, not mansions — will help alleviate the existing housing shortages.
Affordability and supply are inextricably linked, he said. When there is more demand than supply, you’ve got to either increase supply or decrease demand.
The cost to build
“It’s become so expensive to build, the economics of that don’t work either,” Schraub said, pointing to another key factor contributing to the valley’s affordable-housing crisis.
Even without land costs, “It’s $600 a square foot to build anything,” Schraub said.
That means that a 1,000-square-foot, two-bedroom home, with no land costs, costs the builder $600,000, he said.
If a person can afford to pay only $400,000 for that home, it doesn’t get built.
You have to create a subsidy to get it built, Schraub said. If people can afford $400,000 but it costs $800,000 to build (adding land value), that $400,000 has to come from somewhere.
Developers who need to meet the deed-restricted requirements and want to offer at least some housing at lower prices have to make up the difference somewhere else in order to profit — either by charging more for the free-market housing or by having someone else subsidize it, Long said.
Both Schraub’s and Long’s organizations specifically work to provide more subsidized-housing options in the valley.
The nascent Western Mountain Regional Housing Coalition’s Good Deeds program, Long said, preserves existing housing stock by buying it off the free market and then locking deed restrictions in perpetuity.
Buyers don’t have an income restriction, but they do have to be part of the local workforce, she said. The coalition then brings in 30% of the purchase price in exchange for the deed restriction.
In just one and a half years, Long said the organization has leveraged $4.5 million in public dollars to help 19 families buy homes, the majority in Carbondale and Glenwood Springs.
Habitat for Humanity has a new approach too, Schraub said, focusing on finding ways to subsidize larger-scale developments and departing from the organization’s tradition of building one or two homes a year with volunteer labor.
Since 2024, Habitat Roaring Fork has put 114 homes into the hands of owners, Schraub said. “That’s leaps and bounds above what Habitat has been able to do before. … But it’s still not enough.”
On the Harvest proposal, Schraub understands that the developers probably can’t make a profit off a smaller-scale subdivision, especially given the cost of building.
About 800 units may be required to make a meaningful profit, he said.
“Labor is more expensive here. Materials are more expensive here,” Schraub said. There’s also “an exorbitant amount of soft costs” in getting through the planning, permitting and fees process. “It takes more money here than anywhere else.”
Harvest’s planning documents state: “The Harvest team has received multiple cost estimates from contractors within the $220 per-square-foot to $350 per-square-foot range for home construction. This helps make constructing a large-scale workforce-housing community feasible, complements Harvest’s offerings of slightly smaller homes and is something that is not easily replicated by other developers.”
Outside of the deed-restricted units, Harvest’s plan calls for market-rate housing ranging from 450 square feet to 2,800 square feet and accessible to people making 70% to 250% of AMI, translating to an annual household income range of $59,000 to $238,000.
“Garfield County cannot continue to deny housing projects and then act surprised when housing costs keep climbing,” wrote Wanatowicz. “Supply matters. Every project that is delayed or killed tightens the market further, pushing prices higher and forcing families farther down the valley or out of the region entirely.”
Both Schraub and Long lament the impact the affordable-housing crisis has on the valley’s character and the people — especially families — who wish to make a positive contribution to the local workforce but are priced out and move away or never come to fill critical job vacancies in the first place.
The 150 deed-restricted units will total “just 2% of the square footage of the overall development,” wrote Olsen. “The rest of the units will be ‘market priced’ and may be priced and sold or rented at the developer’s discretion. This development will create a demand for new employee housing that will far exceed the 150 mitigation units that will be provided. This development will not fix the housing-affordability problem; it will exacerbate it. It is a myth that we can build our way out of the ‘Affordable Housing’ shortage with free-market development.”
Aside from influencing supply and demand, there are three “levers” that can help change the valley’s housing-affordability crisis, Schraub said: reducing construction costs; increasing incomes and purchasing power of individuals; and creating more revenue streams to fill the subsidy bucket.
“All three levers need to be pulled,” he said.
Gardner said he doesn’t doubt that Myers is genuine about wanting to help address the valley’s housing needs. But he doubts the project’s promises against the existing economic realities on the ground, and he said he worries that Myers’ plans could change as those realities and actual numbers become more apparent.
“I think he believes he can make money and solve a social problem,” Gardner said. “I’m not going to bet the farm on that.”