ISSUE #45: Who Works for Whom at BCHA?
BCHA is recruiting the unhoused from Twin Falls to fill empty units in Bluebird
BCHA is creating its own demand. They allocated Bluebird units to a third-party agency to recruit unhoused people to Ketchum from…Twin Falls! So much for the “locals preference” for Bluebird.
See Issue #43 for more about how BCHA/City of Ketchum Housing Department (it’s the exact same staff—paid for by Ketchum taxpayers) isn’t solving housing challenges for locals.
Bad Data + Ideology Leads to Bad Outcomes: Exhibit A— Bluebird
The Housing Director got the City Council to adopt a Housing Action Plan three years ago that calls for the City to fund/raise over $350mm to build 660 low-income units, primarily in the commercial core of Ketchum.
Here is the rationale (taken directly from the plan):
1. “There is a massive shortage of affordable homes in Ketchum.”
Affordable for whom? Housing is clearly affordable for the 40% growth in permanent population over the past decade.
2. “Ketchum is losing its workforce and year-round residents because most local people cannot afford to live here.”
If you permanently live full-time in Ketchum, it is axiomatic that you are a local. And if the number of full-time residents is increasing, how can it be true that “..most local people cannot afford to live here” and “Ketchum is losing its year-round residents”?
3. “Our community agrees that there is a housing crisis and wants action.”
Whose community would that be? Ketchum residents? Based on what data? This assertion derives from a self-serving, statistically invalid survey conducted by the Ketchum Housing Department in their echo chamber. According to the only statistically valid survey of the residents on this, water scarcity and over-tourism ranked higher than housing.1
As further justification for their existence, the Housing Director asserted that only 7% of Ketchum’s workforce lives in Ketchum. The recent data from SVED do not back that up.2 3 According to SVED, Ketchum has a workforce of 2,655 out of its population of 4,445. According to Visit Sun Valley, 89% of Ketchum workers work in the WRV.4 Ketchum has 4,847 jobs, so, using SVED and VSV data, unless no one who lives in Ketchum works in Ketchum, it is highly unlikely that only 7% of Ketchum jobs are filled by Ketchum locals. Who is correct? The Housing Department or SVED? Whose interests are served by the 7% number?
The Housing Plan was also justified by asserting that the number of owner-occupied housing units in Ketchum has decreased over the past 20 years. Per SVED, that is patently FALSE. While tourism units have grown (e.g., Airbnb and second homes), owner-occupied units are up 50% over that time period.
The Real Crisis Was The Troika Letting Airbnb Take All the Long-term Rentals
The challenge for our local Ketchum workforce at the lower end of the wage scale is that long-term rentals have decreased by 37%. You can thank the Troika for permitting hundreds of these units to go to the Airbnb market without a peep. THIS WAS THE REAL CRISIS. Our elected officials stood by doing nothing while the young workforce of Ketchum was squeezed out. That process is now complete and, according to the City Administrator, is irreversible.
However, overall, the number of full-time residents in Ketchum has increased by 42% in the past decade. The makeup of Ketchum has forever changed. We can not turn back the clock.
The new Ketchum residents are more prosperous. In the last two decades, the absolute number of people living on less than $50k has declined by almost half. “Wait!” you say. “That’s because Ketchum is too expensive for working people, and they have moved down valley.” That is certainly true for some people. However, the overall Ketchum workforce has increased.
For the entirety of Blaine County, the portion of the population making less than $50k has plummeted from 43% to 22%. Not only are Ketchum residents more prosperous, but the same holds true for every city in Blaine County.5
Indeed, the City of Ketchum sees the rest of Blaine County as so prosperous that instead of finding people who live in the poorest areas of the County (Carey/Picabo) and work in Ketchum, they are skipping down three counties to recruit new citizens for Ketchum from the Twin Falls homeless community.
What adds insult to this injury is that they always knew they would be doing this. When the Mayor wrote his famous editorial that Bluebird was for “the lifeblood” of Ketchum and that people who were against it were prejudiced, he and his staff knew they would be recruiting people from far afield, as there would not be the demand from Ketchum workers even at the low end of Ketchum wages to live in it.6 {Read that footnote for the City’s rationalization.}
A Self-Licking Ice Cream Cone?
Why does the Council want to break something that, for most Ketchumites, is not currently broken and turn downtown Ketchum into a refuge for the unhoused from all over the country? What quality-of-life goal for current Ketchum residents is achieved by spending $350mm over the next decade on 660 units of low-income housing in the heart of Ketchum?
Is there a need for that? The Ketchum Housing Department is an example of a bureaucracy creating its own demand (see ad at the top of this post). As I noted in Issue #44, they are having trouble filling the demand for the units they already have, so there is a massive disconnect between their narrative and reality. Why might that be?
Bad data.
Ketchum has refused to conduct any statistically valid surveys about its workforce. it has never surveyed its employers about their workforce shortage challenges—all the information is anecdotal. Even worse, Ketchum has never surveyed the workforce about what kind of housing they want and where. So they are building things that local workers don’t seem to want—or, even worse, don’t qualify for. That’s why BCHA-controlled units sit empty for weeks and months.
The Housing Action Plan Excludes Ketchum’s Essential Workers
Here is one example.7 Read it, then read the ad at the top of this post, and comment below whether you think recruiting a homeless person from Twin while we make a Ketchum worker homeless at the same time is an appropriate housing strategy.
Good morning Mayor Bradshaw, my name is REDACTED and I am a humble front line healthcare worker at St. Luke’s Ketchum, resident, and voter. We’ve met before, but I’d like to tell you a little about myself I moved here in the middle of the pandemic and got a job at St. Luke’s and at the time was forced to live in my car for a month due to the housing crisis. Through out the first couple years i had to move several times only securing housing temporarily until i met my wife. We moved in together to a 330sq ft studio, where we still reside to this day. One year ago she was diagnosed with large B cell lymphoma ( a rare aggressive blood cancer ). Her treatment had to start right away to save her life and her prescribed treatment included seven days of inpatients 24 hour chemotherapy down in Salt Lake City. We had to get married because work wouldn’t recognize I needed time off to be there for her treatment. This inevitably caused the predicament we are in. We were approved by BCHA and referred to Syringa property management to become a resident of Bluebird community housing. We are in the local category for critical infrastructure employees and I was assured there is no income cap for this category. After several weeks of whiplashing back and forth I was denied the opportunity to be a resident of Bluebird community housing based of income. From my first week here I’ve been advocating for Bluebird, speaking at community rally’s and organizing voters for years with the hope our housing crisis may be alleviated even just a little. All that work just to be be denied because of ceiling I was told didn’t exist. I’m REDACTED years old and for once in my life I thought I could have consistent and affordable housing. I write you to out of desperation as I see no one is here to help. We have medical bills, grocery’s go on credit cards, I even sometimes have to get food from the hunger collation to eat some weeks. We don’t make that much money. My education consisted of 10 years and 2 political science degrees however I found myself serving my community in the best way I can by supplying the wood river valley with its medical products. I feel my job is important but my education may help me secure housing for myself and every other millennial and Gen Z voter that shares the same struggle. We are hurting and we are the future of the wood river valley. Please I beg you for your assistance and advice.
BCHA Is the Same Thing as The Ketchum Housing Department: And Behaves Like It
BCHA (I use BCHA and Ketchum Housing Department interchangeably, as they are the same staff, Ketchum taxpayers pay for that staff, and the Ketchum Housing Director is the Executive Director of BCHA) also seems to want to trap people who own deed-restricted units in those units.
A BCSD who owns a deed-restricted unit and her partner saved up enough money to buy a market-rate condo but, given the seller’s conditions, had to close the purchase quickly before they could sell their deed-restricted condo. BCHA has imposed conditions on the sale of the deed-restricted condo that have it lingering on the market, such that this teacher is now trapped in two mortgages and running out of cash.8
In other situations, BCSD has purchased condos for resale with a deed restriction. They recently got the City of Ketchum to buy them two condos (in secret, of course). They could do a lot more in this situation. But instead of working to free up their deed-restricted condo for occupancy, in a recent BCHA board meeting, they went after the teacher for buying a market-rate condo. The Ketchum Housing Director literally blamed the victim!9
They have lost the thread. They have become the self-licking ice cream cone.
Ideology, Not Economics, Drives Ketchum’s Housing Department
It’s not just bad data. It’s bad ideology. If you read the Housing Action Plan, the basic principle is that anyone who wants to live in Ketchum has a right to live in Ketchum, and if they can’t afford it, the Ketchum taxpayers will subsidize them. Sounds crazy, I know. Look at the ad at the top of this post. Read the plan here and let me know what I got wrong: https://www.projectketchum.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Ketchum-Housing-Matters_2022.2023_Action-Plan.pdf
Ketchum’s Housing Department is not advocating housing as many people as they can. They are specifically advocating for housing as many people as they can on some of the most expensive real estate in Idaho.
If their mission were housing, they wouldn’t build anything in Ketchum, as they could build twice as many low-income housing units in Bellevue for the same amount of money. As Ms. Hamilton said during the Bluebird debate, the reason Bluebird had to be built in the commercial district was so that rich people know there are working people.
Take this example. The Ketchum City Council plans to replace the Lift Tower Lodge with over 50 low-income housing units. LTL is within walking distance of the ski lifts. The City valued that land alone at $7mm—it could be worth a lot more. For $6mm of that, you can buy 33 acres in Bellevue and build a lot more housing.10
If it’s not about maximizing housing for the taxpayer's buck, then what is the point of the Housing Action Plan? Whose interests is this expensive and rapidly growing bureaucracy serving?11
Constructive Suggestions
I urge the Ketchum City Council, which enables all of this, to take immediate action.
Scrap the Housing Action Plan
Eliminate the Ketchum Housing Department.12
Collaborate with ARCH and WRCHT if and when we need to develop housing.
These simple steps would save us $10s of millions, improve the quality of life for Ketchum residents, reduce our increasingly expensive bureaucracy, and lead to better housing outcomes for essential workers.
What are your suggestions?
https://visitsunvalley.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Resident-Survey-Data-Pack-Summary.pdf
https://sunvalleyeconomy.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Profiles-booklet-2.pdf
https://sunvalleyeconomy.com/profiles/
https://visitsunvalley.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Resident-Survey-Data-Pack-Summary.pdf
SVED
Perry,
Thank you for bringing this to our attention. I can see your concern based upon the way South Central Community Action Plan worded their social media post about the two available Bluebird units. Blaine County Housing Authority's sharing of the post without adding context didn't help.
To clarify, no Bluebird units are being opened up to those permanently living and/or working in Twin Falls—or anywhere else outside of Blaine County.
Bluebird has two units that—under Idaho Housing and Finance Association's (IHFA) Low-Income Tax Credit rules—must serve households earning 45% or less of the area median income. This is less than $32,300 for a 1-person household (less than $36,900 for a two-person household). This means most anyone earning $15 or more an hour would earn too much to qualify. (Most Wood River Valley jobs pay more than this.) BCHA can't forgo IHFA's requirements because the tax credits are essential to making the project in whole financially viable.
Because of this, those units are used to help people get on their feet so they can join the workforce in Blaine County. They are short to mid-term steppingstones. However, they are still held to the same requirement standards as all other Bluebird housing units. At least one occupant must be one or more of the following:
a full-Time employee working in Blaine County (or will be a full-time employee working in Blaine County soon);
a retired person who was a full-time employee in Blaine County; or
a disabled person living in Blaine County.
In essence, these units (and BCHA's promotion) are targeting those who intend to become a full-time employee here or who live here but are disabled. They are intended to get people back into the Blaine County workforce, not subsidize workforces of other towns. Since these units are hard to fill, BCHA has had to cast a wider net to help promote their availability. Thus, South Central Community Action Plan's post.
Please reach out of I can help clarify anything else.
DANIEL HANSEN | CITY OF KETCHUM
Community Engagement Manager
P.O. Box 2315 | 191 Fifth St. W. | Ketchum, ID 83340
o: 208.725.8787 | f: 208.726.7812
dhansen@ketchumidaho.org | www.ketchumidaho.org
From: HP Boyle <boylehp@yahoo.com>
Sent: Friday, October 25, 2024 8:40 PM
To: Participate <participate@ketchumidaho.org>
Cc: editor@mtexpress.com; publisher@woodriverweekly.com; editorialboard@mtexpress.com; amccleary@co.blaine.id.us; lmollineaux@co.blaine.id.us; mdavis@co.blaine.id.us
Subject: For Public Comment: BCHA is recruiting unhoused people from Twin Falls for Bluebird
It gives a whole new meaning to “local preference.”
Also, ask the Mayor to share the email he got from Ethan.
Or ask the Housing Director for the grievance she got from Molly (and denied),
Your housing department has lost the thread.
Perry Boyle
Ketchum
Shared with permission of the author.
you can watch her here: https://www.ketchumidaho.org/bc-chab/page/blaine-county-housing-authority-board-11
This is also the meeting where the BCHA Executive Director chided the board treasurer for asking her questions about the financials at a board meeting. The board chair should have stepped in, but he defers to the Exec Dir. Who works for whom at BCHA? This is terrible governance.
In my analysis, they are serving their own interests by creating their own demand. It is a textbook example of the self-licking ice cream cone. The cost for the staff alone now approaches half a million dollars. Their overall budget will increase by 50% next year.
They work for BCHA and have an office in Hailey—let BCHA pick up the tab.
The idea of bringing workers isn't a terrible idea; we are short workers. But in addition to the fact that being downtown makes no sense, are these disabled people they're looking for able to work? The ad isn't clear whether they must be able to work, and Bluebird was sold on housing workers. Not people from out of town who can't work. Not retirees. And not corporate welfare for Sun Valley Corp and Marriott to house their employees. I agree this all needs to be shut down and some sense brought to the problem.
There is a certain logic in creating low income housing south of here, especially in Bellevue which has the space as well as the need for a shot in its economy. And because Ketchum real estate is so valuable, it makes one wonder where those people will shop once here, because everything is more expensive than it is down valley.....