ISSUE #49: Good News! BCHA Ended Ketchum's Affordable Housing Crisis!

How do we know? Because BCHA has more units than workers want

There is an increasing pile of evidence that there isn’t an affordable housing crisis in Ketchum. BCHA is advertising to fill units because they don’t have the demand for them. The ads above are from their Instagram.

But how can this be? The Ketchum Housing Action Plan asserts that we need to build 660 units at over $350mm to meet the demand for workforce housing in Ketchum. It says only 7% of the Ketchum workforce lives in Ketchum. The Blaine County Housing Authority (BCHA) said they have a waiting list of hundreds of people ready to move into whatever units become available.

Is the housing team lying? Hmm. The more I learn, the more I think they are.

That’s a strong statement. What’s your evidence?

It’s not my evidence—it’s BCHA’s. And the City of Ketchum’s.

After over six years and up to $20mm of local taxpayer subsidies, Bluebird has opened its doors. 51 units of affordable Ketchum workforce housing. After offering these units to everyone on the BCHA housing waitlist, they still have empty units. They have resorted to recruiting homeless people from Twin Falls. And not everyone moving into Bluebird works in Ketchum. Or works.

Wait, what? Isn’t Bluebird supposed to be Ketchum workforce housing? Didn’t the Mayor promise this was housing for our first responders, health care workers, and teachers—the people he called “the lifeblood” of Ketchum? Did we finally house all of our essential workers?

Of course, we haven’t. We are still eliminating them!

The Facts Don’t Lie

The City of Ketchum just published a “fact sheet” about Bluebird. This is ironic because in that fact sheet, they say that they don’t own it or control who lives in it—so why are they promoting it so hard? Because they used OUR money to pay for this monstrosity.

Here is the fact sheet: https://www.projectketchum.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Bluebird-Village-FAQ-17x11-1.pdf

It is riddled with non-facts. Here is one of the biggest lies in it:

WHY IS BLUEBIRD VILLAGE LOW- AND NOT MODERATE-INCOME HOUSING?

Because 4,700-6,400 additional Community Housing units, serving all income levels, are needed countywide (per BCHA), and one development won’t provide the solution.

The 4,700-6,400 number is not a real number. It is based on numerous assumptions and assertions. On its face, it makes no sense. The population of Blaine County is about 25,000 people. The average household size is about 2.5 people. So BCHA is telling us we need 15,000 MORE PEOPLE to “solve” our housing needs. In what universe does increasing the county's population by 60% solve its housing problem? Wouldn’t that just create more housing problems?

This is what I mean by the self-licking ice cream cone. BCHA, which is the EXACT SAME STAFF as the Ketchum Housing department, has devised a plan to keep it in business forever and to justify a massive bureaucracy to solve a problem that is not nearly as substantial as it asserts.¹

The Ketchum Council has swallowed this hogwash and jettisoned its fiduciary responsibility to Ketchum residents.

Here is another lie the City used to sell Bluebird: that all the tenants work in Ketchum. They re-traded that— once they got it approved. They lied.

WHICH APPLICANTS ARE PRIORITIZED AT BLUEBIRD VILLAGE?

1. Public and critical service workers (those working for a public entity or who are on-call 24 hours a day for public safety emergencies) are first priority.

2. Households who work full-time locally, senior citizens who worked full-time locally, or those who have a disability that live in Blaine County (per fair housing requirements) receive next priority.

3. Other Blaine County residents may apply if units are available after the prioritized households are placed.

For priority details, please reference the Ketchum Preference Policy on BCHA’s website (bcoha.org).

This is not true. From the fact sheet itself, the #1 priority is not work status, it is income limitation. Regardless of the assertion above, if you make too much money, you cannot live in Bluebird. Income dictates—the rest is the lipstick on the pig.

On this sheet, they provide a list of 25 employers whose workers will be living in Bluebird. Wait—there are 51 units in Bluebird—what are the other employers? Is this a complete list? Do some of these companies get multiple units? This is the second iteration of this list—where did the companies from the first list go? Like the contractor for the project—Conrad Brothers.

I think it is a “list of shame” that these companies, some that are multi-million dollar operations, pay their people so little. When you look at this list, ask yourself how it screens against the purported “priorities” above when there are about as many essential workers housed in Bluebird as homeless people from Twin Falls.² From the data provided, most residents appear to fall under priority 3—people with no priority.

• Sun Valley Co. CORPORATE WELFARE. NOT IN KETCHUM. In a previous iteration of this list, the City provided some of the various operations of SVC that would have people housed in Bluebird, but that looks pretty embarrassing, so they seem to have pared it down to just the holding company. How many SVC employees are we paying to house?

• Blaine County Charitable Fund: NOT IN KETCHUM

• Sun Valley Animal Center: NOT IN KETCHUM

• Albertsons: huge grocery chain—CORPORATE WELFARE. NOT IN KETCHUM

• Fairfield Inn & Suites: Owned by MARRIOTT. CORPORATE WELFARE—NOT IN KETCHUM.

• Avis/Budget Rent a Car: national chain; CORPORATE WELFARE. NOT IN KETCHUM

• In Living Color Painting Inc. : NOT IN KETCHUM

• The Cove of Cascadia : NOT IN KETCHUM

• Ketchum Fine Finishes LLC : NOT IN KETCHUM

• Blue Sky Estate Management : Airbnb services. NOT IN KETCHUM.

• 5B Barber Co. : NOT IN KETCHUM

• Better Ask Brenda: NOT IN KETCHUM

• Sun Valley Community School: NOT IN KETCHUM. And why are we subsidizing a private school?

• Best Western Plus Kentwood Lodge: national chain; CORPORATE WELFARE

• St. Luke’s Wood River Valley: what roles are these? They can’t be full-time nurses or doctors at this income level. BCHA just heard from one of their employees who pleaded for a unit—and was denied.

• Atkinsons’ Market: no wonder they lobbied for Bluebird at the Mayor’s request. CORPORATE WELFARE for them.

• Lee Gilman, seriously? You pay your people this little?

• Dean Co : ironic; they provide services for AirBnbs that have displaced the housing their staff needs.

• The Open Room

• YMCA

• Wrap City

• Java On Fourth

• The Tanning Co.

• Sushi on Second

• Magic Lantern

Over one-third of these employers are not even in Ketchum. This was supposed to be Ketchum workforce housing! Why are Ketchum taxpayers picking up 100% of the local subsidy tab when no other political entity in Blaine County is donating a dime?

I have said all along that Bluebird does not address Ketchum’s or even the County’s essential worker problem, despite the Mayor’s assertion.³ It was never going to do that.⁴

Remember—they want to build four more of these. IT MAKES NO SENSE unless you work at BCHA and want job security.

How Can BCHA Have Empty Units?

Empty units are a feature, not a bug, of the BCHA approach. To qualify for BCHA units, you have to be underpaid.⁵ Even better, be underpaid and have more than two people in your household.

Ski season is coming up, and you don’t want to work full-time as a single person? It's not a problem; they have a unit for you. Want one person to work full time and your partner not to work at all? That's no problem; they have a unit for you. Want to retire to Ketchum on a social security check? They’ve got your back.

But if you are two people who want to work full time, can’t afford a starter place, but eventually want to save up and escape BCHA public housing? NO UNIT FOR YOU.

This is not theoretical.

The Squeeze-Out Math

The current program advances the replacement of locals, who, in the Ketchum Council’s calculus, aren’t very valuable to Ketchum’s economy, with higher-value tourists and new arrivals willing to work for less than Ketchum’s prevailing wages in exchange for taxpayer-subsidized housing.

Here is a live example of how our Council and BCHA prioritize people who don’t live here over people who do live here.

blaine_county_housing

A post shared by @blaine_county_housing

Take two starting BCSD teachers who live together. Each makes $53k for a total of $106k. A 2 BR market rate in Ketchum is about $3k/mo for a crap apartment. They pay just under 30% of their pretax income in rent. They risk being evicted at the end of their lease when their landlord decides to make more money in the short-term rental market.

Yet a two-person household can make no more than $73k and pay just under $1,500 for a brand-new apartment in the center of Ketchum. They will pay only 25% of their pre-tax income.

This creates perverse incentives.

On an after-tax basis, the teacher couple is financially better off if one of them quits their job and works part-time just enough to stay under the income cap. The non-teacher pays no income tax: they may even qualify for the EITC (a Federal transfer payment).

They get a brand new apartment, care of the taxpayers, that they can’t be evicted from.

Is this what we think is good for Ketchum? If my analysis is incorrect, please prove me wrong.

Essential Worker Getting Squeezed Out by BCHA

Again, the bias against two-income families is not theoretical.

Right now, a poor (in both the financial and put-upon senses) BSCD teacher is being persecuted by BCHA because she dared to find a life partner with a job and moved out of a BCHA deed-restricted unit she owns.⁶ This young woman found a new market-rate home and bought it before it was bought by someone else—cheap housing goes quickly in Blaine County. That left her with her new home and a BCHA home. That’s a violation of BCHA rules! You can’t have two homes! She doesn’t want two homes. She has been trying to sell the BCHA home for months. [Think about the Catch-22 here.]

BCHA changed the rules on this house while she owned it—without her consent or informing her. They helped her buy it as a single person. But now they say it can only be bought by a 2+ person household. None of the 39 qualified people on the BCHA housing waitlist want to purchase her old home. She wants to rent it until she can sell it because she can’t afford to carry two homes. She could rent out one home and live in the other, but that is not allowed by BCHA. The BCHA house has been empty for almost half of 2024.

Is this how we want our housing policy to work? To put an essential worker into penury while housing sits empty? Isn’t that the opposite of what we should be trying to do? Shouldn’t this teacher be a success story of someone who graduated from public housing?

Not according to BCHA.⁷

This is not an isolated case.

There is a brand new deed-restricted rental unit in Ketchum. It has been empty for months. BCHA entered into a deal with the developer when the building was built that specified a certain rent. Over 50 qualified BCHA waitlist people have said no. The developer wants to open it up to people on the BCHA waitlist. But BCHA has said no. The unit remains empty.

More stupidity.

Meanwhile, more essential workers are forced out of town as their housing gets gentrified for the Airbnb market.

One explanation of why they have empty units is that the qualification for living in them requires more penury than exists in Blaine County, such that they have to recruit the homeless in Twin. This was the explanation given to me by the City.

But there are other plausible explanations. They could be building the kind of units that Ketchum workers don’t want to live in, or they could be building them in places where people don’t want to live. Or, they don’t have the demand for workforce housing they claim to, and their waitlist has no integrity.

My gut tells me the answer is “E: all of the above.”

The Ketchum Housing Department is building units at taxpayer expense for which it has to find the demand. This department is an ever-growing bureaucracy that is creating its own demand. This is the definition of a self-licking ice cream cone. BCHA is constantly advertising the units you paid for on Instagram. They have even hired real estate agents (from outside Ketchum) to market units.

The presumption that everyone wants to live in a small, income-capped apartment without parking in the commercial district of Ketchum is not only arrogant but empirically wrong. We know that because the majority of people on the BCHA waitlist don’t want to live in Bluebird.

Yet, the Ketchum Council plans to quadruple the number of Bluebird-type units on very expensive land in Ketchum. This is not only antithetical to the definition of “economic,” THIS IS IDIOTIC.⁸

I have a solution for that (at the end).

Is There a Better Way? YES

First, let’s apply some common sense. What problem are we trying to solve?

I reject the problem that the Ketchum City Council solves in their HAP. The outcome it engineers that anyone who wants to live in Ketchum has a right to live in Ketchum, and if they can’t afford to, the Ketchum taxpayer will help them out, but only if they don’t want to work full time.

I know that sounds crazy, but that’s what Ketchum is doing. It’s even worse than that. If, even after the subsidies, no one poor enough wants to move into Ketchum public housing, they will scour the state to find those people to move to Ketchum, even if Ketchum is losing essential workers because they need housing. This is exactly what they are doing with Bluebird.

Think about what they will do when they build the equivalent of four more of them (Three near the ski lifts at River Run and one at the Y parking lot). This is not theoretical. This is in the current action plan for the City of Ketchum. They even plan to raise the LOT (again) in May to get this done.

The problem we should be solving: How do we mitigate housing market dynamics to ensure we have enough essential workers for our town to achieve the goals of our Comprehensive Plan?

We have scarce money, land, and town “character.” These resources should be deployed to benefit the people who live in the community—not go to corporate welfare or create lifestyle choices for people who want to live in paradise but can’t afford it or don’t want to work full-time.

Second, we need the data that BCHA refuses to get. We should be doing surveys twice a year (mid-winter and mid-summer).

1. Ketchum Employers: what are their workforce needs? How many are seasonal versus long-term? Where do their workers live? How many employees are they short? What steps are they taking to address their workforce needs? What do they suggest that the City of Ketchum do?

2. Ketchum workers: where do they live? How much do they make? What hours do they work? Do they work for a for-profit or a non-profit? How much do they pay in housing costs? Rent or own? Where do they want to live? Do they want to rent or own? How much would they be willing to pay to live there? What is the size of their household?

Why don’t we do that? I think it is because it will prove the Housing Action Plan is a farce.

We Could Be Using Scarce Resources to Build Ketchum Workforce Housing

If we did this, we would have a much better shot at knowing how much workforce housing we need, at what price point, and in what location. If we did this consistently, we would see the trends and how our actions are impacting the trends.

Once we have the data, we can assess the need against our resources and prioritize our scarce resources to optimize their allocation to the essential workers we need to have a community.

In the meantime, we can scrap the Ketchum Housing Action Plan and offload the BCHA staff to Blaine County.⁹ When Ketchum needs housing, let’s hire local non-profits like ARCH and WRCHT to build it rather than for-profit developers from Seattle who take the money out of our community. We will get better outcomes and better utilize scarce taxpayer resources.

If we don’t do this, we won’t have a “small western mountain town,”¹⁰ and we won’t have what’s left of our community; we will have one big hotel in Ketchum.

We will have the Aspenization of Ketchum, which the Troika of Bradshaw/Breen/Hamilton has been working to achieve for the past six years.¹¹

1. I use “BCHA” throughout this post. But I could just as well have used “Ketchum Housing Department.” They are the exact same team. Authorized for nine people. 100% paid for by the Ketchum taxpayer, yet serving the needs of the entire County. The conflicts of interest are massive, non-transparent and, as far as I can tell, unmanaged. Ms. Connelly pulls the strings. Here’s the org chart:

2. It seems normal for BCHA to create criteria it doesn’t adhere to. For example, the ops manager in the org chart above does not meet the hiring criteria for the role. No matter. As I said, Ms. Connelly pulls the strings.

3. Is BCSD on this list? No. BCSO? No.

4. People are figuring this out and are starting to complain about it to BCHA.

5. Either by fate or, in some cases, by choice. You can have more disposable income as a Bluebird tenant if you choose to make less money.

6. Check out the recordings of BCHA’s last two meetings. The Executive Director would not permit her to attend in person to plead her case—violating BCHA rules— or permit public comment. Thus, the word “persecute.”

7. You really should watch the video of the BCHA meeting where they denied her petition for relief. What I find strange is that they did not offer to buy the unit from her. This unit is in Elkhorn. In Ketchum this year, the BCHA Executive Director got the City to buy not one but two formerly market-rate units condos (in secret) to put into exactly this kind of deed restriction situation for BCHA. Why couldn’t they have just bought this unit? Was it because the units they bought in Ketchum are pigs in a poke that face massive assessments and have not been sold yet? It is one set of rules for BCHA and another for its “clients.”

Here, Keith Perry, I will take a shot at you. I love you, man, but you gotta step up. You are the Chair of BCHA. The staff is supposed to serve at the board's direction, not vice versa. From what I have observed in the BCHA meetings, you do…nothing. You run through an agenda prepared by the staff like you are a less funny Charlie McCarthy. You let Carissa Connelly run roughshod over you (e.g., the JB incident). Worse for a leader, you let her run roughshod over your board members, including people more experienced and qualified than she is, who are trying to do their fiduciary job. How could you let her publicly berate the board treasurer at the October meeting? It was painful to watch—you looked uncomfortable, but you didn’t put the right person in the right place. If you are not going to your job as Board Chair, find someone with some gumption to do it.

8. To add BCHA insult to Ketchum taxpayer injury, the BCHA staff is complaining about how hard they work. I kid you not. The Executive Director of BCHA gets paid over $120k, which is far too much to qualify for any of her inventory, and says the staff is burnt out, so she needs to hire more people.

9. Which they are not dumb enough to do. None of Hailey, Bellevue, or Sun Valley will chip in for BCHA either.

10. The preservation of which was the #1 priority in the Comp Plan that the Troika was supposed to implement but has ignored.

11. And they are succeeding! They are pretty savvy about getting their way without people figuring out what they are doing until it’s too late to stop them.