V2N10: More Bluebirds; More Corporate Welfare; Fewer Locals
Sun Valley Co, workers will be able to walk to work at River Run
Over the past year, the City of Sun Valley has approved substantial development plans for Sun Valley Co across from Dollar and within the resort area footprint. Why should we care in Ketchum?
Because that kind of expansion will require SVC to hire up to 800 more workers. Guess what the City of Sun Valley did not require SVC to do? Build enough housing for those workers.
Where Will They Live?
No worries, SVC; the Ketchum Council Troika of Bradshaw/Breen/Hamilton has your back. The Troika even seems to have Cordovano and Hutchinson on board with this plan, which disappoints me.
As you can see from the ad at the top, Ketchum plans to build more housing for underpaid tourism industry workers. This time, it will be next to the YMCA and within walking distance of the River Run lifts. Combined, this could amount to about four more Bluebirds.
I think this is nothing more than corporate welfare for the tourism industry. In previous posts, I have detailed the $$$ millions of taxpayer subsidies Ketchum provides, of which Sun Valley Co. is a primary beneficiary. The Troika seems to have no limit to what it will do to keep SVC happy.
What pisses me off is they they use garbage arguments to justify what they are doing, and that some people in town, despite all the evidence to the contrary, believe it.
Ketchum’s Community Housing inventory remains too low, impacting businesses and the economy by reducing workforce availability. Over 300 long-term rental units have been lost to short-term rental or seasonal home use in Ketchum in the last 10 years. Even with Bluebird Village and current programs to preserve and convert property to long-term rentals, the city remains short at least 572 Community Housing units needed by 2032 to meet demand across all income levels. (And, with recent growth rates, the number is likely higher!)
I love that they refuse to take responsibility for losing long-term rentals on their watch. They created a problem and now they want to solve it. I have called this the “self-licking ice cream cone” before, and I will call it that again now.
Let’s think this through. “Ketchum’s Community Housing inventory remains too low, impacting businesses and the economy by reducing workforce availability.” Is this assertion true? Is our economy being harmed? Some parts of it are, particularly the parts of the economy that pay low wages to many transient workers to provide services to tourists. Some parts of the economy are booming—like the construction industry. Mr. Doty appears to be getting a lot of business from the four-story box developers. Also, the Ketchum Housing Department keeps growing.
How Much?
Will 572 units of “community housing” solve our workforce shortage? Let’s assume it will. We build 572 units of “community housing” and Ketchum’s workforce shortage will be over, our economy will be “fixed,” and we can continue to pay that workforce $20/hour for tourism industry jobs. Still a boom/bust economy. Still a two-house or two jobs economy. Still a family exodus from Ketchum. But the tourism industry will be good.
How much will that cost? KURA has the answer—about $20mm for 50 housing units and parking for those units. Oh, I forgot the land. Add another $5mm. Oops, we forgot forgone property taxes because the properties pay little tax. Another $5mm. So $30mm for 50 units = $600k per unit. 572 units = $343mm.
The City of Ketchum wants to spend $343mm over 10 years to add 572 housing units. This is not news; it's all in the Housing Action Plan at ProjectKetchum.org, which the Council unanimously adopted.
Who Benefits? Do You?
Today, 1,800 homes in Ketchum are occupied by full-time residents. The City wants those 1,800 families to subsidize the construction of almost one-third more full-time housing units.
Doesn’t that seem…unreasonable? Will that make Ketchum a better place for those 1,800 families to live? If you think so, please share how in the comments.
Nowhere in the Housing Action Plan or the Comp Plan or any plan, has the City of Ketchum indicated to those 1800 families who will bear the costs of this plan how they will benefit from this. How life in Ketchum will be better for the people who live here today. How this plan will reverse Ketchum’s loss of families.
They don’t because it won’t.
Who benefits? Not you. It’s the tourism industry. How many people will 572 units house? About the number that Sun Valley Co will need to hire to staff its master expansion plan. To work in Sun Valley. Ponder that one.
Why is that good for you?
Tourism Growth Should Work for Ketchum, Not Vice Versa
I am not talking about eliminating tourism and pursuing zero growth. We will have both. I’m not even talking about not building housing for underpaid workers. But I am a bit particular about who those underpaid workers are. They should work in Ketchum and serve an essential community function outside the profit motive.
What seems bizarre to me is why our elected officials think it is good for the electorate to subsidize everyone BUT those people. First responders. Teachers. Healthcare workers. City employees. We don’t need 572 units for this.
Bluebird could have done this. Instead, it is a hideous mess. Based on the Mayor's lies, we paid for a building that essential workers can’t live in. Half the tenants don’t even meet the criteria the City uses to justify its next two buildings in the ad above—they don’t work in Ketchum.
The people on the City Council know this. The people on the Planning & Zoning Commission know this. So do the City Planning Staff and the Housing Department Staff. So why do they keep lying to us that if we build more of this crap we “solve” our workforce shortage and our apparently disastrous economy? It’s a lie. They know it is a lie.
Scarce Dollars for Scarce Essential Workers: Teachers, First Responders, Healthcare Workers, City Workers
We should build some workforce housing. For our essential workers who work for the public good. We should build it where it won’t compete for parking, land, and character. We have several choices for this. Where the fire department training facility is in the LI zone, near the Water Treatment Facility and around the Hospital.
The City refuses to consider any of those locations. Instead, we get the following:
A study on available city-owned property has been conducted to determine the feasibility of developing additional Community Housing units to fill in the gaps that current developments and programs can’t. Two potential sites are the most promising options: the current Lift Tower Lodge site and the south YMCA parking lot. Now, we need your input to determine what the potential project parameters will be.
The last sentence is, in my experience, baloney. When did the City of Ketchum, during the reign of the Troika, ever use your input for project parameters? Look at the most important document the City will approve this year—the Comp Plan. A massive upzoning program that they never asked a single resident if they wanted it.
More Lipstick on the Pig
Their standard approach is to pretend to listen and then jam us. If you need confirmation, ask BCHA Executive Director Carissa Connelly to read you what she wrote on the last page of her grant application for HUD funding to develop Lift Tower Lodge. She already got the money. This process is performative.
And guess how much that “study” cost us. I provided the City a list of potential properties for free.
The YMCA lot has been a housing target of the City for years. If it were to house essential workers, that would be one thing. But they took federal money for this project, so they have to house ANYONE who meets the federal income caps. Anyone, from anywhere. Working or not working. Essential, non-essential, or retired. They do have to be US citizens.
Thanks for your analysis Perry. The idea of spending $343 million to create 572 housing units over 10 years is, of course, ludicrous. That amount is nearly the same estimate of how much it would have cost to relocate Friedman Airport to a foggy plateau north of Shoshone. In 2016 the Airport Authority wisely put that bad idea to rest, largely due to the cost and no one wanted the impacts the newly arriving 737s would bring. Now 10 years later, with some great work from Fly Sun Valley Alliance, Friedman remains a great airport option for a community of our size.
Today's Ketchum City Council could learn a lesson from the Airport Authority of 2016:
"Live within your means and do the best with what you do have" The Ketchum Housing Plan of 2025 is a misguided attempt to solve a 2022 housing crisis. Building more dormitories and taking away public parking is a dereliction of duty and, financially, a fool's errand.
Perry Boyle continues to accurately describe a process of entropy and chaos in Ketchum and the WRV that mirrors the suburbanization of communities all over the US. The economic imperatives being imposed on a once classic American mountain town will erase the economic, social, and environmental proportionality that made the community unique and Climate Change is likely to be the coup de grâce. Forget sustainability, better to practice slowly committing suicide as a lifestyle choice.
The impacts of the Sun Valley Company's financial interests on the social, economic, and political relationships perpetuate a shallow and inauthentic social fabric and a kind of ersatz Disneyland mentality. Ironically, the profit incentives behind catering to tourists will cheapen the tourists’ experience further and also serve to commodify local character and culture. It’s a form of highway robbery, a free-market/trickle-down nightmare and a Realm of False Promises. In politics, being deceived is no excuse.
Rather than treating this deterioration as an end-point, business interests will treat it as an opportunity for further profiteering. Local residents’ inability to reap the supposed benefits to be conferred on them by the grand plan of a dimwitted Troika, conjoined with an anachronistic Planning and Zoning department, reflect an abstract, universalized, paint-by-numbers conception of well-being. It’s a form of "Father Knows Best" patriarchy that's sanctioned by Idaho state laws and tax policies and it shamelessly ignores local residents' preferences and undermines social stability. (Btw, Neil Morrow needs to retire to greener pastures rather than tell Perry Boyle to give up because "big money" is coming to town.)
It won't take long before Bradshaw’s gaggle of Bluebirds, if built, will be perceived as naively well-meaning but profoundly misguided follies, out of place suburban ghettos that serve to sequester people into apartment blocks rather than encourage integration. Neil and his crew are not bad people, they're merely the tools of much bigger players that they are largely unaware of on a daily basis. To put it unkindly they're unwitting shills, basically.
Perry’s metaphor of lipstick on a pig is very apt. Be careful what you wish for, good people. SLOW.IT.DOWN.
PS. You have to hand it to the SVCo for perpetuating its local brand as Ketchum’s Beneficent Savior, a version of The Second Coming (after the ore wagons) regarding the town's welfare and its very existence. Yeah, maybe it is in a sense but when you get right down to it, for a corporation that touts itself as the town’s very taproot, the menu of potential contributions is a little anemic. I'm not saying that SVCo is miserly but I wonder about the expansion of possibilities if they put more of their mouth where their money is.
Why is there not a long-standing foundation that channels a small percentage of the corporation’s top line into projects that help to de-stress the community it feeds off (and that in turn gets fed by it). Seems to me the relationship is epiphytic at best; in reality, it’s fairly parasitic in the current socioeconomic environment. Over the course of twenty years, a well-managed foundation might manage to disperse tens of millions of dollars to support the town’s infrastructural needs.