ISSUE #190: Selling Aspen's Slums 3/28/21

"Several generations of slum environment will produce a slum heredity." -- Albion Fellows Bacon

Aspen's housing program is in crisis, but the APCHA board displays little to no willingness to address it. This is likely due to a controversial decision in 2019 to change the make-up of the board to include four citizens and two elected officials each from city council and the BOCC. The conflicts of interest are glaring, not to mention many of the board members are also subsidized housing residents - a dangerous recipe for self-dealing.

Our housing stock is rapidly deteriorating, we are selling uninhabitable units to innocent housing lottery winners and passing on the costs of unit fixes and overdue maintenance to future owners. Increasingly, the fixes are more costly than the purchase price.

HERE is an alarming account of just how bad it is. And HERE is a letter to the editor from former housing director Mike Kosdrosky who now privately consults with other jurisdictions how NOT to run their subsidized housing programs into the ground the way Aspen has.

The APCHA board has met to discuss these issues but cannot decide what to do. Read about this unacceptable inertia HERE.

The program is clearly not going to fix itself. That much is clear. Please join me in emailing the APCHA board to share your disgust with the program oversight and management, and with a request to take the immediate and necessary actions to change policy to include: a program census, inspections of all units prior to sale, and a return to objective governance of APCHA. That would be a good start.

Read my column in today's Aspen Times HERE.