Summit County offering money for your own Accessory Dwelling Unit, if you rent low

When you live in a place like Summit County, Colorado, you have to get creative on how to live in one of the most expensive places in the state. 

Summit County Government knows this all too well, and has been fighting to get creative solutions in place to help the workforce in a tourist town a place to sleep at night that is not on a friend's couch or worse (this is not every situation, but does for sure exist in Summit County).

One of those ideas is to help supplement the costs of Accessory Dwelling Units, homes built on existing home lots and usually rented out to another family. It's a convenient way to provide more housing (specifically affordable housing) when the space in the high country is very limited. 

"Summit County is more than 80% built out," Summit County Commissioner Tamara Pogue said on Tuesday. "We have a very high percentage of federal lands, you can't obviously build on that property. So we are very much focused on infill development or helping to add density to already existing density rather than building out beyond the envelope of where our community already exists."

So, in order to help do so, the county contracted with an architect who has done this before in a city in California and collected five different plans people can come and get free of charge to build at their own properties. 

Summit County has even offered to provide start-up grant money to builders, so long as the finished product ADU is rented at a low end scale. 

It's a give and take, the county will help you build the housing, you ask for less money from the person living in the housing, they get a place to stay and help with the much needed housing crisis, everyone goes home happy. 

Or that's the mission anyway. The average cost of a ADU (out of 80 homeowners surveyed by the county) bounces between $200,000 up to $500,000 depending on the style, location and number of rooms. 

"We were trying to buy that down to something that was affordable for somebody, you know, living in Summit County on a ski resort income, for example." Pogue said, referencing the grant money used to offset the cost of the ADUs. "And that's how we landed at somewhere between, I think, 50 and $100,000."

It's a challenge unlike the housing crisis along the front range, where there are simply not enough units. 

"We actually have one unit for every person that's a permanent resident in some a county," Pogue said. "It's just that those permanent residents don't own those homes and that's what creates our challenge."

So far, the county believes the plan is a success, at least gauging from public interest.

"There's been a lot of interest, a lot of phone calls, a lot of folks coming in to look at the plans," Pogue explained. "So I'm optimistic that this will help."