From creative financing to tenant rights, the push for more and better housing continues

What’s next in the effort to address Laramie’s housing crisis? Both city government and residents are taking action to expand housing availability and protect those most at risk of losing shelter.

Laramie’s housing crisis continues, but city councilors and staff, local organizations and a budding tenant rights movement say they plan to keep hammering away at the issue.

The Laramie City Council took stock of its campaign to expand and improve housing during a work session last week, noting its successes and previewing the challenges that lay ahead.

Laramie City Planner Derek Teini recapped the significant strides the city has made toward addressing the housing crisis. Given the housing difficulties facing communities around the world, Teini said there is more to do — and there might always be.

“For communities that are going to stay on top of housing, this is going to be a constant thing within your agendas and as part of your work from here on out until major things change globally,” he said. “So plan on talking about housing forever.”

But not all housing problems can be solved by local government. At this point, it’s well-known that developers and contractors have been severely hamstrung by labor shortages and supply chain issues. Those difficulties have jacked up project costs and extended project timelines. In the case of Slade Elementary School, those difficulties have even delayed the start of a semester.

There’s little the city government can do — or that county or state government could do, for that matter — to address these private sector issues. But there are active initiatives in Laramie to find creative solutions to the housing shortage, such as quadrupling the number of available residential units downtown.

While efforts continue to increase the quantity of housing, local activists are hoping to address its quality. A nascent tenant rights’ movement is hoping to build on the guarantees of the new City Rental Housing Code.

Taking stock: Zoning changes, rental regulations in the bag

“The need for more housing of every type in this community is very well documented, beginning in 2015 with our City Housing Study and then supported by a host of other documents in the years since 2015,” City Manager Janine Jordan told the Laramie City Council during its work session last week.

Leading up to and into 2020, the council adopted a Unified Development Code to streamline the application process for new developments. It rewrote downtown’s zoning code to allow taller buildings (allowing more space for housing above storefronts) while eliminating residential parking requirements.

The city also tackled and reduced parking requirements in multi-family housing zones. Laramie City Planner Derek Teini said the more parking required on a plot of land, the fewer residential units a developer can put there. So scaling back parking requirements allows developers to put more units on the same patch of land. Teini said it also saves developers the expense of building parking lots.

“Across the county, parking is one of the driving factors that chews up land on properties and reduces the amount of units you can get on a lot — and with that, it drives up development costs fairly significantly,” Teini said. “Building parking lots is expensive.”

Providing for greater density was the name of the game when the city council turned its eye to other requirements in multi-family zones. The city reduced setback, lot width and lot size requirements. All of this allows developers to put more dense and less expensive housing on lots where they might have been limited before.

“What this allows for is for developers to plat and develop smaller lots and allows them to build smaller homes on those lots,” Teini said. “When prior in our code, lots were required to be larger, really to make the project economical, you had to usually put a larger house on it.”

The city also altered the rest of its residential zoning code, making similar changes to single-family zones, where apartment buildings cannot be constructed.

Code changes again included a reduction of setback, lot width and lot size requirements, while also explicitly allowing accessory dwelling units. Accessory dwelling units can be a basement or detached apartment that’s either rented out or provided to a family member.

“Those changes that were made over the past two years were a significant amount of changes related to housing and by no means should you take that lightly as a council,” Teini said. “There are communities across the west that would love to have just one part of those changes done in the last two or three years. We got them all done.”

Jordan also highlighted efforts to improve the quality of housing — specifically, a pair of city council actions that generated fierce pushback from landlords. The city adopted contractor licensing requirements for the first time in 2021 and passed rental regulations in early 2022.

“The public has repeatedly, for nearly a decade, mentioned the quality of Laramie’s housing as a critical issue that they wanted the city government to address,” Jordan said. “It wasn’t just single-family homes. It wasn’t just apartment homes. It was all types of housing.”

Now, the council and city staff are looking ahead to other ways they can support housing development and up housing quality.

Government moves: Taxing schemes, trailer park regulations on the table

According to the presentation led by Jordan and Teini, there are several avenues for further action.

The city could support private-public partnerships for affordable housing developments and create new varieties of zoning districts or overlays. The council could take up mobile home park regulations to protect some of the county’s poorest residents from the profit-seeking excesses of out-of-state investors.

But Jordan especially highlighted a financial tool called tax increment financing, or TIF.

TIF is complicated, but it boils down to this: the city government could invest in infrastructure now with money it expects to make in the future because of that investment.

So, for example, the city could help offset the costs of a new housing development by providing all the necessary utility and road infrastructure to a new plot of land. That infrastructure goes in the ground now, but it’s paid for later when development there raises the value of the land it’s on and the land surrounding it. Higher property values means higher property taxes. And the new tax revenue retroactively covers the earlier cost of the utility infrastructure.

None of these changes are on-the-books yet.

Each will require city staff to bring a proposal to the council, and each will require multiple readings with ample opportunity for alterations and for public feedback.

But city council is far from the only entity looking to tackle Laramie’s housing shortage.

Downtown housing: No shortage of demand or space

In the near future, the residents of three new downtown lofts will be sending their rent checks to Laramie Main Street Alliance.

The LMSA built those units above Big Hollow Co-op as something of a proof-of-concept. There could be quite a lot of new downtown residential units built, renovated or revamped in the coming years.

LMSA Director Trey Sherwood said there are currently 95 units downtown. Those include 1-, 2-, and 3-bedroom apartments, some marketed to students, some marketed to working professionals, and others owner-occupied by whoever owns the street-level business.

“We know from the housing study that was done a few years ago that there is a demand for another 302 units downtown,” Sherwood said. “And that’s all ages and all income sectors.”

LMSA is particularly interested in fostering this demand because downtown living is good for downtown business.

“If you can have people living downtown, it’s activated 24 hours a day, meaning you have built-in customers who are going from their house out to the street to their favorite coffee shop or restaurant or shop to get a gift — it’s all built in,” Sherwood said. “When you have people living in your downtown, it’s an economic engine, it drives more purchases within local businesses.”

The lofts above Big Hollow will themselves marginally increase the number of downtown residences, but Sherwood said the real value is in familiarizing LMSA with the challenges and realities of setting up housing in a unique district.

“We’re at a point where we know a model that works and want to duplicate it,” Sherwood said. “But we also want to be ready to work with homegrown developers, small-scale developers or regional developers who want to do a project downtown. We can walk alongside them through this process and have that knowledge because we’ve been through it from beginning to end now.”

Adding another 302 units to the relatively small downtown area is a tall order, but Sherwood is confident there’s room for that and more.

Some upper floors are currently vacated and could be renovated into lofts and apartments. And Sherwood said other downtown lots are underutilized and could be built up.

“It would be a mix of infill and buildings that are one-story that would be better used as a five-story mixed-use where that business could be in the bottom and housing upstairs,” she said. “And then there are a few upper floors that are empty and not being used. I think with that mix of things, yes, we could get there.”

Growth Plan: A roadmap for housing, other development

There could also be quite a lot of housing construction on the outskirts of the city in the coming years. City and county officials are working on a Laramie Area Growth Plan to guide their respective governments when it comes to zoning or regulations for that area.

“What we’re looking at with the growth plan is: how do the city and the county cooperatively work together to grow and develop in that area in and around the city?” Teini said. “And housing is a component of that because in that growth plan, in that area, we are recognizing that, as a community, we do want to see residential growth in those areas.”

The plan seeks to identify “development pressures,” such as an area otherwise ripe for a subdivision but lacking the necessary infrastructure.

“The key with the growth plan is creating predictability for the citizens and the city, and for property owners and developers,” Teini said.

Putting the plan together has involved a lot of back-and-forth. Both staff and plan consultants have hosted public input sessions, education campaigns, meetings with developers, and various assessments and standards reviews. As the plan begins to take form, Teini said it’s clear that people would like to see the “full spectrum” of housing in the unincorporated area around the city, from single-family homes to apartment buildings and everything in between.

Teini said housing has been one of the top issues for most people giving input on the plan.

“It’s the topic of discussion around the world right now,” he said.

Information about the plan and how to give your own input can be found on the city’s website.

Tenant power: Organizing Laramie’s renting population

Tenants have long been at a structural disadvantage when it comes to advocating for their rights.

For years, tenants have dealt with verbally abusive landlords, unsanitary or unsafe living conditions, and the constant threat of eviction. They have lacked the ability to assert their rights to safety or bring misbehaving landlords to justice. If they do manage to assert their rights under the law and take the extraordinary step of suing a landlord, their poverty hurts them in the courtroom. This summer, Laramie tenants and mobile home owners have weathered jacked-up rents and gentrification efforts.

The City Rental Housing Code passed in January took aim at some, but not all, of these issues. So the newly formed Laramie Tenants’ Association wants to build on that success by developing a popular movement for collective action.

“We are an independent society or association of tenants who democratically deliberate and carry out collective actions in the service of tenants in our organization and broader community,” the association said in a statement. “In 2020, we identified the same need as the city council in the face of a global housing affordability crisis and local rental and home ownership stock shortages.”

According to the statement, the association’s members have been actively trying to build a movement. There’s no shortage of potential members — more than half of Laramie rents the home they live in – but it can be difficult to energize a base that’s struggling to make ends meet, working multiple jobs or raising families.

“We have sent up delegates to national congresses of other autonomous base-building organizations and developed our capacities as individuals and a robust core of volunteers,” the statement reads. “We have flyered, maintained and distributed know-your-rights and tenant legal handbooks, fostered and led tenant demands for improved conditions to both landlords and loudly championed our own insight as tenants to the council during public comments.”

As the association seeks to become a dues-paying union, it also seeks to fight on all fronts.

“We don’t limit our struggle to any particular realm, whether that be policy, economic demands, or civil litigation,” the statement said. “We merely aim to extend the abilities of individual tenant, building, and neighborhood struggles against the abuses of landlords, whether deliberate or from the impersonal creep of market incentives.”

The association praised the City Rental Housing Code, as well as the new enforcement mechanism it utilizes. Under the code, tenants can file a complaint about unsafe living conditions with the city manager’s office, which will then be tasked with investigating the complaint.

This is a far less arduous process than most tenants have faced when asserting their statutory right to an apartment in “safe and sanitary condition fit for human habitation” — an assertion that usually requires a tenant to file a lawsuit and shell out money for a lawyer or prepare to face their landlord’s lawyer pro se.

But tenants can demand more than what’s in state statutes or city code, the Laramie Tenants Association argues.

“Ultimately, tenant power derives not from law but from numbers,” the statement reads. “And the recognition of common interests in a city of mostly tenants of acting in solidarity on the shared basis of the rent relationship; a grounds where more and more us are relegated to dollar signs in double renting or security deposit schemes or allowed to bear the costs of neglect despite an increasing portion of our income demanded for less space and comfort.”