Affordable housing is seriously lacking in Blaine County, but significant strides have been made to address the problem in the past year.
Central to the solution is Advocates for Real Community Housing (ARCH), a Ketchum-based nonprofit organization, and their efforts haven't gone unnoticed.
Tonight, the Sun Valley-Ketchum Chamber & Visitors Bureau will present ARCH and its president, Rebekah Helzel, with two awards during the Chamber's Community Awards Dinner at 7 p.m. at the River Run Lodge, near Ketchum.
Helzel has been named Citizen of the Year "for her unselfish and tireless efforts at providing affordable housing for the work force," the Chamber said.
And ARCH, which Helzel founded in 2004, will be presented with the Nonprofit Organization of the Year award "for its activities to create and preserve housing opportunities and home ownership for working people in Blaine County."
Helzel said she was "thrilled" about the awards but she passed off a lot of the credit to ARCH's board members, some of whom are living in or have applied for an affordable housing unit.
They are Lisa Pettit, Lesley Andrus, Norman Friedman, Larry Young, Michael Carpenter, Sergio Ruiz and Karen Vance.
"They're getting the recognition they deserve," Helzel said.
A former investment banker from Mill Valley, Calif., Helzel moved to Ketchum with her husband, Larry, in 2000. It didn't take her long to notice that affordable housing was high in demand but low in supply.
Helzel said Mill Valley, a suburb of San Francisco, had similar affordable housing problems but "it's even more extreme here."
She said she watched new friends pack up and leave the Wood River Valley—forced out by the lack of affordable homes—and became increasingly concerned that Ketchum was on a fast track to self-destruction.
If something wasn't done soon to fight the problem, "there would be nothing left of our history, our personality," she said. "People would be all transitory people, looking to be here for just a couple years. There would be no family life."
So she started investigating solutions and "I realized there was something we could do about it," she said. "We didn't have to sit here and wave goodbye to everyone."
With guidance from other communities that had undergone successful community housing campaigns, Helzel launched ARCH in the fall of 2004.
ARCH's primary mission since its inception has been educating the public, but it's also committed to building a land trust, securing units for affordable housing when possible, and maintaining a close relationship with community housing applicants.
"We're doing a lot more than people think were doing," Helzel said.
The fact that the area is so far behind the curve—Blaine County currently has about 50 affordable housing units, while other resort towns, like Aspen, Colo., have more than 2,000—has helped as far as education is concerned.
"Because we've come into the process so late, the economic and social consequences are becoming obvious to even the casual observer," Helzel said last month. "People can see that something is terribly wrong. Even if they can't diagnose it properly, they can see something is terribly wrong.
"That has helped us in the education process."
Ketchum and much of the Wood River Valley are surrounded by public land. Private land that is developable is under incredibly high demand, and affordable housing hasn't exactly been a priority for most developers.
But through ARCH's education campaign and a series of city and county ordinances, the affordable housing hurdle is beginning to drop.
Sun Valley and Hailey have already adopted inclusionary housing ordinances—requiring all future subdivisions to include a certain percentage of affordable housing—and the county commissioners are currently exploring two similar ordinances for the county's unincorporated areas.
And the Blaine County 2025 campaign—initiated by county commissioners in January 2005 to address future growth and development concerns—could dramatically alter zoning codes that would benefit affordable housing.
"It's encouraging to me that people are recognizing the work force as an asset to our community," Helzel said. "These are very important people to our community and we need to make sure we keep them here."
ARCH's Community Housing Week will be held July 12-15 in Ketchum. This year's theme is "Make Blaine County Home Again."
