EDWARDS • According to its own housing assessment, Eagle County needs nearly 6,400 affordable rental and for-sale housing units over the next 10 years to address current shortages and future labor growth. Given what one developer describes as its current broken policies, the county will never get there, he said.
The resort county of more than 54,000 that’s home to the Vail and Beaver Creek ski areas is made up of more than 80% federally owned public lands, meaning there’s fierce competition for a limited supply of highly desirable private land for both free-market and subsidized housing.
Matt Larson of Denver-based Rediger Development has family ties to the Vail area and experience building both high-end homes and trying to build affordable housing for local workers. His experiences in both sectors have demonstrated a stark contrast in what the county prioritizes, Larson said.
“That level of process risk may be survivable for luxury projects, but it kills affordable housing — and attainable housing, too,” Larson said of the millions of dollars and years of regulatory review. “If the county wants results, it needs a true fast lane for affordable housing projects.”
Larson pointed to the Confluence Point project he proposed in 2023: 400 single-family homes, price-capped at 100% AMI (area median income) 43 miles west of Vail on I-70 in Dotsero. The project stalled, he said, when county officials told him to expect at least two years and several million dollars in costs just to reach a board of county commissioners hearing.
That same year, he was working with a private landowner in Edwards — an unincorporated community of 10,000 15 miles west of Vail on I-70 — to buy a little over three acres between U.S. Highway 6 and the Eagle River in order to build around 85 affordable homes. That parcel, zoned “Residential Suburban Low Density,” is known as the Riverhouse property.
Larson said the county itself outbid him for Riverhouse at a price ($3.8 million) that makes it too expensive for a privately developed affordable housing project. At a community meeting on the property last month, affordable housing for local workers was barely mentioned as a possibility, with a clear preference from attendees for parks, open space or a nonprofit gathering place.
In fact, county officials took members of the public and press on a tour of the property using a driveway Larson claims he rightfully owns after paying $10,000 for the narrow half-acre Peterson property where he now wants to build six price-capped rental units at 60% of AMI, or about $1,500 a month for a two-bedroom apartment.
Larson has proposed utilizing federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC) for his Left Bank project, and wants to work with Eagle County to provide a template for tapping into the 9% federal credits going forward. Larson also wants proof of concept so he can take the technique to other housing-strapped mountain resort towns.
Like Vail Resorts’ controversial Booth Heights parcel in East Vail that resulted in litigation and a settlement with the town, Larson’s strip of land in Edwards that he bought from the Peterson family had fallen off the county’s tax roll years ago. All he says he needed was for Eagle County Assessor Mark Chapin to review the clerk and recorder’s records, trace the title, record the owner and allow him to pay the back taxes. Instead, the county is claiming Larson’s property is “encumbered” and therefore he must seek a decree of quiet title.
Chapin, an elected official, declined requests to comment for this story, but in a July 24 email told Larson, “This office has historically shown the subject land to be a right of way. A decree of quiet title is required for me to change my records.”
Larson has produced two lengthy videos explaining his position and providing documentation to the county. He says a quiet title action would be prohibitively expensive for an affordable project.
“The county can burn public money on lawyers; we can’t,” Larson said. “Forcing us into court creates perfect pressure to walk away, while giving the county a chance to revive its weak adverse possession claim.” Larson alleges the county attorney’s office is using a “land grab” technique used in Boulder in 2009 that resulted in an amendment to state law.
The Eagle County Attorney’s Office, via a county spokesperson, provided this response via email: “We have no comment on Mr. Larson’s asserted plan to build 6 affordable rental housing units on a 40-foot encumbered strip of land. As for any remaining questions, Mr. Larson’s depiction of the facts and law are incomplete, inaccurate and unfounded in many ways. The county does not wish to dedicate further resources to refute his claims in detail.”
Asked to explain how the property is encumbered, the county pointed to Larson’s video discussing an easement the previous property owners granted to neighbors, which Larson said “has been incorporated into our Left Bank site plan and poses no obstacle to our development.”
More broadly, county housing officials were unable to respond to Larson’s assertion in one of his videos that in the decade between 2012 and 2022, Eagle County built 125 new affordable units at a taxpayer cost of $19.1 million, while private development produced 146 new affordable units. The county is pursuing a regional housing authority and may soon seek taxpayer funding.
In an email via a spokesperson seeking confirmation of Larson’s affordable housing stats, a county housing official said “answering that question would take literally days of research to produce, and there’s no capacity to do that at this time. That information is available in PUDs (planned unit developments), which are public and you could research them if you wish.”
Pressed on its unprecedented $64.9 million taxpayer investment in housing over the last four years that produced 747 units of “new homes, preserved housing and support for renters, homebuyers and homeowners,” and just how much of that was new construction, a county official responded, “213 newly constructed units.”
“In my opinion, Eagle County is not effectively investing taxpayer dollars to solve the affordable housing problem — much less put a dent in it,” Larson said, pointing out Eagle County planning forecasts for the year 2030 predicting only 56% of the workforce will live in the county. “This should be a five-alarm fire. There also needs to be more accountability — at the elected level and staff. If folks are not putting significant points on the board, step aside and let someone else try.”
As for his property, Larson says he’s not walking away or looking for a payout from the county. Instead, he wants to be part of the affordable housing solution in a county treading water on keeping its cops, firefighters, teachers, hospitality and health care workers housed. But unless things change, he added, he will have serious reservations about floating future proposals.
