Legacy Lost: Hole full of housing hypocrites

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — Housing. Everyone talking about housing. The lack of it, the price of it, the wacked out column inches of rentals-to-want-ads ratio. It’s the coffee talk topic du jour every day all day for the past 30 years or more in Jackson Hole.

Talking about housing gets politicians reelected. Writing about housing gets newspapers sold. Nonprofits, social services, government departments dedicate resource hours and real money to the subject of housing. And still the hole gets deeper.

This community should probably stop trying to create new housing; government, certainly should get out of the housing development business. They aren’t good at it (see: The Grove, Parks and Rec employee housing, Cheney Lane, Kelly Place Condos, et al).

And when the private sector offers to get in the game and lend a hand, they are thwarted at every turn. By bureaucracy or bigotry.

The failed Porter annexation, Larry Huhn’s bid to put a couple hundred units on 84 acres in Hog Island, Bar J Chuckwagon makeover, and the latest: the Darwiche family’s attempt to repurpose an old folks home into readymade workforce housing.

In every case, we the people said, “Nope.”

We say we need housing but do we really want it? Talk is cheap until the dump trucks are next door. Meaningless lip service. Words without action.

Creating housing opportunities is easy to say, hard to do. Even if some bold or insane developer found a way to make a workforce housing project pencil, and even if it somehow made its way through the grind of the planning process. If it has even one neighbor it has one critic.

Fight of the century: Rafter J CC&Rs vs. Teton LDRs

The latest goodwill attempt to make housing happen in the Hole is the Legacy Lodge project in Rafter J—a rental ready 57-unit retrofit of an assisted living facility that shuttered in early 2021. The Darwiche family purchased the property shortly thereafter with the admirable attempt of tweaking the building into workforce housing and putting heads in beds within months.

It’s been a year now.

Pushback from a mighty Rafter J Home Owners Association has been fierce. It should not have come as a surprise. The same core band of cantankerous neighbors successfully fought off the Seherr-Thoss “New Neighborhood” proposal of 2002. They also sent James Reinert and his Teton Meadows packing in 2008. In 2012, Rafter J’s all-powerful governing board effectively sunk plans River Crossing (now Gateway Church) had for expansion.

This time around, it’s the Darwiche’s feeling the heat.

In an environment where it costs in excess of $750k to build even one affordable unit in Teton County right now, Legacy Lodge proposes 57 at no cost to the taxpayer. A 100% private workforce housing development ready for occupancy tomorrow. Slam dunk for a community desperate for inventory of any kind, right?

Wrong.

Wrong place, wrong type of housing, traffic and water concerns, end run around CC&Rs—name it, detractors have claimed it while also personally attacking the longtime local family as “con men,” accusing them, among other slanders, of trying to house their own employees.

Heaven forbid a small businessman recognize the need to not only pay his employees a fair wage but, in this community, might want to invest in putting a roof over their head as well. If they want to hang on to workers. Too many other businesses simply build out, expand, create more and more jobs, and then expect government to coerce taxpayers into housing their cooks and cashiers.

“We have invested in properties to house our employees since the 1990s,” Jim Darwiche admitted. “Legacy Lodge will be used for some of our employees but mostly for other important members of the workforce that deserve a decent place to live while they contribute to the community.”

Lot 333, the 5-acre parcel where Legacy Lodge sits, is zoned Planned Unit Development-Rural 3 (PUD-R3) with the Rafter J final plat designating it as “Ranch Headquarters and Local Commercial.” Historical precedent has been of little value.

The Rafter J subdivision was created in 1977-78, before even the county had established any Land Use Regulations (LDRs). Rafter J has no master plan to fall back on and the 1978 Comp Plan is vague regarding what might be constituted a commercial use. Would apartments qualify?

And, really, little of this minutiae matters here for approval or denial of the Darwiche’s Stage Stop application. That’s for lawyers to hash out once litigation begins, which has already been threatened should commissioners greenlight the housing project.

“The big concern is if we approve this and, while I am happy to hand it over to Board of County Commissioners, there is such bad blood and lawsuits waiting to be filed. It does everybody a disservice to have it bogged down in suits. Both sides need a reset to build a better relationship,” said planning commission chair Alex Muromcew said during a meeting that okayed the PUD and CUP on narrow 3-2 votes.

No fence mending was ever accomplished. Both sides remain far apart as the agenda item ate up an entire meeting earlier this week with no resolution, no vote, no end in sight.

Rafter J residents, at least the ones showing up and speaking out at public meetings, don’t want the additional density apartments at Legacy Lodge will create in the nearly 50-year-old subdivision. And who can blame them? It won’t help property values (although that is celebrated more during refi and resale than it is when property taxes come due).

People, generally, don’t like change and enjoy a more bucolic quality of life in Jackson Hole. And those buying into Rafter J did not expect to see an apartment complex nearby. It’s a backyard swingset neighborhood not suitable for worker bees busing and buzzing to their hotel jobs at all hours of the day and night.

It’s already a bear trying to make that left out of the subdivision headed to town. The Legacy Lodge dorm will bring more noise, lights, and activity with the higher density use. It’s undeniable. Two unrelated persons to a unit with one allocated parking space between them is unrealistic. A man camp. And no kitchens in units will mean a lot of trips to McDonalds and Quiznos.

Nobody wants to live next to that. Who would? And that brings us to NIMBYs.

NIMBY (Not in My Back Yard)

NIMBYism has spawned its own acronymical dictionary including LULUs (Locally Undesirable Land Uses, NOTEs (Not Over There Either), NIABYs (Not in Anyone’s Backyard), BANANAs (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone), and even NOPEs (Not On Planet Earth!), CAVE people (Citizens Against Virtually Everything) and NIMTOOs (Not in My Term of Office).

Weaponizing NIMBY as a label has maybe gotten a bad rap. World-renowned author Alexandra Fuller, who lives in Wilson, is unabashedly proactive in protecting her yard.

“I think corporations invented [NIMBY] so that we would be embarrassed into not fighting for our backyards. I absolutely am a NIMBY, and I am going to stay and fight for my backyard,” she said in a 2008 interview with New West.

Nothing wrong with watching out for one’s interests. If residents don’t stand up for their own neighborhoods, who will? The danger is believing you’re actually for housing. One side of the mouth claiming pro-housing as the other stands in front of the bulldozer. You aren’t for housing. And, again, that’s OK, just say it straight.

To claim: “We need housing, I am all for housing. Just not here” is to say: “I don’t want housing.” If you are not prepared to put housing next to you, you are not FOR housing.

The same thing has happened over and over.

A proposed housing development at Bar J Chuckwagon was fought tooth and nail in 2015-16 by a pop-up coalition calling itself Alliance 390. Well-heeled neighbors in tony Teton Pines lawyered up when the representatives for the singing cowboys proposed first 40 duplexes, then 69 units (20 affordables, 49 market rates) on 21 acres off Highway 390 (Teton Village Road).

Alliance 390 eventually faced down the project, all the while contending they were neither NIMBY nor wealthy ‘lock and leave’ second homeowners. They were simply asking the all players to adhere to the rules, and repeated a mantra that such an increase in residential could not be accommodated on a road that was already clogged with traffic and responsible for mowing down moose at an alarming rate.

In 2016, David Quinn’s Steelhead Partners tried to develop four lots in South Park on Lucas family property—206 homes on 203 acres with at least 57 affordables in the mix. It never had a chance, shouted down by neighbors who did not want to see growth in South Park.

Employee rentals, affordable and workforce housing…it all sounds like a dream come true. The reality of it on the ground, next door, is a nightmare.

And how about the height of hypocrite? Even those in affordable housing don’t want affordable housing next to them.

When Lodges at Fish Creek LLC sought approval to build out 10 affordable homes in the Homesteads at Teton Village in 2017, it was vehemently opposed by the nearest neighbors who themselves were living in affordable housing. Additional traffic and lack of parking cited as reasons several people were opposed to the development.

Not only does this community not want to see housing, they don’t want to pay for it, either. Efforts to create a special tax carved out specifically for housing and mass transit have repeatedly failed at the polls.

Look, we are a community that likes to bitch about housing but are not prepared to do a thing about it. Until we are ready to be honest with ourselves and politicians get the message to stop exacerbating growth, and employers start housing their own, we are all just shouting into the wind.

And all of us, the housed, the homeless, and the couchsurfers—we’re all just barely hanging on to a merry-go-round that is spinning way too fast. One eviction notice away from gone. One more property tax increase away from having to sell out and move away from a place we loved.