Committee considering whether affordable housing at Brown Ranch is still worth pursuing
- Dylan Anderson
- Jun 3
- 5 min read
Steamboat officials stress the 40-member Deliberation and Stewardship Team is first considering “if” development at Brown Ranch should move forward, “not when.”
Before a Steamboat Springs citizen group can make recommendations about the future of the Yampa Valley Housing Authority’s Brown Ranch property, it has first been tasked with deciding whether the affordable housing project is worth pursuing anymore at all.
The Deliberation and Stewardship Team has had just two meetings so far, the second of which on May 8 being the first to feature any real discussion about the future of the Brown Ranch. The third meeting of the 40-member group is scheduled for later this week.
City Manager Tom Leeson said at Council’s meeting on May 20 that they are attempting to take a “lead from behind” approach to this process. He recommended against ordering any more feasibility studies for Brown Ranch until the group agreed there was a path forward on the project.
“It was always expected that the first few months of this conversation, this community conversation with the [Deliberation and Stewardship Team] was going to be the most difficult,” Leeson said. “Honestly, this group does not know if there is yet a path forward because they’re still grappling with these huge community issues.”
The Brown Ranch has been heralded as Steamboat Springs’ solution to its affordable housing crisis, but a plan to build more than 2,200 units over two decades was soundly rejected by the ski town’s voters 14 months ago. The Yampa Valley Housing Authority purchased the land in 2021 with a $24 million anonymous donation and the property is largely within the city’s Urban Growth Boundary.
Following the March 2024 vote, City Council said they wanted to have more involvement in the next attempt at Brown Ranch and hired Glenwood Springs-based nonprofit Community Builders to guide the current process.
The Deliberation and Stewardship Team is a group of 40 locals chosen after the city received more than 80 applications from the public. City Principal Planner Brad Calvert said applications included questions like how they voted on Brown Ranch in the past, how they feel about housing issues locally and how their own living situation is working, to name a few. From there, they used a computation tool to select 40 members.
This process wasn’t entirely random, with various factors like how people voted on Brown Ranch in the last election being used to get a "representative" group. For example, a larger portion of the applicants said they were supportive of the last Brown Ranch proposal, but the final roster aimed to give each side an equal share.
“We wanted it to be random, but we wanted it to be representative,” Calvert said. “So that we don’t randomly end up with a group that is not representative.”
The Deliberation and Stewardship Team is currently scheduled to have three more meetings, one in each of the next three months. Consultants described the group’s August meeting as a “go or no-go” conversation. If they could imagine a way forward, they would continue to phase two, working toward a framework for how a development plan should be designed. If not, the group could seemingly conclude its work.
Council member Joella West attended the Deliberation and Stewardship Team’s May 8 meeting, where she told the group Council hasn’t predetermined anything, and that they are looking for the groups' recommendation on if there is a way forward on Brown Ranch. At the May 20 Council meeting, West reiterated that point, noting that they need to start with an “if” to get participation from Brown Ranch detractors.
“In their view, the whole reason for convening this Community Builders process was to do Brown Ranch — that there was a foreground conclusion,” West said. “That was not why we brought Community Builders in, that is not what their marching orders were. It’s if, not when.”
Council member Michael Buccino said he felt that was an incorrect view of the situation in response, noting that this property has long been designated for expanding the city.
“This land is in our Urban Growth Boundary, so if we’re saying that we may not have a path forward for this, then we have another issue,” Buccino said. “We all have this master plan of the Urban Growth Boundary… something is designated for that area.”
YVHA: Releasing soils report a question of ‘timing’
At the end of the May 8 meeting, Kelly Phillips, a member of the Deliberation and Stewardship Team, brought up the existence of a “soils report” for Brown Ranch, saying it not being publically shared showed a lack of transparency from the Housing Authority.
That document Phillips' referenced is an email from local developer Jim De Francia to YVHA Executive Director Jason Peasley and YVHA Board President Leah Wood offering a “very general assessment” of the larger soils report.
In the email, sent in January 2024, De Francia wrote that the mix of soils could prove challenging to build on and may require higher-cost building methods. While the results were not unexpected, he suggested they should “revisit aspects of the master plan with this data now [in] hand, focusing on how best to achieve the vision for affordable housing given potential cost challenges.”
In public comment at Council on May 20, Peasley acknowledged the soil study, saying that he got the study early in 2024, prior to the March referendum vote.
“It’s a question of timing,” Peasley said. “When is that information appropriate for decision making?”
“I didn’t think it was important for us to be talking about how much premium we might have to pay for soils if we as a community didn’t decide that we wanted to annex the land,” Peasley continued. “That was my decision. Was it the right decision? That is for you guys to decide.”
Peasley said if there are questions about issues like soil from the Deliberation and Stewardship Team, then they should bring in experts to give them answers.
“If those are fundamental questions that are needed to be answered to be able to say, yeah, I think we should grow in the area that we’ve said for 30 years we’re going to grow in, then let’s get those questions answered,” Peasley said.
After Peasley’s comments, Jim Engelken, another member of the Deliberation and Stewardship Team, said the soils report should have been shared publicly prior to the vote. He said YVHA’s reputation has been “severely damaged,” with the soils report being just the latest misstep.
“We have to get by the politics and at this point in time, as a result of the three-year fiasco that was the proposal for the Brown Ranch, this community is, we’re in trouble,” said Engelken, who was a member of the group that spurred the 2024 Brown Ranch vote. “This is coming out in [the Deliberation and Stewardship Team]. People are kind of running to their corners.”
“I hope that we can break through some of that [and] we can have honest discussions about this,” Engelken said.