The legal saga between embattled and former Burlingame Ranch resident Lee Mulcahy and Aspen’s housing authority is over now that a settlement has been reached.
Multiple offers have been made in recent months on the property without it being listed, according to the city’s real estate agent, Andrew Ernemann of Aspen Snowmass Sotheby’s International Realty.
The local real estate market has seen unprecedented activity in the past year as people from all over the country have settled in Aspen and the Roaring Fork Valley during the pandemic.
“The inventory is at an all-time low in the modern market,” Ernemann said. “You cannot find vacant lots or smaller single-family homes downtown.”
With hardly anything left to buy of its kind, the historically designated chalet-style house is more desirable than it has been in the past.
APCHA board members tossed around those ideas Wednesday as they consider a pilot program that will attempt to gauge the condition of aging deed-restricted ownership units.
Board members agreed that getting people to voluntarily allow APCHA-hired inspectors to come into their home could come up short.
“I am one of the people who just kind of wonders how many are going to open their doors voluntarily with no incentive whatsoever,” APCHA board member and Aspen City Councilwoman Rachel Richards said. “I use the analogy it’s like your parents come to visit and you spend two weeks beforehand cleaning everything you haven’t cleaned … homes are a private space and they are very personal.”
, and include initially targeting 100 single-family units that are least 20 years old.
The goal is to understand the “breadth and depth of capital improvements that may be needed” in these types of units, of which there are at least 675 of them that are 20 years old, according to Diane Foster, interim executive director of APCHA and assistant city manager.
“The intent of this program in particular is simply to look, not do any mitigation, but to put a box around what’s the problem,” she said.
The proposal is in response to a decades-old quandary that affordable housing officials in the upper valley have been dealing with in trying to ensure that when any of the 1,600 ownership units in the taxpayer-subsidized program is sold that basic upkeep of the property has been maintained.
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