The League of Women Voters held a voter education program on the state of housing in the Verde Valley on Wednesday, April 12, at the Camp Verde Community Library.
Featured speakers were Verde Valley Regional Economic Organization Executive Director Mary Chicoine, Sedona Housing Manager Shannon Boone and Mimi Maher of the Village of Oak Creek.
All three speakers highlighted the role that outdated laws, zoning procedures and attitudes related to housing are currently playing in leaving the Verde Valley short an estimated 3,800 housing units over the next five years.
Migration Patterns
Chicoine pointed out that while the region has been experiencing a housing shortage for 30 years, “it didn’t become a crisis until all of a sudden we had the short-term rental impact, we had the COVID impact and migration from California and other states into the Verde Valley.”
As salaries fail to keep up with housing costs, Chicoine said, “we have had migration out of the Verde Valley of individuals from the age of 15 to about 60. And it’s getting worse … in essence it is a dying community.”
“When we had the recession in 2008, our construction workforce left and went down to Phoenix,” Chicoine added. “Getting them to come back is very challenging, because they’ve got plenty to do.”
Zoning and Reality
Chicoine and Boone both spoke to how official zoning codes and unofficial assumptions have perpetuated what Chicoine described as “the culture in rural communities where single-family houses was what got built.”
“We still have in our [Yavapai County] plan that houses have to be on two acres of land,” Chicoine said. “That’s a real challenge to work with some of those traditions … Municipalities have looked at changing zoning for things like tiny homes, or infill, different things like that. If it’s not major complexes, how can we, instead of building one house on a piece of property, maybe put six or eight if the zoning would allow for something like that?”
“We had a philosophy for many years of only building single-family housing in rural areas,” Clarkdale Mayor Robyn Prud’homme-Bauer said. “We have to change that mindset.”
Boone added that the state constitution’s gift clause also inhibits the ability to build affordable housing because cities have to show “a direct benefit, dollar for dollar, for any money that we give to a private, for-profit entity.” The indirect benefit of creating additional housing for the community is not sufficient to meet the constitutional requirement.
The Maher Method
Mimi Maher described how she and her husband Basil, who are currently funding the conversion of a classroom building at the former Big Park Community School into teacher housing, decided to work around development obstacles by simply buying up existing houses and renting them to local families at affordable rates.
“The first thing we did was almost by accident,” Maher said. “I was looking for a home for Caesar and Berenice, who work for us directly. And so I found a home, and then I heard another family needed a home, so I found another home, and then another family, and so I found another home, and it grew from there.”
Her first home was followed by the purchase of a run-down rental on Sedona Street, which Maher renovated and rented to a single mother with three little girls. Her “poster family” came along later.
“The husband was studying to be a police officer, so he was at the police academy, she was pregnant, and she had two tiny little boys, and they were living in a guest room,” Maher said. She referenced a survey comment Chicoine quoted on one of her presentation slides: “Four generations and I can’t find a home.”
“That was this family,” Maher said. Not only did she find them a house, a few months later, when that woman’s brother lost his rental, she was able to help him as well: “The house across the street came up for sale. So the brother and the sister are now across the street from each other with five little kids.”
That family, the Erlichs, will be profiled in the upcoming spring issue of Sedona Red Rock News’ Lifestyles of Sedona magazine.
The Mahers are also in the process of obtaining a zoning change for a property on Goodrow Lane in order to add housing units there.
“Another coup on the short-term rentals,” Maher related. “Basil and I found a piece of property in Uptown, an eight-unit apartment building, which we bought, and rather than have shortterm rentals, which it was … by July, that will be teacher housing.”
“I guess that now I have 14, 15, 16 — I did write it down — we have a number of homes now,” Maher said. “Over 22 kids moved back to Sedona. Maybe more now, because one’s pregnant, one just had a newborn … No permission asked, but this is how we went around the system to put people in houses for less rent, taking houses out of the short-term rental category.”
The Mahers took the same approach to the school renovation project. “Basil said, ‘Rent the building to me, I will turn it into teacher housing, I’ll collect the rents and you pay back the debt,’” Maher recalled. “Simple. Done. No permission asked. We said, if we go through the red tape, if we had really gone through the avenues that take so long, we wouldn’t have gotten anything done.”
The Mahers also established the Sedona-Oak Creek School District after-school program in order to make it easier for parents who live in Cottonwood or elsewhere but work in Sedona to enroll their kids in Sedona schools, which, by increasing enrollment, will increase the funding the district receives.
“I think we should clone you,” Chicoine laughingly said to Maher.
“We’re just thinking creatively,” Maher said. “We know that Sedona is going to suffer if it doesn’t have a younger generation.”
Trust Issues
Although the city of Sedona has begun to implement many of the solutions recommended in its 2020 housing needs assessment, including the creation of a down payment assistance program, pursuing deed restrictions and a review of obtrusive building codes, it has not yet acted on the assessment’s recommendation to create a community land trust.
A CLT holds title to land donated by a local government or private individuals and leases it at nominal rates to homeowners or developers, who are restricted from later selling their properties at market value.
“Cities are not the best stewards of community land trusts,” Boone said. “It’s onerous to get all the pieces in place, get your resale equation in place so it’s beneficial to the homeowners and the trust as well beneficial to the future buyers … We’re trying to get a nonprofit developer in place, and that nonprofit could also then house a community land trust.”
Stewardship
Boone disclosed that city staff have already decided to subdivide the Sedona Cultural Park property and construct apartments on part of it.
“The Cultural Park will undergo a major master plan with tons of community input before we do much of anything there,” Boone said. “We are planning to divide off one small parcel to start an apartment building on because we know that’s one of the things that absolutely has to go there. It will be strategically situated and the community will get to plan the whole other 40 acres.”
“The Dells — that’s questionable for me,” Boone continued. “There are a lot of reasons why the city can’t put a development out there. First of all, that’s where we put our wastewater. The treated effluent is sprinkled on the land out there … So we would have to put in injection wells.”
The city’s 2017 Wastewater Master Plan Update planned for the replacement of the effluent irrigation system with up to six injection wells. Two of these wells were completed in 2018 and are currently used to dispose of the majority of the city’s treated effluent. The city has chosen to postpone construction of the remaining wells.
“It’s outside city limits,” Boone added. “So if we start building out there, all of those people are going to be in the county, not in the city of Sedona. We purchased that land for the wastewater purposes.”
Prud’homme-Bauer challenged the view that land outside the city limits was unsuitable for development.
“Where is the land?” Prud’hommeBauer asked. “The land is in the unincorporated areas in most of our communities … we’re going to see municipalities probably annexing a lot of those lands.”
