Affordable housing has long been an albatross for the city of Sedona.
While officials use the term “affordable,” and there is a federally defined term “low income housing,” what city officials and most residents really mean is “workforce” housing.
Sedona City Councils in the 1990s discussed workforce housing problems before I moved here. For the past 20 years, affordable housing has been a “priority” — and yet, virtually nothing gets accomplished in terms of actual workforce housing.
Sedona has seen one multifamily complex in the last decade, but its rents are arguably not really that affordable for most workers. Other developments face backlash long before specific details are even announced, such as the 52-unit complex proposed off Andante Drive in 2019.
The city requires developers to pay into its affordable housing fund, which is now well over a million dollars, but rarely doles out these funds for any significant project.
For the projects that do come to Sedona, the city generally waives sewer hookups and some development fees, which may marginally lower the cost of construction, but there’s little in the long run to maintain affordable housing for residents.
Thanks to high rents and homes bought up by short-term rental owners looking to make a buck, there are so few rentals available for Sedona area workers that should someone decide to move or be forced out by a property owner, there’s almost no chance they’ll remain in Sedona. If they do, they will be paying so much in rent that there’s almost no financial sense to remain in city limits.
There are numerous apartments in the Village of Oak Creek, but these get snapped up quickly.
Workers are instead left to find housing in other Verde Valley communities, or leave the Verde Valley all together, which many have.
Sedona residents have witnessed the Sedona-Oak Creek School District’s enrollment numbers steadily drop for more than 15 years. West Sedona School and Big Park Community School were built to serve 750 students each and never reached that threshold, nor did they ever come close. Right now there’s a grand total of just over 500 students in the entire district, which includes Sedona Red Rock High School. BPCS was mothballed in 2018.
Families with children are not simply moving to other parts of the Verde Valley: Other valley school districts have seen numbers drop as well, meaning there are fewer children overall, despite the fact that our total population has been steadily increasing.
Compounding the lack of long-term rentals is the sharp increase in the number of short-term vacation rentals, which further reduces the housing market for renters as well as home buyers, driving up the value of homes and artificially inflating the value.
Individual homeowners aren’t going to sell their homes on the cheap to workforce renters instead of vacation rental entrepreneurs. A few acts of charity won’t solve a systemic problem.
The city is forbidden by the Arizona State Legislature from nearly any sort of regulation, so these rentals are here to stay and will increase. Now, thanks to 60 or so complaints about vacation rentals’ trash cans, 6,000 homes in the Sedona area are subject to potential city fines in the thousands. We can expect more of these misguided efforts by council to come sideways at these unregulatable rentals, negatively affecting the rest of us.
Businesses also report extreme difficulty in hiring good staff because new employees simply cannot find a place to live. Single workers rarely want to rent a room in the house of a stranger with a shared bathroom and kitchen. Working class couples can really only move here if they have two stable incomes.
It might actually make more sense for Sedona business owners to buy vacation rentals and convert them into employee housing to both reduce the short-term rental market and provide their staff someplace to live. Neighbors opposed to vacation rentals could also buy these and rent them only to Sedona workers. They can also collect reasonable rents, offsetting the cost of purchase. These are both absurd propositions, but still more effective than anything Sedona City Council has proposed in 30 years.
Yet we can’t simply rent our way out of a housing crisis. Sedona has a lack of leadership and lack of any sort of plan to actually fix our rental problems.
Maybe the Ancient Mariner had the right idea when he shot that albatross out of the sky.
Christopher Fox Graham
Managing Editor
