Aspen City Council Passes Emergency Ordinance for Local Homeowners
The Aspen City Council passed an emergency ordinance on August 3rd that will allow a group of condo owners to remodel their Cooper Avenue complex and escape a restriction in the city’s land-use code. The Aspen West Condominium Homeowners Association can proceed with their exterior remodel without adding employee housing units.
The Multi-family Replacement Program law was passed in the mid-1980′s to discourage the trend of demolishing older housing occupied by year-round residents to build new condos to be sold for a premium to part-time residents. The law requires an affordable housing unit be built on-site for each free-market unit that was combined, demolished, converted, or redeveloped in a multi-family complex. Demolition is defined as having 40% or more of the building demolished. The law’s goal was to keep a mix of full-time and part-time owners in the City of Aspen. But for many current Aspen owners, this law prevents them making environmentally-friendly upgrades to deteriorating buildings which would result in more energy-efficient homes.
Aspen West Condominiums Homeowners Association was granted authorization to remodel their 41-year-old Aspen condominium complex without the work being considered a demolition. When the remodeling project began two months ago, the condo owners discovered the roof was rotting and the back wall was made of sound board with no insulation. They both need to be replaced but that would put the homeowners over the threshold of 40 percent, constituting a demolition, according to the city’s law.
The council has been considering possible amendments to the land use code for the past few months and is slated to make changes in the future that better reflect the intent of the law — for property owners to mitigate based on the increase of square footage, not necessarily demolition, so Aspen homeowners who remodel can improve the condition of a property and make it more environmentally friendly without being penalized.
