The Colorado Sun reports from Norwood, on the Western slope, home to a novel pre-fabricated home solution to the housing crisis being created by rural gentrification in one of the most scenic counties in the state:
Norwood is an agricultural village of about 580 residents that has been swept up in the latest real estate boom that has permeated every corner of Colorado’s Western Slope, spiking prices well beyond the capacity of working families. The Pinion Park neighborhood is emerging as a model for easing the so-called housing crisis with a collaborative confluence of public and private, for-profit and nonprofit businesses, governments, agencies and groups.
Pinion Park is made up of 24 easy-to-assemble modular homes built in the first-of-its-kind Fading West modular home factory in Buena Vista. A unique lending program with low interest rate mortgages and down payment assistance has empowered paycheck-to-paycheck residents. Philanthropic investment, state grants and free land from San Miguel County have enabled the nonprofit developer, Rural Homes, to build infrastructure.
Rural Homes’ nonprofit model has harnessed these varied collaborators in a moment of record-setting real estate sales and a shortage of attainable homes that is altering the sense of culture and community in mountain towns. By aligning governments, foundations, lenders and a first-of-its-kind construction process, Rural Homes is able to sell new homes for less than $400,000 in a county where the average home price is more than $3 million.
Those prices are changing lives, enabling residents with important jobs to stay in their communities.
Norwood is in San Miguel County, population 8,072, Earlier posts out of San Miguel County are here and here.
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