JACKSON HOLE, WY - The Jackson Town Council today will likely extend a 180-day moratorium on converting rental apartments to condominiums to give leaders enough time to formulate new regulations governing the procedure. According to staff reports, the council will likely vote to impose an additional 90-day moratorium on conversions to give consultants time to finish gathering and analyzing information about historical trends in conversions.
At a council meeting in May, consultant Craig Richardson of Clarion Associates told town leaders consultants still did not have the information they needed to craft new regulations and should do a more comprehensive study of the issue. That study should quantify whether conversion of rental apartments to individually owned condominiums hurts affordable-housing stock in town, Richardson said.
In January, the council put a six-month moratorium on accepting or processing applications for residential condominium conversions. After months of public comment, debate and legal research, the council agreed at that time it had neither the information nor consensus among its members to formulate a new rule governing conversion and that current disagreements between planning staff and the council over how to interpret existing regulations made it impossible to proceed.
In late February, the Town Council and Jackson Planning Commission met to hammer out differences on how the town should regulate conversions of existing apartment buildings to condominiums. Such conversions have become more popular in the valley as real-estate prices have escalated. As the price of land and of existing apartments has risen, it has become difficult for developers to pay off their loans from rent alone, and they have increasingly turned to the condo model, which allows them to sell individual units as a way of recouping their investment more quickly.
Town leaders have said they would like new regulations to address how to maintain an appropriate number of rental units in Jackson, how to regulate condo conversions in a way that discourages speculation, how to protect tenants from old, unsafe buildings, and how the town should apply any sort of affordable-housing mitigation to conversions. The debate over condo conversions began in spring 2007.
Since 1994, the Town Council had allowed developers to convert apartments to condominiums without requiring a final development plan or requiring that 15 percent of the units be deed-restricted affordable housing.
However, then-Planning Director Brian Grubb ruled that conversions of existing apartments to condominiums would be considered new development and would be required to have a final development plan approved by the Town Council. As part of that final development plan, the conversions would have been subject to the town's 15 percent affordable-housing mitigation rate, though how much affordable housing could have been created was debatable.
Source: JHguide.com