JACKSON — The Jackson Town Council approved 21 townhomes on South Park Loop Road after the Presbyterian Church of Jackson Hole voluntarily offered to deed-restrict all of the units.
One townhome will be deed restricted as affordable with income eligibility limits to meet the town’s requirement to offset new development by building housing or paying an affordable housing fee. The remaining units will be deed restricted as workforce housing, which means tenants qualify based on working locally but there are no income limits.
Councilors lamented the impacts on neighbors, who have opposed the project’s density, but said they couldn’t turn down a private developer voluntarily building 100% deed-restricted housing.
“I am going to have to disappoint my friends and neighbors who live in the neighborhood by voting for it,” Councilor Jonathan Schechter said. “And I do so as somebody who really loves that open space.”
But Schechter said the 100% voluntary deed restrictions set a strong example for other developers. He also called the plans a good project that complies with town regulations and said he just wished it could have been in another location.
On Monday, the council voted 5-0 to approve the townhomes and a fellowship building. The council also waived town application fees.
Councilor Jessica Sell Chambers said the guarantee of a 100% deed restriction “moved the needle” for her.
She also told neighbors that she understands the difficulty of having development close to your home. Many in the community are seeing density added to their neighborhoods, including Sell Chambers, who lives just down the street from the new 12-unit, 22-bedroom condominium project at 440 W. Kelly St.
“It’s been a boon for my neighborhood,” she said. “It’s actually added quite a bit of vibrancy.”
The lights are on, people are home, and her son has even made some new friends, she said.
“We don’t have dark homes,” she added, referring to neighborhoods occupied by part-time residents.
Councilors Arne Jorgensen and Jim Rooks also stressed the community benefit of housing that is slated for church employees and possibly local nonprofits.
Rooks said it was one of the toughest decisions he’s had to make, empathizing with the neighbors who live on a quiet cul-de-sac at the base of High School Butte.
“We have well over 1,000 families in this town desperate for housing as we speak,” Rooks said, adding that those families are not newcomers but friends, neighbors, teachers and nurses.
“When we have a developer, who is the church, who’s willing to come forth with 20 voluntary deed restrictions on a project,” Rooks said, “it’s literally impossible for me to say no to that.”
Initially, the church had proposed building free-market units and deed restricting them later through a housing preservation program that pays for deed restrictions on existing homes.
But on Monday night the church pivoted and agreed to deed restrict them up front.
The project calls for building the townhomes in two phases on 2.93 acres at 1251 South Park Loop Road. The property was entitled to three homes as part of a land swap and the county’s realignment of South Park Loop Road decades ago. But the property also is part of the Cottonwood Park neighborhood, which was originally approved in 1983.
That original plan called for building 785 units on just shy of 149 acres. Of the approved units, 59 have not been built. The town approved the church’s request to transfer the right to build 18 of those remaining units in addition to the three units the church was already entitled to build.
The unexpected change in density caught neighbors by surprise. When they bought their homes decades ago, they said, they didn’t realize the property could add more units.
Neighbors also said the development could put more traffic on a pathway used to get to the middle school, add congestion to South Park Loop Road and degrade open space that wildlife — from deer to foxes — use to move from High School Butte to lower elevations. A small creek also runs through the property.
Neighbor James Musclow questioned whether the project would really solve Teton County’s decades-long housing crunch, quoting a refrain he said he once heard from Hank Phibbs, a lawyer, conservationist and former county commissioner, who died last year at age 79 after five decades spent fighting to protect the environment.
“We’re never going to build our way out of this,” Musclow said. “There will always be a problem no matter what we do.”
Church leaders have said the housing is critical to keep running an institution that serves community members whether or not they belong to the church. The church wants to get back to pre-pandemic staffing levels with about 40 employees, of which about half are part time.
But it’s getting harder to recruit and retain qualified staff to run the church, which has 684 members, Senior Pastor Ben Pascal has said.
Church leaders see the church as both a place of worship and a hub that supports the entire community. During the pandemic the church hosted COVID-19 vaccination clinics, which served about 10,000 people, he said. The church has a preschool that could expand if it had more staff. The church also serves 3,360 meals a year during Wednesday dinners that are open to anyone in the community, he said.
The church canceled its popular JOY Summer Camp, which served 222 total children (about 30 to 50 every day) because of the cost of housing the staff needed to run it, for example.
“I think that affects families all across this community, not just the families and individuals that would be housed by this program,” said Jackson resident Jessica Jaubert, who spoke Monday in favor of the project.
Church leaders also have said that if the church decides to sell some of the units to help pay for construction, those units could go to social service nonprofits or other churches.
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