Storytelling to Address Housing Disparities in Chaffee County, CO
Editor’s Note: In March of 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic eliminated our ability to work with people in person, StoryCenter staff traveled to Salida, Colorado, to collaborate with Chaffee County Public Health on highlighting stories about the scarcity of affordable housing in the area. Salida is home to artists, service workers, medical professionals, and business owners, and the county has seen property values skyrocket over the last decade, leaving lower paid workers with fewer and fewer housing options. The county’s efforts to combine personal stories with statistical information is working to pull the community together to better understand and tackle the housing challenges.
By Becky Gray, Chaffee County Directory of Housing, and collaborator on the Housing Disparities Digital Storytelling Project
Two years ago, I moved to Salida, Colorado, hired by Chaffee County to lead the charge in making housing more affordable. I remember walking into a community conversation about affordable housing that had been underway for some time—a conversation wrought with acronym, policy recommendations, and mathematical formulas, all designed to calculate eligibility and affordability. My colleagues were discussing the Area Median Income, what price range to consider affordable, how the lottery for deed-restricted properties should be operated, and what those deed restrictions should be.
And all the while, a huge part of the conversation was missing. While formulas were analyzed and policy debated, the only human element that peeked in from time to time was that of the NIMBYs. The “Not In My Back Yard” people would interject, offering their perspective about why this-or-that would negatively impact their property value, or how they used their bootstraps and therefore everyone should use their bootstraps to do better. Their comments, of course, insinuated that the people who work for entry-level wages in our community were, themselves, the problem—not the skyrocketing housing costs.
Storytelling has helped our community turn this narrative on its head. After a three-day workshop with StoryCenter, six community members from very different backgrounds emerged as champions for themselves, their friends, and their neighbors. Their stories of housing insecurity were very real, spanning generations, countries, relationships, heartbreak, and salvation. They told stories from the heart, and shared them with the community at our online “dinner and a movie” event in April. (We had planned this as an in-person screening, but COVID-19 required the shift to a virtual setting).
Today, the conversation has distilled around our community values—around the people. The NIMBYs suddenly aren’t the only human element in the conversation. Rather, policymakers and affordable housing advocates are now able to see the faces and hear the stories of their favorite bartender and shopkeeper; they hear the voice of the homeless man that the whole community recognizes, but few know; they hear about how housing stability helped the children and healed emotional wounds.
It turns out that humans live in houses—if they’re lucky. And our conversation about housing has turned to those humans. How much we value them. How much we need them in our community, and how much their voices matter. And that absolutely changes the conversation about housing. While formulas, acronyms, and deed restrictions are important and still need to be discussed, our community now holds the human element at the heart of the conversation—our friends, neighbors, and coworkers—and we’re working collaboratively to make sure they are heard and have safe, stable, and affordable homes.
View all six stories from the project, and learn more about partnering with StoryCenter.