Affordable. Moderate. Achievable—oh my! Tahoe has more housing definitions than you can find in a dictionary. If you’ve been following the world of housing in Tahoe, you might know that the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA) adopted a bunch of incentives a few years ago to spur the development of deed-restricted housing. And now, even more incentives are being considered in a public process this year. 

What does it all mean? If you look behind the veil of achievable housing, you’ll see it’s primarily market-rate housing for locals. While housing for locals is better than housing for second homeowners, it still doesn’t address our affordability crisis because (spoiler alert) most locals can’t afford market-rate housing. Throughout the Basin, 62% of the need is for affordable and moderate housing (or for those earning less than 120% of the Area Median Income). According to BAE Urban Economics, on average a household in Lake Tahoe must earn about 245 percent of the Area Median Income to purchase a market-rate home, aka achievable housing.    

Another concern is that new deed-restricted housing may not be effectively monitored, and the units may be rented to people who can afford them, rather than the workforce. Despite the electeds brushing this off, we’ve actually seen it happen before. Coburn Crossing is a locals-only project in Truckee. A few years after it was built, the Town finally audited the building and found that roughly a third of the residents didn’t meet the locals-only requirement, showing the need for better oversight.

Officials keep telling us that out-of-towners won’t want small studio apartments, but we have already seen how these market-rate units make great ski or summer leases in Tahoe, especially without deed-restriction oversight. Ultimately, Tahoe needs more than market-rate, achievable housing; it needs truly affordable housing for the local workforce, seniors, and disabled communities, in line with the TRPA’s stated intentions, but contrary to some of the policy proposals.

Join Mountain Area Preservation in advocating for workforce housing that protects the lake. Learn more and sign our petition today: www.mountainareapreservation.org/the-housing-tahoe-needs

-Sophia Heidrich