Special offer

Affordable, green homes for every community and every country: Sandpoint Real Estate Blog

By
Services for Real Estate Pros

One of the great things about Sandpoint is that when hippies started moving here in the 1970s, it became a mecca for forward thinking. Our area, incredibly beautiful and natural, attracted the very highly educated and successful. With 148 square mile Lake Pend Oreille and Schweitzer Mountain Ski Resort, and removed from the heartless barren urban cityscape, Sandpoint was a paradise to those that had protested in Berkeley and LA. While the same types came from Portland and Seattle, a unique relationship formed with hunters and loggers, and the mindset of creating a truly unique home away from it all evolved. Ex-law enforcement and firemen came in droves, along with musicians, artist, and the like. In 1978, Ed Kienholz, one of America's great 20th Century artists made his home on the Hope Peninsula. What followed certified North Idaho as one of the great art colonies in North America.

In this environment, I have worked supporting art and our community in 41 events and art shows over the last few years.

I met Pete Keller when I owned Wigleys Café and Bakery several years ago. While our press was legendary, the offer made to me was too good and I sold.

Pete is one of those forward thinking souls and a home designer with architectural finesse and largesse. He want to make a difference in the world, while still making a living. Pete's family is from Germany, and I relish our conversations in German.

Pete has come up with an idea for creating serviceable, renewable, resellable, marketable, and affordable housing. The idea is creative and compelling.

For the last five years there have been copious meetings about finding a way to create affordable housing in Bonner County, specifically around Sandpoint. As prices approached $500,000 for a home a few short years ago, the prospect of finding land and builders close to town became more and more murky. It is almost a blessing to have our prices fall back to reasonable levels.

In San Jose, as prices rose to unattainable levels for regular folk, to find personnel to fill positions such as waitresses and bartenders, retail clerks and bus drivers, became virtually untenable. People had to drive an hour to get a job in the city. If you have ever had to fight the interstate in and around San Jose during rush hours, you know this is a big issue. As gas prices rose, wages for these average positions became almost too much for small businesses to pay.

We faced the same challenges in Sandpoint, Idaho. If homes cost a half million, then how could we as a community survive. Here we have created, with the great help of mother nature, a paradise. Great and diverse opinions, fantastic people, unbelievable views.

But without affordable housing, we would be lost, and all of us knew it.

While many call us the next Vale or Lake Tahoe, we do not yet have the infrastructure or tax base to become something other than what we are; we are a rural Idaho county that is a very cool place to live, but not some upscale French chalet.

We need people to move here that will do the great American jobs that are needed for our county.

That is where Pete and I come in. There has been a lot of talk about building affordable and green housing, but nothing has really happened in a meaningful way.

We met with Jerod Keyser, whose family founded Priest River, and is the former owner of Infinity Financial Group.

We have a plan, we can sell one bedroom, one bath free-standing condos at $75,000, and two bedroom, two bath units at $95,000.

This is fair warning. We are going to build these affordable, green homes. Be ready for it, because we will be coming to your community next.

Affordable Housing Brochure     Floor Design

Comments (0)