After years of planning and design, shovels broke ground this morning on new housing units that will provide more than 1,100 Canyons Village employees and their families a place to live, work and play car-free.
The nearly 8-acre parcel that will become employee housing is just above the main parking lot by the Cabriolet. When complete, it will feature six housing buildings along with amenities including grocery and liquor stores.
Housing options will range from three-bedroom townhomes to dorm-style co-living spaces with 10 bedrooms and shared common areas. Rents will be based on formulas that calculate a percentage of employee income.
The development is a public-private partnership between Summit County, the Canyons Village Management Association, Elliot Work Group and real estate developer Columbus Pacific.
Tony Tyler, a partner at Columbus Pacific, said the project’s design is rooted in employee input about how workers want to live. And he hopes the finished product will become a prototype for other resort communities.
"This type of project hasn't really ever been done before. And so it's not just groundbreaking in that it's a it's a new project that's going to accommodate, you know, employees and their families in the resort but it's how do you accommodate those employees while making it still attainable and affordable for them to live and work here."
In a phased rollout, employees will begin moving in next summer. Demand may exceed supply. So who gets to live here? Brian Madacsi, President and CEO of Canyons Village Management Association, said there’s a system in place for finding occupants.
"So we have a priority list with a waterfall that's in place and so employees who are full time within the canyons village area - doesn't matter if they work at the resort or Waldorf or Hilton or Hyatt or West Gate - if they're full time, that's our first idea," Madacsi said. "We're trying to - our first objective is to fill everybody that's full time. After that we'll go down to part time again working within our area in the event that we cannot fill in the first couple of years with our own numbers of employees, then we open it up with full time within Summit County."
The housing will be next to a transit hub, enabling employees to easily access downtown and other parts of the city without a car. Employees are being encouraged not to bring cars when they move in, which Tyler said should reduce traffic around town as well as on the main thoroughfares so many employees now to use to get to work from outside the county.
"It's more than three quarters of the people that work in the resort area already live somewhere nearby. And those employees are all driving more than 30 minutes to get here," Tyler said.
Summit County is providing some financing for the project. Councilman Glenn Wright said the existing worker housing shortage is an impediment to resorts’ ability to provide the quality of experience that tourists expect . He called the project an innovative example of how public-private partnerships can meet community needs without dipping into tax revenue.