by Derek White
Looking at the communities in Northwest Kansas, Colby has always tried to be that regional hub. People come to shop, do their medical care, and to enjoy the other amenities that Colby can offer that the smaller communities cannot provide. The city doesn’t ever want to lose that, and if you get to a point in your community to where you’ve started to become stagnate, you won’t notice in one year but in five years. By then it’s too late to have an immediate fix, and you’re limited in options available.
This is where the City of Colby is right now on housing, ten years ago we should have hit the ground running with housing projects, but we didn’t and now were trying to attack the crisis at every level. On paper, the Colby community has about 5,700 residents, but Colby city manager Ron Alexander believes that number is closer to 6,000.
His reasoning is based on available housing right now, if you’re trying to find a place to buy in town, your options are very limited as the supply is astonishingly low. Colby has several long-term individuals working in the community that are being forced to live out of hotels and recreational vehicles, implying that the population is larger than the paper records suggest.
The city hired a company called Five Rule out of Nebraska in 2023, and their job was to come into Colby and collect data to help provided a plan to attack a housing crisis. Their reports determined that Colby’s greatest need when it comes to housing is the middle-income families that are in the most need of housing.
This need is having a relative effect on the low-income housing, since there are no homes available for the middle-income, they’ve been renting units from the low-income properties around town, but at a market rate. If the city was able to make room for the middle-income to move into more appropriate housing, then some of the low-income housing would become available.
We’ve also had a lot of people on our in our community that are at retirement age, they are at that state of their life where they don't want to maintain property. We need those individuals to sell their properties to the middle-income individuals and then move into more senior housing.
To battle the crisis, the city of Colby has been working with local developers and trying to recruit outside developers to begin building. Currently, Colby has a total of 30 units being built on Walking Trail Lane, which is the sub-division being constructed south of Colby Community College. These properties are geared more for the upper-income families in Colby, which helps the crisis because they’ll be moving out of the middle-income homes that the community is in dire need of.
There are nine duplexes being constructed North of Jimmy Johns, which will give Colby 18 units dedicated to individuals in the retirement community, again freeing up some middle-income housing.
The city is also working with a private developer in coordination build on the old Community Building property. After the demolishing of the previous building, that property has been assessed to be worth $75,000. The city of Colby is willing to hand over the deed to this property to a developer if they were committed to developing middle-income housing.
To promote the advancement of this project, Alexander and his team has been working to secure $1.4 million in grant funding to secure the project. The state is throwing a lot of money at housing right now, and the city prepared a 160-page document to get grant money for a developer to build on it. With a decision expected at the end of February, the project would provide 24 units in the form of townhomes ranging from one-bedroom to three-bedroom homes.
Now, we have 30 homes out by Walking trail lane, we’ve got 18 units by Jimmy Johns, and hopefully we got 24 units going next to the post office, but we're still only scratching the surface. We’ve got to be doing more, so Alexander recruited a couple of developers, trying to entice them to develop some of the single lots that are vacant around town.
He’s currently recruiting a guy that is building homes and duplexes out of Goodland to come build one here. Build one, get your capital from that and then go chase another one. We reached out to the owners of Friendly Acres because after they cleanout some of the vacant spots they will have 15 empty lots that could be living units.
Unfortunately, the price of modular homes has went up significantly in the past couple years, and so the city is looking at changing some of the housing ordinance to allow for tiny homes to be placed in these lots.
The problem will not go away easily, and it will require attention from many avenues. The city of Colby is working to improve the crisis, but time will only tell if their attack at every level will be enough to endure the crisis.
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