BY ISAIAH FRIZZELL
ARCH Angels Helping the Community
One Home at a Time
Higher Ground, the Hunger Coalition, Mountain Humane– just a few of the many delightful organizations in our Valley that make you smile and feel uplifted when you hear the name. That’s true social currency. The slight feeling of happiness when merely thinking of goodness.
Social Currency
The Advocates for Real Community Housing (ARCH) is definitely one of these. Over the last 20 years they’ve worked for the work-force searching, partnering, buying and building or remodeling homes for people who work in Blaine County. As an essentially year-round tourist/resort town, Sun Valley offers magnificent hiking and fishing in the summers, splendid skiing (when we have winters) and an infinitely warm community. People of all ilk work and play in the Valley.
To be able to work from home is a luxury or an invention if you can but if not, and you’re working in the Resort or a restaurant that caters to the tourism or recreational sector, the work is enough, and we know what a commute does to the soul, the environment, the individual’s vehicle and the augmentation of traffic. The need for accessible homes, if we want the industry to function, is real and that’s where ARCH makes the rubber meet the road.
Enter Michelle Griffith
With only three core staff members it’s incredible the amount of work ARCH gets done. Michelle Griffith is their Executive Director and sat down to talk about what the current goals are in their “pipeline” of potentials.
“We moved here full time in 2009. One son graduated from Wood River High School, the other from Community School and I’ve been with ARCH since 2009. Now, initially ARCH relied predominantly on federal housing programs in order to finance housing development and in 2021, 2022, around in there, you know, right as the impacts of COVID were really hitting the Valley. Our board recognized that we needed more funding and more flexible funding.
“So we began fundraising in earnest and those efforts allow us to serve a wider variety of households and have proven to be really effective. We started doing rental programs using donor dollars and we also started by engaging in partnerships. So we would partner with another entity and that other entity would either bring land or construction financing to the project and ARCH would bring whatever the other entity didn’t have. And then we didn’t have to fundraise for both the land and the houses. We would fundraise for one or the other.”
Consolidated fundraising and creative partnerships– this is a team aware of the landscape around them and how to carve their own path.
ARCH is currently finishing the Herberger Hideaway in Hailey, previously the Ellsworth Inn, now a six one-bedroom set of apartments which are completely full. There’s also a detached one-bedroom unit behind the inn on 4th Street, fully leased.
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Pipeline Partnerships
If you work in Blaine County, 30+ hours a week, and find yourself earning between 80 and 140% of the area median income you should immediately contact them. Particularly Ben at ArchBC.org
Get on their lists, they do absolutely come through.
If you’re a property owner of homes, buildings, etc, and they’re zoned for residential living ARCH works directly with you to get your project in their ‘Pipeline’. “We work on what we call the pipeline. So we’re always looking for land that can be developed. We’re always trying to get things through the entitlement process,which would mean architecture, engineering, and permitting.”
“And then we’re always under construction and swiftly leasing up. So the under construction stuff is the Hideaway project. We also have a couple of home ownership opportunities in Hailey, which are under construction. In the entitlement phase, we have a development up in Ketchum. 11 units at 180 Leadville! And so there’s an existing house there, which we renovated. It’s a historic house, renovated and occupied. And we just got approval to go ahead and start engineering our drawings to put in for building permits for the new construction piece of it. So we’re waiting for our engineers to get us the plan set that we can submit for a building permit and that we could also put out to contractors as an RFP to get them to bid to build it.
You hear so many bizarre things about worker housing and low income housing. These are the people who run and ‘make function’ the restaurants, bars, gear shops, thrift stores, chocolatiers, coffee houses, diners, etc… EVERYTHING. People say things like “We’re a high class ski town. If you can’t afford to live here, go to Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, small towns in Texas, Arizona, etc.” The blatant and OBVIOUS fallacious ignorance put forth is that everything about the ‘high class ski town’ REQUIRES workers! What about the shops and businesses that people who say things like this rely on for their libations and recreation? There would be no grocery stores, no restaurants, no bars, without the workers. It’s an age old discussion and perhaps the possibility of robots ameliorates this in the mind of the one spreading such vulgar sentiments. Some day that may arrive but not now. ARCH is helping with the help. A crucial role played by a company single-mindedly searching for opportunities to make things work. For all.
Management Rumors
Griffith was unworried and spoke almost with laughter when asked about whether ARCH were outsourcing management. “No, we’ve never done that. Yeah, no, we’re not outsourcing anything. We’ve always kept to our… you know, we’re going the other way. We’re outsourcing less and less.”
So there it is.
Griffith is a delight to speak with, assured, informed and absolutely at the top of her game as Executive Director. This is one of those wonderful organizations we enjoy, even just knowing they exist is coolness point. Someone needs a leather rocker vest with pins showing the logo of each of these great organizations in action for the betterment of our community. It’s kind of amazing, especially after visiting a city where little is recognized and even less is done to help. We live in a wildly beautiful Barry Lyndon-esque painting. Support it!
If you have property that’s just sitting? Call ARCH to discuss a partnership.
If you know of people who do, anyone who enjoys the fruits of Sun Valley must consider how those fruits are picked, cleaned, cut and displayed for all to enjoy.
Any questions about the new developments in Ketchum, specifically the 11 units at 180 Leadville’s Historic House, feel free to contact ARCH through the typical means on their website: https://archbc.org/
Call: (208) 726-4411
Email: homeownership@archbc.org
They also have socials:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/arch_blaine_county
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ARCHbc/
X: https://x.com/arch_idaho
