Burlingame Ranch

Welcome to the city of Aspen's resource page on Burlingame. We hope you will take the time to familiarize yourself with the facts.

In 2005 the City of Aspen produced a brochure on the Burlingame Ranch Affordable Housing Development. The brochure showed a "total cost" of $74 million for the project as well as a total subsidy of nearly $15 million for the project.

The brochure's listed "total cost" was only the total cost of on-site construction. It did not include all of the elements of building the Burlingame project including land, infrastructure, design, engineering, changes to the project made by Council, inflation in the cost of construction and other associated costs. This was not meant to be evasive but nonetheless was a mistake that should not have happened. The brochure should have said "total cost of construction."

We understand the sense of outrage from friends and neighbors after they saw such numbers in the media. However, this was a mistake in a brochure, not a mistake in accounting or building Burlingame.

The total cost of Burlingame (and all of its yet-to-be-built phases) is a moving target; however we do know the cost of Phase I, which was about $50 million. We haven't even begun Phases II and III of the project, and we haven't decided what that portion of the project will look like. We could decide to build things differently … We could build with partners who bring their own money to the project . . . We could change density … We could decide not to build it at all! Some critics of Burlingame have said "the numbers keep changing." Well, to an extent that's true. When a project changes over the course of a decade, so do the costs. We hope you'll read more about this in other documents posted on this site.

City Manager Steve Barwick has put together an advisory group of local development experts to create ways to reduce the cost of housing construction at Burlingame and other possible locations - including density increases and design changes. We are also looking at various partnership opportunities to lessen the use of tax dollars to deliver workforce housing to the community.

What You Should Know About Burlingame