Host: City of Grand Junction
Region: Colorado
Openings: 1
Project Focus: Affordable Housing
Skills Needed: Community Engagement, Relationship Management, Community Outreach, Stakeholder Engagement,

Remote or On-Site Placement

On-site

Service Needs & Plans

This Housing Engagement and Outreach Specialist would be serving within the City of Grand Junction, a Home Rule municipality of approximately 68,000 people. The City’s values include Continuous Improvement, Collaborative Partnerships and Exemplary Service. One of the City Council’s key priority areas (2023-2025) is “Welcoming, Livable, and Engaging” designed to foster a sense of belonging, where people are accepted as themselves and have access to the amenities and services they need to thrive, and actively seeks participation from our community which includes key affordable housing and houseless initiatives.

More specifically, the City of Grand Junction’s Housing Division is committed to enacting housing policies and partnering with outside organizations that seek to increase affordable housing options, diversity housing choice, decrease the gap between need and housing inventory, and assist those without homes to access supportive services. In 2019, the City conducted a Housing Needs Assessment that indicated nearly 50 percent of its residents rented and of those more than 50 percent were cost burdened paying more than 30 percent of their income to housing. Data shows that the greatest need for housing at or below $25,000 per year income and the largest concentration of need for aging, disabled, and female head-of-household persons/families. The City subsequently drafted and approved a Housing Strategy and is currently working on a Housing Strategy refresh designed to update and enhance current strategies to align with current trends and housing needs. Moreover, in the last two years, the City of Grand Junction’s houseless population has increased approximately 48 percent and additional resources, staff, and programming is being built to address houseless concerns and increase partnerships between service and housing providers.

Project Description

The Housing Engagement and Outreach Specialist (HEOS) will support the development and implementation of the Housing Strategies designed to increase housing production in the community – which may include work on the following projects:

1. Housing Unit Tracking: In compliance with Proposition 123, the Housing Division will be working to track affordable unit production and be developing programming including a rental registry to aid in tracking. HEOS will support these efforts.
2. Accessory Dwelling Unit Production – the City has currently launched an ADU incentive program with goals to expand the program in 2025. The program outreaches to homeowners, researches funding opportunities, aids in further expansion of programs, supports homeowners through the process, and processes applications.
3. Affordable Housing Incentives & City Owned Land – The City currently is in the process of developing an Affordable Housing Incentive Program and a city land inventory. In the next few years, the City will be looking to develop these programs further and will need administrative support on the ongoing projects.
4. Landlord Engagement & Outreach – This program launching July 2024 aims to encourage landlords to participate in providing units to low-income households. The city will be recruiting landlord, developing and maintaining relationships with landlords, property owners/management companies, and tenants, developing program materials and informational resources, coordinate education course, outreach events, and workshops, evaluate and collect data to support effectiveness of the efforts.
5. Community Engagement and Outreach –increase community understanding of housing/unhoused issues, reduce NIMBYism (Not in my backyard), and increase community feedback in the development process. Some smaller projects within this strategy will include the development of a K-12 educational program regarding housing issues, developing and supporting educational workshops to the general and business community regarding housing issues. And, other similar new projects as they develop.
6. Other projects as assigned. As the City continues to evaluate and develop new housing strategies, the HEOS may be assigned different types of projects aligned with the general scope of the role depending on the future implementation of housing strategies, yet to be determined.

The Housing Division is a fairly new division with the City of Grand Junction, due to its infancy there are many new programs, policies, and strategies that are being implemented. The HEOS would help increase capacity by developing the outreach, communications, and engagement mechanisms for housing projects and support the ongoing initiatives in a variety of ways ensuring community support and feedback, and providing a strong foundation for future resources to continue to increase housing unit production to meet the Proposition 123 goals. By providing additional capacity in these areas, the Housing Division will be able to increase programmatic elements meant to incentivize and increase housing units, and resources to meet the shortage of housing supply needs.

Desired Skills

A good communicator, writer, ability to track and analyze data, ability to work with both broad concepts and fine detail, well-organized, independent and self-directed, but works well with a team, basic understanding of government and housing.

Organization & Workplace Highlights

Grand Junction is the largest city between Salt Lake & Denver along the I-70 corridor. It has great access to the outdoors and also provides many urban amenities such as arts, music, and dining. It is home to Colorado Mesa University that hosts approximately 10,000 students during the school year.

The City of Grand Junction is an open and transparent government that supports a professional, hardworking staff dedicated to public service and improving the lives of its residents. The city has invested in engagement of staff and is focused on providing an accessible and inclusive government for and by the people. Grand Junction is also at a pivotal point in its history as more people are recognizing the high quality of life the area enjoys as well as the lower cost of living compared to many Colorado cities. The City has worked to diversify its economy and increased tourism through investment in the waterfront, downtown, parks and recreational amenities. The City of Grand Junction’s thriving community is increasingly committed to social justice and encouraging new opportunities including the creation of it’s Housing, Sustainability and Mobility Divisions and is changing cultural and community habits related to these efforts
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Community Highlights

Working for the City in this capacity will allow a fellow to experience the inner workings of local government and identify and impact housing and houseless efforts. The Housing Division offers a wide variety of experiences from policy work, programmatic elements and community engagement and developing partnerships and provides real experiences that create visible change within the community. Due to the infancy of the division, fellows will play a pivotal role is shaping how these efforts form from ideas to implementation.