Vaughan: Who’s going to pick up this gauntlet?
Letter to the editor
The Red Ant’s latest (Aspen Times, May 21) calculations on the cost of the Lumberyard affordable housing project could perhaps benefit from using an HP 12c, but her conclusions as to the financial hurdles the Lumberyard faces that haven’t been adequately addressed appear on cursory examination to be sound.
I’m a little rusty on my 40-year-old 12c, but I calculate that paying off $500 million (her development cost number) at 5% with monthly payments for 30 years would cost about $2,684,108 per month.
If you take her estimate of $2,500 per unit rental income for 277 units, that’s only $692,500 per month coming in, yielding a $1,991,608 monthly shortfall. And that’s assuming that all the rental income could be applied to debt service, which of course wouldn’t happen.
$1,991,608 per month is quite a shortfall, even in Xanadu. Maybe the Ant and I are just pushing the wrong buttons, but I’d like to think that the folks driving the Lumberyard project have thought through the financing and have a realistic plan.
If so, they might want to share it with the public so that the doubts that she is raising regarding the amount of mentation that the project’s proponents have devoted to answering the question “how do we pay for it?” might be dispelled.
Elizabeth has thrown down the gauntlet on Lumberyard financing. Who is going to pick it up?
Barry Vaughan
El Jebel