By Vince Phillips
You own 40 acres of ranch land in Chaffee County. You paid for it, you pay the ballooning taxes on it every year, and your family has worked it for decades. There is already one home on the property. Now your adult children, with families or planning to start them, want to build modest homes so they can stay on the ranch, help with the operation, and keep the multi-generational legacy alive.
Under Chaffee County’s 2025 Land Use Code, the answer is brutally simple: you probably cannot do it.
The code allows exactly one Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) on the parcel, attached or detached, and caps it at the lesser of 1,000 square feet or the size of your existing primary home. That single small unit is essentially the only realistic housing option available for all your adult children and any grandchildren they may have. One 1,000-square-foot unit for multiple families is not a solution. It is a practical impossibility.
If you try to build anything beyond that single ADU, or if you need any relief from the new stream setbacks, wildlife habitat overlays, or density calculations, you must apply for a variance. The Planning Department can handle only minor administrative modifications. Any meaningful exception must be approved by the three-member Board of County Commissioners sitting as the Board of Adjustment. There is no independent appeals board. The same three officials who wrote and defend the restrictive code are the ones who decide whether your family gets to live on your own land.
The cost to even ask is staggering. A typical variance package requires expensive professional studies: habitat assessments, visual impact analyses, soils reports, drainage studies, and more. Families routinely face bills of $20,000 to $40,000 or much higher before the county even holds a hearing. And success is entirely speculative. The BOCC can deny the request outright, citing environmental protections, even when the land has supported a working ranch for generations.
Imagine a rancher with 40 acres who already has his primary residence. He has two adult sons, both married with young children. One son wants to stay and continue the cattle operation. The other hopes to help with hay production and equipment maintenance. Under the old code, modest additional housing on the family land was often possible. Today it is not. The new density rules (roughly one dwelling unit per 35 acres in many agricultural zones) combined with expanded setbacks and habitat overlays leave almost no practical room for more homes. The family’s 40 acres are effectively frozen at one main house plus one tiny ADU.
This is not abstract policy. This is a parent being told by the government that he cannot help his own children and grandchildren build a future on land he owns outright. Commissioner PT Wood cites the statistic that 91 percent of local households cannot afford a home here, when he is trying to get taxpayers to spring for more housing funding. Why doesn’t that same statistic carry weight when the commissioners deny residents the ability to build on their own land? Yet its own regulations actively prevent families from creating housing on property they already own, property that has been in the family for decades, and could otherwise help ease the very shortage the county laments.
How did we reach the point where three elected commissioners can vote with impunity to restrict the freedoms and family futures of so many landowners? The system has moved away from clear, objective rules that every citizen could rely on and toward a discretionary model where landowners must “bend the knee,” spend life-changing sums of money on studies, and hope the same three officials grant an exception. This is an open invitation for favoritism or even corruption. When appeals loop back to the very body that passed the code, true accountability disappears.
This overreach deepens the housing crisis rather than solving it. Multi-generational ranch families who have stewarded the land, paid taxes, and sustained our rural economy are now watching their adult children priced out or forced to leave the county. The Western way of life we claim to value, family ranches passed down through generations, is being regulated into extinction one denied variance at a time.
Chaffee County’s Land Use Code was sold as “smart growth” that would protect open space and wildlife. In practice, it has inserted government between parents and their ability to provide housing for their own families on land they own free and clear. A 1,000-square-foot limit and discretionary BOCC approval are not reasonable accommodations for working ranch families. They are a regulatory straitjacket.
If we truly care about housing affordability and preserving our rural character, we must revisit these rules. Restore meaningful by-right uses for responsible landowners. Limit the endless expensive studies and discretionary power. Give families a realistic path to keep their children on the land that has sustained them for generations.
Otherwise, the next time county leaders point to the 91 percent affordability crisis, remember this: many of those struggling families include the very sons and daughters of longtime ranchers who are now legally blocked from building on their own family’s 40 acres.
The land belongs to the people who own it, not to three commissioners sitting as the Board of Adjustment. It is time to return the fundamental right to use private property to the families who have earned it through generations of hard work and stewardship.
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