Jon Sanders gets a lot of calls from developers across the country, looking for guidance as they try to turn old hotels into workforce housing. 

He understands why they reach out: Over the last decade, Sanders has completed a series of increasingly ambitious hospitality retrofits in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, a ski town of about 13,800 people. Across these projects, he's added at least 250 new rental units to the local market – all of them relatively affordable for the teachers, service workers, and civil servants who struggle to find housing in the well-off yet chronically underbuilt mountain town. When he started working on these conversions, he was one of the only developers pursuing the strategy, and he's definitely among the most successful in executing on it.

So, provided he has time, he's happy to help. 

But Sanders doesn't see himself as The Hotel Housing Guy. Sure, those were some of his bigger recent projects. He didn't come up with the concept, though. ("They started doing stuff like this in Aspen in the '70s," he points out.) He didn't have any plans to tackle the workforce housing crisis before the first of these projects came across his desk. And he definitely doesn't see this as his new niche – he'll gladly rattle off a laundry list of unrelated projects he's worked on recently. (He's especially proud of the property he converted into a new home for a local brewery.)

If anything, he sees himself as a steward of Steamboat overall. "I've got a huge assemblage" of properties in the town, he explains – 11 as of the time he spoke to GPLetters this spring, mostly commercial and worth upwards of $120 million.

"I'm the largest owner in downtown Steamboat proper," he adds. And he's deeply invested in efforts to revitalize what he sees as the community's neglected corners.

He took on the heavy lift of developing workforce housing in a mountain town because the town was voicing a need and seeking solutions. And he believes that, "when you commit yourself to an area, then you've gotta go all in."  

"I was always the kid wearing cowboy boots, a pair of jeans, and a sport coat while everybody else was wearing suits. I didn't fit in. Up here, I walk into the bank wearing flip-flops." 

Sanders' parents, a doctor and a "finance guy," owned a couple of rental properties in northern Fort Collins, Colorado, while he was growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s. Occasionally, they'd put him to work "cleaning up houses when they had a bad tenant… cleaning windows, painting addresses on curbs." He parlayed that experience into the occasional gig working on friends' and neighbors' homes. And without realizing it, he slowly developed an obsession with the idea of owning and managing real estate. "High school friends say I was talking about it then," he claims.