If you’ve read this column for a while, you may have noticed we talk about The Carter a lot.

When your organization spends years bringing 88 homes to Glenwood Meadows, you tend to think about it quite a lot. But this month, I want to go past the big picture and zoom in on something more concrete.

What are the actual dollars and cents of what an affordable home costs a local worker?

Here’s a real example. Recently, two people who work here in the valley became homeowners at The Carter. Both earn somewhere between $60,000 and $80,000 a year. That’s a solid income and also the kind of income that, on the open market in this valley, doesn’t come anywhere close to buying a home.

So what do they pay? Their all-in monthly housing costs land between $1,500 and $1,700. And when I say all-in, I mean everything. That number covers principal, interest, property taxes, insurance and HOA dues. For many people, that’s in the same neighborhood as what they were already paying in rent, and often it’s less. But now, instead of dollars disappearing into rent, their dollars build equity in a home they own.

It does take a lot behind the scenes to reach affordability numbers like these. We get there by using several tools working together, with each one chipping away at the cost. We help buyers access mortgages with interest rates well below what they’d find on the open market. We connect them with down payment assistance, which clears one of the single biggest hurdles to ownership. And we use extended loan terms, in some cases stretching amortization out as far as 38 years, to bring the monthly payment down to something a working household can manage. Depending on a buyer’s situation, there are other levers we can pull, too.

On their own, each of these tools helps a little. Stacked together, they turn a home that would be flatly out of reach into a monthly payment a teacher, a lab tech or a line cook can fit into their budget.

We want to share this with the community so we can all see it really is possible. It’s easy to talk about affordable housing in the abstract, and it’s just as easy to tune that out. We hope you read this message and start to believe that owning a home in this valley is possible right now.

Building homes at a reasonable cost is an important thing we do. Making sure the people who live and work here can afford them is even more important, and we are proud to be succeeding at that.

If you work in the valley and have ever wondered whether owning a home here is within reach, I’d encourage you to find out. It might be closer than you think.

Jason Schraub is the chief external relations officer for Habitat for Humanity of the Roaring Fork Valley.