When Heather Toth looks at the current Ouray City Council trying to untie the huge knot created by the city’s affordable and workforce housing crisis, she sees five people who own their homes, who have removed that layer of uncertainty from their lives.

What she doesn’t see is someone like her — a renter who has scrambled much of her life to make ends meet, who never knows when the landlord could choose not to renew her lease or sell the building, clouding her housing future.

In local and st...