Flatirons Habitat honors executive director with building name change!

Susan Lythgoe has served our community for 10 years and overseen major changes to how Flatirons Habitat for Humanity operates!

Flatirons Habitat for Humanity is pleased to announce that we are renaming our Cottonwood House in honor of Susan Lythgoe, who is directly responsible for the affiliate’s tremendous growth over the past decade.

The location of our office in Broomfield, 1397 Cottonwood Street, will now be known as The Susan Lythgoe Vasquez House, Susan's House for short, going forward.

Her leadership as our executive director has transformed Flatirons Habitat into what it is today. Under her guidance, we continue to grow each year, while taking on larger projects to ensure more opportunities for affordable homeownership in the community.

“Susan’s progressive vision and steady leadership has grown the organization to what it is today with greatly expanded services over and above the traditional Habitat model of single-family homes,” said John Bosio, the board president for Flatirons Habitat.

Susan oversees an affiliate that has a staff of 13 and manages about 1,000 volunteers each year. She started in her current role as our executive director 10 years ago.

The native of Canada and alumnus of Queens University has spent a large part of her career in the non-profit sector, focusing on education, job training, and housing. She has also completed programs with the University of Denver and Harvard Business School Executive Education.

Susan joined Flatirons Habitat in 2013 after spending 19 years with The Learning Source for Adults and Families in Denver. Her tenure with us has been defined by her ability to navigate the ever-expanding housing challenges unique to our area, especially during the Coronavirus Pandemic.

Our service area is home to one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. Barriers to home ownership in our area only continue to increase each year. In Boulder alone, the average price of a new home on the market is around a million dollars.

Continuing our mission of affordable homeownership means being able to quickly adapt to an ever-changing and expanding housing market while also being able to think outside the box in terms of solutions.

Susan has mastered that delicate balance. She played a crucial role in our affiliate’s ability to drastically increase the number of homes we build as well as make them more energy efficient. She made sure that we were able to sustain that growth as we navigated new challenges brought on by the pandemic.

Her leadership has seen a marked increase in our community partnerships, donations and volunteers. That in turn has led to larger projects that bring dozens of new homes to the community.

“When I joined the affiliate in 2016, we were in the implementation of our growth phase,” Assistant Executive Director Steve Hinson said. “Susan built our capacity to handle multiple build sites at once, generated a strong pipeline for future projects, and has consistently looked outside of the box to address the affordable housing crisis in our community.”

An example includes the Ponderosa Community Stabilization Project, which is the result of a partnership with the City of Boulder and will lead to the creation of about 70 new homes in north Boulder over a period of 10 years.

Susan has also spearheaded initiatives unique to standard Habitat affiliates. That includes the purchase of our Cottonwood House in 2019, which not only serves as our headquarters but provides affordable housing to 8 older adults in Broomfield and our AmeriCorps members.

“Cottonwood House, as an affordable senior cooperative living space is a great example of that vision, providing our service area with a variety of different living arrangements to meet multiple types of needs,” John Bosio added.

We at Flatirons believe it only fitting to name that structure after the woman who has overseen the tremendous growth of our affiliate’s influence and operations.