Ski town rents push workers to the edge
By Jack Healy, New York Times
BRECKENRIDGE, Colo. — On nights when she could not crash on a friend’s couch or unroll a sleeping mat on an attic floor, Chelsea Lilly tucked her silver Subaru into a supermarket parking lot or a dark spot along a mountain pass, wrapped herself in a green Army blanket and watched movies on her phone until she fell asleep.
Getting work at a day spa in this bustling ski town had been easy, but finding an affordable apartment this winter proved almost impossible. So Ms. Lilly, 34, bounced along an itinerant path of couches and borrowed bedrooms that has become a fact of life for workers in jewel-box tourist towns across the country. Nights in the Subaru got so cold that she shivered awake every few hours and ran the engine to thaw out.
The miners who once pried gold and silver from the heart of the Rocky Mountains would attest that living in paradise has never been easy. These days, soaring home prices and a shift toward weekend vacation rentals have created a housing crisis in ski country, one that has people piling into apartments, camping in the woods and living out of their trailers and pickup trucks.
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Stay in school and then get a real job.
Kits, you know that is not always that easy.
Many ski-town employees come just for the season, and don’t make much money; thus, they try to rent a house & share with several others. Many homeowners no longer want to rent to seasonal tenants for a variety of reasons. It might be time to refresh old motels into employee housing… Maybe the rehab/reorientation could be funded by businesses like Vail, casinos, etc – maybe based in an employee unit system.
When I was young, I moved to Aspen for a year and lived at a place called “The Indepedence Lodge”. It was located in the center of town (had no car), and there were usually 2 to a room (unless you could afford the single room yourself. It was kind of like a hostel… Had a large community living room and an essential kitchen (sink, fridge and would have microwaves today). There was a manager who lived onsite. It was wonderful! I could walk to Ajax where I worked, and team up with other employees for meals & fun. It was safe, clean & cheap, and all I could afford.
Housing will get worse for young people coming to work at a ski/beach resort – so it might be a good idea to think in the way of redevelopment into employee housing for the future winter & summer employees. Housing will only get tighter.
Another idea is to create & include EIR – Entrepreneurs in Residence and get some tech companies to sponsor start-up companies in the employee housing environment. That might even bring in some remote business opportunities. Just thinking out loud…..
Affordable employee housing complexes must be included in all large luxury home developments, villages and resort destination hotels and casinos. It shouldn’t matter that the workforce is transient. The units must be available not just in-lieu fees paid so sometime in the future when a County has enough capital will build it. Expecting the much needed workforce to find suitable, clean and affordable housing should be the responsibility of those who utilize and often underpay. This is always a concern that will not just disappear but nothing is done to secure and mandate the requirement. The recently approved and some proposed Town Centers should have to be required to include the affordable housing in the Town Center not expect that the outlying areas become the location where the employees live. The Regional Plan touts walkable, bikeable, LIVEABLE communities that means Town Centers too ( South State Line, Casino core, Kings Beach, Tahoe City, Incline Village…. and nearby commercial areas)!
Cautious-
You are, of course, spot on.
In its Specific Plan Kirkwood was required to have a certain level of employee housing, and in fact since near the beginning had a couple of employee housing complexes. One was locally called Animal House….but they did work after a fashion. I have no idea what the Vail organization has done with these if anything. These kinds of accommodations should be required for resort developments that depend on dozens and dozens of minimum wage workers for their success.
There are few Counties or Cities that want to think about the reality of seasonal employment issues. The usual practice is to ignore these problems hoping they will take care of themselves. And car living, tents and room packing becomes the solution. Local governments are too interested in padding the tax base with upscale development and adding to the transient occupancy revenue stream to balance their budgets. Given that the vacation rental/upscale home builders etc usually sink to the top of the political chain, city and county management all too often becomes a self interest promotion activity.
Personally, I think a requirement to create affordable housing should be a given for all projects beyond single family development. Done right, it could provide safe and suitable accommodations which could actually pay for themselves and their upkeep over time.
When people are sheltered, fed and earning their own way, the spin-off is always less crime, fewer mental health problems,and increased revenue from the taxes paid on the new infrastructure.
The bottom line is that any revenue producing business like resorts, hotels, ski areas etc should have, as a basic permit requirement, a workable plan to mitigate the affects of the many people they need to attract as workers.
In my opinion, the best place to start is a livable wage structure. If this could be established, many of the problems of housing and feeding workers would be significantly reduced.
I am actually surprised that the companies that build for profit dormitories and residence facilities around universities have not looked at the resort worker housing situation and realized resort development needs are really not much different than the student body needs of a college or university.