In the 1990s, when author Hunter S. Thompson spoke at Woody Creek Tavern outside Aspen, he often railed against “the greedy people.”
I grew up in Aspen, and my dad would take me there every now and then to look at the dollar bills on the walls. In addition to photos of the bar full of ski bums in head-to-toe denim, he always included a photo of me and the first bull moose we ever caught.
Jacob Richards with his father and the first bull moose they ever hunted. Jacob Richards/Courtesy Photo
Now the bills are a few hundred dollars and the pictures on the walls look like fashion shots. What would Hunter Thompson think? Maybe greed won. Most of the resort towns in the West are becoming Aspenized, including Aspen commuter towns Basalt, Carbondale and Rifle, which provide workers for the ski lifts and restaurants.
When I was a kid, my family lived in various trailer parks around Aspen and even lived in a stable office at the base of Aspen Highlands Ski Resort. The stable had no running water and was heated only by a wood stove. We sledded down the hills, holding on to groceries and water jugs.
When I was 8, my mother was able to buy a deed-restricted condo in Aspen, but we still needed a roommate to live in our 740-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment, and one of us slept on the daybed in the living room.
His father called it “mansion bondage,” but his love of horses, hunting and wide-open spaces led him further down the valley, settling in Silt, more than an hour from Aspen.
I spent my middle school years there with my dad in the early 1990s and it felt like another world; decades later, I still recall the first time I saw that Sotheby's “For Sale” sign outside a ranch near Silt.
A sense of anxiety washed over me. It was the same anxiety I'd felt as a senior at Aspen High School, despairing at the reality that I had a job, basic math skills, and couldn't afford to live in my hometown. I thought, “How could I afford to live here when my dentist commutes from over 70 miles away?”
Twenty years ago I moved to Grand Junction, a historically working-class town of 65,000 people that is the largest in western Colorado. Now, even humble Grand Junction is becoming Aspenized, despite being more than two hours away from the glitz of Telluride and Aspen.
This is a far cry from the town's history of crushing uranium and hiding the residue (still highly radioactive) along the Colorado River, as well as its methamphetamine epidemic and ongoing homelessness problem.
But these days, you can also zip line over the Colorado River, rent electric scooters and buy luxury apartments downtown built by Aspen-based developers.
The downsides of this aspenization can't be ignored: A 2019 study found that the Grand Valley surrounding Grand Junction was short about 3,736 affordable housing units. Since then, housing costs and homelessness have both risen by about 45%, according to Grand Junction Housing Director Ashley Chambers.
“Our seniors are getting hit, our service workers are getting hit, and it's exacerbating our homelessness crisis,” said Grand Junction City Councilman Scott Beilfuss.
“If we remain an economy based on health care, services and retail, wages will never catch up with housing costs,” Beilfuss said. “This will impact the entire Western Slope.”
But here's what I learned growing up in Aspen: the perpetrators of this rural transformation have a lesson for us: The town has had a strong affordable housing program for many years, and a recent study found that two-thirds of housing units are affordable for Aspen residents.
Additionally, Aspen has invested in a world-class public transportation system over the years, allowing workers to commute from miles around.
There are problems. My mother, who still lives in a deed-restricted apartment, learned that the basement frequently fills with leachate collected from Aspen's toxic mining history. The estimated cost of repairs is $10 million, an amount she and 79 other families simply cannot afford.
Aspen's success teaches us that we can't stop the greedy, but we can pressure them to build and subsidize affordable housing that benefits resort towns.
Aspen also shows that downstream communities need to organize and fight for affordable housing—and they need to stay organized, because the greedy guys love to fight you every step of the way.
Jacob Richards is a contributor to Writers on the Range (writersontherange.org), an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering vibrant conversation about the West. He is a writer and outdoor guide based in Grand Junction, Colorado.
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