This has a little bit to do with recent history, a little bit to do with economics, but it's also very regional so I thought it would be appropriate to place it here. It's about poverty. It's pretty long. The following stories/articles give insight into a phenomena that has happened in America's Rocky Mountain region over the last 35 years. This is not going to be an uplifting story. Basically the people who lived in this region found themselves replaced by outsiders with more money, and an outside immigrant labor force. It's no coincidence that the satirical cartoon-series South Park, which dwells on the happenings in a small town in the Rocky Mountain region, has two episodes dealing with this theme, Here Comes the Neighborhood, and later The City Part of Town. (If you find the subject in this thread interesting, or like South Park, I suggest you go try to find those videos and watch them) Santa Fe's desirability drove the prices of real estate so high that few natives of the community could stay. Housing became so expensive in winter 1996 -- a three-bedroom, three-bath, 2,635-square-foot adobe house had been marked down $90,000 to $345,000 -- that only people with resources from elsewhere could buy there. Civil servants, children who had grown up in town, married, and wanted to stay, and the rest of Santa Fe's middle class simply could not afford the town. In 1994 the median home price reached $200,000; the average annual wage remained at about $16,000. "Our children face a future of waiting on tables and cleaning toilets," complained Jaramillo, the city's mayor. They won't be able to live here. Locals were being forced out, replaced by outside money and people who were willing to be underemployed, indeed poor, to live in Santa Fe. The stratification also spread to the white residents. "I'm not sure I can name one person in town who has a livable-wage job with a promising career track in front of them," observed city council member Cris Moore in 1996. Typical hotel industry wages ran between five and eight dollars per hour, yet according to data compiled by the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, who sought to organize labor in Santa Fe, $12.60 per hour was the minimum living wage in the region. Nor was advancement possible for a maid. The middle sector of the economy was missing. Santa Fe was well on its way to a stratified profile in which only rich and poor lived in town. Jaramillo correctly recognized that such a profile would have a tremendous impact on the community she called home. The consequence of the competition for space reverberated throughout the mountain West. Unlike in Santa Fe, where an entirely new community sprang up adjacent to the tourist town, the mountain towns lacked cheap and easily available space as a pressure valve; the attraction of the superrich put a premium on any existing space, and real estate values continued to soar in an essentially thirty-year rise. Aspen became an exclusive suburb, and as the price and property taxes increased, fewer locals could afford to stay. As a result, workers almost uniformly lived elsewhere, and commuting became a necessity. The symbol of this daily movement was the endless line of traffic headed downvalley towards Glenwood Springs on Highway 82 from Aspen each afternoon, and it illustrated the class structure of Aspen. The exorbitant cost of housing forced not only workers but much of the middle class from the town. Long-distance commuters, who in 1985 included the director of the Aspen Chamber of Commerce, Carol Kiesinger, dotted the high-ways of Colorado, driving long distances across snow and ice-covered roads to work in service jobs with limited pay and little chance for advancement. Even service professionals could not afford the cost of resort communities. In 1995 thirty-nine of Vail's forty-eight-person police and fire departments could not afford to live in the town. The consequences of winter commuting were sometimes tragic. Accidents that resulted from fatigue or impossible driving conditions became a common feature in the local news. Highway 82 acquired the moniker Killer 82. One satirical songwriter became a local celebrity with a song, "The Downvalley Shuffle", that chronicled the predicament of Aspen's commuters. In Sun Valley, commuters came from as far away as the Sawtooth Mountains, seventy-five miles distant, to work each day. Within a few years after Jackson became chic, people commuted from as far away as Driggs, Idaho, seventy-six miles over a mountain pass through the snow and ice of the northern Rockies. The regional situation had become basic serfdom, one Aspen area motel manager observed. The structure of commuting revealed a dimension of race and class. By the 1980s the number of ski bums decreased as working conditions worsened, and a growing segment of the people who did menial work were non-white and Spanish-speaking. In the mid-1990s African and Filipino workers were prevalent, sometimes living in rare but crowded quarters or in trailer park ghettos in Aspen but, like Hispanics, generally living downvalley. Their jobs were essential; without cooks, maids, catering workers, busboys, janitors, and other behind-the-scenes workers, the resort could not exist. As with most temporary labor, such as employment, typically in the six-to-seven-dollar per hour range, was too low to allow workers to live in Aspen. Non-white workers constituted a disproportionate percentage of the commuters. For workers who lived in the resort community, conditions were bad. Crowded condos and trailer park ghettos housed most local service workers, highlighting the class distinction. During the 1994-1995 winter, one twenty-three-year-old white worker slept under a bridge; he could not afford an apartment on the $8.75 per hour salary he received for driving a bus. Later he and a friend moved into a van that they kept underground in the lower level of the town's parking garage in an area reserved for maintenance. It was the only place they could find where they were not hassled. Although Hispanic workers were often men alone, living as cheaply as possible and sending money home, white American families who worked in the service industry faced working poverty. At the bottom of the skills ladder, employment remained seasonal, typically six months on, six months off, and generally lacked benefits. Nor were amenities such as daycare available at affordable prices. For people from the region with extended networks upon which to rely, family support helped address child care and other issues. For others without local or regional roots, the work scene remained more problematic. Many workers seemed one step away from economic collapse; without benefits, any personal, familial, or other catastrophe meant certain impoverishment. One thirty-four-year-old mother began the 1994-1995 ski season living a tent with her three children, on a seven-month-old baby, on national forest land. Another who had begun working at the age of twelve lamented that she had never had a childhood. (Conover, Whiteout; Ring, The New West's Servant Economy) The glint of the sun off the immense picture windows of expensive vacation homes with their exquisite views, managed by a caretaker and lived in typically six weeks each year, exacerbated the grind of poverty. Although by the early 1990s regional newspapers such as the High Country News championed the cause of workers, the rising value of each square inch of land in places such as Aspen suggested that the problem of limited space and unlimited popularity had yet to be solved. Too many people wanted to be part of places like Aspen and Jackson, more than their geography could hold in any comfortable way. A competition for living space resulted, with costs rising perennially. The situation forced a two-tiered society, workers commuting or living in meager and crowded quarters in town and the wealthy and guests staying in the expensive comfort that marked the resort experience. Corporate control also changed the demography of labor in the mountain towns. Downsizing took place in the resort industry long before the term became fashionable. In the 1970s and 1980s, in a move that presaged a similar late 1980s shift in the corporate world, ski resorts across the West expanded their services to meet the growing demand and, instead of hiring permanent employees, used temporary labor to fill even midlevel managerial positions. This move helped the bottom line but cut into the special feel of ski resorts. Visitors dealt with a seasonal employee at the counter. An evident decline in the caliber of service followed since, even in managerial positions, employees had little investment in their jobs. People complained of the decline in service and lamented the loss, not only nostalgically but also as a claim on the standing that a longer personal history there conveyed. As the transition to a temporary workforce grew pronounced, one casualty was an icon of the slopes, the ski bum. Since the late 1940s ski bums had decorated ski resorts and become a backbone of the industry. Unlike the local people displaced by skiing, these beneficiaries of the affluence of American society selected this experience as a second career or as an interlude in their lives. Often they were between college and graduate school or their first job, exploring life for the first time. Ski bums, once essential to the industry, nearly disappeared under corporate control. Some selected other options in a changing cultural climate, once the ski towns lost some of their charm and the bottom line became the dominant local goal. But the new practices of the corporate leaders, the miniscule wages, and the increasing cost of living made a year as a ski bum a chore instead of a pleasurable respite from ordinary life. The work conditions worsened under corporate ownership and camaraderie diminished. As the cost of living rose exorbitantly in nearly every ski community, even the long-term ski bums, the adult professional ski workers who served as an alternative icon for younger aspirants in the manner that a real hobo did for displaced young during the Great Depression, left in disgust. Their replacements felt temporary; they did not belong to the places they worked. Ted Conover described the sense of alienation from living in a town devoted to other peoples fun. "As he bent over the frozen fender to check the oil on the cab he drove on the night shift, The snow fell. The wind blew. Gusts from over the frozen hedge carried the sounds of people having fun and the smell of a hot tub. Young men made jokes and young women laughed; all I could see over the hedge was steam rising through a spotlight. But I could imagine them, naked, surrounded by bubbles, perspiration, warm except for the wind on their faces and the beer in their hands. Their Frisbee got away from them. Hey bro! one shouted. Can you toss us the Frisbee? As Conover stood blowing on his hands in an effort to warm them from the touch of the cold metal, he considered his options. The line was clear: Privileged young people, on vacation. You worked for them, and were best off to remember it." Tourism has also profoundly changed the landscape. Senile real estate agents will tell tales of open fields and empty highways. The optimism and ebullience of resort communities had become a relic, replaced by professional serving classes and people who loved their place but hated what it had become. Tourist-based transformation drove wedges into communities; some benefited, others were hurt, and hardly any relationships, either among the residents or with the place, remained the same. The feel of communities changed. Struthers Burt's Jackson Hole was a charming place, peopled by elegant easterners and taciturn but warm cowboys. Even Donald Hough in his paean to alcohol describes a heavy-drinking town where people remain in control; they use alcohol to cushion themselves against the elements, not against each other. The protagonist of J. Royal Horton's Murder in Jackson Hole, local sheriff's deputy Tommy Thompson, is an alcoholic struggling to stay sober with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous. Set in the 1990s, the novel shows a community of alcoholics or recovering alcoholics who drink to help them deal with the changes that surround them. Locals have lost their place in Horton's Jackson, replaced by wealthy outsiders. What was once their respite has become personal affliction. The transition from elegance to conviviality to alcoholism suggests the transformation of resort communities from the perspective of the people who lived there. They were trapped in a world they could not control and in which they had little say.
Perhaps this helps explain why the Mountain West region of the United States constituted a statistical "Suicide Belt" in the wake of the Recession. Why 'Deaths of Despair' May Be a Warning Sign for America
Steamboat Springs, Colorado - Despite offering a salary of $167,000, the city of Steamboat Springs can't find a head of human resources who can afford a place to live in the remote Colorado community surrounded by ranches and famous for training Olympic athletes. At the Steamboat hospital, doctors willing to pay more than $1 million for a home have been repeatedly outbid by all-cash, out-of-town buyers, and housing costs have caused some positions to go unfilled for more than two years. The local ski resort has been leasing a hotel for its employees to live in as the homes they once rented are increasingly turned into short-term rentals for visitors. "I know that it’s so hard for folks outside of mountain or resort communities to even wrap their heads around, but housing is just so through the roof that unless you’re extremely wealthy, it’s unattainable," said Margaret Bowes, executive director of the Colorado Association of Ski Towns. The article also explains how there is a lot of opposition to the local city building an affordable housing project, with worries over cost and impact on the community. A 'cowboy ski town' where high earners can’t afford a home faces a housing battle, Shannon Pettypiece, NBC News, March 3, 2024
