Things had been going downhill, for many of the working families in Pagosa Springs, well before the coronavirus arrived on the scene… well before Governor Jared Polis began issuing public health orders and shutting down ski areas, and then restaurants and churches and theaters…
Things had been going downhill, well before Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton by winning a majority of the electoral college votes in 2016. In fact, well before Barack Obama’s election in 2008.
I would guess that the gentrification of Pagosa Springs probably began — very subtly, almost imperceptibly — around 1972, when Ralph Eaton and his partners began buying up the ranches in what are now the Pagosa Lakes subdivisions. But it really took off, starting in about 1990.
The Town and County governments had noticed the problem unfolding, and pretended, at first, that they would step up and do something about the problem.
Alas, they were only pretending.
Gentrification initially appears to be a good thing, in so many ways. Here in Archuleta County, the gentrification was driven by retirees from around the American Southwest, with substantial representation coming from Texas. The mild climate, especially in the summertime, was enormously attractive, as was the cost of real estate. Add in a small, family-friendly ski area and thousands of acres of national forest, and things started to look pretty darn good.
Especially, it seems, to Republicans.
One of the first big changes brought about by gentrification was a larger grocery store. Other changes included substantial growth in certain local industries: real estate, construction, government, tourism. We also got more churches.
It was easy to perceive the growth of certain industries as evidence of ‘success’.
But, like a brain that’s been separated into two halves, a once-agricultural community that had historically been somewhat unified by the struggle to merely survive, became divided into “essential workers” on the one hand, and “essential non-workers” on the other.
Some of our community leaders saw this dynamic unfolding back in the late 1990s — well before the current public health crisis — and perceived that we were headed into a housing crisis. Thinking that they might address the problem before it became unmanageable, the Town and County governments eventually hired a Denver consulting company to study the problem, and the resulting 2008 report was entitled Archuleta County Housing Needs Assessment. You can HousingAssessment2008download that report here.
That report laid out some ideas, which were basically ignored by the Town and County governments and by our other community leaders. Essentially, nothing at all was done to address the problem. In fact, numerous policies were instituted — with the aim of “improving” the community’s physical appearance and its attractiveness to “essential non-workers” — that served to make the housing problem even worse.
The Town and County governments took another look at the housing crisis, a decade later, when things had indeed become rather desperate for our “essential workers”. Two more reports were generated with the help of outside consultants. You can download them here.
The Roadmap to Affordable Housing
2017 Archuleta County Housing Needs Study
The reports made the problem clear. Whatever affordable housing was still available in the community was getting snapped up by investors, who were converting the homes into vacation rentals, or selling them to second-home buyers at inflated prices. The construction industry was meanwhile focused on building higher end homes. As a result of these dynamics, the average selling price of a home in Archuleta County rose from about $250,000 to about $400,000.
What the community needed, to address the crisis, was an active effort to build homes for “essential workers”. It was very clear to some of us, that private industry was not going to address the problem on its own. It was very clear to some of us, that the public — you, and me, and our representative governments that spend our collective tax donations — would need to step up and make a creative change to existing priorities.
Didn’t happen.
Both of our local governments have since spent millions of dollars — millions of dollars they didn’t have, and had to borrow — to build new facilities for themselves.
But you can’t run a town with only half a brain.
In Part One of this essay, I mentioned my theory about people who “can’t draw”… that they are rendering ‘symbols’ based in verbal language, rather than using the non-verbal language of ‘shapes’ that are visible right in front of their eyes. Instead of drawing the ‘shape’ of a flower as it actually appears to the human eye, they have been taught to think of a flower in terms of symbolic details. A central circle. Half-circles for ‘petals’. A curved line for a ‘stem’.
Once a child or adult learns how to see like an artist, and stops translating words into symbols, they can eventually draw things that look more like this:
You must be able to see a flower, the way its actually appears, before you can draw a flower the way it actually appears. You must be able to set aside your verbal descriptions and symbols, and see what’s really there.
Like so many people in Pagosa, I have been concerned that our local leaders are not seeing the shape that’s right in front of their eyes.
The shape of the economy, that is.
I am concerned that our local leaders have been taught to look at the community’s economy through a language of symbols, rather than perceiving the real struggles of our working families. I’m concerned that only certain symbolic details — the number of tourist visits, for example — are determining our local government and business policies, and that our leaders cannot see the real picture… for the simple reason that they can’t see the real picture.