For this particular political reporter, the past week has been slightly exhausting, but maybe in a good way.
On the one hand, I’ve been writing about a difficult subject: selfish entitlement, as Pagosa’s number one problem. During my 16 years as editor for the Daily Post, I’ve written about a wide range of controversies, but I’d never before come to the conclusion that a simple fact of human nature was at the root of our problems.
Nor had I been reminding myself that different aspects of human nature — compassion, generosity, kindheartedness — are actively working to try and balance our natural tendency to think mainly of ourselves.
One of our readers, who now owns and operates a vacation rental, had sent me an email explaining why he and his wife had chosen to enter the vacation rental industry. It was a very familiar story — similar to those we’ve heard repeated at numerous public hearings. As this reader pointed out, most of the families and individuals who’ve entered Pagosa’s short-term rental (STR) market are not “rich investors”. Rather, vacation rental owners tend to be individuals and couples in their 30s, 40s, 50s who are internet- and marketing-savvy, and who’ve found a way to prepare a pathway to retirement, in a national economy that no longer promises a secure future for working families.
This picture of the vacation industry demographic — an industry being developed largely by individuals and couples who are not yet retired, and are perhaps not even close to retirement — has been vividly painted for me during the various meetings I attended over the past couple of weeks.
The fact that these individuals and couples tend to be younger, and looking out for their own future, does not, however, lessen the impacts of this industry on a relatively isolated mountain town like Pagosa Springs.
I wrote back:
Your story is very similar to the stories we heard at the April 20 Board of County Commissioners meeting… and at many public meetings previous to that public hearing. The advent of AirBNB and VRBO have made it practical for people like yourself to fulfill their desires for a second home in Pagosa (or elsewhere) by covering the cost of a second home with vacation rental income.
You make a good case for owning an STR… if you want to look at the situation only in terms of your own family’s desires. Vacation rentals work great for the tourists who love vacation rentals, and they work great for people like you and your wife.
The people it has not worked great for, are the people who live full time in Pagosa Springs. (Except perhaps our realtors and STR maintenance folks.)
The advent of STRs in our community has been, overall, a disaster for working families. The vacation rental industry has acted like a wrecking ball on our local workforce and economy. (Added to other social changes also having a detrimental effect.)
Everybody has selfish desires, and nearly everyone I know feels ‘entitled’ to certain ongoing advantages that benefit them personally . (I include myself in that group.).
Everybody also has the ability to show concern for their neighbor. What the Pagosa vacation rental industry has consistently projected, at the public meetings I’ve attended, is an apparent lack of understanding — and a complete lack of concern — about what this industry is doing to my town.
If the vacation rental owners were willing and able to admit the damage they are doing, and if they were willing to step up and help mitigate the problem, that would be wonderful. I don’t see either thing happening. And that, to me, is the essence of ‘selfish entitlement’.
I know that many other long-time residents, here, feel the same way.
Last Friday, I had a chance to meet with, and interview, Dan McCraw and Alan Friedhof, two of the principals with Latcon Corp — the Pueblo, Colorado-based construction company that’s building 34 low-income housing units on Hot Springs Boulevard, across from Town Hall, known as Rose Mountain. Also participating in that interview was former County Commissioner Clifford Lucero, president of the Archuleta County Housing Authority board of directors. ACHA is the sponsoring agency behind the Rose Mountain project.
For those of us concerned about the disappearance of affordable housing options in Archuleta County, it was a stroke of luck that ACHA was able to land the federal funding for 34 units of housing — housing that cannot be converted into vacation rentals. But this project doesn’t put even a dent in the housing crisis. According to my own research, close to 120 residential homes within the Town limits have been converted into mini-motels over the past ten years — and hundreds more have been converted out in the unincorporated county.
34 dwelling units is better than nothing. But not nearly sufficient, if we truly want to retain our historically diverse community.
I mentioned, earlier in this editorial series, that the Pagosa Chamber held a joint meeting with the Pagosa Springs Area Tourism Board. Both of these organizations have played an active role in creating our current lopsided Pagosa economy, built upon a foundation of low-paying hospitality industry jobs. In one sense, both of these organizations — through their active marketing of Pagosa Springs as an attractive tourism destination — have helped bring about the housing/vacation rental crisis we are now experiencing.
Not that we can blame these two organizations for doing the job they were charged to do, and doing it well. But we can now see, in hindsight, that we were creating a Frankenstein’s monster without realizing what we were doing.
The Zoom meeting between the Tourism Board and the Chamber Board could have been completely depressing for me — if the discussion had been focused on better ways to bring in more tourist dollars.
Instead, the entire hour-long discussion focused possible ways to address the housing/vacation rental crisis.
As I said: exhausting, but maybe in a good way.