https://www.governing.com/urban/resort-towns-need-to-get-serious-about-affordable-housing
I’ll go ahead and say it: I don’t like being around people who complain.
But sometimes, you just can’t help it. Complaining, I mean.
And it seems to me, providing underpaid journalists with a chance to complain is the primary raison d’etre for the Pagosa Daily Post.
Other publications offer the same service. Like the magazine Governing, where a journalist named Rodney M. Milton Jr. was complaining recently about the housing crisis in Colorado resort towns. Mr. Milton works at Urban Land Institute Colorado, apparently a hotbed of complainers.
For some of us, that first snowfall of winter conjures fun-filled days on the slopes and cozy evenings by the fireplace. But for the mountain towns, beach destinations and other resort communities we flock to, there’s a growing problem: The need to accommodate the increasing lodging demands of visitors has absorbed available housing stock. Between second-home owners and short-term rentals, little remains that is attainable for longtime residents, many of whom make up the workforce for these resort destinations…
You can say that, again.
For some of us, that first snowfall of winter conjures fun-filled days on the slopes and cozy evenings by the fireplace. But for the mountain towns, beach destinations and other resort communities we flock to, there’s a growing problem…
Well, no use repeating the entire statement. We get the idea. There’s a growing problem in mountain towns.
As my dad always says, relative to problems, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. That colorful metaphor dates back to when you actually had to grease wheels, like in the 1972 Volvo that I once owned. It had these little grease valves attached to the inside of the wheels, barely accessible to the home mechanic, even if you could manage to squeeze yourself under the car. And plus, you needed to have a special grease gun that could attach to the valves.
Needless to say, the wheels on that Volvo usually squeaked. Which was annoying.
But in the case of a mountain town, you want to have squeaky wheels. That is to say, you want people complaining. Only then will you get the grease.
The talk of the town, this winter, is the upcoming reconstruction of the highway through the middle of downtown. For some reason, the Colorado Department of Transportation decided that it would be a good idea to completely tear up our main road, during our peak tourist season.
Granted, these CDOT people are engineers. And we all know about engineers. They are not actually people; they are flesh and blood computer units. Walking talking AI applications.
Which is all well and good, if you want your roads to be straight where they need to be straight, and curved where they need to be curved.
But if you want a lively, thriving downtown commercial area during a two-year construction project, you probably need to enlist the help of artists and musicians.
I haven’t yet heard that the artists and musicians have been contacted about this.
Nor is it clear that artists and musicians can still afford to live here, what with all the ‘improvements’ to our community.
Not that I’m complaining.
Except that, actually, I am complaining. In a gentle voice, hopefully. No need to scream.
At least, not yet.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.