I’ve already mentioned the fact that different people see the same thing differently. A hiker, for example, might look out at a forest of trees and see a place of quiet recreation. A timber company official might look out at the same forest and calculate the percentage of old-growth trees suitable for lumber. A real estate developer might dream about the number of well-treed parcels he could sell.
We have some forests here in Archuleta County, and some nice creeks and rivers. In a good year, we get lots of snow in the mountains. A person can look at Archuleta County and easily see the potential for an ever-expanding outdoor recreation economy. I believe that’s what the Masters degree graduate students from CU Boulder may have seen, as they studied our community over the past three months for their college class:
ENVS 6302: Sustainable Landscapes, Sustainable Livelihoods
We can view a landscape as something that really ought to be “sustainable.” That term might mean, to some, an “unspoiled, unchanging landscape.” And a “sustainable livelihood” might mean a job that will still be viable 50 years from today, and one that doesn’t harm the landscape.
Like, for example, outdoor recreation? A relatively harmless activity, seemingly. Doesn’t rip up the land. Doesn’t deplete resources.
Those were not popular concepts when people from the eastern US began flooding into Colorado during the late 1800s. The idea, back then, was to get rich quick, if possible, and to own a fine brick house.
This industry — silver mining — provided Aspen, Colorado with its initial population and economy, but it was not sustainable. Following the Silver Panic of 1893, the population of Aspen dropped from 5,000 to less than 1,000.
In a moment, we’re going to talk a little bit about Aspen, one of the nation’s finest examples of an “outdoor recreation economy.”
When I moved from Alaska to Colorado in 1993, and bought a house on Lewis Street in downtown Pagosa Springs, I was roughly in the middle of what we might call “my wage-earning years.” I’d already been working for a living and supporting a family for about 20 years, and — if I followed the curve of a typical American worker’s life — I was going to work for another 25 years before retiring around age 65.
I would then live a quiet life of retirement for maybe 15 years. Maybe 20.
This was 1993. The community I moved to — Pagosa Springs and its surrounding unincorporated subdivisions — had been growing its population, in fits and spurts, since the early 1970s, to around 6,000 residents. (Also adding a large number of second homes.)
The resident population would roughly double by 2007. This rather fabulous growth was supported by a couple of closely related recreation-oriented developments — the rapid development of an affordable retirement and second-home economy, and the equally rapid development of a tourism economy.
Pagosa is not Aspen. But if we want to understand the full implications of an “outdoor recreation economy,” we probably don’t want to rely too much on a three-month class project by some CU graduate students. We might, instead, want to look at a real world example that’s been unfolding over the past 80 years. The poster child for an “outdoor recreation economy.” Aspen, Colorado.
As we mentioned, the town of Aspen was originally built to support a silver mining industry, and the community struggled when that industry fell on hard times. But in 1946, the Aspen Ski Corporation opened its first mechanical ski lift. The new chairlift attracted thousands of skiers to Aspen each year, setting a precedent for the Colorado ski industry. In 1946, to complement the well-established roads into Aspen, a rough gravel airstrip — Sardy Field — was built, and by 1948 commercial flights were landing outside of town.
In 1958, two more ski resorts opened for business: Buttermilk and Aspen Highlands.
Sixty years later, the population of Aspen is around 7,000. Despite attempts by local officials to maintain some semblance of affordable housing, in 2011 Aspen ranked as the most expensive town in the United States. According to the Trulia real estate website, the median sale price for a 3-bedroom home was about $3.3 million this past season.
The median sale price. Which means, half the sales were more than $3.3 million.
The Colorado Sun recently published a fascinating article by reporter Jason Blevins, discussing the pending failure of Aspen’s carefully constructed affordable housing effort.
For decades, the Aspen-Pitkin County Housing Authority has been viewed, all across the US, as a model program to provide affordable workforce housing in the midst of an ‘outdoor recreation economy.’ The Housing Authority has used a real estate transfer tax — one of the few legally allowed in Colorado — to subsidize low- and moderate-income housing, since the late 1970s.
Deed-restricted housing. Government-owned housing. And so on.
That is to say, Aspen was addressing its affordable housing crisis before Pagosa Springs ever even thought of itself as having an “outdoor recreation economy.”
But all is not well in Aspen. From Jason Blevins’ October 2018 article:
“I’m hearing from business owners all over the place — restaurants, law offices, financial offices: ‘We can’t hire anybody. We can’t find the people. We can’t house them. It’s too expensive,’ ” said Mike Kosdrosky, the executive director of the Aspen-Pitkin County Housing Authority. “If we don’t nip this retirement issue in the bud, we are in big trouble.”
The housing authority manages 2,956 units of affordable housing. About 1,650 are deed-restricted homes owned by teachers, politicians, doctors, chefs, nonprofit workers, police officers and business owners — the people who keep Aspen running as it hosts waves of the wealthy and the glitterati on holiday. The remaining properties are rentals.
Kosdrosky is worried because by 2025, anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the owned homes will be occupied by retirees, Kosdrosky said.
Affordable housing is an issue reaching crisis level across Colorado, especially in the high country, where luxury real estate and second homes drive resort economies. And in Aspen, where the affordable-housing program has enabled thousands of residents to own homes in one of the country’s most expensive markets, the crisis is particularly acute.
Aspen’s Real Estate Transfer Tax (RETT) generated about $7 million for the Aspen-Pitkin County Housing Authority in 2017. But even with millions of dollars available each year for housing subsidies, the town’s economy is in a crisis situation.