Across the West, desirable communities high in the mountains are in a bind. Well-to-do people can afford to buy property, but where is everyone else supposed to live — especially the seasonal and low-income workers who provide the goods and services that those well-to-do homeowners want?
In response to the challenge, ski towns are trying all sorts of new housing policies. This fall, an obscure coalition of local governments released one of the most comprehensive studies of the myriad policies that are being tried at the local level around the region. Megan Lawson, a researcher at Headwaters Economics who was not involved in the report, was struck by the sheer variety of policy solutions that seek to address what has become perhaps the high country’s defining issue.
“It’s a recognized crisis that isn’t going away without a lot of resources directed toward addressing it,” she told High Country News.
The report was produced by the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments (NWCCOG), a voluntary association of 30 local governments, including some of the state’s most iconic — and expensive — ski areas. NWCCOG’s 2023 Workforce Housing report presents summaries of housing policies in more than 40 local jurisdictions, predominantly in Colorado, but also in places like Mammoth Lakes, California, and Whistler, British Columbia. The report, which covers everything from local building regulations to construction costs, makes it clear that local governments have to get involved in their own housing markets, if they want to maintain a workforce.
Here are a few key takeaways from the report:
The market will not save us. One common refrain is that communities need to loosen development restrictions in order to encourage more building. Increased housing supply, the thinking goes, will bring eventually bring down prices. And the report does encourage various pro-growth policies, such as easing zoning requirements to allow homeowners to build secondary dwelling structures — often known as Accessory Dwelling Units, or ADUs — on their property.
Ultimately, however, the report rejects the idea that mountain towns can promote affordable housing without substantial intervention by local governments. These areas are simply too desirable: The price of a single-family home in Breckenridge, Colorado, for example, has increased by 300% in recent decades.
“It’s a recognized crisis that isn’t going away without a lot of resources directed toward addressing it.”
This has been especially true since the pandemic began. The report cited 2021 data showing that 70% of new arrivals — and an even greater proportion of part-time residents — came to mountain towns with incomes that exceeded $150,000 per year. Full-time residents “whose earnings are tied to the local economy” earn significantly less. “The wave of newcomers never receded,” the report noted.
Despite the deluge, many ski towns in the West have genuine limits on growth. Many communities are surrounded by federal public lands, making sprawl impossible. And even as construction costs have soared across the country in the past few years, they are especially high in these areas. The average cost of a unit of workforce housing in Summit County, Colorado, is nearly $408,000, according to the report, while in Eagle County, it averages around $600,000.
The combination of these factors means that “the marketplace for attainable housing is broken,” according to the report.
That’s why public entities need to play an active role in the housing market. About half of the municipalities surveyed are spending funds from their general budgets on affordable housing. For example, a local lodging tax in Colorado, passed in 2022, allows counties to fund housing and child care for workers in the tourism sector. And in Breckenridge, a concerted local effort — using a combination of public funds, including some from lodging taxes, grant money and private investment — is on pace to add 924 units of workforce housing in the next few years.
Meanwhile, many local governments are also trying to address the voracious demand for short-term rentals, with 63% placing caps on services like Airbnb and Vrbo.
“The only way most workers whose wages are tied to the local economy can step into the housing marketplace (even to rent) is with some combination of a hand-up from government-subsidized housing, down-payment assistance and market regulation,” the report concluded.
No one wants to be Aspen … do they? Perhaps West’s most notorious example of ski town decadence, Aspen has faced affordability concerns far longer than many of these towns, some of which only recently became destination resorts. Aspen, however, has been dealing with these issues for so long that its mitigation efforts are starting to pay off.
Since the 1980s, the city and county governments have promoted housing that is sold under certain restrictions: The property must go to a low-income buyer or have its sale price increase capped at a few percent — conditions known as deed restrictions. Of the communities surveyed, Aspen had the second-highest percentage of deed-restricted units.
“These deed-restricted units house a majority of the full-time population of the city,” the report found, representing “37% of the total housing units.”
Aspen also had a noticeably low percentage of housing units that are used only seasonally or sit vacant for part of the year — just 35%. By contrast, Winter Park has a whopping 79% rate of seasonal or vacant housing, followed by Breckenridge at 66%. That’s not to say that Aspen has become some haven of housing accessibility. Far from it: In December, the median home value there was $3.2 million. But it does show that policy goals can be achieved, given persistence and enough time.
With no single solution, towns are getting creative. And why not? No community can honestly claim that it has figured out how to create enough affordable housing for the army of low-income and seasonal workers that these economies employ. Some creativity is probably in order.
Some creativity is probably in order.
In Summit County, home to Breckenridge, local governments are working with the U.S. Forest Service to build employee housing on federal land. In Durango and Ouray, old hotels are being remodeled and set aside for local workers. Meanwhile, the town of Leadville created a brand-new regional housing authority in 2022, in partnership with the county, that will offer down payment assistance, deed restriction programs and many other housing services.
And noticeable effort is being put toward preserving mobile home parks. Often some of the only truly affordable housing near ski resorts, trailer parks have been increasingly targeted by private equity firms and other investment firms in recent years, at times resulting in mass evictions or radical rent increases.
In Moab, Utah, and Colorado’s Pitkin and Routt counties, local governments have purchased parks rather than let private buyers acquire them. Near Steamboat Springs, Colorado, the county plans to eventually transfer ownership of one park to the mobile-home owners, creating a resident-owned community. In August, HCNcovered how residents of a mobile home park in Durango partnered with a land trust to acquire the site and form a cooperative, rather than let the property be purchased by a corporation with a history of jacking up rents.
“(Mobile home parks) historically have been viewed as undesirable parts of communities,” said Lawson, the Headwaters researcher. “But it seems like there’s a growing recognition that they’re an important part of the affordable housing picture.”
Nick Bowlin is a contributing editor for High Country News. Email him at nickbowlin@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
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