Aspen Battles Sky-High Home Prices

Hugh Burrows is, in many ways, a prototypic Aspenite. He rolled into this breathtaking ski resort 13 years ago in a ’66 Volkswagen bug, which he lived in for a time. He scrounged a part-time job and, his career as a ski bum fully launched, commenced living in a tepee.

Burrows got older, his jobs got better. He skied less and his housing improved. Finally, married with two children, he was forced to leave his beloved Aspen and seek cheaper housing “downvalley,” in the small, rustic towns between Aspen and Glenwood Springs, 40 miles to the north.

Burrows has one more shot to return to the Aspen he dreamed of: the lottery. Like thousands of others who work in this ski resort but can’t afford to live here, Burrows is participating in one of the town’s innovative affordable housing programs. He’s pinning his family’s future residence on a lottery in which the winners earn the right to pay something less than half market value for coveted family homes.

This glitzy mountain retreat would seem an unlikely laboratory for urban experimentation. But, unlike other outposts of posh, Aspen is in the forefront of building affordable housing. Although Aspen is not unique, experts say it has been innovating longer than most towns and serves as a model for other fancy ski and sea resorts.

So acute is Aspen’s housing problem that it has bled into the rest of the Roaring Fork Valley. The nightly exodus of Aspen’s work force threatens to subsume smaller towns, or at least irretrievably alter their rural character. Carbondale Mayor Randy Vanderhurst calls this phenomenon “the influx of Aspen refugees: Billionaires are chasing millionaires out of Aspen.”

Aspen’s difficult effort has yielded, so far, 1,600 affordable homes or apartments--accounting for more than one-third of the living space in town.

Chitchat in the town’s boutiques and cafes--other than griping about the paucity of snow this season--is usually along the lines of: “Have you found a place yet?” In a county where the median home price is $2.4 million and there is a two- to four-year waiting list for apartments, swapping housing tips is not idle chatter.

Finding a place to live here takes creativity and persistence. Youthful ski enthusiasts sardine themselves in studio apartments. Or they camp, live in cars and, in the summer, even live in caves.

Concerned that existing housing might take on slumber party overtones, officials have cracked down on some of the cheaper alternatives. The Bureau of Land Management restricted the length of stays at nearby campgrounds, concerned that locals were squeezing out vacationers. A city ordinance in the town of Gypsum forbids the renting of homeowners’ driveways to people living in campers or RVs.

Affordable housing is possibly the most polarizing issue in Colorado’s mountain resorts. Rob Ford was the mayor of Vail until last month, when he quit with two years left in his term. The problem? He was fed up with local resistance to his efforts to implement affordable housing policies.

“The bottom line is that everyone at a cocktail party stands around and says, ‘Affordable housing is a good idea; we need it.’ But when it comes to putting it in their neighborhood, or if it affects their property values or their mountain views, they are unwilling to make the small concessions necessary to make it happen,” he said. “I heard more about housing in four years than I ever hope to hear about again.”

The irony is that in no way does Aspen lack living space. The hills are alive with the sound of money. One trophy home, said to be owned by a member of the Saudi royal family, weighs in at 55,000 square feet. Typically, the houses--mostly second homes--are huge, dwarfing even apartment buildings. Some say the second-homers are taking over, and Mayor Rachel Richards noted: “I’d say more than 60% of the property bills are mailed out of state.”

By fits and starts, and by employing complicated and often controversial approaches, city officials hope to redress the divide between the housed and housed-not. The town’s program is strict--open only to those working in Pitkin County--and depends on a public-private partnership in which the housing authority exercises remarkable say-so over privately held property.

Among Aspen’s strategies:

* Requiring developers to allocate 70% of the units they build to the affordable housing program. The remainder may be sold at free-market prices.

* Holding lotteries to buy affordable homes. Those residing in the county longer have a better chance to be drawn.

* Setting the sales price of newly built affordable homes according to the income of the buyer. A one-bedroom townhouse auctioned last week cost $78,300 for a low-income Aspenite, but the same unit had a price tag of $196,000 for someone who earned more.

* Levying sales and real estate transfer taxes to fund Aspen’s $54-million housing development program.

Richards acknowledges that much is required of developers. The town insists that affordable houses be built with the same integrity that goes into free-market homes. The affordable units here are colorful, tasteful and indistinguishable from their wildly expensive clones.

“Aspen is not an easy community to develop in,” Richards said. “It has very stringent standards and a slow-growth philosophy. You are going to have to show that your project is exceptional.”

For more than 20 years, Aspen has been firmly in the slow-growth camp. For nearly that long the town has had a critical shortage of housing within the reach of most of those who work here. Even in a highly competitive job market where salaries for busboys are $2 above minimum wage, few can afford the cost of housing, at least not without multiple roommates.

Jackie Kasabach, chairwoman of the county’s housing board, like most people who actually live here, tells of scraping together seven partners to buy a condo. “Even our affordable housing is expensive!”

Richards only recently moved out of a trailer, and Mary Roberts, the housing administrator, currently lives in affordable housing.

Those seeking a place to live in the region have flooded the small towns that line Highway 82, discombobulating the market. Longtime residents have found they can no longer afford the homes they have lived in all their lives. The population flow is largely one way: Carbondale’s population has grown 51% in eight years, while in that same period Aspen’s population of 6,000 rose only 2.8%.

The “monster homes” that ooze across the steep mountainsides are reviled by some, adored by others. A Pitkin County report released last month estimated that for every new 6,000-square-foot home, two domestic workers are brought into the work force.

But in Aspen’s circular equation, job creation produces a need for cheap housing that doesn’t exist. In part to address this, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Denver began a program four years ago of building housing for the “service workers” in the area’s mountain resort towns. The church’s projects in four towns rent for as little as half the free-market rate.

Aspen’s optimistic goal is to bring at least 60% of those who work in town back into it to live. All acknowledge the frustration: No sooner does a housing project go up than its waiting list overflows. In the latest lottery, for instance, more than 200 people were competing for 16 units.

“It can take years from conceptualizing the project and going through the planning, zoning and contracting before turning the key and moving in,” said Richards. “It is very easy to fall behind the curve, and we have. I think we are very clearly behind the curve.”

Maybe so, but Aspen is miles ahead of other resort communities.

At Snowmass, the next ski resort downvalley, city officials found that last year half of the town’s employers lost at least one employee because of the lack of housing. The city responded, in part, by requiring that anyone adding a development must provide housing for all its employees.

In neighboring Eagle County, home to the Vail and Beaver Creek ski areas, housing prices have jumped 119% since 1990. A county report estimated that a 1,300-square-foot starter home costs $183,000. Many consumers would love to find any house: A recent market survey found only two single-family homes for sale.

Liz Frazier, 61, who works at the Aspen Public Library, sold her local property but has a few more years to live in it. After that, she says, she’ll reluctantly pack up and retire back East.

“Aspen is wonderful, it’s lovely, but the middle class is getting squeezed out,” she said, gazing out a window at snow-dusted Aspen Mountain. “Everyone goes downvalley, but downvalley is getting expensive. This situation takes away from the feeling of community. It’s too exclusive. Who lives here? I’m old; I have no regrets. But if I were young and had to start all over, I’d hate it.”