AN INTERVIEW WITH A 'LIFESTYLE STATISTICIAN'

How The American West Is Being Won And Lost

By Todd Wilkinson, 1-30-07

Jonathan Schechter, a popular “lifestyle statistician” from Jackson Hole, opened up New West’s successful Real Estate and Development Conference last autumn with one of the more provocative analyses of why some communities are prospering—and likely to be buffered somewhat from a deflating real estate bubble nationally—and why others may not.

(Click here to listen to audio from Schechter’s panel at the conference.)

Schechter’s own migration to the Rockies is kindred to many Lone Eagle entrepreneurs.  He first came out on vacation, enjoyed himself, could not get the region out of his mind, and then returned with his family, vowing to succeed even if it meant taking a job lower on the rung than his resume would otherwise support.

Schechter has contributed several essays to New West. In the interview which follows, he talks about an early meeting with longtime Jackson Hole legend Robert “Captain Bob” Morris, a descendent of the famous colonial Morris clan of New York City and who represents the “old guard” of migrants who arrived decades ago. 

As fate would have it, Schechter’s friendship with Morris would prove instructional, for Morris himself shows that the West attracts a high concentration of eccentrics who add vitality to their communities.

In the case of Morris, a devotee of the Republican Party, the word “conservative” is synonymous with conservation; the phrase “compassionate conservatism” is one that Morris practiced long before the current President and Karl Rove tried to brand it; and in Morris’s mind, it means advocating for affordable housing, developing a public transport system to leave the highways less clogged; giving car-less residents a better way to get around, and, of course, promoting cleaner air.

Morris also has said that decriminalizing marijuana is a better way to more effectively regulate its availability to young people and he believes the U.S. should express extreme caution when casting its economic and Democratic ambitions on other nations.  Over the years, Morris also took out radio advertisements advocating that motorists offer rides to hitchhikers.  When he has run as a candidate in several political campaigns, nearly winning a seat on the Teton County Commission, Morris’s platform has been based on many ideas that carry a streak of Libertarianism.

What does this have to do with Schechter?  Morris gave him his first job. Morris, Schechter believes, is an important example of the quality of human capital that exists in the mountain communities up and down the Rockies.  And, more importantly, Morris is a man of means who believes in charity.  It is the spirit of giving back that defines a place that is desirable to live in versus developments in which the inhabitants espouse to live separately from the communities immediately around them.

Schechter has been a founder of the Jackson Hole Center for Global Affairs and the One Percent for the Tetons campaign which is an outgrowth of One Percent For The Planet started by Patagonia clothing company co-founder Yvon Chouinard.  When Schechter isn’t on the public speaking circuit, he runs an office out of Jackson. Today, at the top of his webpage for his consulting firm, the Charture Institute, is this quote from British historian Lord James Bryce who made at speech at the University of California-Berkeley in 1909:

“What will happen when California is filled by fifty millions of people, and its valuation is five times what it is now, and the wealth will be so great that you will find it difficult to know what to do with it? The day will, after all, have only twenty-four hours. Each man will have only one mouth, one pair of ears, and one pair of eyes. There will be more people – as many, perhaps, as the country can support – and the real question will not be about making more wealth or having more people, but whether those people will then be happier?”

NEW WEST INTERVIEW WITH JONATHAN SCHECHTER

NEW WEST: Tell us some of the highlights and most influential events that shaped you growing up, and how did you end up in Jackson Hole?

JONATHAN SCHECHTER:  I ended up in Jackson because I responded to an ad for News Director at KMTN-FM that Capt. Bob had posted when he owned that radio station.  He put it up at the Stanford University job center because he got tired of hiring journalists who had credentials/skills but didn’t know how to ask a thoughtful question.  His idea was to find a person who knew how to conduct an interview, i.e. a Liberal Arts grad from a good school, and try to teach him to be a journalist.

I came here on the way to grad school, originally intending to stay for six months but extending for another year because I never thought I’d permanently end up living in a place like this.  At the time, it seemed there were no real career opportunities for someone like me.

After two years at Yale and another two in Boston, I came back because I realized I was of the West, wanted to live in it, and Jackson Hole was the place I’d lived post-college where I felt most at home.  That, and the fact that I was trying to keep a relationship alive long-distance.

NEW WEST:  What had you studied?

SCHECHTER:  My undergrad major was an interdisciplinary mix between biology and the social sciences; my graduate work was an interdisciplinary mix between business and public policy.  I’ve always been drawn to ideas and efforts that cut across boundaries and disciplines, because that’s what I find to be most interesting and most important.  That instinct and predilection has no doubt been the invisible hand guiding me to where I am today, both personally and professionally.

NEW WEST:  You’ve gained renown as someone who thinks at the landscape level of the West and in explaining what the government statistics (from census reports to campaign contributions to tax roles) mean for our region. What are some of the trend lines that you think t people in the real estate business need to pay attention to, not only in the Tetons but also across the Northern Rockies where natural amenities have been a significant driver for the inward migration?

SCHECHTER:  Let me first invoke a caveat: I’m labeled by some as an economist, but I don’t consider myself to be one. I have neither the official training nor the interest.  What I’m reasonably adept at is taking a lot of data and making sense of it.  Because a lot of data are related to the economy, I end up working with a lot of economic data.  For this reason, and because society needs to be able to label people, I’m called an economist.  But I have too much respect for real (i.e. trained) economists to call myself one.

I guess the key trend is that it’s becoming easier and easier to do any type of work from anywhere, in the process severing the connection between living based on where you work—as in needing to commute to a large office building every day into the city from a suburb and then go home at night.  The new mobility of workers is driving any number of phenomena we’re seeing from growth to real estate price increases to changes in local economies and community character.  The pace of this change is so rapid that most people don’t understand it, particularly the established interests such as tourism, agriculture/extraction, and government.

This newfound sense of mobility is the key factor driving change in the region, and will only become more so.

NEW WEST:  What does “Growth” mean to you?

SCHECHTER:  Something very different than just change.

The northern Rockies are both growing and changing, and it’s easy to confuse the two.  For instance, the region has grown before, most recently in the 1970s and early 1980s with the last minerals boom.  Between 1970 and 1980, the combined populations of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming grew by 26 percent.  Yet I would argue to you that despite pretty significant population growth, the Northern Rockies of 1980 were little different than the Northern Rockies of 1970: similar economy, culture, politics, values, etc.  There were more people in 1980, sure, and they were wealthier, but essentially this was the same place.

Conversely, during the 14 years between 1990 and 2004, the combined populations of the three northern Rockies states grew, on a percentage basis, just about as much as did the three states during the 1970s.  This change in the region has been profound, however, with the “traditional” economies and cultures fast losing out to the new realities.  The region grew but it also changed.

My point is that I am less concerned about growth than I am about change.  Growth can occur without much fundamental change. Fundamental change can occur without much growth.  Right now, the Northern Rockies is going through fundamental change, and growth is a by-product.

NEW WEST:  When you, as a social commentator and the father of a college student, are having dinner with your friends who buy and sell real estate properties, what do you talk about when you ponder the future of Jackson Hole where land values preclude a significant number of people from living there?

SCHECHTER:  Well, I don’t really have that many dinners with folks who are big players in the real estate game, whether they are agents, developers, investors, or buyers/sellers.  Here’s a dirty secret, however.  I think most people in the business of selling land really do care.  It’s everyone else who doesn’t care as much and doesn’t get involved the way they should because once they’re here, they end up getting involved with other things to do and care about.  If they care about what is happening to their community, they need to be as attentive as those in the real estate business are with their vested financial interests.

With that caveat behind me, there’s a similar phenomenon among a lot of folks who come here for the recreation: Why worry about the future when there’s so much fun to have today?  That’s part of the essential narcissism of this community (Jackson Hole).  When the future does come up, often it comes up in terms of other things besides the community per se - in many ways community is a pretty hard concept to get one’s mind around, especially for people who don’t plan on living here very long.

The overarching theme that emerges in such conversations is that people really care about this place and want it to continue being a great place.  The rub is in defining what “great” is.  That, in turn, usually depends on where you sit - are you a developer, small business owner, politician, real estate person, retired wealthy dude, single mom, immigrant worker with the service job, ski bum, or young trust funder? 

Jackson Hole, and I suppose the same could be said of similar communities, is a Rorschach blot, with different people projecting onto it whatever touches them.  Reconciling those differing opinions is a job we, by default, defer to the government, which is not equipped to handle it especially in the current environment of rapid and profound change.

Not that many conversations go very far.  Of the people who seriously wrestle with the future, many - far too many, in my view - end up reconciled to a “we’re screwed” conclusion assuming we’re going to become like the Silicon Valley (nee Santa Clara Valley) or other formerly really nice places to live that seem overrun.  We are resigned to the idea that we, like they, will succumb to greed and growth pressures, to self-interest and structurally ineffectual government and the other host of horrors that get in the way of thoughtful conservation, preservation, and sustainability.

I recoil at such polemical conclusions, for my constitution is such that I can’t just sit back and do nothing.  Hence the motivation for a campaign that some of us have launched called “Sustaining Jackson Hole”.  We may end up screwing this place up, but it won’t be for a lack of trying on my part.

NEW WEST:  How is Jackson Hole like the rest of the West and how is it different?

SCHECHTER:  Ah-ha! How about if I first give you two quotes from authors you’ve read:

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (from “The Rich Boy” 1926)

“Yes, they have more money.”
—Apocryphal retort by Ernest Hemmingway

The easiest way I’ve found to understand Jackson Hole is that it’s a place of extremes: climate, terrain, money, environmental abundance and quality, education, etc.  Everything we have can be found - in greater or lesser amounts - elsewhere in the West.  What we have is a ton of stuff in a very concentrated dose in a very concentrated space.

So, in that way, we are both very much like and very much unlike the rest of the West.  Where we have been and where we are is where most of the rural and formerly rural West is headed: declining agricultural economy, stagnant tourism economy, increasing emphasis on something that we call ‘quality of life’.

Some places are nipping at our heels; others will take a long time to get where we are, and then only get here in certain respects.  But the thing that makes Jackson Hole so interesting to me is that it is a microcosm of the transformation from “old” to “new” West, as tired of a cliché as that is.  We’ve moved from an old kind of resource extraction to a new kind.  In the old days, we mined for gold and other minerals.  Now we are mining real estate and views framed through picture windows and private space where some of us can live apart from other people.

We are that, coupled with the fact we have no idea how good we have it.  As a result, we still are willing to sell our birthright for a mess of pottage, something occurring throughout the West.  One consequence of the severing that has occurred elsewhere between the place where people work and where they live is that the qualities of the Northern Rockies - the land, the wildlife, the sense of community - are becoming increasingly valuable.  Because these things are in limited supply elsewhere like the suburbs and distant urban areas, and in fact in finite supply here, people are moving here and trying to do it without sacrificing their big city incomes.

We in the West have a long and glorious history of treating natural qualities as commodities—something to be traded away for very little in the name of progress, economic development, or similar rationales.  In many ways, we’re as shortsighted as the frontier settlers.

Sadly, all of these rationales of being better through unbridled economic commerce are, increasingly, proving to be canards.  They are things that may have been true and/or important decades ago, but now have fallen victim to the rapid changes I mentioned earlier.

Unfortunately, our appreciation of this reality lags well behind the actual pace of change on the ground, so we continue to act in ways that will harm us - economically, socially, and environmentally - in the long run.  We behave as if the things that we worry about happening tomorrow will never come.  But what we don’t realize is that, as we’ve been asleep, we’ve awoken to a new day with lots of new people and development around us.  And you can never go back and retrieve what you think you’ve lost.

NEW WEST:  Looking back at the New West Real Estate and Development Conference in Missoula, what was the best advice you imparted?

SCHECHTER:  Don’t put beans in your ears; buy low; sell high; that kind of stuff.

No, really, I just wanted to offer a dose of something I call Schechter’s Maxim.  No matter how much we try to control things, here is a truism:  Economies change faster than perceptions and perceptions change faster than politics.  I think this explains a lot of the reason why we don’t understand what’s happening to us.  We’re changing so rapidly that we are much less thoughtfully acting on those changes.

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