Generation Recreation with Michael Pearlman

Ski Bum Housing Search Grows Desperate

By Michael Pearlman, 10-14-08

	Ski town redevelopment projects similar to this one in downtown Jackson have shrunken the pool of rental units and forced communities to come up with creative solutions to house their workers.

It’s migratory season in mountain country right now for both animal and human populations. With ski season little more than a month away, a new crop of 20-something ski bums are arriving in resort towns around the west, dreaming of deep snow, cheap beer and a simple job to pay the bills.

A tough economic climate means a steady stream of recent college graduates willing to endure low wages for a free ski pass, but these economic cogs in the wheels of ski resorts’ winter economies still need a warm bed and running water. These days, housing seasonal workers in towns with dwindling pools of rental units is reaching crisis stage.

Last week, the Salt Lake Tribune ran a story about the dearth of seasonal rental housing in Park City. The article neatly condenses into a simple sentence what’s been going on, for those who haven’t watched it occur in front of them.

“Much of the seasonal housing stock has been converted to more lucrative nightly rentals for tourists or sold to year-round residents as real-estate prices soar.”

As gentrification extends to every back-alley cabin and shag-carpeted rental condo, it’s the workers on the lowest rung of the employment ladder that are most affected. When real estate prices skyrocketed in recent years, landlords and deep-pocketed investors cashed in, remodeling and selling older, low-end condominiums, the lifeblood of the rental market in most mountain towns. New owners who financed purchases with no money down had to increase rents to cover their mortgages, while skid housing was demolished to make way for new construction.

Park City’s “resident housing initiative”, suggested by a well-meaning but naive director of the town’s Christian Center, would encourage locals to rent a bedroom in their houses for $300-$500 a month to a seasonal worker. This sounds like a good idea on paper, but I don’t think homeowners really understand who they’re inviting into their homes. Perhaps Park City’s proximity to Temple Square draws a different breed of ski bum than Colorado, Montana and Wyoming, but this recipe is ripe for entertaining horror stories. Based on firsthand experience, I can confirm that the majority of seasonal workers are skids who like to play more than they like to work, a recipe for some pretty incompatible living situations. There’s nothing that screams “international good will” like the two Argentine ski instructors who enjoy staying out all night and bringing their girlfriends home with them, the hapless homeowner left trying to ignore the noises coming from the other bedroom. Good luck on that project, I’m curious to hear how it works out.

Other Western ski resort towns have addressed this issue in a variety of ways. At Big Sky Mountain Resort, some seasonal workers are housed at the Whitewater Inn nine miles down the resort’s access road, getting a free shuttle to their jobs and meal discounts. Copper Mountain Resort in Colorado bought a former Club Med to house winter employees slopeside. In Telluride, many resort employees live in rent-controlled apartments owned by the towns of Telluride and Mountain Village. Jackson Hole Mountain Resort has an inventory of apartments and condos, but is able to house only about 120 of its 900 winter seasonal workers. The rest of its employees are left to fend for themselves on the free market while earning around $8.50 per hour.

In August, a redevelopment proposal for the Days Inn motel in Jackson Hole was submitted to the town planning department. The idea of converting motel rooms to studio units and reselling them to businesses that use seasonal workers seems to make sense. Fortunately, the Days Inn sits squarely in a commercial district. In any ski town, density upzones for workforce housing proposals encounter immediate opposition from neighbors concerned about property values and traffic. Ski town residents say they support affordable housing, until it’s proposed in their neighborhood.

In Jackson, the conversion of apartment complexes to condominiums is also exacerbating the housing crisis. Deep pocketed developers have been purchasing the town’s few remaining apartment complexes and submitting redevelopment proposals, which freed them from the expensive affordable housing requirement imposed on new developments. Concerned about the effect this phenomenon is having on the local rental market, the town imposed a moratorium on these conversions. The developers, of course, are suing.

It takes a lot of employees to run a ski resort, staff a four-star hotel or sell T-shirts. Without a shift in policy that addresses the needs of a group of residents that don’t vote, it’s the business community that will take the biggest hit. As oil prices creep steadily upward, long commutes are going to become less and less attractive. How these hot real estate markets handle their housing problems is going to effect economic growth. When you don’t have workers able to find housing, or at least afford what’s available, they end up going elsewhere. The mountains may not be going anywhere, but workers will go where it’s convenient to work and to live. For the communities left out in the cold, it won’t be pretty.

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