Workers Call Tents, Caves Home in High-Rent Aspen

In the evening, as the vacationing skiers descend from the slopes and head back to their luxury hotels and chalets, as the shoppers leave the expensive boutiques, construction worker Tim Travelsted finishes his day among the million-dollar condos here and heads “down valley” to Glenwood Springs, a 40-mile drive to the cave that he calls home.

Not far from Travelsted’s cave, down by the Colorado River, Skip Merlo, 30, will be hunkering down for the evening in a makeshift plastic lean-to. Two sleeping bags protect him from the bitter cold. He spends his days working in Aspen, too. This is the only home he can find.

Meanwhile in Aspen, while the well-to-do make small talk over cappuccino and cognac, the bartenders, cooks, dishwashers, waiters and housekeepers who serve them are hustling to earn $7, $8, sometimes $12 an hour. After they finish work, a number of them will spend the night in their cars. Others will bed down in a railroad boxcar, a vacant building or an abandoned mine shaft. Some will curl up in doorways. They have nowhere else to go.

“It’s like Charles Dickens’ ‘Tale of Two Cities,’ ” said Jim Adamski, housing director for Aspen and surrounding Pitkin County. “It isn’t the best of times for a lot of people.”

Aspen, tucked high up in the Elk Range of the Rockies, is a place where the rich and famous come to live and play, where there are jobs galore and where “on any given night, you can go out and find people living in cars, tents and boxes,” said Dan Arrow, an Aspen businessman and member of a nonprofit organization working to find and build housing for people such as Travelsted and Merlo.

In urban areas across America, homelessness has long been a fact of life, but it is a relatively new and unsettling phenomenon in this affluent rural setting. Unlike those in Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Seattle and Chicago, few of the homeless here are transient, alcoholic, addicted to drugs or mentally ill. They are workers earning what in most places would be considered decent wages.

There are few homes to be found here. Aspen has a near-zero vacancy rate, and few working people can afford what space there is. Two bedrooms rent for $2,000 a month, one bedroom for $1,000. Even the town’s “affordable” public housing is not affordable for some at $750 a month for a two-bedroom unit.

Consequently, workers looking for a place to live drive down Roaring Fork Valley to towns such as Basalt, Carbondale, El Jebel, Glenwood Springs, Rifle, Silt and even as far as Grand Junction, 60 miles away. But the housing shortage in Aspen, which offers most of the jobs in the area, has had a ripple effect, driving up prices in those towns as well and leaving few vacancies.

Family Lived in Car

Barbara Walker, 30, spent four months living in her car with her children, ages 6 and 8, when she moved to Glenwood Springs from Grand Junction in search of work. Like many others who have moved to the area, she found a job the first day, but found she couldn’t afford to pay rent.

Lisa Kerchner, 20, who works in Aspen and Glenwood Springs, spent two years moving from place to place in Glenwood Springs before she landed an apartment she could afford. First she moved in with a couple in a one-bedroom apartment. The number of occupants expanded to four, then to six as others arrived looking for work.

Later, she shared a two-bedroom apartment with another couple, but those numbers quickly grew to four, then six and finally to eight.

“It’s easy to find work,” Kerchner said, “but it’s hard as hell to find somewhere to live.”

For years, housing has been a problem in this town of 6,000 people. Michael Schultz, Aspen’s director of social services, recalls how he almost passed up his current position 10 years ago because he had trouble finding a place to stay. Gary Peters, a city councilman and a resident for 17 years, lived for years in an unheated cabin without running water, partly because it fit the Aspen mystique, but largely because it was so difficult to find housing.

“I never thought I’d see the day when there would be homelessness in Aspen,” Peters said.

Homelessness comes as a rude awakening to image-conscious Aspen. The community has long prided itself on being all things to all people, a place where the rich and the not-so-rich, joined by a common independent spirit, reveled together in the beauties of nature.

“We tend to think we’re slick and special in Aspen,” said Michael Gassman, another city councilman, “but we’re not immune to the other things that are happening in the country.”

Aspen’s problem, however, may be unique. Although unemployment is a major cause of homelessness in other cities, there is work for everybody here. Yet to make $6 an hour in Aspen is to be considered most definitely poor. Nearly half of those who work in town must live elsewhere, and 20% of all employed Aspen residents live in city-supervised housing.

Even professionals such as dentists and architects may find themselves cast adrift as their rental housing is sold out from under them or their leases expire just in time for the winter season.

In urban areas, the neighborhoods of the rich provide jobs for workers who live elsewhere; in Aspen, “elsewhere” often is another town miles away.

Many workers must commute 90 minutes daily on a dangerous stretch of two-lane highway dubbed “Killer 82” to attend to the whims of Aspen’s visitors.

Homelessness came to Aspen through a combination of greed, glut and well-meaning efforts to keep development under control.

In the 1970s, the city adopted several slow-growth ordinances aimed at holding down density and preserving the community’s small-town flavor. The move backfired. Property prices rose quickly.

Then Aspen became a darling of the wealthy ski set.

The town’s tax rolls read like a prologue to “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” Property owners include tennis star Martina Navratilova, actor Jack Nicholson (who has an in-town Victorian and a lavish retreat beside Castle Creek), business tycoon Donald Trump and television’s Barbara Walters. Actress Jill St. John has lived here 18 years. George Hamilton supplements his acting income by refurbishing and selling Victorian houses. Other famous Aspenites include comedienne Goldie Hawn, actor Kurt Russell and rock star Don Henley (at whose 1986 New Year’s Eve party then-Sen. Gary Hart made the costly acquaintance of Donna Rice), slugger Reggie Jackson, Beach Boy Brian Wilson and Texas financier Sid Bass (whose dance floor hides an indoor swimming pool). Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith play here with baby daughter Dakota, and magazine publisher William Ziff had a “lake custom” home built at 9,500 feet above sea level.

To make way for this new elite, apartment houses and duplexes that were year-round residences came down and were replaced by expensive vacation homes and condominiums for out-of-towners and real estate speculators.

Housing prices shot through the roof.

Aspen Mayor Bill Stirling needs only to look out the window of his real estate office to see the crux of the problem: In a 2-block area just a stone’s throw away, six new condominium units, priced at $2.5 million each, have replaced an apartment complex that once housed 40 moderate-income families.

“What happened is, we’ve got six second homes (instead),” Stirling said with a sigh. “The people who once lived here have now moved down valley, and they’re on Highway 82 commuting to work every day.”

Consequently, the other towns along the highway are booming as old time Aspenites are pushed out and workers drawn to one of the few places in Colorado where there are jobs trickle in. In Basalt, housing starts in 1988 were up 53% over the 1987 rate, while in Carbondale, the rate of new construction rose 200%.

Other Towns Pressured

And growth brings attendant problems. City officials in towns such as Glenwood Springs and Rifle say that all the new people have increased demand for roads, schools, law enforcement, child care and other services. Employees, however, are hard to find and even harder to keep because the pay is always better in Aspen.

Critics have accused the Aspen city fathers of sticking their heads in the sand and allowing the housing situation to deteriorate to the point of widespread homelessness.

To some extent, Stirling agrees with that assessment. “We just weren’t paying attention,” he said.

Only recently, the critics charge, since it has become difficult for local businesses to keep their employees, has the city taken hold of the issue.

“It’s become an economic problem, not a humanitarian problem,” Arrow said. “If the rest of the nation knew about this it would be an embarrassment.”

Many professionals are beginning to abandon Aspen because of the housing shortage. Annette Carlozzi resigned as director of the city’s art museum this year, largely because of the housing crunch.

“I received a wonderful offer to be executive director of the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans . . . the same week we lost our housing,” she said. “I have always gotten lots of offers. I usually wasn’t interested.”

Nancy Haddad, a business teacher at Aspen High School, recently found a one-bedroom apartment, but when the owner returns in June she will have to move again.

“The day I move down valley is the day I leave Aspen,” she said.

The Aspen bus company has postponed extending service to the airport because it is short 14 drivers. Even the White River Forest Service has jobs that go begging because the housing shortage makes positions here unattractive.

The city has imposed a moratorium on demolition, and a new ordinance requires that any new business must provide housing for at least 60% of its employees or pay the city $30,000 per worker for housing construction. Aspen is completing work on 46 units of year-round housing and 100 units for seasonal workers.

The city hopes eventually to see a vacancy rate of at least 10%, and to see 70% of those who work in town also housed in Aspen.

A major part of the problem, city officials said, is that many workers simply are not paid enough to live in a town where the middle income is $80,000 a year.

“The people in this wonderful resort community who have made all this money should share the wealth and start paying better wages,” Adamski of the Housing Authority said. “What we’re doing (with public housing) is subsidizing low wages.”

Public housing plans have met with resistance. While the voters have approved tax increases for such projects, nobody wants such facilities, no matter how nice, to go up next door to his million-dollar home.

“It’s the NIMBY syndrome,” Stirling said. “ ‘Not In My Back Yard.’ Aspen used to be a place where the rich rubbed elbows with the poor constantly. Now, it’s like prerevolutionary France. It’s more of a gatehouse community.”

Many workers here agree. “You get the message that they don’t mind if you work there, but if you don’t have money they don’t want you to live there,” said Hope Reed, 34, who works in Aspen and lives in Glenwood Springs.

Even the city’s public housing, some workers say, is not really designed for them. Working people who stand in line six deep for every available unit find themselves competing with dentists, lawyers and other professionals because the guidelines for occupancy allow income levels up to $49,500.

Residents of Glenwood Springs, Rifle and Silt who work in Aspen also eye with caution efforts to widen Highway 82 to four lanes. While they agree that it would make commuting easier and less dangerous, some speculate that Aspen’s desire to have the project completed is part of an effort to keep them living “down valley.”

But many townspeople have come to believe that ending a housing crunch that puts workers on the street is essential.

“It took me a long time to come around,” said Gassman, the councilman. “. . . But you say, ‘What are you preserving if you lose the community?’ ”

Spence Videon, president of the Aspen Chamber Resort Assn., agreed.

“To have a community where there are no children because homes are owned by outsiders is not the kind of community I think people want to live in,” Videon said. “Maybe that’s OK with the glitter-and-glitz crowd, but I sense that most of the people in Aspen don’t want to have that cold, exclusive environment that doesn’t have laughing children.”