High Rents Making Help Hard to Find in Resort Towns
In this resort town, where million-dollar homes on the lakefront seem more plentiful than rental apartments, Nick Fuller has turned to the tent.
Fuller runs a river rafting business here, sending tourists--at $25 a head--on a meandering journey down the tranquil Truckee River. Though he has customers aplenty, Fuller has had difficulty getting capable college-age employees. The reason: a paucity of rental places on Tahoe’s increasingly ritzy north shore.
So Fuller got creative.
On a blacktop parking lot just above a riverside restaurant that doubles as the pullout spot for rafts, Fuller erected what locals are calling a “tent city.”
It’s a simple collection of five pop-up tent trailers, cramped but cozy abodes that house a dozen employees that Fuller imported from Eastern Europe as part of a four-month cultural exchange program sponsored by the U.S. State Department.
“Affordable housing is just nonexistent around Tahoe,” said Fuller, who has run Truckee River Rafting Co. for 26 summers. “When I looked around for places for these guys, everyone just laughed at me. So I turned to this.”
Fuller’s problem underlines a growing problem in these go-go days at resort towns all around California and the U.S. From Vermont to Mammoth Mountain, soaring real estate prices have conspired to put a crimp on the affordable housing market.
The result is simple: While millionaire tourists multiply, the restaurant dishwashers and shop clerks and ski lift operators are getting harder to find.
Many have been priced out of the shrinking market for affordable rentals. Others have been lured away by what locals refer to as “real jobs” down in the flatlands of Silicon Valley and other booming areas.
Rulers of the resorts, meanwhile, have been scrambling to catch up with the housing crunch.
All over Tahoe, chieftains at ski mountains such as Alpine Meadows, Northstar and Squaw Valley USA have taken steps to secure housing for employees, converting old hostels into rooms for workers or buying up the last few affordable rental units.
At Mammoth, community leaders have joined with Intrawest, a Vancouver-based resort developer undertaking an ambitious expansion that has already sent home prices soaring, to establish a special foundation to produce more affordable housing. City leaders are requiring the firm to provide new housing for two-thirds of the employees produced by the development.
“We’re not to the tent city stage, but we’re jumping on it as probably our highest priority,” said Mike Vance, Mammoth Lakes community development chief.
He and other city leaders took a recent tour of more than half a dozen North American resort towns--the Colorado resorts of Aspen, Crested Butte and Steamboat Springs among them--and in every one housing was the top issue. In spots like Aspen and Vail, Colo., traffic is jammed by priced-out employees making hourlong commutes from the flatlands.
Tahoe is no different. Just ask David Middleton.
The manager at a Sizzler restaurant in nearby Truckee, Middleton spends an hour each way commuting up from South Lake Tahoe, which has more aggressively addressed its affordable housing needs. On the glitzy north shore, he picks up the local weekly newspaper to scour the rental ads. So far, he has found nothing for less than double what he now pays.
“This is Yuppieville,” he said. “Everyone has been priced out. And there’s no work force because of it. Every other store around here has a help wanted sign. Safeway has had to advertise on TV just to find workers. That never happens anywhere else.”
Down by the river, Fuller has a front row seat to that dilemma. He first saw it about three years ago. The typical revolving door of college kids he used to get as seasonal workers slowed and then stopped.
Most folks around here blame Silicon Valley. Flush with cash from “dot-com” conquests, high-tech kingpins turned to Tahoe for vacation homes. Median home prices jumped 60% in the past year.
The region has a long-term rental vacancy rate that stands, essentially, at zero. When an apartment goes on the market, it’s rented within hours. Many service employees have turned to renting rooms in private homes. But even those simple accommodations now fetch as much as $500 a month.
“There’s a huge crunch,” said Neil Morse, a rental agent in Tahoe City. But he sees hope with the rise of Fuller’s tent city. “It’s not bad, but it’s not exactly pretty either,” Morse said. “Maybe it will prod the powers that be to do something.”
Officials in Placer County, on Tahoe’s north shore, are well aware of the problem but, like most local governments, they plead poverty on the issue. The five rented trailers could kindly qualify as spartan. They have tiny refrigerators and microwave ovens. A nearby A-frame owned by the rafting company was converted into a bathroom, with a single shower for the dozen employees.
In all, Fuller said, he has spent more than half a year and $10,000 just getting the enclave up and running. And he’s spending more than $100 a week just on propane to heat the tents against Tahoe’s chill nights.
But it has been worth it. So far, his Eastern European work force has “been great,” Fuller said.
