Is Susan Knopf your aunt?
The housing shortage for low income/seasonal workers in ski towns has been an issue for my entire life. You will remember Dexter's accommodations in Aspen Extreme.
High mountain valley's, bottoms were ranch land, purchased by developers who built second homes for the 1 percent. All the mountains are public land therefore you can't build there, geography in these areas restricts growth, that's just the reality. In the past people kinda made it work by just living down the valley from the resort areas and commuting everyday. Now "down valley" is getting the same pinch and workers have nowhere. It's not just dudes slinging chairs for the resort, it's teachers, cops, nurses, post office, etc etc any lower/middleclass job. Attrition in all of these professions for as long as I have been alive has been brutal in ski towns. There were years were it was 80% for teachers.
Vail resort has tried to deal with this issue, how do you pay people $8.50 in Vail, with employee housing, they have a couple of college dorm like properties that they fill with seasonal workers.
J-1 Student Visas have been the backbone of a lot of their work force. Various administrations had dicked with the program and its a huge topic of consternation for everyone in the valley. Bush/Obama/Trump/COVID, in different ways affected J-1s and had major impacts on the workforce.
Solutions are tough, but that absolutely needs to be the focus of the conversation.
Why is California, California... who knows, probably a combination of various conservative and liberal policies coupled with massive immigration, growth, and geopolitical factors that took place over the last 50 years. Wild innovation and economic opportunity has it's downsides. Any human development has it's downsides, there is no free lunch.
This guy is an idiot simply because he obviously hasn't been paying attention for the last 3 decades. My parents left Grand County in 1994 because 2 teaching salaries couldn't pay for housing. We moved to Michigan for 2 years then moved back to eagle county, who at the time was dealing with their own teacher crisis by building teacher housing which they rented at a huge subsidized rate, which allowed young teachers to build up enough savings on a downpayment for a house. In our case the program worked and my parents worked in the district for 25+ years.
Jackasses scream about commies, adults fix shit.
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