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Can Cities Be Saved From ‘Supergentrification’? Aspen May Offer a Roadmap

Can Cities Be Saved From ‘Supergentrification’? Aspen May Offer a Roadmap

April 27, 2021

By Phineas Rueckert

Read More: https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/can...ffer-a-roadmap

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While the city has managed to maintain a working middle class, thanks in large part to an affordable housing program established in the 1970s, progressive political leadership and creative urban planning, moneyed interests threaten to tip the scales in favor of high-end development. In 2016, the City Council announced a complete moratorium on development. Over 10 months, it rewrote the land-use code to favor residents over developers.

- Aspen shouldn’t exist, because you shouldn’t have a place where there’s such profound discontinuity between how much people earn and how much housing costs. But going back to the 1970s, that math equation was resolved by the introduction of an affordable housing program. Aspen has two very distinct housing markets and maybe more. It has a free market for housing where people buy and sell listings on the open market. And then it has a dual housing market that’s composed of the employee affordable housing program, which was entirely separate up until the 1990s. Until the 1990s, working people in Aspen could access free market housing, they could afford units in the free market housing but the housing costs have escalated dramatically since then.

- Supergentrification is the further upscaling that occurs within areas that have already gentrified. It can have a number of elements to it. So supergentrification can take place within housing markets, and it can take place within retail and commercial markets. It can dovetail with a concept called tourist gentrification. It’s up for debate whether a place has already needed to gentrify once before for supergentrification to occur. Another way of describing it is the continued upscaling of retail and residential commercial spaces that displace locals who can’t afford to compete in those areas and enter those areas. — The physical architecture and the buildings are still there; the Victorian funk or the mid-century modern that was part of Aspen is still there. Aspen looks a lot now like it did in 1979.

- The results of this moratorium, which lasted about 10 months, were multiple. One of the key things they did was keep building heights at 28 feet, which is two stories. That’s an interesting move that further constrains the availability of land to develop and real estate to develop. It preserves the view of the mountain; it preserves the small town character. But that, in tandem with the fact that real estate becomes more scarce, further drives up prices. So this move to capture local culture, on the one hand, is at the same time a move that displaces locals and local businesses on the other hand. — To attempt to compensate for that, they also tried to regulate what’s happening inside of buildings. They’re capping the envelope, but they’re also regulating what happens inside the envelope. And they say that x percent of this building must now be devoted to ‘second tier’ spaces.

- The people who pursue Jackson, Wyoming, in many ways, they’re the same kinds of people who pursue Aspen. But the context of Wyoming, a low-tax state that has an energy-based economy, kind of means that you get the wild west mentality of people from Houston and Oklahoma who are rich from the energy sector and hate taxes. And so that influences what happens when they go to Jackson, Wyoming. And so Aspen, in some ways, is relatively affordable compared to those from a tax standpoint. Think about how that shapes a local culture. Jackson is a bit more conservative, a little bit more ‘wild-westy,’ a little bit more connected to Texas and Oklahoma, and that shapes the local cultures and the ability to extract [revenue] from the people who may be making second or third or fourth homes there and visiting there.

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https://nextcity.org/images/made/380...920_612_80.jpg

Well, that is one of the worst hot takes I have ever read. The fact that they chose to create a separate "affordable" market in order to preserve community character for the uber-wealthy, but then kneecapped that market by further limiting supply is really just offensive. Zillow shows that the least expensive multi-bedroom (2-bd) condo for sale in Aspen is still $1.2 million and that's under 1,000 SF.

Yeah, Aspen shouldn't exist, but for reasons different than the author is stating.

Sounds very Whisterish. Affordable housing in Whistler (BC)? Surely you jest!

Why would anyone write an article about affordable housing in Aspen? Isn't unaffordable housing the entire point of Aspen?

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Originally Posted by iheartthed (Post 9265818)

Why would anyone write an article about affordable housing in Aspen? Isn't unaffordable housing the entire point of Aspen?

they need affordable housing for their maids and ski waxers.

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Originally Posted by SIGSEGV (Post 9265854)

they need affordable housing for their maids and ski waxers.

Does the help not still live in the servants quarters?

Why can't the market take care of this? Rents are too high > fewer workers are willing to put up with living there > fewer workers to serve high-end clientele > fewer businesses to serve clientele > local economy begins to shrink > land value begins to come down. The remedy is to pay these workers a lot more to prevent the local economy from shrinking; it needs to be worth the effort to live in Aspen.

Quote:

Originally Posted by SIGSEGV (Post 9265854)

they need affordable housing for their maids and ski waxers.

I remember the one time I went to Aspen for a wedding, and I remember driving into town in the morning.....

It felt kinda like Boulder in a sense where all of the people who work there have to commute in, work, then leave because obviously none of them can afford to live there. You role into Aspen (along with the service workers) and stroll by the airport in the process where you see a lineup of private jets....

This article is troll bait.

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Originally Posted by xzmattzx (Post 9265963)

Asheville is about to find out how well your formula works, if Facebook is to be believed. Online Asheville is abuzz by how high and how fast housing prices have risen during the pandemic, as people from big cities and expensive states have snapped up houses. A crummy, rundown bungalow in West Asheville, for example, is currently commanding a price of $525,000, and that is definitely not going unnoticed. Meanwhile, employers are having to beg people to work, and at the wages offered, are being told to go fuck themselves in return.

It really just seems, again, going from what the city's Facebook groups are saying, that people are waking up and are ready to demand more than just enough to afford an apartment with three or four roommates. They're also getting tired of hearing from employers that the nature and the weather and the beer make up for the low pay. They're getting tired enough in fact, to go elsewhere. The cheaper outlying rural counties are seeing a wave of Ashevillians driven out by high prices, and so are the nearest cities like the one I ended up in.

Between the people appalled by the housing prices, the people more appalled by the offered wages, and the people ready to leave, you really get the impression the wheels are about to come off of a place like Asheville that is rapidly becoming a place like Aspen.

Why should one of the most desirable markets in the country be affordable ?

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Originally Posted by hauntedheadnc (Post 9266040)

And you bring up another point. People can commute in for work. No one is forced to live down the street from work, and workers can't expect to live close to work for their whole lives. People will sacrifice time to save money, and in Asheville's case, people are saving money by moving to the next county over or wherever. That's a main reason why suburbs exist in the first place.

So why can't Aspen's workers live in, say, Carbondale?

Quote:

Originally Posted by xzmattzx (Post 9266380)

I have a friend who used to work in Vail (I think his wife still does) and they live about 20 or 30 minutes away in Eagle, which is a nice little town. But even there, it's not all that cheap. It seems like there just isn't much land to build on out there because of all the mountains - I don't quite get it. I would think that whole new towns for service workers should spring up within a few.miles of Aspen, Vail, etc, maybe on federal land. Having a long commute to a mountain town is kind of nuts and bad for the environment.

If that's what Aspen looks like, people who are paying millions to buy property there are nuts.

"Supergentrification"? Holy crap.

Quote:

Originally Posted by xzmattzx (Post 9265963)

Or raise wages.

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Originally Posted by xzmattzx (Post 9265963)

I don't think this works because the circumstances of these workers vary. Some of them might be living in a house with 10 others and get up and go to work 12 hours a day 7 days a week. Those people will then be able to subsist in an austere way at that wage floor you describe but others don't want to live like that.

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Originally Posted by llamaorama (Post 9266709)

I don't know about Aspen, but Incline Village at Tahoe has tons of Romanian migrant workers (possibly seasonal?). Not sure what the extent of their documentation or housing is...

Quote:

Originally Posted by iheartthed (Post 9266674)

Or raise wages.

Sure, that should happen. But raising wages does little to make housing more affordable if you aren't addressing the supply issues. See the Bay Area.