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

[M II A II R II K]

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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