Living in a ski town sounds like a dream. But the reality is crushingly expensive.
Ski-town employees can't afford to live where they work. Vail is paying homeowners to rent to locals, but it's still tiny progress for a big problem.
Kevin Ruck/Shutterstock
- Ski towns are so expensive that workers struggle to afford local housing and stay in their jobs.
- Vail, Colorado has spent $17 million paying homeowners to rent to local workers, according to the Wall Street Journal.
- It's a little bit of progress for a massive problem.
Callie Kuchan moved to Breckenridge, Colorado, with dreams of hiking, biking, and cross-country skiing on breaks from her job as an account manager at a local resort. But she found that parts of living in an outdoorsy paradise were unsustainable.
"If I wanted to get the smallest, crappiest house that I could find in the area, it would be in the millions of dollars," she told Business Insider's Jordan Pandy in October.
To pad her $60,000 salary and save for a down payment, Kuchan told Pandy, she worked three additional jobs. Now she's fed up and moving back to Illinois, where she can live in a four-bedroom home in suburban Chicago.
Ski-town employees like Kuchan are struggling to afford to live where they work. The typical home value in Breckenridge was $1.1 million in October, while in Vail, 40 miles west, it was $1.6 million, according to Zillow. Prices for housing and other essentials, which have skyrocketed since 2019, are a turn-off for the very workers who keep the resorts, restaurants, and retail shops running. But the Wall Street Journal reports that Vail is trying a relatively new tactic: paying homeowners in exchange for a promise that they'll rent to local workers rather than deep-pocketed tourists.
Other popular vacation spots across the country are coming up with other ways to carve out housing for locals. Some, like Aspen, are limiting short-term rentals in the hopes that that housing will be used for workers signing year-long leases instead; others, like Big Sky, Montana, are building affordable housing specifically for workers.
Vail's housing-for-locals program is promising
The Journal article explores how Vail's director of housing, George Ruther, is exploring innovative solutions to the worker housing crisis. Case in point: A 2017-launched program called inDEED that uses town money to buy a stake in local homes. The one condition to get the cash? That the owners rent them out to local workers.
If the homeowner accepts, the town implements a deed restriction that requires the house to be occupied by at least one person who works an annual average of 30 hours or more a week in the county, according to a description of the program on the US Department of Housing and Urban Development's Office of Policy Development and Research.
It essentially prevents the home from becoming a vacation rental.
Typical deed-restriction payments are 20% of the market value of the property, according to the Journal, and Ruther said he's not concerned if the homeowners themselves are locals or out-of-towners.
"I don't care who owns the property. I only care who lives in it," Ruther told the Journal.
So far, the town has spent $17 million for at least 200 restrictions, according to the Journal. Vail is also financing construction on 294 deed-restricted apartments in a new housing development.
The program has not been foolproof, however. The Journal reported that a compliance sweep last February uncovered some deed-restricted homes violating their terms and not renting to locals. The town got a $1 million settlement that it will use to snap up new deed restrictions, according to local newspaper Vail Daily.
Affordable housing is essential for Vail employers and employees
Solving the ski-town housing crisis is crucial for employers like Vail restaurant owner Paul Anders.
He told Business Insider earlier this year that the worker exodus from Vail has forced his business to stop offering lunch some days. Plus, Anders and his business partners have bought or leased 11 apartments for workers over the years. As of February, he housed 30 of his employees, nearly one-fifth of his staff, in dwellings he offers at below-market rates.
"Housing is the single most impactful factor for every business in Vail," Anders told BI.
Take Allison Weibel, who paid $600 a month for a room in a ski-resort-subsidized four-bedroom apartment when she was working part-time as a ski instructor. But switching to teaching full-time forced her to move 30 minutes away to find a home she could afford.
"Teachers, like myself, want to stay here in the community, but doing so requires the stability that homeownership can offer," Weibel told Business Insider.