Don't take it personally. Your restaurant manners were impeccable; your gratuity was generous to a fault. Then why did the waitress sneer at you, and why were the waiters so ill tempered? In fact, what was it with all the snarly help, all the way along your Rocky Mountain holiday this summer? They couldn't all have got out of bed on the wrong side, could they? No. That would assume they all had beds. On the contrary, many of these people, out of necessity, were sleeping in dirt. It would put you in a bad mood too.
"Most of my friends used to live in homes," says a woman who lives in a tent. "Now they're camping." This was outside Telluride, the too-precious- for-words old Colorado mining gem that perches way up there in the San Juan Range like a jay's nest in a ponderosa pine. The woman, Jill Mattioli, 28, used to have an apartment in town -- back when she could afford it. Now she lives off in the woods near others who service Telluride in manifold ways but whose purchasing power is so weak they sleep in their cars, in campers, in condemned shacks, in caves, in tents. "If I wait and serve these people," says Mattioli, who has lately been mowing lawns, "I should be able to live here and have a decent standard of living."
She is wrong. A 40-hour workweek, even at double the minimum wage of $4.25 an hour, does not necessarily buy you shelter anymore -- especially in America's tourist boomtowns. Life for the working class in resort areas has always been short on personal amenities, but the situation is now reaching crisis proportions because of stagnating wages and escalating real estate prices. From snow-and-arts resorts like Breckenridge, Colorado, to country- music Meccas like Branson, Missouri, America's playlands are producing a booming class of unfortunates: the hardworking homeless. To step off the main drag of a glistening little jewel like Telluride, then, is like stepping out the back flap of a circus tent: Lord, there's a caravansary of gypsies parked back here! The chief of Telluride's housing authority, Dave Johnson, quit in June, citing job stress. The problem, says Jim Davidson, editor of the Telluride Times-Journal, "brings instability and a surly work force. We can't expect nice worker attitudes when people come to work begging a shower."
The situation in tourist towns is an extreme version of the trend that affects the rest of America -- the dearth of working-class jobs that pay enough to support a life with even the bare necessities. Much of the job growth in the boomtowns is in the so-called hospitality business, where workers typically start as waiters, maids and bartenders at about $6 an hour. In the five counties that account for most Colorado tourism, 45% of all births in 1992 were to low-income families, according to local health departments. In Pitkin County, where Aspen is situated, the number of births to families on Medicaid quadrupled -- to 16% -- in the three years ending in 1992.