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Most of these towns have grown up in rural areas where nobody thought much about a working population that needed public transportation, day care and other amenities. Most critical is the housing crisis from bauble to municipal bauble along the glittery necklace of Rocky Mountain resorts. Here, each square foot of real estate today fetches a ransom. Gone to outrageously priced condos are the apartments the help used to rent -- and there is scant room left to build more. The reason is location, location, location: these picturesque hamlets beckon and charm and cost the earth because they are usually isolated and they often cannot grow, surrounded -- especially in the Rockies -- by federal lands that are vertical. And where the private land flattens out sufficiently, the people with bulging purses are putting up $1 million log cabins. So the help either commutes from a distance out by where the sun sets or sleeps nearby, under stars.
Take tiny Telluride, 2 1/2 miles square, whose population of 1,500 grows to 6,000 in the skiing months. Basically, $300,000 buys you four walls exceedingly close together. Bank president William Dodge laments, "It's a struggle to live here with three kids. If my wife didn't work, we probably couldn't." Together, the Dodges make about $200,000 a year.
In a tepee by a creek 35 minutes down valley from town lives a 25-year-old woman who works the counter in a local coffee shop. Monique Toulouse says she has her name -- she says it is her name -- on a waiting list for one of the 108 housing-authority apartments in the city ($450 a month for a one-bedroom), but her position on the document is more than a year down from the top. Before winter, she declares, knowing that it is a foolish declaration, "I'm determined to find a $250 rental." Kevin Buckanaga, a server in a coffee shop, was happy to be subleasing a shed for $65 a month until he was evicted last month. He now lives in a tent three miles outside town.
So why stick around? "This is God's land," says 26-year-old John Korte, who lives in a little pickup he parks here and there. Harold Wondsel lives in an old bus and Bill Pinkard in a mountainside lean-to and Rusty Scott in a condemned mining shack with four buddies -- no locks, no heat, cold water, expecting an eviction notice, in case he was getting comfortable (he heard the property has been sold for half a million). "There's no concept of the pain we go through," said Scott, a counterman who made it through -40 degreesF nights in a sleeping bag last year. "The town doesn't realize that the people who do their dishes and clean up after them have to live someplace too."
But the town does; up and down the Rockies you find municipalities struggling with the problem. Telluride's San Miguel County requires developers to set aside 15% of their sites for affordable housing. In Aspen, where resistance to more new "monster homes" has great zeal, there is a proposal to raise the amount of new development that must go for modest housing from 40% to 60%. In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where a 14,000-sq.-ft., three-bedroom log cabin is going up, building inspector Dennis Johnson says a campground for low-wage earners might not be a bad idea.