Vacation Homes
Second Homes Come With a Price
Finding the balance between vacation home owners and local communities.
words by > Alex Miller
People fall in love with the Colorado Rockies—so much so that a week at a rented condo in Vail or Breckenridge once a year just doesn’t seem enough. Those with the money to do so scratch their high-country itch by purchasing a home in the area, sometimes using it as much as half the year; others maybe only for a week or two.
While the national home-buying market slowed noticeably in the latter half of 2006, realtors in resort areas like Aspen and Beaver Creek near Vail watched gleefully as home sales figures continued to set new records. Meanwhile, some local officials, business owners and workers continued to wonder how to provide attainable housing for the lower and middle class when average home prices in places like Vail’s Eagle County topped $900,000.
It’s a conundrum faced by resort communities around the world, but in Colorado’s hot mountain home market, the need to find homes for “regular” people has taken on a new urgency. In Summit County, home to Breckenridge, Keystone and Copper Mountain, nearly two-thirds of all the homes are owned by people who don’t live there full time. The second-home owners may not know or care much about the impacts of their presence, but it’s something that consumes a person like Mick Ireland, a county commissioner in Aspen’s Pitkin County.
“People used to think second homes were this benevolent thing that throws lots of tax dollars with no cost or consequence to the community, but that’s not true,” Ireland says. As places for workers become less aff ordable, affl uent, older second-home owners start filling up the homes, the demand for services grows while workers must commute from farther and farther away.
“So you have this massive transportation problem that exceeds your transportation capacity,” he says.
On the plus side, wealthy part-timers do bring a lot of money into the rural resort communities, fueling things like Aspen’s world-class arts scene and an international dance festival in Vail, to name just two.
“They bring and spend a lot of money,” says Peter Runyon, an Eagle County commissioner. “Last week I saw 60 original Rembrandt etchings. We have a vast number of charities on a national scale that are very well funded.”
GETTING ALONG
While locals may be frustrated at not being able to buy a home for their family in a place like Frisco, where modest single-family homes easily top $700,000, it’s tough to vilify second-home owners when they represent a chunk of the local economy greater even than winter sports. From gallery owners and builders to ski resorts and plumbers, all recognize the value of the part-time owners. But still the question remains of how to cope with their impacts.
Over the years, Pitkin County has created thousands of aff ordable housing units in an eff ort to keep workers local. It may be a drop in the bucket in a place where one Arab prince has his mansion on the market for $135 million, but it’s a start. In Summit County, voters in November approved a bump in taxes to fund its housing authority, which seeks to help locals get a leg up with special loans, down-payment assistance and “deed-restricted” aff ordable housing units—homes with a cap on appreciation in the hopes they’ll remain at least somewhat attainable to locals.
There is also growing understanding among second-home owners themselves.
“I know we’re part of the problem,” says Ken Wagers, a Boulder businessman who owns a second home in Frisco. “It’s scary how much it’s gone up even since we bought it almost two years ago.”
Education is also being driven by people like Pat Long, a professor of economics at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who teaches classes and runs a program on “sustainable tourism.” Long says many towns are starting to understand they have to do something soon, before there’s no aff ordable housing left .
“In some cases they’re reactive, but sometimes it’s proactive,” he says, citing places like Estes Park in Colorado, Jackson Hole in Wyoming and Whistler in British Columbia that have made inroads on aff ordable housing. They’ve done so, he says, in the face of unavoidable statistics.
“It’s human nature to wait on items of importance until they loom heavy before us,” Long says.