We have been living in Summit County, CO for the last 10 months. It’s been fantastic on a lot of different levels. It truly is our Mountain Happy Place. The big downer, however, has been finding a place to live. I read somewhere that only 30% of the actual population of Summit County actually lives here full-time. The rest are second homeowners and vacation rentals (mostly from Texas).

When we sold our house in Portland, it went blessedly quick.  Because we bought it before the housing crash in ’08, we also ended up not making any money on it. As a result, we’ve been saving like crazy for a new down-payment on a house since we got to Colorado.  Since the start of summer (which is June here), we have been shopping hard. The difficulty is in finding something that we can afford in an area that isn’t too far away from town and our jobs.

It turns out, there are a lot of folks besides us who think it’s beautiful here and they love playing in Colorado on the weekends! As a result of all the second homeowners here snapping up property, the price of real estate is really, really high. Obscenely high. For example, just outside beautiful Kalispell, MT, we could buy a 5 acre property with a huge, beautiful log cabin on it for less than we can buy a 2-bedroom, slightly trashy condo here. Finding a nice house with an acre here is really challenging if you don’t have $800,000 or more. I don’t know about you, but I don’t have almost a million bucks laying around.  And if you do find a nice house for less than that, they get snapped up in 24 hours or less. We just had one go under contract before we could even look at it today. It had only been on the market for 12 hours. Some places even sell before they actually go on the market. On the flip side, there are also totally unrealistic folks who built their dream retirement home out here. It’s finally time for them to sell, but they won’t come down to a realistic price because of they are emotionally attached to the house they worked so hard on. Their house sits on the market for a year or more. We’ve seen one that has been on the market for over two years. To compound these problems, many of the houses here are built for vacationers, so they don’t have practical things like garages and closets. With 5 feet of snow on the ground in my back yard this winter, you can bet I’m wanting a garage! But, they are amazingly hard to come by here because houses weren’t built for full-time use.

This is true in resort/destination communities all over the West. Look at Jackson Hole, for example. We can barely afford to vacation there, much less live.  Brian works at a hospital and when I had a full-time job, we would still barely be hitting the poverty level there. We’d be lucky to afford a trailer house in Jackson.

What really sucks about it, is that the work force that lives here and serves all the skiers and tourists can’t afford to live here. You see really high turnover in jobs because people can’t afford to stay after a season. Rent is too high, or they can’t find a roommate. Most jobs here don’t pay much over minimum wage. The townhouse we are renting is almost as much every month as our mortgage on our house was in Portland. The younger crowd of lifties, hospitality and retail workers can’t afford that much! The resorts help some employees with housing, but mostly these workers are on their own.

It’s a paradox.  How do you make it so your labor force can afford to live there and how do you keep your luxury-playground atmosphere?

I don’t have the answers, just observing the fallout.

In the meantime, we will continue looking and will find someplace permanent, that fits our needs as residents eventually!  I am sure the right thing will come along with time.  Thankfully, we have a fantastic realtor, Eddie Bowers, helping us navigate the craziness.  If we can’t eventually find our happy place, we will likely just build it ourselves (and will likely overprice when it comes time to sell).  🙂