ISSUE #285: Aspen's Housing Lies (3/9/26)
March 9 "Sometimes the point isn't to make people believe a lie. It's to make the people fear the liar."
-- Anne Applebaum
THANK YOU
I was heartened and humbled by your responses to my "return" Ant last month (The Aspen Zeitgeist). Let's do this. But moving forward, heads up, there just might be some homework. Watching from the sidelines is clearly not a winning strategy, and we're about as close to the wheels coming off as we've ever been.
Upon receiving my last Ant on February 6, the Aspen Daily News contacted me about contributing a guest column to follow up on the lack of coordination between the city and county on the massive infrastructure projects currently in the pipeline. I was happy to submit THIS column, which ran on Sunday, February 15. I am grateful to have had this opportunity.
Ever hopeful to return to print, I recently sent them the following, unsolicited. They weren't interested, but I won't give up. It's the promised Part 2 to "The Aspen Zeitgeist," specifically on subsidized housing.
As always, I love hearing your feedback. And if you have friends, neighbors or colleagues who'd enjoy reading The Red Ant, please feel free to forward this email or send them my way.
ASPEN'S HOUSING LIES
This community is lying to itself about housing.
Time and again, we tell ourselves and each other that we can’t “build our way out” of our housing challenges, yet we continue down a never-ending path of building for desire and not actual need. Who doesn’t want to live in Aspen affordably?
In the city, we now allow subsidized housing development in all zone districts with mass, scale and parking exemptions, the county says it’s okay to build subsidized housing in rural areas, and any employer that can afford to is clamoring to build its own inventory, all while we refuse to examine what we already have and optimize its use for the betterment of the community that paid for it. There is complete disregard for accurate and transparent metrics in favor of political expediency and for fear of hurting people’s feelings.
Recently, when former mayor John Bennett spoke out in favor of the massive subsidized employee / visiting lecturer housing proposed by The Aspen Institute, Aspen Music Festival and School and Aspen Physics Institute for their shared campus in the West End, one major lie stood out. Bennett confidently stated that all this new housing will remove cars from Hwy 82. Really, John? And that’s based on what exactly? A gut feeling? Isn’t that what they told us about Burlingame? How’d that relieve traffic? And notably, “cars off 82” is also a primary justification for the soon-to-be-built 277-unit, all-rental, half-billion dollar Lumberyard, home to 435 cars.
Here are some very inconvenient truths about housing in Aspen, and note: I do not call it a “crisis.” It’s a disaster for sure, but of our own making.
· Willful ignorance. There are no metrics on what’s changed or improved with the housing we’ve built. No one is tracking which businesses are unable to hire for lack of housing and for which jobs. We can only guess-timate our total number of jobs and workforce size. In other words, everyone seems to blindly accept that we have a housing “crisis” but no one asks for it to be defined or quantified.
· No prioritization. Simply put, there are some jobs that are more critical to the functioning of our community than others. Sorry, realtors, I’m talking doctors, nurses, first responders, teachers, resort/hospitality/restaurant workers, transportation providers, road crews and utility workers. We need to prioritize housing our essential workforce in units subsidized by the community. The only reason we’re subsidizing other “workers” is so as not to hurt their feelings. It’s not personal. Public housing should address a public need.
· Zero transparency. We barely know our housing inventory. And only APCHA staff knows who’s in it, if and where they work, and how many empty bedrooms there are. APCHA’s insistence on hiding the facts from the public has become widely accepted. This dereliction of management by our electeds only serves to further the false narrative of needing more.
· Growth impacts. While our local governments regulate and tax all private sector development, insisting on punitive mitigation for this unwanted “growth,” they perpetuate the intellectually dishonest characterization of subsidized housing development as “impact mitigation,” not growth. Tell me again how the 24/7/365 community impacts of a 265,000 sf, 277-unit housing development are non-existent while the impact of re-developing an existing private home warrants mitigation fees for an arbitrary number of employees generated (cleaners, landscapers, maintenance) based solely on the square footage.
· Double standards. The city and county have their own employee housing units. And they encourage private employers who can to build their own inventory. Yet APCHA does not allow other local employers to participate in the housing lottery, illustrating how little we really care about optimizing our inventory and long-term unit maintenance. (No employer-owner would tolerate empty bedrooms or allow their employees to trash a unit without repercussions.)
· The failure of APCHA ownership. There is no incentive for owners to maintain their APCHA units. Demand is so high that squalor sells. A new publicly-funded repair grant program shifts maintenance from owners back to the community that subsidized the units in the first place. Increasingly high HOA dues are curbing qualified applications and enabling singles to purchase 3-bedroom units – hardly inventory optimization. An aging APCHA population and a growing number of retirees creates increasingly more empty bedrooms, and there is zero requirement or incentive to right-size.
· No central waitlist for rentals. Anyone seeking a subsidized rental must get on a waitlist at every complex. Nothing governs who gets chosen other than being APCHA-qualified, making it nearly impossible to gauge future availability and wait times, and creates a “wild west” environment of bribes and favors.
· Cultural “upward drift.” The game is to get into APCHA housing and then be set for life. It only matters what you make and what you’re worth on the day you buy. After that, you just have to work 1500 hours a year in the county. Once in, most leave the essential workforce for higher paying opportunities, oftentimes for remote employers.
· APCHA ownership units actually keep housing from the essential workforce. When 80% of our jobs pay Category 1 and 2 salaries, and less than 20% of our housing inventory is available to this group, we are instead subsidizing a middle class whose demand for community services is 24/7/365 (far greater than our visitors’), creating work rather than providing it.
· No goal, no definition of success. Today, seventy percent of our year-round population lives in subsidized housing. Since most new housing is subsidized housing, is this still “mitigation” or is it now the primary source of local population growth? How much is enough?
If the question “Who wants to live in Aspen affordably?” continues to drive the debate, we can never attain the infinite number of subsidized housing units “needed” to meet such “demand.”
The entire subsidized housing conversation in Aspen is a lie. As the old adage goes, to tell one lie, a thousand lies are needed. I just gave you ten.