January 2003

Planning

Copyright by American Planning Association

Change Comes to the Mountains

Tourist towns face an uncertain future.

By Myles C. Rademan, AICP

For mountain resort towns, these are the best and worst of times.

After two decades of unprecedented popularity, resulting in momentous growth and development, towns such as Aspen, Vail, Park City, Jackson Hole, Sun Valley, Telluride, and Crested Butte are no longer rural backwaters.

These and similar mountain tourist meccas have been colonized by waves of rich, tan, and well-to-do baby boomers; they're now part of the archipelago of Spandex and Lycra dotting the West. A running joke in these tony resorts is that the only real emergency is running out of white wine and Brie.

But as these high-end Shangri-las start showing their varicose veins and wrinkles, an air of uncertainty about the future hangs over their shining peaks. Among the worries are these:

Skiing slump

In the 20th century, the mountain towns changed their image from mining towns and railroad camps to ski towns. Their prosperity was joined at the hip with the youth culture of the baby boomers, and its rising wealth and leisure time.

Skiing as we know it started in the 1940s, picked up steam in the late 1960s, and saw its heyday in the 1980s and '90s. But the 78 million baby boomers that fueled that growth are aging; the first boomers turned 50 on January 1, 1996, and it is estimated that another 50 year old will be added every eight seconds for the next 16 years.

All of them will get a free copy of Modern Maturity and an invitation to join AARP. They will think more about cruising and golfing and less about skiing. The fact that skier visits have not grown substantially in 20 years, despite repeated efforts to reinvigorate the industry, bears this out.

It is possible, of course, that the equally large "Gen Y" cohort, or "echo boom," will improve these stagnant numbers. Snowboarding, which now accounts for 30 percent of all on-mountain visits, has certainly made its mark, and more and more youngsters are taking to the slopes in their nontraditional garb and even more nontraditional attitudes. But in reality they are simply replacing aging baby boomers, whose squeaky knees have made Advil their drug of choice.

'National suburbs'

The flip side of this aging coin is that, while the boomers may not be skiing nearly as much as they once did, they are in their prime earning years, have just come through the longest bull market in recorded history, and are the recipients of the largest intergenerational transfer of wealth the world has ever seen.

Add to this the incredible advances in information technologies (Internet, bandwidth, PDAs, even FedEx). People can live anywhere and still stay in touch, a factor that has helped to fuel the stupendous growth and building booms of the West's mountain towns.

But the mountain towns are no longer just ski towns. As Ford Frick, president of BBC Consulting, an economic consulting firm in Denver, has pointed out, "They are becoming national suburbs of seven major urban U.S. markets." Second home ownership has boomed, and "lone eagles" and "cappuccino cowboys" are establishing beachheads in ever greater numbers.

Activities like shopping, fine dining, golf, and mountain biking are making these towns attractions in their own right — quite apart from skiing. Frick estimates that more than 18,000 new housing and lodging units are on the drawing boards in Western resorts.

But how much growth is too much? And how long can this living-high-on-the-hog boom last? These are the questions that haunt public meetings and local elections. Subdivide and Conquer, a documentary shown on public television stations around the country several years ago, brought the issue to a national audience, but answers are elusive at best.

Every mountain town has access to a smorgasbord of planning tools to help it control this flood of growth. But while politicians and planners fiddle at the edges, citizens worry that their efforts are too little, too late. Numbers back their concerns. The Roaring Fork Valley, with Aspen at its headwaters, has lost 60 percent of its ranchlands in the past 20 years, and the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem has seen 3,000 square miles of development since the 1970s. Some observers estimate that this generation might be the last to witness ranching in the West.

A big part of the problem is that much of the development is sprawled on one- to five-acre tracts, making delivery of services expensive and reliance on automobiles mandatory. The question shadowing all political discussions these days is whether this pattern can or should be permitted to continue into the future.

Environmental degradation

Once thought to be the very embodiment of solidity, our mountain regions are now seen as fragile and shrinking islands of biodiversity. It has become obvious to even the most callous observers that they are not immune to D-9s (Caterpillar's giant bulldozers) or the blindly grandiose schemes of dreamers and developers.

Recognizing how quickly time is running out, the United Nations declared 2002 the International Year of the Mountains and cosponsored conferences worldwide to focus attention on their plight. In October, one of these meetings was held in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. "Mountain Resort Planning and Development in an Era of Globalization" was cosponsored by the University of Colorado, British Columbia's Simon Fraser University, and the Denver-based Center for Resource Management.

The sessions brought together academics and planning practitioners to focus on what is "sustainable" and how sustainability can be implemented and institutionalized.

Terry Minger and Meredith Miller from the Center for Resource Management urged participants to view mountains not merely as landscapes but as "laboratories of sustainability," and reminded them that patriotism means a love of land and place. Others spoke about the dangers of unfettered free enterprise.

Still other speakers noted that mountain regions are a relic of a 19th century Balkanization. Overlapping and competing jurisdictions hamper efforts to intelligently manage these increasingly fragile and fragmented ecosystems. Planners have entered the battle with attempts to design comprehensive regional systems, but with spotty success.

Michael Smith, a professor of planning at California's Humboldt State University, pointed out that growth management policies often simply redirect growth to meet new environmental and community standards. In an unfinished study, Smith has asked Western resort planning professionals to rate the best and worst land-use tools for protecting their communities.

His preliminary results reveal that the best tools include: outright purchase, protective zoning, land trusts, and comprehensive plans, while the least effective tools include permit restrictions, impact fees, density bonuses, and regional planning. This distrust of regional planning reflects Americans' distrust of government in general and the clinging fear of losing local control in particular.

Whether citizens will ever embrace a regional future and demonstrate the courage to share power and resources across jurisdictional boundaries remains a highly problematic and open question.

Equity gap

A prevailing joke in many upscale resort towns is that billionaires are pushing out millionaires. Meanwhile, those who work for wages feel the pinch most. The growing equity gap apparent elsewhere in the country is more pronounced in mountain towns, where a huge income chasm has opened between the worker bees and their affluent neighbors.

Lately, a flood of poor Hispanics, hired to fill the lower rung resort jobs, has exacerbated this disparity. Gary Lindstrom, the elected county commissioner of Summit County, Colorado, estimated at the conference that over 10 percent of his county's residents don't speak English and earn barely minimum wages.

The affordable housing shortage is made worse by the scarcity of developable land, the market's preference for trophy homes, and increasingly stringent planning regulations. Lindstrom noted that many jurisdictions have a long list of Robin Hood schemes for redistributing wealth, either by mandating affordable housing in new developments, or redistributing tax dollars to subsidize housing units for the working class. But all these schemes fall far short of the need, he said.

Many long-term residents have simply picked up and moved to adjoining or outlying communities where land prices and housing are cheaper. This has created the "downvalley" syndrome of bedroom communities and long commutes. The result: mountain towns sprawled into mountain regions.

These new mountain megalopolises now face the same sorts of traffic, pollution, and social issues as their urban cousins. But the biggest downside to this decentralization, or "hollowing out," of mountain towns is its impact on the future vitality of the communities themselves.

With the teachers, firefighters, planners, and resort workers moving out, the questions of who will serve on civic boards, play softball in the park, or turn off the lights when the tourists leave is paramount. Years ago, a bumper sticker prophetically proclaimed, "Aspen is alive and well ... in Basalt," a small town some 20 miles downvalley.

Economic stratification will in fact be the defining issue of the next decade. Mountain towns are more than the sum total of altitude, log mansions, and tourists. Locals are the community, yet they can no longer afford to live in the towns they helped to create. As gentrification intensifies, only the very rich, and sometimes the poor, remain. The middle class has fled and with it the vitality that makes these places exciting to visit.

Urban denial

Terry Minger and Meredith Miller challenged participants at the mountain resort conference to think about "What's the next next?" What comes after skiing, after build-out, after environmental despoliation, they asked. Can citizens replace a "politics of interest" with a "politics of place"? Good questions for all communities.

Many mountain towns are stuck in their dreams. Those who have escaped to them often suffer from "urban denial" and find it hard to admit that the problems of the outside world have caught up with them. But the ugly reality is that maintaining the status quo, whether through physical planning or economic exclusion, cannot protect against change.

While many residents would like to see the gates go up, and their mountain paradises become gated theme parks, the shallowness of such an undemocratic dream is widely understood. Democracy is still key to guaranteeing human dignity and personal growth.

Mountain towns face a conundrum: how to grow and thrive while ensuring their long-term survival. "Our generation might best be remembered by what we choose not to do," University of Colorado historian Patricia Limerick has noted, suggesting that a new paradigm is needed for towns that have been addicted to growth and development.

What's certain is that equity and sustainability are essential qualities for towns that hope to survive — and thrive. And that means the end of gaudy opulence and architectural extravagance.

Planning is a step in the right direction. Even more important is a renewed sense of stewardship on the part of local residents.

A hopeful sign is that many mountain town residents are reconsidering counterproductive notions of unfettered freedom, limitless mobility, and unrestrained entrepreneurialism. They are discovering the inner strength to practice restraint, consider "enoughness," and renew their lives with spirituality. Accomplishing such a change without suspending the laws of economics will be the ultimate challenge.

Myles Rademan is the public affairs director for Park City, Utah, a former planning director of Crested Butte, Colorado, and president of Rademan & Associates, which specializes in community strategic planning and leadership training.