Editor:
When Walter Paepcke started the Aspen Institute, he recognized the power of ideas. Now, 75 years later, the institute has joined many others in subscribing to the powerful idea that in the Roaring Fork Valley, and especially in Pitkin County, we have an “affordable housing crisis.”
But what if this powerful idea is an illusion, a siren’s song? What if there’s no “crisis” that can be solved? What if reports of a housing “shortage” are actually well-disguised prescriptions for perpetual growth, overcrowding and environmental degradation? Maybe we don’t need businesses that can’t function without subsidized, cheap labor.
Maybe high housing prices, long commutes and labor scarcity, if allowed to operate without taxpayer-funded governmental intervention, would lead to a better quality of life for those who could still afford to work and live here. Maybe the hard truth is that not everyone who wants to live here gets to live here, and maybe this is not selfish elitism but just a fact of life.
Numerous economists have recognized that, in an amenity-rich locale like ours, the demand for housing is global, effectively infinite and cannot be satisfied by building more “affordable” homes. So it’s surprising that, with a lot of well-educated, high-IQ locals, we apparently haven’t done any critical thinking about whether building more affordable housing is ultimately futile and unsustainable.
Maybe the better solution is a basket of measures that don’t lock us into the donkey-chasing-the-carrot-on-a-stick paradigm. Maybe we should recognize that commuting long distances is a personal choice, not a societal problem, and that not every community can, or should, accommodate all income levels and occupations.
Maybe shelving the construction of more subsidized housing, converting free-market housing to affordable and incentivizing businesses to house more of their workers, would, in the long run, be the better course.
Barry Vaughan
El Jebel