De-Aspenization
May 23rd, 2009Posted in Skiing Everywhere
In a previous post, There Goes the Neighborhood, I wondered about the future of the Yellowstone Club now that economic sanity is being valued even by people with enough money to live frivolously indefinitely. Has all the bad PR and gloating by critics and schadenfreudenistas permanently branded the YC as a new kind of toxic asset, a symbol of blatant over-consumption and excess, a place rich folks looking for a home in the mountains will want to avoid? The rich have become somewhat gun shy about being noticed as rich these past few months so plunking down millions to join the YC and build a snow palace there isn’t the best way to keep a low profile regardless of how much the YC touts the privacy angle in its marketing to the wealthy. The YC will remain in the media spotlight for a long time and new members will have far less privacy and anonymity then the original members enjoyed before the club became a national story.
I don’t want to dwell too much on the Yellowstone Club because it is only a symbol of the more widespread problem impacting ski country, the bidding up of the cost of virtually everything, but especially real estate, by developers, restaurateurs, retailers and ski resorts themselves to attract the wealthiest segment of the skier market. Often termed Aspenization, the escalating cost of living in ski towns as the rich buy up more and more real estate has had lots of negative impacts on the middle class and the service workers who make the resorts and the ski towns work. The worst is the displacement of the workers and the middle class to distant bedroom communities as taxes, rents and home prices sail out of reach in ski towns. Other living costs go up too as upscale stores and restaurants replace affordable and practical stores and eateries. Why on earth are there Dior, Prada, Channel, Gucci and Fendi stores in a ski town (Aspen)? The folks who shop there can shop at those stores in whatever metropolitan area they call home the other fifty weeks of the year- or they can go right to the source while in Europe. Wouldn’t Aspen, and other ski towns, be more inviting and better for locals if local artists and artisans could afford to have shops where the European retail conglomerates out bid them?
Reading in the financial pages reports about the massive loss of wealth by the investor class (The Los Angeles Business Journal reports- “The 50 Wealthiest Angelenos collectively lost more than $32 billion as the deepening recession took a toll on virtually every major industry. Los Angeles now has just 29 billionaires, the lowest total in five years”), the shrinking numbers of millionaires and billionaires, and the hit the high end real estate market has taken, I’m wondering, and frankly hoping, that an era of de-Aspenization might be soon start.
Now it appears that posh neighborhoods all across the country are losing their financial vitality as well as their real estate valuations. After recently reporting on the liquidating of assets by the rich (art, sports cars, yachts, wines, second homes, antiques, motorcycles, etc) the Wall Street Journal’s Robert Frank askes a reasonable question, “what will happen to all the high-price floatsam and jetsam of the latest Gilded Age. The dusty Ferraris, the mansions with untended lawns, the yachts with barnacles rising up the sides. Will an economic recovery create enough buyers to snap it all up? Or will they just fall into disrepair like so many of the baubles of the 1930s?”
This past year has seen the wealthy withdraw funding from many worthwhile institutions and charities in ski towns and has seen them tighten their belts while on ski vacations eschewing private lessons and high end retailers. I’m curious to see if the retrenchment in ski country reaches the level that Mr. Frank is finding in other wealthy neighborhoods. If so, perhaps there is a chance that ski towns might become affordable again for real skiers to live in. The odds are against it, but one can hope-right?
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