Many people lost everything and are now sheltering far from home, where they face an uncertain future. Unfortunately, climate change is part of their story.

On October 12, ex-Typhoon Halong, the second and stronger storm, slammed into the villages of Kipnuk and Kwigillingok along the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. A late jog in the storm track gave the over 1,000 residents little warning.

As gusts topped 100 miles per hour and seawater surged inland, houses never built for such conditions floated away or crumbled. In Kipnuk, people crawled through the windows of flooding houses and waded in darkness and howling winds toward their neighbors, only to find their homes gone, too. The school provided shelter.

Rescuers arriving in Kipnuk found nearly all homes destroyed and failing water, sanitation and power. Far from Alaska’s road system, the village of 700 evacuated, in what became part of Alaska’s largest-ever civilian airlift.

Helicopters plucked people from eroded runways, carrying them 60 miles to Bethel, population 6,200. As shelters overflowed, C-17 military transports thundered in to bring survivors to Anchorage, another 300 miles from home. Exhausted survivors filed from planes without much more than their clothing.

Many do not know when or if they’ll ever return home.

Their plight is unique in America. No roads lead to these communities. No utility trucks are headed their way, something we see after Western fires and Atlantic hurricanes. Everything arrives slowly and at exorbitant cost by barge or plane, mostly in summer.

Additionally, many residents live by a subsistence economy. They have lost hard-won winter stores and precious boats, snow machines and other expensive tools for securing food. They are American refugees.

In a day, these members of close-knit and culturally distinct communities suddenly scattered to Bethel, Fairbanks, Anchorage, and elsewhere. People are generously sharing necessities, but they can’t replace connections, like the daily use of Yup’ik language and humor, or a young person walking in the door with fresh traditional soup for an Elder.

Although fierce fall storms are common in Alaska, scientists have long warned that ongoing warming in the North Pacific and Bering Sea can energize the storms beyond historical norms. Today, a stubborn Pacific marine heatwave exacerbates the warming. It’s premature to say how much warming fed these storms, but the science warrants dialogue and research, not the recent zeroing-out of federal research funds.

Declining sea ice and thawing permafrost have also dramatically increased erosion in dozens of Alaskan communities, especially during fall storms. The recent storms tore away more land, edging waters closer to vital power and other infrastructure. At the village of Quinhagak, the storm swallowed 60 feet of shoreline and scattered thousands of Yup’ik archaeological artifacts.

Federal reports name over 30 Alaskan villages imminently threatened by erosion. Investing in their resilience to avoid the trauma and astronomic cost of relocation—or sudden destruction—was behind Biden-era clean energy and infrastructure laws, which Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski and other Alaskans helped author.

But the new administration abruptly canceled dozens of projects, including a $20 million EPA plan to fortify the now decimated Kipnuk. The work would not have started in time to make a difference by this fall, but what just happened signals an urgent need for investment in vulnerable communities.

The disaster comes amid a government shutdown and the gutting of  Alaska public radio, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the National Weather Service, which now flies fewer weather balloons to aid forecasters near the Bering Sea.

Yet Alaska’s National Guard, Native consortiums, businesses and nonprofits have embraced survivors. They are cleaning up and flying pet-rescue missions. In Anchorage, shelters have opened for survivors, and an already stretched school district is compassionately working to absorb at least 130 displaced students, for whom urban schools may bring further shock.

Western Alaska communities, already bearing their share of the disaster, are also acting on ingrained Yup’ik and Iñupiat values as they support their neighbors. It’s how Indigenous people have thrived here for 10,000 years.

Outside Alaska, news media didn’t give this disaster its due and has since moved on. But people should know about these storms, and can consider giving to the Alaska Community Foundation relief fund coordinated through Alaska Native and other organizations.

Tim Lydon lives in Alaska and is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

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We were young professionals and bought a cute one-bedroom crackerbox in a small Montana town for less than $50,000. Today on Zillow, that house lists for more than $300,000. There’s no way salaries have kept up with that kind of inflation. Clearly, rising costs are hitting the working class hard. The escalating prices of fuel, food and shelter squeeze families like a vise.

But that doesn’t excuse people who would use the national housing crisis to advance their agenda to strip Americans of their public land heritage. While there are some rare opportunities for public land sales to help ease the tight housing market here and there, wholesale liquidating of public land is a false promise.

People should know that the folks who ideologically oppose public land are exploiting the housing crisis to push their unpopular agenda.

Recently, some pundits have suggested that a fix for America’s housing problem is to sell off the public estate, thereby increasing the supply of available land. After all, the federal government managed hundreds of millions of acres.

In a few widely scattered places, it makes sense to allow careful urban development on limited public lands. Clark County, Nevada, has done just that on the outskirts of Las Vegas. But that scenario has been collaboratively developed over the years through legislation pushed through by the late Nevada Democratic Senator Harry Reid.

A crop of mostly Republican politicians in the West resent the public estate simply because they dislike the idea of federal land ownership. They use both the courts and Congress in their attempts to reduce the public estate. In their vision, Western states should be more like Missouri or Kansas, with almost no public land.

These folks insist they aren’t targeting national parks or even national forests. They know that’s political suicide. Instead, they focus on Bureau of Land Management property as a precedent, which most people have never heard of. And what are these lands like?

First, the vast majority of BLM land is remote and rugged. Think of the tundra of Alaska, the basin-and-range desert of Nevada, and the Missouri River Breaks of northern Montana. These are history’s leftovers, and not where most people want to—or even can—live. 

Second, these areas tend to be arid. Developments require water, and Western water rights already tend to be oversubscribed. Local climate alone means that human habitation in these places can’t be very dense.

These lands also are often prone to wildfire. Loading these “wildland-urban interfaces” with more homes could lead to future disaster. Managing fire risk in the interface grows more difficult and costly as they are developed. When the fires do come, damages can climb into the billions, rather than the millions. The tragic 2025 fires of Los Angeles would have been even more catastrophic had the adjacent Angeles National Forest been full of homes.

One more value is worth pointing out. Even if these public lands don’t have houses on them, public lands are being used.

Undeveloped canyons help control floods. Open lands provide habitat for wildlife—not just rare species—but also the deer and elk we like to hunt and the birds we like to watch. Public lands are valuable for recreation that’s good for our souls and are the goose that lays the golden egg for many rural economies.

The bottom line is that this debate has virtually nothing to do with the price of homes, which are high for a complex mix of reasons ranging from local growth policies, wealth disparity, and high interest rates.

There’s a shortfall of millions of homes nationwide, but most of the demand simply isn’t where the public lands are. The BLM already has a process to liquidate lands when it needs to or when it makes sense. There is no screaming need for reform of that process, even if there is a screaming need for affordable housing.

To a local eye with any perspective, it’s clear that the argument to sell public lands for housing is a Trojan horse to take public lands out of public hands.

Ben Long is a contributor to Writers on the Range, Writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is senior program director for Resource Media in Kalispell, Montana.

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Commuters include nurses, teachers, police, waiters, cooks, motel housekeepers, construction workers, landscapers, fishing and mountain guides, and salespeople. All are Jackson Hole’s economic lifeline.

On June 8, the highway over Teton Pass failed catastrophically, part of it collapsing into an impassable cliff of rubble. The failure made national news, and now you can spend hours on Facebook reading everyone’s opinions about what should be done. Calls for building a tunnel through the mountain are resurfacing, although the tunnel that was previously proposed would not have bypassed the section of road that failed. 

The Teton Pass highway is vital to Jackson’s functioning as a tourist mecca. In good conditions, driving the 24 miles from Victor to Jackson over Teton Pass takes about 35 minutes. Now, a detour means that workers have to drive roughly 85 miles to get to their jobs, adding about two hours to the daily commute.

Jackson town councilor and economist Jonathan Schechter estimates the road closure is costing the local economy roughly $600,000 a day, and he says that’s a conservative figure. Using IRS numbers for mileage reimbursement, the cost for drivers is $88 a day, while the mean hourly wage in Jackson is $40. Not only has the commute become nearly four times longer, but workers also have to put in an extra two hours to cover the cost of that drive time.

Jackson residents have responded to the crisis with compassion and financial aid. Homeowners have opened their houses in Jackson, and many are allowing people to pitch tents in their yards. Businesses are offering parking lot space for RVs. Teton County, Wyoming, eased its temporary shelter regulations, and the daily commuter bus altered its schedule and waived its fees until June 30 to accommodate riders.  The Teton Valley Community Foundation set up a fund that accepts donations for affected workers. I am sure there are many other services and resources as well.

But camping in Jackson means you aren’t going home after work. It means you may not see your children, partner or friends for days on end. It means you need to get someone to feed your dog or check in on your cat, horses, gardens or plants. It means you cannot enjoy the natural world—why most of us live here—because you’re driving a car.

Most of us have a love-hate relationship with Teton Pass. There’s an Instagram page called TetonPassholes, dedicated to showing people doing stupid things on the road. Most of the time it’s video clips of truckers ignoring the winter trailer ban; sometimes it’s pictures of people driving recklessly. We snarl and complain, but we still drive the road because it gets us where we need to go.

The average list price for a single-family home in Jackson reached $7.6 million at the end of 2022, according to the Jackson Hole Report. In the first months of 2024, 56 homes were on the market, with only three listed for less than $2 million.

In Victor, Idaho, the median price for homes was $537,000, an asking price that’s not reasonable for most working people. Housing is in short supply in Victor, too.

For years, affordable housing has been a hot-button topic on both sides of the pass, as well as an hour south of Jackson in booming Star Valley. Now that the funnel that allows Jackson to prosper has been blocked, we can see more clearly than ever that our current model—housing the rich in one town, workers in another—is not sustainable.

Wyoming Department of Transportation has indicated that it hopes to open a temporary bypass around the landslide in as little as two weeks. A long-term solution will undoubtedly take months, if not years. 

In the meantime, I hope our community leaders take this as a wake-up call and address the absolute need for workforce housing. A temporary patch will not address the crisis that this road failure has dramatized.

Molly Absolon is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit spurring lively conversation about the West. She is a writer in Idaho.

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Meanwhile, in California, some fire insurers have lost so much money they’ve pulled out of the state. Overall, fire insurance is becoming as expensive and unpredictable as the natural disasters—not just wildfires but also hail and windstorms—that are driving up rate increases. In some places, increases are as much as 1,000% for houses and condos nestled close to trees.

In Colorado, Tiffany Lockwood said she was dropped twice by fire insurance carriers over the 10 years she’s lived in Evergreen, a heavily forested exurb of Denver.

A former Florida resident, Lockwood, 59, only has one way out in case of a wildfire—and even then she’ll have little warning. “When I lived in Florida,” she said, “we knew four days ahead when a hurricane was coming. Here we get 40 minutes.”

Lockwood thinks insurance companies are running scared and giving impossible directives. One insurer asked her to remove all the shrubs and trees within 30 feet of the house. But the plan meant taking down a lot of her neighbor’s trees, too.

Evergreen’s attraction is that residents live amidst towering conifer trees. But red zones on fire maps are being expanded all over Colorado after several recent large forest fires and the wind-driven Marshall grassfire outside of Boulder, in December 2021. It destroyed more than 1,000 suburban homes and was the state’s most expensive fire yet. Formerly “safe” places are now described as at-risk.

Jeff Geslin lives in high and dry La Plata County, in southwestern Colorado, surrounded by 35 acres of piñon and juniper trees. He and his wife Lorna are used to remediation plans, he said, and when their insurance increases, “I just pay it, no questions asked.”

But they were shocked when their condo association in Summit County, governing their second home, lost its insurance policy.

“It might be because we’re close to Forest Service land,” Geslin said, “which must be more risk.” Geslin was assessed $6,772 extra for the new policy the Homeowners Association managed to find—an increase of 1,000%.

Colorado State Senator Dylan Roberts is working on legislation to insure larger structures. “I’ve gotten calls about insurance for the last year if not two years,” he said. “The single-family upset has quieted down, but the big thing I hear about is HOA and condo buildings.”

The state already has what is called the Fair Access to Insurance Requirements (FAIR) Plan in place for smaller buildings when insurance companies refuse to underwrite traditional coverage. It’s backed by private insurers and administered by an appointed board of insurance professionals.

“We hope to insure no one,” said FAIR Plan board member Carole Walker. She’s the executive director of an insurance trade group covering, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah.

“This is insurance of last resort,” she said, “as we don’t want to compete with private insurers. They’re  struggling after 10 straight years of unprofitability in property insurance.”

The FAIR Plan board, which plans to sell policies late next year, hired industry veteran Kelly Campbell as executive director this May. It will offer bare-bones coverage with high deductibles and low maximum amounts. The plan would offer coverage of $5 million per commercial structure and $750,000 per house.

“Everything has escalated,” said Walker. “Colorado is in that perfect storm of catastrophes. The number of claims and the cost to pay those claims is at a record pace. Add in the escalating number of events like hail and wildfire, and it’s the hardest insurance market in a generation.”

Walker says Colorado established a resiliency code board via state law in 2023, with a mandate of hardening structures with fire-resistant siding, metal roofs and landscaping. “We need confidence back in the marketplace,” she said about the board. “Ultimately, this is a life-safety issue because wildfire knows no boundaries. You’re dependent on your neighbor.”

Kevin Parks, a State Farm insurer in Western Colorado, has some advice for Western homeowners: “Widen your driveway and road to 20 feet, install a turnaround big enough for fire vehicles, remove shrubs and trees close to your house, and add a perimeter of gravel all around your structure. Finally, hope you live where two roads lead to your house.”

In this new age of longer and meaner fire seasons, Parks added, “The fire is coming—now it’s a question of being ready.”

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.

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I grew up in Aspen, and sometimes my dad took me there to look at all the dollar bills on the wall. He made sure a picture of me and my first bull elk joined pictures in the bar of ski bums in head-to-toe denim.

Nowadays the bills are $100s and the pictures on the walls look like fashion shoots. What would Hunter Thompson think? Likely that the greedheads had won. Most of the West’s resort towns have undergone something of an Aspenification, and that includes Aspen’s bedroom communities of Basalt, Carbondale and Rifle that send workers to the ski lifts and restaurants.

When I was young, my family bounced around Aspen-area trailer parks, and even lived in the office of a horse-stable at the base of Aspen Highlands Ski Resort. The cabin had no running water, and the only heat was a wood stove. We’d sled down the hill hanging on to our groceries and water jugs.

When I was eight, my mom was able to buy a deed-restricted condo in Aspen. Even then we needed to add a roommate to afford our 740 square foot, two-bedroom apartment, one of us sleeping on the day-bed in the living room.

Dad called it “condo-bondage,” and a love of horses, hunting and open spaces pushed him farther down-valley before he settled in Silt, over an hour from Aspen. 

I spent my middle-school years there, living with my dad in the early 1990s, and it felt like a different world. Decades later I remember the first Sotheby’s “for sale” sign I saw outside of a ranch near Silt. 

A feeling of dread swept over me. The same dread I felt as a senior in Aspen High School with a job, basic math skills and a sinking realization that I couldn’t afford to live in my hometown. I thought, “My dentist commutes from over 70 miles away, how could I afford to live here?” 

Twenty years ago, I moved to Grand Junction, a historically blue-collar town, the biggest in Western Colorado with 65,000 people. Now, even humble Grand Junction is undergoing Aspenification despite being over two hours from the glitz of Telluride or Aspen.

It’s a long way from the town’s history of milling uranium and then stashing its tailings—still containing high amounts of radioactivity—along the Colorado River, not to mention meth epidemics and an ongoing homelessness crisis. 

But these days you can ride a zip-line across the Colorado River, rent an electric scooter or buy a luxury condo downtown, built by Aspen-based developers.

The downsides of this Aspenification are hard to ignore. A 2019 study found that the Grand Valley surrounding Grand Junction was short some 3,736 units of affordable housing. Since then, housing costs and homelessness have both risen about 45%, according to Grand Junction Housing Manager Ashley Chambers.

“Seniors are getting creamed, service workers are getting creamed, and it’s adding to the homelessness crisis,” said Scott Beilfuss, Grand Junction City Councilman. 

“If we remain a healthcare, service and retail-based economy, wages will never catch up with housing costs,” Beilfuss said. “This has consequences for the entire Western Slope.”  

But here’s what I’ve learned from growing up in Aspen. The perpetrator of this rural transformation has lessons to teach us. The town has run a robust and affordable housing program for years, and a recent study found that two-thirds of occupied housing units in Aspen were affordable. 

Additionally, Aspen has long invested in a world-class public transit system so workers can commute from miles away.

There are glitches. My mother, who still lives in her deed-restricted condo, learned that her basement often fills with leach water collected from Aspen’s toxic mining heritage. Repair estimates are $10 million—a sum she and the 79 other households can’t begin to afford. 

What Aspen’s success teaches us is that the greedheads can’t be stopped, but they can be pressured to build or subsidize affordable housing, something that’s in the resort town’s interest.

Aspen also shows us that communities downstream need to organize to fight for affordable housing. And they need to stay organized, because the greedheads would rather fight you every step of the way. 

Jacob Richards is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a writer and outdoor guide in Grand Junction, Colorado.

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Like any western resort town, it desperately needs affordable housing. What locals say it doesn’t need is a high-end development on a sandbar projecting into the Colorado River, where groves of cottonwoods, willows and hackberries flourish.

“Delusional,” shameful” or “outrageous” is what many locals call this Kane Creek Preservation and Development project, some sending letters of outrage to the weekly Moab Times-Independent and Moab Sun News. Developers plan 580 luxury housing units and a business park on the floodplain. 

The 180-acre site is less than two miles downstream of Moab along a cracked asphalt road that’s barely two lanes. The development site and the unpredictable river are bounded by looming canyon walls. The road turns to dirt at the downstream end of the site before heading up Kane Creek, a popular mountain biking, hiking and four-wheeling area.

Just upstream of the site, there’s a riverside BLM campground and the mouth of cottonwood-shaded Moonflower Canyon, with its ancient petroglyph panels. 

I first saw this floodplain site in April 1984 when it was underwater. Moab’s former Mosquito Abatement Manager Bob Phillips reports he canoed the site in 1995.

By mid-January of this year, a petition fighting the development, created by Moab resident Laura Long, had 1,200 local signatures. More than 13,000 other signatures came from visitors to Moab or former residents who have their own connections to this land of canyons and slickrock. Access the petition and more information here: https://kanecreekwatch.org/.

A Jan. 16 Grand County Commission meeting about the development packed the chambers, the hallway and Zoom lines. The crowds of largely younger activists made the hearts of us older residents swell.  

Like many resort towns in the west, Moab is rich in beauty, nature and outdoor activities. It’s why locals live and work here, and it’s what we care about preserving. But housing is hard to come by for working people.

Many live in their cars and vans. Local government and nonprofits pursue admirable, but relatively small-scale projects, to build workforce and low-income housing. Unfortunately, this high-end project won’t bring us what we need.

How was this project approved? It’s complicated, but in 1992, the Grand County Commission mistakenly granted rights to build dense commercial and residential buildings on this property, instead of just the campground the former owners wanted. Developers are now exploiting the mistake.

The project has approval to haul in 8 to 10 feet of fill to bury the riparian soils and reach the required one-foot elevation above the designated 100-year floodplain. The County Commission hoped to exercise some control by governing the development’s water and sewer treatment plants, but the state Legislature intervened and allowed developers to run their own district instead.

“Re-grading” is underway and expected to take more than a year. It is major earth-moving, building up the floodplain and the adjacent Kane Creek Road.

Now, drivers and mule deer must watch for haul trucks that move cobbles, gravel and sand onto the floodplain. Migrating and resident birds that nest there may need to make new plans this spring.

Moab resident and Colorado River expert John Weisheit, along with others, have documented evidence of the Colorado River flooding in the past, some floods four times greater than any river volume in living memory.

Future, smaller floods may flood the site with upwelling from rising groundwater. Larger floods will most likely occur as climate change brings more extreme weather events. The entire development could be inundated, causing property loss and a lot of debris flowing downstream and into Canyonlands National Park.

This floodplain should be left alone. Think of the coming of floods small and large, unsolved housing issues, potential sewage-treatment plant failures, lawsuits, road issues, disrupted dark skies, destruction of a wide swath of critical wildlife habitat in the desert, and, of course, heartbreak.

Besides reading like an absurd satire, it sounds like a very poor investment.

Mary Moran is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She lives in Moab where she is a hiker and birder. For 20 years, she worked for Arches and Canyonlands national parks.

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In ski towns in western Colorado in 2005, risk was everywhere, but in a way that felt exciting. I liked the brag of drinking too much, and I was too naïve to notice harder drugs. Climate change seemed theoretical, and no one I knew had died in the mountains yet.

Corporate entities were just starting to binge-buy resorts while I somehow thought that living in my car was cool and I could exist like that forever.

But myths are complicated things to keep alive, and I eventually left ski towns to work as a writer, already seeing the ski-bum dream changing. I saw friends struggling to build careers, families and community while still chasing the fragile dream that a powder day topped almost everything.

So recently, I went back to see what was going on, to try to track the evolution of what had been my own obsession. I looped through mountain towns across the West, from Aspen, Colorado to Victor, Idaho and Big Sky, Montana, to assess the current state of ski bums.

What I found was that everyone trying to build a life in those towns was struggling, from my old colleagues who had stuck around and wished they’d bought real estate to “lifties” fresh out of school.

“A lot of people here are living a fantasy I can’t obtain,” said Malachi Artice, a 20-something skier working multiple jobs in Jackson, Wyoming.

At the most basic level, the math just didn’t work. In most mountain towns, it’s now nearly impossible to work a single full-time service job, the kind that resort towns depend on, and afford rent. The pressure shows up in nearly everything, including abysmal mental health outcomes like anxiety and depression.

Ski towns have some of the highest suicide rates in the country, and social services haven’t expanded to meet demand. Racial gaps are also widening in an industry that often depends on undocumented immigrants to fill the poorly paid, but necessary, jobs it takes to keep a tourist town running.

On top of all that, abundant snowfall, the basis of a ski resort’s economy, is getting cooked by climate change.

And sure, you can argue skiing is superficial and unimportant, but ski towns—some of the most elite and economically unequal places in the country—are microcosms for the way our social fabric is splitting.

Ski towns face crucial, complicated questions: Can they build affordable housing and also preserve open space? What happens when healthcare workers or teachers won’t take jobs because they can’t find a way to live in the community they serve? Will a town willingly curb growth when that’s what supports the tax base?

There are no easy answers because the problems are entrenched in both that slow-moving nostalgia that stymies change, and in the downhill rush of capitalism, which gives power to whoever pays the most: The housing market always tilts toward high-end real estate instead of modestly priced homes for essential workers.

What we value shapes our lives, and so I think we must hold the ski industry to higher standards. If these rarefied places can find ways to support working as well as leisure-based communities, they could serve as lessons for change elsewhere.

During my tour, I saw necessary workers in the ski industry facing hard economic choices, but I also saw positive, community-scale change. In Alta, Utah, for instance, the arts nonprofit Alta Community Enrichment added mental health support when its employees reported an urgent need.

If ski-resort towns are going to survive, the lives of their workers need to matter, and that means caring about them—from affordable housing to accessible mental health support.

Heather Hansman is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She is the author of Powder Days: Ski Bums, Ski Towns and the Future of Chasing Snow, and lives in Durango, Colorado.

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Residents across the West will recognize why so many came out that snowy night. A proposed development, called Holtan Hills, would expand our town’s footprint but include almost nothing affordable for teachers, firefighters, wait staff or others who comprise the soul of our community and drive its economy.

With no guardrails to support local homeownership, second-home real estate investors would likely gobble up the project’s predominantly high-end units. It’s happening already, with most shunning the long-term rental needs of a few thousand people in this south-central Alaskan community. New owners often offer nightly rentals or just leave their houses unoccupied.

That would mean more empty houses in a town with a severe housing shortage. The dozens who testified that night, and the hundreds who wrote letters, described the impacts.

They included Emma, who runs a fishing boat with her husband, and whose young-adult daughter can’t find a place to rent in the town where she grew up and now works. And Amanda, the pizza shop owner, who is overwhelmed trying to help her employees find housing, including the 65-year-old man whose landlord recently booted him out on short notice.

Erin described bailing on her long-held dream of raising a family here after 11 years of pouring her talents into nonprofit youth education programs. She reminded me of Autumn, my daughter’s former piano teacher, who recently moved away after years of teaching music to local kids. She had been unable to find steady housing.

Such stories swirled into that winter night from the heroes every mountain community knows — the ones who clean rentals, provide health care, build houses and teach our kids to speak, spell, ski and say “thank you.” Business owners were there, too, detailing how the lack of attainable housing causes employee shortages that curtail operating hours, leaving fewer visitor services.

Some who didn’t speak that night included the local workers who sleep in their cars or in drafty cabins on the edge of town. We also didn’t hear from the Filipino parents of my daughter’s close playmate, who are trying hard to remain in the town where their accounting jobs are located, and where their daughter is thriving.

Dozens of us highlighted how communities across the West have fought similar battles for an entire generation now. We talked about Whitefish, Tahoe, Breckenridge, Boise and other towns. We explained their use of sensible deed restrictions, limits on nightly rentals, incentives that promote local home ownership, and concessions from developers. All helped local workers attain housing.

I know the benefits. Living in Colorado in the 1990s, I accepted a financial incentive to put a deed restriction on my modest condo. After my wife and I sold the condo, the payment became seed money for our first house. Meanwhile, the condo still holds a deed restriction that helps locals enter the market. Under such reasonable measures, developers could still make buckets of money while workers gained access to housing.

Someone else who didn’t show that night was the developer, who instead dropped a guest column in the state’s largest newspaper maligning her project’s critics.

Some of our elected officials were equally indifferent. One blithely suggested that someone just needs to build a hardware store in town so that building costs could come down. Another asked why our town hadn’t solved the housing issue earlier. Others grilled residents on how many more houses it would take to solve the problem.

Of course, as with many Western communities, the issue is not an actual shortage of houses. It’s the blizzard of cash that second-home speculators and others can throw at any property that enters the market.

The meeting ran almost to midnight, as snow blanketed the cars outside. I imagined this must have been the scene two decades ago, as housing proponents in the West’s mountain towns spent nights eking out seemingly small wins. But those wins are now the proven programs that can help communities today.

We just need elected officials to understand that people can’t work here if they have nowhere to live.

Tim Lydon is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about the West. He writes in Alaska.

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McNatt works as an operating room nurse and is a single mother of two teenagers, one about to go to college. Though she landed on the homeownership ladder at one of its lower rungs, she’s relieved. “But this is not how I saw myself approaching the age of 40,” she muses.

The rent on her home lot is $650; her mortgage just $604. Combined, that’s about half of what she had been paying to rent an apartment in Durango.

These days, real estate prices in Durango, as in so many Western towns, have outrun most workers’ ability to buy or even rent modest digs. McNatt, for example, makes $85,000 annually, which places her at over 90% of the area median income in Durango.

A two-year-old study by Root Policy, a Denver consulting firm, showed that single- and two-parent households have begun leaving Durango and southwestern Colorado in droves. Replacing them are retirees and wealthy non-working people. That means businesses struggle to find workers as 80% of people moving into La Plata County don’t work in the region.

Adding to the housing crisis is the boom in short-term rentals, compounded by second-home owners snatching up houses once rented to students at the local Fort Lewis College. Fort Lewis has been scrambling for housing. Starting in 2019, demand for on-campus living skyrocketed, and this August, the college of 3,856 students placed 93 kids in hotel rooms. Thirty more were quadruple-bunked in off-off-campus apartments.

The town thrums with stories of scores of students living in cars and scouting for “safe parking,” meaning places where police won’t roust them out. Others camp out on public lands.

The city of Durango, population 19,400, has tried to help by limiting short-term rentals within city limits, and hiring housing expert Eva Henson to figure out how to create workforce housing.

At a Durango council meeting last month, Henson said that only 169 housing units are under construction, while a thousand more are planned. Finished units for the first nine months of 2022 totaled 59. Meanwhile, a ballyhooed Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) regulation, which would allow homeowners to add “granny flats,” fizzled. Just two were completed this year, and potential builders complain that restrictions remain tight.

According to the Root Policy study, Southwestern Colorado’s overall housing deficit is 2,500 housing units. “Every town is short on housing,” agrees Nicole Killian, a community development director for the Durango bedroom community of Bayfield. Killian says developers plan to build 800 homes over the next decade, a 75% increase in housing units.

What everyone can agree on is that the area’s housing shortage began in Durango, the biggest and most attractive town, then radiated out to every other town within 50 miles.

“Durango has had a sales tax that funded parks and recreation,” says Mayor Barbara Noseworthy. “Now we need to redirect some of that money toward housing.” But the council is divided, with some members favoring a free market approach.

So far, the free market wants only million-dollar homes. McNatt tells the story of two clinical experts at the hospital, each making $160,000, who “have looked for a house forever. And he’s like, I refuse to pay $1 million for a house.” In the end, “they paid over $1 million and are now house-poor.”

One result of the housing crunch, says Mayor Noseworthy, is finding people for essential jobs: “We have difficulty getting math teachers. If you can’t get a high school math teacher, who’s going to live here?”

Meanwhile, one housing solution in Durango has been Chris Hall’s Hermosa Orchards Village of 22 tiny owner-occupied homes, a gem of collegiality. Many of its residents commute to Purgatory Ski Area or Silverton seasonally, and given their small inside spaces, tend to congregate outside on their stoops.

On Nov. 8, there is hope for affordable housing, thanks to Proposition 123 on the ballot. The measure would give grants and loans to local nonprofits to build workforce housing, and provide mortgage assistance to people like McNatt.

At the end of my interview with McNatt, she took me to meet a friend who lives in a storage unit. The box-like space was narrow, his sleeping bag on a foam pad just fitting between a snow blower and a leaf blower. He said he was glad he’d found it.

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He lives in Durango, CO.

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Westside’s fate was hardly a given. The New York-based owner, Neal Kurzner, rejected their first offer, saying he had a corporate buyer who owned many trailer parks and was ready to pay $5.5 million in cash. He gave the community just seven days to come up with a cash offer.    

“We knew what was at risk,” resident Darcy Diaz, told me. “But how do you raise $5.5 million?”  

Diaz, who grew up in Colombia and moved to Westside in 2018, knew their only hope was to organize. With a group of other determined residents, Diaz helped start the Westside Mobile Home Park Cooperative.  

It launched a GoFundMe account, opened a Facebook page, and prepared tamales, posole, and empanadas to fundraise for the cause. Then Local First, which supports development initiatives in La Plata County, granted Westside $140,000 in cash plus a $395,000 zero-interest loan, while the Durango community turned out in force, helping Westside raise just over $50,000 in less than a week.   

In the meantime, Stefka Fanchi, who heads up Elevation Community Land Trust, shored up support from county officials, banks and a handful of non-profits. Westside Co-op’s relationship with Elevation, which advocates for housing solutions for working-class people, provided the collateral needed to support the project.  

The result: In just five days, Elevation and Westside pieced together $5.56 million in cash plus closing fees. On March 25, they submitted their offer.  

For nearly a week, the community waited to hear back, with many residents saying they could hardly sleep.    

Then, on March 31, Fanchi said she had news. Diaz and her fellow organizers gathered around a single computer in a neighbor’s kitchen.  “It’s been a really tough week,” Fanchi began over Zoom. “And I do have an update, and that is that we are buying the Westside Mobile Home Park!”    

“They accepted!” residents screamed, crying and turning to each other in joy. Diaz hugged her 2-year-old daughter, and on the screen, Fanchi and her colleagues wept.     

Westside’s success provides hope in a housing market where mobile home parks are frequently sold on short notice followed by large rent hikes or eviction.  

But Westside’s success is an exception. Since 2020, when Colorado began requiring mobile home park owners to provide their residents with notice of their intent to sell, dozens of trailer parks have been placed on the market and only four have successfully bought the land beneath them.  

Now, Colorado needs to pass additional legislation that would grant first right of refusal to park residents, give them more time to submit an offer, and cap the percentage that parks can raise rent. A bill to do just that has been introduced by State Democratic Rep. Andrew Boesenecker.  

Westside Mobile Home Park residents needed a miracle, and they got it. But access to dignified housing shouldn’t come down to miracles. It should simply be the way things are.   

Benjamin Waddell is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a sociologist based at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado.

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