Last week, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee updated its budget bill to include making over 250 million acres of public lands in 11 western states eligible for disposal, including recreation areas, wilderness study areas, inventoried roadless areas, critical wildlife habitat and big game migration corridors, according to analysis by The Wilderness Society. 

At the same time, Trump’s Interior Department is aggressively pursuing ways to industrialize, privatize and monetize the public lands. But these places, rich with ecological values, are held in trust for us to conserve and deliver intact to future generations.

Despite the administration’s rhetoric about wanting to reduce the deficit, its goal is to dispose of these lands—to remove them permanently from the public domain. This serves an ideology that reflexively favors private ownership over public enjoyment, whether by diminishing long-term protections on public lands, promoting their immediate development or selling them outright.

What are the effects of this wrongheaded policy?

First, once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.Any land pulled out of the public domain for development will never be returned. As a result, wild places will no longer offer open space for people to hike, hunt or fish, wildlife to thrive, waterways to flow unimpeded and much more.

Second, it’s a slippery slope. We lose environmental protections not by a one-time tsunami of destruction, but by nibbles. If we lose a piece of land today for an appealing idea (for example, deficit reduction, space for housing), then tomorrow we will hear an equally appealing idea to develop the neighboring piece. Then the next day, even more land will be needed for another reason. And so on. The process of destruction by nibbling will never end until there is nothing left to devour. 

Third, there’s one upside: It’s an excellent opportunity for conservationists to expand public support for nature.The current attack on public land is enabling conservationists of different stripes to come together and build alliances. Think of hunters and fishers, farmers and ranchers, mountain bikers and horseback riders, campers and birders who all cherish open lands—whatever their politics.

Fourth, we need to make the case for urgency. If public land advocates don’t stand strong now to protect nature, who will?Right now, we need to defend the water, the trees, and the wildlife on the public lands for generations to come. We need to tell our representatives in Congress that their duty is to never sell out the public estate.

Fifth, standing up for nature brings out the best of humanity. The framing of the “debate” in Congress and the public is always human-centric, the same approach that has caused so much environmental destruction throughout the world. Ignored is what would be lost, from water storage and wetlands to places for wildlife to live out their lives. We must tell the story of what nature brings us just by being left alone.

Compared to most developed countries, America is extraordinarily rich in public lands that everyone can enjoy, no matter their income or their background. Thanks to those who came before us who knew their value, Congress set aside these unique places as designated wilderness, national parks and monuments, and other special types of land, not to mention national forests and Bureau of Land Management lands that serve multiple purposes. That means all of us can roam land that has no fences or “No Trespassing” signs.

Humility and restraint, not privatization and exploitation, are the words that unite us as we fight to preserve our public lands. This is the public’s land, and let’s keep it that way forever.

T. A. Barron is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a board member of the World Wildlife Fund and the Wilderness Society, and the author of more than 30 books.

The post Public land goes back on the chopping block appeared first on Writers On The Range.

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.

The post It’s a perfect storm for fire insurance appeared first on Writers On The Range.

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.

The post What Aspen can teach us appeared first on Writers On The Range.

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.

The post The housing crisis is harming my town appeared first on Writers On The Range.

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.

The post When no home is affordable, where do you live? appeared first on Writers On The Range.

That’s because the average home in the greater Bozeman area is going for more than $650,000, up from an already astronomical $500,000 in early 2020. A couple of tenured professors at the local Montana State University might be able to swing that, but it is way out of reach for the rest of the faculty.

If college professors can’t afford homes, then what kind of local worker can who has no outside source of income? Certainly not public-school teachers, firefighters, cops, or journalists. Service workers? Forget about it. 

As pandemic-spurred remote work is freeing folks from the office and the cities, they are buying up remote work-centers, aka houses, in places far away from their cubicles. The result is real estate markets blowing up across the West, as well as the nation.

It will take $533,000 to buy an average-price home in Bend, Oregon, and $425,000 in Corvallis — a 23 percent jump from a couple of years ago. The pattern repeats just about everywhere, with 25- to 35-percent price increases in nearly every market: Tucson, Flagstaff, Tahoe, Salt Lake City, Durango.

You can’t escape by forgoing homeownership and renting, either. Rentals, if you can find them, are similarly expensive. Boise’s median rent shot up by 23 percent over the last year, with other mid-sized Western cities seeing similar leaps.

Many of these places have long been too pricey for the average worker, but a hopeful homeowner could always find look farther afield, as home prices tended to drop in direct proportion to the distance from the town’s center. It’s the old “drive till you qualify” non-policy of affordable housing, leaned on by communities from Jackson to Aspen to Park City.

But now the Zoom Boom-fueled market fire is spreading beyond the “best places” into the once-affordable bastions of working class neighborhoods, the bedroom communities, rural ranchettes and even trailer parks.

In other words, you could drive all night and still not qualify unless you have cash coming in from a trust fund, you sold out of a more expensive market, or you happened to hit it big with cryptocurrency.

Something is bound to break. When even drive-till-you-qualify breaks down, the non-Zoom workers have little choice but to crowd into substandard housing, move into tent-towns, or set up camp in the backseat in the Walmart parking lot. I know experienced teachers who have been forced into rooming with others in small apartments, like college students. It’s hardly surprising that so many businesses are having a hard time finding workers.

Perhaps the most maddening part of all of this is that the Zoom Boom isn’t the half of it: The biggest real estate action is happening in the luxury markets. Aspen saw 90 sales over $10 million last year and the average home price shot up to more than $11 million. Jackson, Wyoming’s, median sale price last year was $2.5 million, and it continues to climb.

This is happening during a time when more than a half-million people have died in the United States due to complications from COVID-19 and the U.S. economy has shed millions of jobs. Los Angeles County’s unhoused population is approaching 70,000 and even quaint small towns are seeing growing numbers of unhoused people. Wyoming, which Jackson Hole real estate firms tout as a “tax haven with a view,” is facing a budget crunch, forcing more than $40 million in cuts at the University of Wyoming.

There are solutions: Tax the wealthy — and the high-dollar real estate transactions — and put the revenues into building affordable housing.

Call it what you want: socialism, redistribution of wealth, compassion, or just a tweak in the system to keep the economy from collapsing and violent revolution from occurring.

Or maybe call it what it is: A return to a time when we took care of one another and no one felt the need to amass billions of dollars of wealth at the expense of the working class, or the people who keep America running.

The post Housing prices in the West are over the moon. appeared first on Writers On The Range.

 Americans are still mobile and still moving West, but over time, the trajectory of the human flow has shifted to something more complex, with shifting patterns that sometimes double back unexpectedly. It’s a sign of changing economics, but also, perhaps, one of a maturing region.

 During the 19th century the federal government lured colonizers West with vast land giveaways. The masses came seeking what Frederick Jackson Turner called “the richest free gift that was ever spread out before civilized man.” Erasing from view the peoples who had lived on the land for millennia, he described the West as “vacant” — an irresistible “opportunity for a new order of things.”

 Later, during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression, hundreds of thousands of people flocked from the lower Midwest to California, seeking refuge from drought and economic distress. The trend continued after World War II, as a wave of returning soldiers and their families moved westward for opportunities in the growing cities of the region, along with the oil and gas booms and the uranium frenzy and then the big coal-power buildup on the Colorado Plateau.

 \Those same trends continue in many parts of the West, but over the last few years, some of the same migration-magnet counties of the past have seen a greater number of people leave — often for other parts of the region — than move in.

Take Farmington in northwestern New Mexico. Once a quiet agricultural town, a succession of energy-related booms beginning in mid-century drew droves of job- and opportunity-seekers to it from all over the nation. The population of the county ballooned from just 18,000 in 1950, to 130,000 sixty years later. But when natural gas prices plummeted at the end of 2008, the main pillar of the economy crumbled. Energy workers followed the drilling rigs to more lucrative oil patches, and the population started shrinking and continues to do so today as the coal industry also erodes away.

 The pattern — of as much as eight percent of the population moving away — is repeated in other natural gas and coal-dependent counties, including Sublette and Campbell counties in Wyoming, Rio Blanco County in Colorado, and Uintah County in Utah.

 Drill rigs and draglines — or the lack thereof — are not the only factors driving migratory movement in the West. Denver, which once housed enough energy executives to inspire the Dynasty television series, still attracts migrants, only this time they are millennials coming to take advantage of high-wage jobs, a growing marijuana economy and recreational and cultural amenities. On the other hand, the population continues to drain from some of the agricultural, non-resort counties of Colorado and every other state in the West.

Meanwhile, in California, the exodus is outpacing the influx, with Los Angeles County losing about 30,000 people a year and the state of California some 200,000 per year. Many of them are equity refugees — cashing out of the inflated California real estate market and putting their money into places like Maricopa County, Arizona, home of Phoenix. It’s one of the nation’s fastest-growing places, despite this July experiencing the city’s hottest month in the past 125 years.

Relatively reasonable housing costs in Phoenix and a revitalized downtown remain a draw, and energy-intensive air conditioning, for those who can afford it, helps offset the brutal temperatures  — even as it helps trigger them.

 Yet another pattern-shift is upon us, as urbanites and telecommuters flee from the pandemic or social unrest to smaller, more affordable “Zoom towns” and rural areas. Although coronavirus-era migration data has not yet been released, the real estate brokerage Redfin reports that, after taking a dip this spring, the rural real estate market nationwide has taken off much faster than in urban areas.

 Amenity-rich, rural places like Chaffee County, Colorado, or Bonner County, Idaho, have seen noticeable spikes in median home prices and home sales over the last few months. Whether this represents a wave of second-home buyers looking for a part-time refuge or people looking to permanently relocate is not clear. But it may signal a new wave of urban migrants crashing into the suburban and rural West once again. You could even call them COVID migrants.

The post The West’s Population Grows and Churns appeared first on Writers On The Range.