Where Do the Workers Live?

All across the land, from Manhattan to San Francisco, from Deer Valley to Aspen, real estate prices are soaring (and rents reflect the cost of ownership as well). The average sale of an 800 square foot residence in San Francisco just hit one million dollars, so affordability – rents or ownership – is now restricted to those with seriously appreciated assets or really top 5% incomes. But clearly, these venues require maintenance workers, clerks, sales personnel, instructors, cops, inspectors, safety personnel, waiters and kitchen staff and a whole host of modestly-paid blue and white collar support staff. And in these costly places, modestly-paid support staff cannot afford the cost of living anywhere near their work.

For New Yorkers working in Manhattan, where they’re not stacked like sardines in tiny rent-controlled Manhattan apartments or the reaching-the-end-of-their-life-expectancy “projects,” housing is often relegated in the soon-to-be-gentrified Bronx or the distant reaches of Queens or New Jersey. Most of Brooklyn is already unaffordable. Let’s hear it for subways and trains, and the high cost (in money and time) for the average commute. SF workers spend their time commuting from communities in the East Bay, like slummy Oakland, or areas closer to their airport. Let’s hear it for BART with the same parameters. And so it is with workers in so many expensive cities: living far away and facing a horrific commute every day.

It gets a whole lot worse when folks live in chi chi resort towns where there is no real fast mass transportation at any cost. Like Aspen. “In Aspen, that division is magnified because the gap is geographic as well as financial. The people who clean the vacation homes, maintain the mansions' gardens and work in the hotels must find housing in mobile home parks or subdivisions squeezed into the few acres of developable space dozens of miles to the west. A lucky few - about half of Aspen's year-round population of 6,700 - are able to score units in the town's unusual affordable housing program that, on the open market, would sell for millions each.

“Meanwhile, residents who struggle to find affordable real estate watch an increasing number of houses in town become rarely inhabited vacation properties… ‘It's a mirror image of Detroit, where wealth, not poverty, is driving population down,’ said Mick Ireland, a former three-term Aspen mayor… Aspen's dilemma is similar to that of other resort towns, from Nantucket, Massachusetts, to Park City, Utah, especially those nestled in the jagged terrain of the western United States. In the West, vast tracts of public land and sheer mountain faces prevent the easy development of suburbs to house workers, pushing clusters of more affordable housing many miles away. The jobs in these communities are largely in the lower-paying service industry, yet the resort towns are a destination for the global upper class, said Bill Hettinger, author of ‘Living and Working in Paradise,’ a book on resort towns.

“Aspen's median family income of $71,000 is higher than the state average. But the further ‘down-valley,’ or to the west, you drive, the more incomes drop until you hit Glenwood Springs, 51 miles west, where the median family income of $54,000 is below average and carpenters, plumbers and other laborers regularly spend hours commuting to Aspen.

“The situation would be worse had Aspen not gone to extraordinary lengths to try to avoid being hollowed out by the departure of middle-class and working-class residents. Financed by a 1.5 percent charge on real estate sales and a mandate that any new projects include affordable housing, the city and county run a 40-year-old program that allows people who have worked for one year or longer in Aspen to rent, or buy, cheap residences.

“Doctors and lawyers, as priced out of most homes here as carpenters and bartenders, take advantage of the program. Everyone in town praises the program for maintaining a critical mass of year-round families that give Aspen a more lived-in feel than many of its competitors.

“But many in town grumble about inequality. The mordant joke is that the billionaires are pushing out the millionaires. Cheaper eateries frequented by locals are relentlessly replaced by upscale restaurants and high-end shops, and even the Aspen realtor's association office was pushed out of town because it couldn't afford to pay the skyrocketing rents in a town where the average property sale is $5 million.” AOL.com, January 12^th.

This accelerating American polarization of haves and have-nots is not sustainable. That the 400 richest family own 50% of the nations’ wealth has to be a global embarrassment for all Americans, but that we have a Congress committed to making life even easier for the rich – from allowing them to exercise more political clout by expanding their ability to use money to buy elections to tax laws and regulatory schema that literally provide them with economic breaks not accessible to the vast majority of Americans – is a shame that also carries the seeds of governmental instability, if not total collapse. History is full of “let them eat cake” failures of nation-states that truly believed that maintaining a great divide between the elite and everyone else was natural, normal and sustainable. They also could not picture how their form of government could ever topple or be changed. They were wrong. Are we?

I’m Peter Dekom, and if we really love our great nation, it’s time to instill a new higher value to the support of equality that made us great.