Steamboat Springs draws thousands of visitors every year thanks to its trademarked Champagne Snow powder and quaint charm.
But despite a $200 million investment to make it the state's second largest ski resort after Vail, many locals are being left out in the cold.
The housing crisis is so serious in the 13,000-people city, that the local hospital is losing job candidates left and right due to the surging real estate market.
The small mountain town, about a three-hour drive from Denver, cannot find a head of human resources for the city because the offered $167,000 salary will no longer put anyone in a position to buy a house in the area.
But it appears to be locals who are paying the true cost. Doctors willing to put down more than $1million on a house are repeatedly outbid by out-of-town buyers putting down all-cash, over-asking price offers.
According to an NBC report, the city's local ski resort has been leasing a hotel for its employees to live in because the homes they were once able to rent are now mostly on the market as expensive, short-term rentals for visitors.
Loryn Duke, the Steamboat ski resort's director of communications, told the outlet: "Houses used to be for employees and hotels for guests. Now houses are for guests and hotels are for employee housing".
Remote workers, short-term rental investors, and second-home buyers have swept in and caused home prices to essentially double with no sign that they will fall anytime soon.
Since 2020, single-family home prices in Steamboat have increased by 80 percent to, on average, $1.8million. For already existing homeowners, their property taxes have shot up, on average by 86 percent.
Those numbers put even starter-home ownership out of reach for anyone making less than $200,000 annually, and even for that tier of income earner, the home prices make taking high-paying jobs in the area unattractive.
A local realtor for the past two-decades told NBC: 'We are seeing across all segments of the market even high-paid professionals, they're turning down jobs because they spend a little time looking at housing costs and they can't do it.
'The people who are coming here are paying a million dollars for an entry-level house - a totally entry-level, 50-year-old house.'
The hospital, in order to stop bleeding staff and potentially beckon professionals to fill positions, some of which have been open for two-years, has gone into the residential real estate field.
>>>The institution is currently building 42 apartments that will rent at rates no higher than about 30 percent of the given hospital employee's income.
In Steamboat, local officials are attempting to ease the strain by proposing building thousands of new housing units on a 534-acre ranch that the city's housing authority purchased with an anonymous $24million donation.
In phases, the office wants to build more than 2,200 units. Sale and rentals of the properties would be restricted to those who live locally on a fulltime basis and meet certain income requirements.
Even residents who are opposed to the project, believing it to be too large-scale a project for a city with limited infrastructure, understand that the housing issue is a real one.<<<
'It is hard because we are here to deliver health care, we're not here to deliver houses. Usually, if we have the dollars to spend, it is on state-of-the-art equipment and upgrading our facilities,' said Fidler.
Professional golf teacher Luis Gaspar lived in the city for six years before deciding to relocate.
He said when he first moved he found a one-bedroom apartment at Torian Plum Condominiums for $1,100 a month.
'Two years after that, it was $2,300 for a one-bedroom, one-bath apartment,' Gaspar told the Steamboat Pilot. 'That is a more than 100% increase in two years.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art....html#comments
Note where I put the ">>> <<<". See what's happening? The town is forced to expand to accommodate rich outsiders buying vacation getaways and Airbnb investments. The hospital has to divert resources for the same reason. How many small towns have someone willing to gift 24 million dollars to build targeted income housing or businesses willing to build apartments for employees? All of these properties have to be guarded from the rich gobbling them up so bureaucracy, rules and regs. Not very "free market" is it? Without those actions being taken, though, no affordable housing for the people who actually live there. You think the locals would be okay with less government in this crisis? I don't and that illustrates a problem that I don't think Libertarians really talk about. "The market" says the rich like this place and are gonna buy it out from under the locals and tough $#@!, too bad so sad - move if you can't afford to stay in your home/hometown.
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