Down and Out in Telluride

Don’t take it personally. Your restaurant manners were impeccable; your gratuity was generous to a fault. Then why did the waitress sneer at you, and why were the waiters so ill tempered? In fact, what was it with all the snarly help, all the way along your Rocky Mountain holiday this summer? They couldn’t all have got out of bed on the wrong side, could they? No. That would assume they all had beds. On the contrary, many of these people, out of necessity, were sleeping in dirt. It would put you in a bad mood too.

“Most of my friends used to live in homes,” says a woman who lives in a tent. “Now they’re camping.” This was outside Telluride, the too-precious- for-words old Colorado mining gem that perches way up there in the San Juan Range like a jay’s nest in a ponderosa pine. The woman, Jill Mattioli, 28, used to have an apartment in town — back when she could afford it. Now she lives off in the woods near others who service Telluride in manifold ways but whose purchasing power is so weak they sleep in their cars, in campers, in condemned shacks, in caves, in tents. “If I wait and serve these people,” says Mattioli, who has lately been mowing lawns, “I should be able to live here and have a decent standard of living.”

She is wrong. A 40-hour workweek, even at double the minimum wage of $4.25 an hour, does not necessarily buy you shelter anymore — especially in America’s tourist boomtowns. Life for the working class in resort areas has always been short on personal amenities, but the situation is now reaching crisis proportions because of stagnating wages and escalating real estate prices. From snow-and-arts resorts like Breckenridge, Colorado, to country- music Meccas like Branson, Missouri, America’s playlands are producing a booming class of unfortunates: the hardworking homeless. To step off the main drag of a glistening little jewel like Telluride, then, is like stepping out the back flap of a circus tent: Lord, there’s a caravansary of gypsies parked back here! The chief of Telluride’s housing authority, Dave Johnson, quit in June, citing job stress. The problem, says Jim Davidson, editor of the Telluride Times-Journal, “brings instability and a surly work force. We can’t expect nice worker attitudes when people come to work begging a shower.”

The situation in tourist towns is an extreme version of the trend that affects the rest of America — the dearth of working-class jobs that pay enough to support a life with even the bare necessities. Much of the job growth in the boomtowns is in the so-called hospitality business, where workers typically start as waiters, maids and bartenders at about $6 an hour. In the five counties that account for most Colorado tourism, 45% of all births in 1992 were to low-income families, according to local health departments. In Pitkin County, where Aspen is situated, the number of births to families on Medicaid quadrupled — to 16% — in the three years ending in 1992.

Most of these towns have grown up in rural areas where nobody thought much about a working population that needed public transportation, day care and other amenities. Most critical is the housing crisis from bauble to municipal bauble along the glittery necklace of Rocky Mountain resorts. Here, each square foot of real estate today fetches a ransom. Gone to outrageously priced condos are the apartments the help used to rent — and there is scant room left to build more. The reason is location, location, location: these picturesque hamlets beckon and charm and cost the earth because they are usually isolated and they often cannot grow, surrounded — especially in the Rockies — by federal lands that are vertical. And where the private land flattens out sufficiently, the people with bulging purses are putting up $1 million log cabins. So the help either commutes from a distance out by where the sun sets or sleeps nearby, under stars.

Take tiny Telluride, 2 1/2 miles square, whose population of 1,500 grows to 6,000 in the skiing months. Basically, $300,000 buys you four walls exceedingly close together. Bank president William Dodge laments, “It’s a struggle to live here with three kids. If my wife didn’t work, we probably couldn’t.” Together, the Dodges make about $200,000 a year.

In a tepee by a creek 35 minutes down valley from town lives a 25-year-old woman who works the counter in a local coffee shop. Monique Toulouse says she has her name — she says it is her name — on a waiting list for one of the 108 housing-authority apartments in the city ($450 a month for a one-bedroom), but her position on the document is more than a year down from the top. Before winter, she declares, knowing that it is a foolish declaration, “I’m determined to find a $250 rental.” Kevin Buckanaga, a server in a coffee shop, was happy to be subleasing a shed for $65 a month until he was evicted last month. He now lives in a tent three miles outside town.

So why stick around? “This is God’s land,” says 26-year-old John Korte, who lives in a little pickup he parks here and there. Harold Wondsel lives in an old bus and Bill Pinkard in a mountainside lean-to and Rusty Scott in a condemned mining shack with four buddies — no locks, no heat, cold water, expecting an eviction notice, in case he was getting comfortable (he heard the property has been sold for half a million). “There’s no concept of the pain we go through,” said Scott, a counterman who made it through -40 degreesF nights in a sleeping bag last year. “The town doesn’t realize that the people who do their dishes and clean up after them have to live someplace too.”

But the town does; up and down the Rockies you find municipalities struggling with the problem. Telluride’s San Miguel County requires developers to set aside 15% of their sites for affordable housing. In Aspen, where resistance to more new “monster homes” has great zeal, there is a proposal to raise the amount of new development that must go for modest housing from 40% to 60%. In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where a 14,000-sq.-ft., three-bedroom log cabin is going up, building inspector Dennis Johnson says a campground for low-wage earners might not be a bad idea.

There are tiresome local arguments about which way to approach the problem. One of them is how to sort out the workers who can’t afford shelter from the freeloaders who live dirty and like it. Then there is the libertarian case: Jesus was a hippie, man. But for the most part community leaders would like to get everyone back indoors, particularly when it’s nasty outside. Of course the ( sorehead view is widespread too. As Jackson Hole builder Jacques Sarthou sees it, “You don’t go into Beverly Hills and demand cheap housing just because you want to live there. If you cannot afford it, tough luck.” But Beverly Hills is spang in the middle of one of America’s largest urban bowls, Mr. Sarthou. It doesn’t have to share with the majestic Grand Tetons, which don’t leave a town much room.