On a cold night in late January, snowmobiles ushered celebrities and their guests to the T-Lazy 7 Ranch to watch the unveiling of Moncler Grenoble’s new winter clothing collection.
The high-end fashion house based in Milan hosted the event at the nearly century-old local ranch to usher in Moncler’s flagship Aspen store, which opened on the southeast corner of Hyman Avenue and Galena Street that same weekend.
It marked the advent of another luxury retail store in Aspen’s downtown core.
In an article about the fashion show and the new retail location, the New York Times wrote of the town, “Aspen, like certain other havens of the ultrawealthy, is in some sense an imaginary location. In a way not true of Vail or Alta, this onetime mining center and former hippie outpost has become such an effective emblem of high-end chic that luxury brands have eaten up most of downtown.”
It’s a reality of Aspen that locals have long lamented while perched on old barstools or riding in gondola cabins. Names like Eric’s or Little Annie’s are spoken like lost friends or family members.
Perhaps none have been eulogized more than The Red Onion, whose red brick walls and fading nameplate that once welcomed silver miners and survived Aspen’s Quiet Years now serve as another reminder to locals of what they’ve lost. Plans have been in the works for years to reopen The Red Onion after its pandemic closure, but formal documents to renovate the space haven’t been filed with the city, and the restaurant and bar has sat empty for over five years now.
Yet despite the post-mortems in newspaper columns and letters to the editor, some are still not yet ready to resign Aspen to a town of luxury brands only. After years of trying and failing to regulate the issue, the city of Aspen has launched a new project — a community land trust called the Aspen Area Community Trust with the goal of acquiring and preserving commercial properties to keep local businesses thriving.
Maintaining ‘messy vitality’
For decades, local elected officials have tried to preserve what a 1993 Aspen Area Community Plan referred to as Aspen’s “messy vitality.”
They tried to establish new zone districts, form committees to study economic sustainability, build incentives into the land-use code for local business developers and more. They were all methods done with the end goal of supporting and sustaining locally owned and locally serving businesses.
But rents kept rising and local stores kept shuttering. The city’s efforts had not translated to effective preservation of local businesses.
In 2016, a group of three longtime locals approached the Aspen City Council about the issue. Jerry Murdock, an Aspen resident and co-founder of Insight Venture Partners, and former Aspen mayors John Bennett and Bill Stirling proposed a new regulation that would prohibit “formula retail” establishments, or chain stores, in the downtown core.
They said those types of stores catered to wealthy visitors and second homeowners while the mom-and-pop shops locals could afford were getting pushed out.
At the time, the city had its hands full, working on new policies to reshape the land-use code, taking a yearlong moratorium on commercial development applications as officials reviewed it.
But the organizers and several members of the community urged the council to take up the issue. They held a panel at the Aspen Institute with local attorneys, developers, landlords, business leaders and elected officials to discuss it.
Some of them applauded the proposed ordinance, while others thought it wasn’t the right path forward.
“I think most people in the room agreed that there was an issue, there was a problem to be addressed,” Bennett said.
After months of discussions, the city council unanimously approved a new regulation in March 2017 that would allow the city to block the opening of new chain stores in future development.
But the final ordinance was what Bennett called a “lite” version of the initial proposal. It required a conditional use review before the Aspen Planning and Zoning Commission for any proposed “formula retail” establishment, defined in the ordinance as businesses that have at least 11 other stores in the United States with standardized characteristics, including product lines and trademarks.
Most notably, the ordinance could only be applied to developments that had not yet been proposed. All existing buildings and any projects in the city’s building permit pipeline were exempt.
“I think that day at the institute helped clarify what the big property owners would accept and what they wouldn’t and what would drive them to some very large lawsuits against the city and what wouldn’t,” Bennett said. “The good of that day was I think it produced the thinking that led to a compromise. … The negative is that, without any question, we left some pretty large barn doors open.”
At the time, all of Mark Hunt’s large projects (like the Crystal Palace and Bidwell building redevelopments) were still in the process of receiving their building permits. They were among the “pipeline” projects that would be exempt from the chain restrictions, Aspen Community Development Director Ben Anderson said.
All of the existing buildings in the downtown core were exempt, too, unless the property owners later decided to tear them down and build anew or expand their net leasable space by 500 square feet.
In the nearly 10 years that the ordinance has been in place, a “formula retail” establishment development has never gone before the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission. Community development staff on two occasions considered new proposals against the ordinance, Anderson said, but after researching the proposed businesses, they found that the proposals didn’t meet the chain criteria. The two properties that were considered were the former Main Street Bakery and the property next door to White House Tavern, Anderson said.
“The formula chain ordinance and regulations really had good intentions behind them, but I think is the case with different kinds of regulations, the devil’s in the details, and it just hasn’t been super effective at creating what people thought it was going to create when it was put in place,” he said.
In a 2017 letter to the editor, Bennett wrote that the chain ordinance “tells the world that we won’t let Aspen become just a high-end mall with a mountain.”
Nine years later, he said that was not the outcome.
While local staples were shutting down long before the ordinance was adopted — like Little Annie’s in early 2016 and the Cooper Street Pier in 2008 — the pandemic accelerated it.
A 2023 Aspen Daily News article reported that “factors such as soaring rents and long off seasons don’t faze the luxury chain stores … They are built for the long haul thanks to corporate conglomeration.”
Aspen’s average monthly retail rent is between $275-325 per square foot, according to the city. Luxury chains can foot the bill, but the rate makes it hard for local proprietors to stay in business.
Mi Chola closed after nearly 10 years on the corner of Main and Mill streets in September after its landlords raised the rent from $42,000 per month to $85,000, the Aspen Daily News previously reported.
“Aspen has changed so fundamentally it’s hard to even comprehend,” Bennett said. “Town had a completely different feel a few decades ago from what it was today. It’s not just bigger and faster and shinier. … The things that used to draw people to Aspen, I’m not sure are the same draws today.
“They visited here because Aspen was this eclectic place … We clung to that notion of ‘messy vitality’ for decades, and we worked hard to preserve it, we worked hard to stimulate it and enrich it in every way that we could. I’m not going to sit here and say it’s gone, but I will certainly say it’s changed,” he added.
Aspen Councilman and longtime local John Doyle attributed some of Aspen’s loss of character to the lack of affordable housing in town. Because a lot of people no longer can afford to live in Aspen, they’ve stopped going out as much in town, and the local spots have suffered, he said.
“People no longer live in town, so they don’t linger in town,” Doyle said. “They get off work and they go home, when it used to be you’d get off work, you go have another cocktail or two someplace else, maybe go dancing at the Paragon, or the Paradise [Club] … but we’ve lost a lot of our nightlife and I would tie that directly to housing.”
The city is still working on its approach to affordable housing. Construction on the 277-unit Lumberyard project, the city’s largest-ever single affordable housing development, is set to begin this year.
But for the last year and a half, the city has been exploring a new project aimed at maintaining affordable commercial rents in hopes of revitalizing the town’s local spaces.
A new approach to preservation
The city council formally acknowledged the incorporation of the Aspen Area Community Trust during a March 24 meeting. The AACT is a nonprofit community land trust meant to keep commercial properties in Aspen affordable.
The project first started in 2023 as another way to tackle affordable housing in Aspen, but evolved into an initiative with the main goal of protecting and preserving locally serving businesses who are getting priced out of town.
A community land trust, or CLT, is a nonprofit that acquires and holds land for stewardship purposes. Across the country, communities have established CLTs to address affordable housing concerns, acquiring residential property to maintain affordability for those tenants.
They are formed as nonprofits that purchase land or take land donations, establish ground leases and sell the properties at a restricted price.
The AACT is a model of CLT that hasn’t really been put into practice before. There isn’t a roadmap for the venture, and it will require some learning as the project goes along.
But that’s nothing new for Aspen, Tim Sack, executive director of Buckhorn Public Arts and member of the AACT board, previously told the Aspen Daily News.
“The trailblazing of this is so appropriate for us in Aspen, as a town that has been so notorious for trailblazing, and because of that trailblazing has created the problem that we are now trying to solve,” Sack said. “We’ve created a place that has such desire to be here that now, every local business that was here for the last 20 years is now competing with a multinational [business] that wants to be here as well, has beyond financial abilities to do whatever they’d like.”
“We created … such an incredible place to be over 75 years of cultural injection, so I think it’s our opportunity and kind of our duty now to figure this out,” he added.
The land trust will explore property acquisitions and establish lease agreements for affordable retail tenants, providing protections and use restrictions in the agreements to maintain affordability.
It will also explore deed restrictions for some properties. The board wants to focus on locally serving businesses that offer necessary goods and services in order to maintain a year-round community.
AACT Board President Ann Mullins said the land trust is meant to preserve spaces for both potential businesses and existing ones.
“The other thing that’s very important about this is the stewardship of the existing businesses in town, the places we want to keep, but also bringing in the places we’ve lost,” Mullins told the city council. “This is not a competition with people in town. This is bringing back the laundromat, this is bringing back one more pharmacy, could we bring back a gas station?”
The AACT also differs in that it will not be a city-run endeavor. While it launched as a city initiative and has been backed by city funds, the board decided it should be removed from government.
Anderson, the city’s development director, will serve on the board to represent the city’s interests, but there will be no council members on the board.
In the AACT’s 501c(3) application to the Internal Revenue Service, it argues that the nonprofit will “lessen the burden of government.” The nonprofit can take a new look at tackling the issue after the city has spent years trying and failing to regulate it.
“From time to time, the issue sort of bubbles up, and the responsibility pathway usually ends up pointing at the city and this becomes your obligation, your burden to solve. Rightly or wrongly, that’s kind of what happens in this community,” Chris Bendon, co-founder of BendonAdams and member of the AACT board, told the city council. (Bendon also formerly served as the city’s community development director.)
“Our ability to move forward as a nonprofit, not being local government and also not being a for-profit business venture, I think puts us in a position where hopefully we can remove some of that burden from local government and be effective in this space,” Bendon said.
The city has had some success in regulating local businesses. Aspen Public House operates in a city-owned space in the Wheeler Opera House building, and offers affordable menu options in exchange for below-market monthly rent.
The city also recently selected 520 Grill (also known as Silverpeak Grill) to open an affordable restaurant in the city-owned space at 455 Rio Grande Place. The subsidized restaurant space faced trouble before 520 Grill was selected to take over the lease — the former restaurant Yogi’s was selected to open in a similar fashion, but faced construction delays and was ultimately open about four months before the city evicted it for not paying rent or utilities.
But on a larger scale, city leaders hope the nonprofit land trust can pave a new path forward.
“Bureaucracy is slower to move, slower to be able to negotiate contracts,” Mayor Rachel Richards told the Aspen Daily News. “If they were able to find a piece of property that they had donors willing to line up for and a seller willing to go, going through the government might take a long time.”
A ‘local’s heart still beating’
Aspen has seen many “ends of an era” in the last decade. But some places are still hanging on, and others are cropping up, backed by the fervor of locals looking to keep the town’s spirit alive.
“There have been so many losses. La Cocina was a staple of everybody’s for food and drink and that’s long gone. The Red Onion’s been out of commission for what seems like close to 10 years,” Doyle said. “Mi Chola just seemed like the final nail in the coffin in a way — that was really one of our last local’s places. But, I mean, there’s still a few that have popped up. The Buck is a shining example of the local’s heart still beating, but there’s been some real seismic shifts.”
Buck’s proprietors are happy to fill that role in the community. The bar opened in late 2023 in the basement of the former Cooper Street Pier location by locals Brad Smith and Jordan White. Smith was the former part-owner of The Red Onion and White was the former general manager.
“Our goal [with Buck] from the beginning was to have a spot that the ski patroller, the ski instructor, the lifty and the client that the ski instructor just skied with that day can come hang out together,” White said.
While the 2017 ordinance regulating chain stores didn’t accomplish what the group of locals thought it would — and those local spaces where everyone from ski bums to movie stars can gather are scarce — Bennett is hopeful the Aspen Area Community Trust can make more headway.
Luxury stores like Moncler, Chanel, Gucci or Louis Vuitton have certainly cemented their spots in Aspen. It’s not necessarily an issue, Bennett said, unless “we become this homogenized resort with nothing else.”
“We owe it to the heritage of Aspen to be a whole lot more than that,” he said.