A sense of belonging is crucial to the success of a city or town of any size, but for many longtime locals in Aspen, it seems to be slipping away.
In the first part of his series “In search of community” for Aspen Journalism, longtime local journalist Paul Andersen looks at the tension between Aspen as a community versus a commodity.
He’s now working on the second part of the series, which focuses on how towns from Basalt to Parachute are becoming vibrant, diverse communities that are less reliant on Aspen as an economic engine.
The Aspen Journalism series was launched with a grant from the Aspen Business Center Foundation run by the local McBride family.
Aspen Public Radio’s Eleanor Bennett spoke with Paul Andersen about how Aspen and the valley’s sense of place has evolved, and the importance of regionalism as a cohesive force.
The conversation below has been edited for clarity and length.
Eleanor Bennett: Paul, you were born in Chicago, but came of age living in Crested Butte and Aspen in the seventies and eighties. How did that experience inspire this series and your own sense of community?
Paul Andersen: So you can't choose where you're born, but you can choose where you'll spend the rest of your life. And living in Crested Butte and Aspen on both sides of the Elk Range, the Elk Range really became what I call my spiritual home. So that was the first time I'd ever really fallen in love with a place and had a really strong sense of place. And that was honed for me in Crested Butte. When I first lived there in 1970, there were 300 people in town and it was very intimate and very close. You knew everybody, you knew everybody's dog. It was just one of those experiences that I don't think you can have anymore.
So it really all came together in Crested Butte, when we fought the AMAX Mining Company in the late seventies and early 1980s, a molybdenum mine that would have made Crested Butte into an industrialized sacrifice zone, and the town said, "No." And that's where I recognized the power of community, that this small group of people, a bunch of eclectic radicals came together and stood up against a huge international mining company and prevailed and really cherished our place and protected that place for the future.
In Aspen, where I moved in 1984 — 40 years ago, Eleanor — I came to a place that had that same community experience in different stages. And as I became familiar with Aspen, I recognized how important those stages were to where we are today. History is not an isolated experience. History is a continuum. And so for me to learn the continuum of Aspen's history really showed me the value of community here and what has happened to it.
Bennett: So the series so far looks at the history of community in Aspen spanning from the Ute people and the silver mining days, all the way up to the post-war rise of skiing to the current day. What have you learned about the creation and loss of different communities throughout our history?
Andersen: There's a lot of tragedy attached to it. It's really quite an emotive story. The Utes, of course, as you mentioned, were the first people here if you discount early man, which really there's no sign of. But there may have been people here 10,000 years ago. The Utes were the first community to face a crisis here, obviously, when they were expelled from most of the state in 1881 by an edict of Frederick Pitkin, the governor who said the Utes would either be removed to reservations or exterminated.
So the Utes were pushed out and 12 million acres of Western Colorado were opened to settlement. And in came the flow of the miners and the prospectors. And they were an interesting breed of people whose character was formed on the advent of the frontier. That contact with the wilderness made them very independent and self-driven people, but they were here not for scenery, not for the peace and quiet. They were here for riches. They were here to mine silver. And that was a very brief epoch. I mean, it built the downtown of Aspen, but it only did so in less than 15 years of time, from 1881 to 1893. And that's when the silver crash occurred and suddenly the miners were all moved out. That's the second crisis of community here.
Then came the “Quiet Years,” which I think still is the longest historical epoch that Aspen has had. There was very little economic activity here, and it was probably the most cohesive Aspen has ever been because everybody was poor. Everybody was in the same boat. It was a lot like what Crested Butte went through when we were all simple, most of us poor people, poor hippies, just trying to live a life. The Quiet Years were incredibly impoverished, but people pulled together and they felt the strength of community.
And then that ended fairly abruptly with the beginning of skiing, the advent of skiing, which really I'd say kicked off in a serious way in 1945 when Walter Paepcke came to Aspen, when the Aspen skiing company was created, and in 1947 the longest chairlift in Aspen was put in, and the post World War II era began in Aspen and it just boomed and it hasn't stopped.
Bennett: And at the crux of these articles is the question of whether Aspen is a community or commodity -- it's in the name of your series. What did you find in your research and in just talking to community members about how this dichotomy has evolved throughout Aspen's history?
Andersen: Aspen is a divided city now and you read it in the newspapers almost daily. There are letters to the editors, the columnists who write for both newspapers. Well, especially for the Aspen Daily News, not so much The Aspen Times anymore, but the sense of loss that you feel reading this, these heartfelt pangs of regret.
It's a sad story because people have seen the disintegration of community and it may never come back, because of the housing issue. So people lament this loss and they should, because when you attach to something that is beautiful to you and it fades, there is a sense of loss, and because you also lose a sense of identity with the place where you live.
Bennett: And can you tell us a little bit more about how housing specifically has impacted this loss of community?
Andersen: 45% of the housing stock in Aspen is second homes. People come to sort of cherry-pick specific times of the year when the activities are in full flower, but they don't stay here full time, they don't vote here. And so the community has lost, I would say, a lot of its rudder. The median income in Aspen is $74,000 approximately. The average price of a home now is, I think, well over $15 million. Those numbers don't equate. There's an imbalance there that's unsettling to people who have identified strongly with a more cohesive experience.
Bennett: As you were running through the different eras or epochs of our history in this town, it strikes me that with each community's loss comes a new community. But I'm also hearing you say that in this current moment, it does feel like maybe there is a real true loss of community. Or do you think there is a new kind of community springing up here and maybe some of us don't like it or can't stay here because we can't afford to, but it's somebody else's community now?
Andersen: There is definitely a loss. Aspen has achieved a sort of theme park dynamic where the workforce comes in on Highway 82 in that godforsaken commute. They come, they do their work, and then they leave. Theme parks run the same way: the workforce comes in, serves the guests, and then departs. So the flow of community is in and out. If you consider commuters, the full-time residents of this region that we're looking at, where community is evolving now, is along the Colorado River.
The communities of New Castle, Silt and Rifle are redefining community. And it's amazing to see communities where people who live there, live there full-time. There's very few second homes, there are very few Airbnbs, and there's a growing pride in those communities. And what they're doing is amazing.
There is an economic development push right now and their tagline is, "Better jobs, closer to home." And there are people behind this effort now who are going to make this happen. And if that happens, the workforce in this region will have an option not to commute all the way up to the Upper Valley and instead stay closer to home near their families, reduce the commute, reduce their stress levels, and have a more at-home experience working where they live.
Bennett: And did you witness any efforts in the course of your reporting to bring that back to places like Aspen? Are there folks on the ground trying to preserve that sense of community?
Andersen: There are, and I don't want to diminish the efforts that have been made. I mean, the affordable housing program in Aspen and Pitkin County has been incredible. Thousands of units, I think 3,000 units of affordable housing — or I'd call it “accessible housing” in Aspen. Instead, however, of integrating the housing throughout the community like it used to be, it's almost ghettoized in developments that are big clusters where everybody who lives there is in the same boat.
And it used to be the planning departments of Pitkin and Aspen used the term "messy vitality" to describe the planning goals of trying to achieve this mix of people who can then interact and create a little bit of tension, a little bit of a dynamic, but something that's alive and vital because of the contrast. That doesn't happen so much anymore. There's a real division of classes and neighborhoods and you can feel that when you're there — like walk through the West End in the off-season sometime, it's quiet and too quiet.
Bennett: The next part of your series is going to focus on communities from Basalt to Parachute and Battlement Mesa. And so many of the threats to community that we face — you've talked about housing shortages — racial discrimination and climate change are also impacting our whole region. Do you think it's possible for all of our towns and counties to see themselves as one community and solve these issues together?
Andersen: I think it has to happen. If it doesn't, we risk contention and separation. Isolation. Those are not good for social capital. Those are not good for what may be needed in these communities. In events like the pandemic, for example, where communities had to speak to one another and pull together to handle that crisis.
There could be other crises that come. Who drives the ambulance around here? Who is the ER doctor who serves in times of trauma and crisis? You have to have housing for those people. And this is where Habitat for Humanity, Gail Schwartz in particular, is doing a tremendous job — and so is Dave Myler and April Long with the housing program that they're running, trying to create housing that is accessible to give that mix that is so necessary to creating a society that is diverse and thrives on that diversity.
