This is the first in a six-part series for The Colorado Dream: Housing Wanted. The stories in this series are part of the KUNC podcast The Colorado Dream, airing on Fridays beginning October 6. The podcast is available for download wherever you may listen to podcasts and on KUNC.org.
When Javier Pineda Rosas was 12 years old, he left Mexico with his mother and younger brother to emigrate to Summit County, Colorado. They moved there to reunite with his father who was working in hospitality and restaurants.
“The first thing that I noticed about Summit County in general was just the beauty, the natural beauty behind it. There was still snow on the peaks when we arrived,” he said.
Despite the scenic views, Pineda Rosas was homesick. It wasn’t easy for his family to actually find a place to live. The first couple of months, they stayed in a friend’s living room in the town of Breckenridge.
“It was a two bedroom apartment,” he said. “There was a total of four people, eight people sharing that small apartment.”
When an apartment in the same complex opened up, Pineda Rosas and his family lived there for about a year. Then they started moving around a lot, mostly because the rents kept going up. But there were other reasons too.
“It is very usual that when you have a lease here in Summit, long-term lease, here in Summit County sometimes this housing goes into short-term rentals or they get sold. So it's really common to move around year by year,” he said. “I felt like we were always on the go, so it was never really a place to call home.”
Pineda Rosas never unpacked, leaving most of his stuff in boxes as they moved from place to place. He did warm up to Summit County, however, and like so many others, is ready to plant some roots. Now, almost two decades later, the 29-year-old is still struggling to find his place to call home.
“It sucks that even now (I’m) almost 30 years old, I don't have a stable living situation still,” he said. “I still don't have access to buying or options to rent and it has gotten really, really bad. Like super bad.”
His housing story has become all too familiar in Colorado's mountain resort communities where it’s getting increasingly hard to find a home, whether buying or renting.
Housing ‘crisis’ in the high country
A recent survey taken by Summit County residents shows just how dire the housing situation has become. The county will need over 2,500 rental and for-sale units - at all price points - to meet the housing demand.
“In mountain communities, affordable housing affects all income levels,” said Margaret Bowes, the executive director of the Colorado Association of Ski Towns (CAST).
CAST is a membership organization of local governments that depend on tourism and or the ski industry. It was formed in recognition that rural resort or mountain communities have unique issues and challenges, she said, compared to very rural or metro areas.
“What the organization is all about is sharing information, sharing lessons learned, sharing ideas and programs,” she said.
CAST members hail from 29 Colorado communities and five counties - including Summit, Eagle, and Routt - and local governments from the Mountain West like Moab, Utah; Jackson, Wyoming; and Ketchum Idaho. Some of their big issues are transportation and climate change. One of the biggest is housing.
“Some have even gone so far as to label it as a crisis,” she said.
In some ways, the very things that make Summit County, and other mountain resort communities, so compelling and attractive also contributes to its housing challenges. The large swaths of protected, forested terrain that people love to explore translate to small amounts of buildable land that usually come with high construction costs.
“Many of our communities are in valley bottoms and we're surrounded by federal land. So there's just very limited land left to build on and then very high real estate values,” she said “But in recent years there’ve been some new pressures.”
One of those pressures is the pandemic. People working remotely decided to leave their urban cities and buy a place in the mountains, which really drove up home prices. The summer of 2023, in Summit County, the median sale price hovered around a million dollars. Meanwhile the median household income was less than $95,000.
Another issue is the rapid growth in short-term rentals over the last decade which has reduced the available housing inventory for the local workforce, Bowes said.
Tourism is the largest industry in Summit County. But the groomed ski slopes, restaurants, and hiking and biking trails wouldn’t exist without the workers. This means the stakes, according to Summit County Commissioner Tamara Pogue, could not be higher.
“I mean, for us, this really is about the ability of our community to exist into the future. If we can't find a way for our workforce to live locally or live in our surrounding communities, there will be no tourism industry to welcome folks to. It is really that simple,” she said. “It literally takes a village to build affordable housing.”
It might be surprising to learn that this village extends to local employers. An increasing number of them are building workforce housing including Copper Mountain Ski Resort. In 2020 and 2021, Copper Mountain built Sky Chutes Landing on the resort to house full-time, year-round staff members. The environmentally conscious complex has two, three-story buildings with a total of 44 units ranging from studios to three bedrooms. The first building opened in 2020, the second a year later.
Olivia Butrymovich, 25, lives in a 600 sq foot, furnished one-bedroom apartment in Sky Chutes Landing. She’s lived here over a year and a half and the rent is $950 a month including utilities. A typical one bedroom in Summit County would cost more than double what she’s paying now.
“(It’s) pretty nice to live alone, especially in a mountain community where that's not super, super common,” she said.
Copper Mountain has roughly 400 full-time employees and during the peak winter season, it employs about 1,600 people. The ski resort also provides a housing option for seasonal staff. The Edge offers a reasonable daily rent that adds up to about $400 a month. The Edge used to be a Club Med hotel which functioned as an all-inclusive family resort. Copper renovated it and turned it into a dormitory-style residence with single or double rooms, private bathrooms and shared community spaces.
Every department at Copper is allocated rooms at The Edge and Sky Chutes Landing for their staff. There is also a third housing option for ski resort employees. They can buy deed-restricted condos and townhomes that cost below market rate. Deed restrictions control things like how much value a home can gain each year and who it can be sold to. In Summit County, the deed restrictions require that a person live and work here and there are limits on how much income a person can make. The idea is to keep things affordable and available for local workers.
“We do provide housing for about 45% of our employees, which is a pretty staggering number. I don't know a whole lot of other employers that actually provide that much housing,” said Kelly Renoux, director of employee experience for Copper Mountain Ski Resort. “We don't see the housing market getting easier in the future. And so we are definitely working with the county, we're working with real estate brokers to see if there's other options in the future to potentially build to potentially procure more employee housing.”
There is a downside, however. If an employee is living at the Edge or Sky Chutes Landing and gets another job, they have to move out. And if that same person actually owns a deed restricted condo, they have to rent it to a Cooper Mountain employee. Or if they sell it, the buyer must work at the ski resort or rent it to someone who does.
Housing tied to employment could be problematic as the loss or change of a job would leave one without a place to live. According to the Summit County housing survey, employer-owned housing is less desirable because employees often feel they are being watched.
A more ‘equitable’ housing process
“Housing is a complicated issue,” said Jason Dietz, Summit County’s housing director. “There's not a silver bullet to fix housing. It's more like silver buckshot, (with) a lot of different pathways because there's a lot of different types of needs and a lot of different strategies to get there.”
The county has five strategies designed to increase the amount of affordable workforce housing. From new housing developments and new policies and codes that allow accessory dwelling units to land acquisitions and banking.
One strategy is called adaptive reuse, when a former hotel is converted into housing - like what Copper Mountain did with the Edge building. By the summer of 2023, Summit County had converted three hotels into well over 100 rental units. One of them is the former Days Inn in the town of Silverthorne. Now called, 580 Silverthorne Lane, it has 51 income-based apartments,from studios to three bedrooms that range in rent from $900 to $2,300. The building opened in May.
To inform residents about housing opportunities, the county posts information on social media and the local newspaper. It also works with other organizations and community groups including Mountain Dreamers, a non-profit group based in Summit County. Pineda Rosas, a Deferred Action for childhood arrivals or DACA recipient, co-founded the organization in 2019 and is now the program coordinator.
In the past, Spanish-speaking residents have had a hard time accessing workforce housing, according to Mountain Dreamers. This is problematic because Hispanics and Latinos make up at least 15% of Summit County’s population.
Barriers for Spanish-speakers include vital information distributed in English, a lack of technology that electronically uploads and sends documents, and not enough Spanish speakers to help residents navigate the county’s housing process.
Mountain Dreamers didn’t want a repeat of these issues with 580 Silverthorne Lane. Meeting with the county early on, they asked to be notified before the application process started so they could inform their community. But according to Pineda Rosas, that didn’t happen.
“It was through our understanding, that they were supposed to let us know prior to the waitlist to get people informed and be more equitable in the process,” he said. “But it turns out that they completely blew us off.”
About a week before the building was set to open, Pineda Rosas recorded a social media video in Spanish encouraging the Spanish-speaking community to sign up for the 580 Silverthorne Lane rental waitlist. After the video was posted, the waitlist more than doubled. Mountain Dreamers ended up corresponding with county officials again. Eventually, changes were made to make the rental process more equitable. Rather than first come, first serve, renters were chosen via a lottery.
It’s difficult to know how many Spanish-speaking residents now live in 580 Silverthorne Lane. However, according to a county spokesperson, over 65% of the people that applied filled out a Spanish language application.
A place to call ‘home’
Pineda Rosas has been snowboarding for about half his life and says it gives him something to focus on, makes him feel zen.
“The feeling of feeling free,” he said. “I never really ridden with music. I always have liked just the natural sounds or just hearing how the snow carves with the edges of the board.”
He is a part-time snowboard instructor at Arapahoe Basin Ski Area and teaches free lessons to local immigrants, BIPOC and Spanish-speaking residents as part of a new program he created at Mountain Dreamers. It’s one of the ways he connects with people in the high country.
“The idea, though, is just (to) create a community,” he said. “Using the outdoor activities as a medium. That’s the focus.”
Pineda Rosas has been a community leader since he attended Summit High School where he was elected the first Hispanic student body president. He’s put down a lot of roots in Summit County and wants to stay. He currently lives with his mom and three younger siblings in the town of Dillon, but is hoping to buy a place in the county one day.
“Summit County is my home,” he said.
Next Episode
We stay in Summit County and travel to the town of Breckenridge. It has a home preservation program that turns exisitng units into affordable options for the local workforce. And the town prioritizes housing for a group of essential workers.
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Credits
The Colorado Dream: “Housing Wanted” is a production from KUNC News and a member of the NPR Podcast Network.
It's hosted by Stephanie Daniel with reporting by Stephanie Daniel and editing by Sean Corcoran. The theme song was composed by Jason Paton. Michelle Redo sound designed and mixed the episode. Digital editing and social promotion by Jennifer Coombes. Photos by Stephanie Daniel and Jennifer Coombes. Artwork by Ashley Jefcoat and Jennifer Coombes. Music from Epidemic Sound.
Special thanks to Manuel Contreras, Rae Solomon, Yoselin Meza Miranda, Natalie Skowlund, Scott Franz, Robyn Vincent, Robert Leja, Mike Arnold and Tammy Terwelp is KUNC’s president and CEO.
