Pandemics create social change. In the 14th century, the Black Death killed at least one-third of Europe’s population. In western Europe, the resulting labor shortage drove up wages, freed the serfs, inspired adoption of time-saving technologies in agriculture and manufacturing, accelerated the growth of cities and trade, triggered peasant rebellions and hastened the replacement of feudal economic arrangements with capital investment schemes. Wealth inequality decreased. It took 250 years for the aristocracy to regain its 80 percent wealth concentration, and it had to open its ranks to bankers and merchants.
On a smaller scale, in the wake of Covid-19, ski towns and skiing culture are experiencing greatly accelerated social change. Thanks to modern medicine, the virus proved about 150 times less deadly than the bubonic plague, and its social effect thus far is almost the opposite of the 14th-century experience. Across the larger economy, Covid-19 concentrated wealth mightily, into the hands of internet retailers and tech entrepreneurs. Anyone who has lived in or visited a ski town over the past three winters noted ominous changes since Covid arrived early in 2020.
Real Estate Spikes
High real estate prices, and rents, soared higher. Using one prominent region, among many, in Colorado’s Eagle and Pitkin counties (which includes Vail and Aspen), the median selling price of a condo more than doubled between April 2019 and April 2023, from $850,000 to $1.75 million, rising an average of 23 percent per year. (During the previous 20 years, which included the dotcom crash and the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, the average annual increase was about 3.5 percent.) The median price for a single-family home rose 320 percent, or 43 percent annually, from $2.5 million to $10.5 million (compared to an average annual 13.5 percent appreciation over the previous 20 years).
One reason for these spikes in value is that technology enabled wealthy people to work from home, and they chose to do it in the isolated splendor of luxurious mountain retreats. Another is that real estate looked like a sensible hedge against a volatile stock market, especially when mortgage rates fell below 3 percent in 2020 and 2021, while inflation peaked briefly at 9 percent in 2022 before falling to about 4 percent in May 2023. Even a severe recession is unlikely to bring real estate prices down to earth. Finally, any ski town can be an attractive refuge from climate change.
Covid, and resulting low interest rates, drove more modest inflation in other wealthy real-estate markets—prices of the top 5 percent of homes rose less than 11 percent worldwide at the peak of the boom in early 2022. As a result, Bloomberg reported, sales at the top of the U.S. market fell 17.8 percent that quarter.
Employees Driven Out
In all ski towns, rising prices and rents accelerated the flight of service employees. Those who kept their jobs faced long, expensive and sometimes dangerous commutes along snowy mountain roads. Along with labor shortages, the situation was tough on locally owned businesses, too. Many folded, to be replaced by restaurants, hotels and retail stores owned by cash-rich public corporations. NIMBY millionaires have even, perversely, worked to prevent construction of new employee housing. Pity the employee-housing resident forced to leave town at retirement. The exile of longtime residents greatly dilutes the character and flavor of ski towns, both for locals and visitors.
Crowded Slopes
Ah, visitors. Visitation to ski towns skyrocketed. At the height of Covid’s social distancing and masking experiments, outdoor sports boomed. Retailers sold out of bicycles, camping gear and ski equipment. After the ski resorts shuttered in March 2020—they were considered potential Covid super-spreader sites—skier visits for that winter dropped 12 percent, to 51.1 million in the U. S. (according to the National Ski Areas Association), and fell about 18 percent worldwide. But visits at U.S. resorts soared back to 59 million for the 2020–21 season and set a record at 60.7 million in 2021–22. Vail Resorts reported a 67 percent drop in profits for the fiscal year ending in July 2020, but set records in 2022, with revenue above $2.5 billion and profits up 15 percent over pre-Covid 2019.
There’s no evidence, however, that these record skier visits are based on any growth of the skier population. It’s never been more expensive to learn to ski at a destination resort—a well-heeled newcomer might spend $10,000 for lifts, lessons and lodging over the first week of a skiing career (for that kind of money you could earn a private pilot license). But with cheap season passes, existing skiers skied more often. Covid sent them home from the office and their kids home from school; the internet encouraged them to work from hotel rooms. As a result, skiers lined up in droves, creating early-morning lift lines and tromping out the powder by 9:30 a.m.
The rush sparked resentment among the swollen population of second-home “locals” and shrinking cast of seasonal employees. Locals have cursed tourists in the past (remember the “Turkey, Go Home” sentiment of the early ’70s?) but today’s wage-earning locals also resent lack of housing, static income and the entitled attitudes of some wealthy patrons.
Meanwhile, lodging costs inflated, too. The traditional shoulder and low seasons evaporated, as hotel owners found they could fill $500-per-night rooms until after Easter.
Long Term Trends
It’s likely that most of these changes would have happened anyway, but absent Covid, at a much slower rate. As noted, in Aspen and Vail, home prices rose about 13.5 percent per year for the two decades ending in 2019. At that rate, the median single-family home would be $4.2 million today and wouldn’t reach today’s value of $10.5 million until the year 2031.
All this may prove a boon to smaller resorts. “Independent” has become a valid brand. On the other hand, former ski-bum secrets are in many cases rapidly Aspenizing. Powder havens like Fernie and Big Sky are growing too expensive for the kind of gap-year ski bum who might once have settled in for good.
We’re decades past the era when someone like Whip Jones could respond to an overpriced monopoly market by building a competing resort (in his case, Aspen Highlands). We may be stuck with gentrified ski towns with no room for colorful ski bums, or for middle-class mom and pop with three kids in a van. And if you’re a lifelong skier, your options for retiring to a ski town have narrowed, perhaps vanished.
What can a middle-class skier do? Travel afield. Search out that off-brand indie mountain with cheap motels nearby. Go to Europe, where you can still buy a $50 daily pass for a network spanning three valleys and 120 lifts and get a $120 hotel room. Buy a winterized motorhome. Free your heels: climb for your turns or ski cross-country.
Resorts and ski-towns have proposed dozens of schemes for affordable employee housing. They want to repurpose or replace existing structures, build on city-owned land, incentivize homeowners to rent space on year-long leases (instead of short term), or import tiny homes. Any and all projects can meet with vociferous local opposition. Opponents cite neighborhood impacts on congestion, noise and architectural unsightliness, but it often boils down to anxiety about having working-class families around the corner. It’s a universal problem: Everyone recognizes a social issue but few want to be part of the solution. In May, the Colorado legislature failed to enact a statewide land-use bill meant to encourage construction of affordable housing because counties and towns didn’t want to cede authority to the state.
In economics, the concept of tragedy of the commons describes the overuse of a finite resource by self-interested individuals. That’s where we stand. No zoning law, or peasant rebellion, can restore the original spirit of the ski town. 
Seth Masia is the president of ISHA.
Snow Country December 1988
“She wants to know if it’s got the modified slalom sidecut with pre-preg glass laminate for superior shock absorption.”
