Phillip Supino spent eight years working as a planner for the city of Aspen, helping to shape the complex land-use code that reined in the scope of the resort community’s over-the-top residential construction and the impacts of short-term rentals.
Even under some of Colorado’s most restrictive building and development policies – or, depending on who you ask, because of those limiting policies – a single-family home in Aspen now sells for around $17.2 million — more than $4,000 per square foot of space — up more than sixfold from 2020. The stratospheric explosion of Aspen home prices has transformed the city, where, as Supino says, “it’s easier to buy a $10,000 purse than a slice of pizza.”
The front-row seat to the hard-to-fathom wealth disparity in Aspen — and the rapid dissolution of a culture created over decades by Aspen’s ever dwindling population of full-time residents — has led the city’s former director of community development to build a new tool to protect locals in mountain towns.
Launched last week to help middle-class locals priced out of their mountain towns, Supino’s First Light Community Development aims to acquire existing commercial or light industrial properties and convert them over to attainable housing. It will create a bank that can offer locals low-interest mortgages and construction loans. It will create its own construction company to help build housing for residents who make nearly triple the region’s median income but still cannot afford a home in the valley where they live and work.
“We are creating an economic entity and a community entity that will serve the needs of mountain folks. Look, the real estate, the banking, the construction sectors in these communities are no longer responding to the needs of locals,” said Supino, who lives in Aspen.
Supino started working as a planner in Crested Butte in the mid 2000s. He’s watched mountain towns grapple with rapid growth for nearly 20 years and endure the most acute growing pains in the last five years.
“Not one of these places is healthier now than it was 20 years ago. And there has not been any meaningful response to helping these places get more healthy. We are trying to do something that makes economic sense and makes cultural sense,” he said. “Culture is the most valuable thing we have and it’s the hardest thing to measure. But when you lose it, these towns then lose their attractiveness to the very people who are consuming these places.”
Supino quotes Rasta Stevie, a Telluride skier and former town councilman featured in the seminal 1988 ski movie “Blizzard of Aahhh’s:” “And when I’n’I leave and all my brethren leave there’ll be no funky culture left.”
“It’s a cliche,” Supino said, “but it’s so true.”
First Light is based in in Aspen but Supino plans to work in mountain communities across the Colorado high country. He’s got an advisory board with residents from several mountain valleys. He’s enlisting deep-pocketed philanthropists “who understand there is inherent value in place-based mountain culture and that culture needs to have inherent financial power.”
He envisions his group working to advocate for local-focused housing policies financed by backers who see the importance of local culture in mountain towns and are willing to wait for financial returns until community culture is protected.
Gordon Bronson is a developer who grew up in Aspen and is working with Supino. He’s seen a lot of local governments in mountain towns craft community-minded regulations designed to protect the local culture. But those rules make it difficult and expensive to navigate building projects.
“As a result, the process of getting things built, renovated or repurposed is so slow that the only groups that can afford making those changes are large, out-of-town entities,” Bronson said. “And that investment, when it pays off, leaves the community. We’ve got to find a way to keep wealth in these communities and grow that wealth in the local middle class.”
Bronson said Supino’s new effort is an example of “smart people asking tough, but hopeful, questions that can lead to interesting outcomes.” Bronson is keen to see more solutions protecting the culture of his hometown. That starts with giving full-time residents places to live, work and gather.
“It does not take a brain surgeon to understand that if you do not have a working population in your community and you don’t have a middle-class community, you don’t necessarily want to live in that place. No one wants to live in a place where every single person is exactly the same,” Bronson said. “If you can find space to allow local businesses to have a fighting chance, you create the opportunity to build things that are cool and establish that culture everyone wants.”
For decades, mountain valleys have battled over space. There’s not a lot of room for growth in communities surrounded by public lands. And too often that limited space is provided to wealthier buyers.
“It’s easy to make space for luxury,” Supino said. “Creating space for less powerful economic interests is challenging.”
Eventually Supino sees his group launching a real estate investment trust with holdings that can be offered to local residents in mountain towns. That way locals who are often limited to deed-restricted homes that do not appreciate at the rate of the neighboring properties — where owners can earn millions in equity every year — “can build wealth based on the wealth that is growing in their own community,” Supino said.
“It’s time to change the conversation around who gets to live in these towns and do business here. These communities are not gold mines. They are not places to be exploited. They are places that need to be protected and this could be a way for locals to engage and fight for their communities in a different way,” Supino said. “It is past time for a different solution. Maybe this is the right one. Maybe it’s not. But it’s a response to forces that could very well kill mountain town culture.”
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