Aspen does not have a housing problem in the way that a town has a pothole problem. It has a housing problem the way a body has a slow bleed.
Ask the people who keep the place running. The barista opening up at six has a forty-minute drive before her shift starts. The nurse on the late rota keeps a bag in the car because she never quite knows whether she will make it home. The electrician who rewired half the older houses in town has moved two valleys away and now charges for the travel.
None of this is dramatic. That is exactly what makes it easy to ignore. Year after year, the council approves homes for people who visit and rentals for people who invest, while the people who live here are nudged further out. That is not an accident of the market. It is a policy choice, and it can be made differently.
Who actually keeps the town running
Picture a normal Tuesday. The school needs teachers. The hospital needs nurses, porters and radiographers. The buses need drivers, the hotels need housekeeping staff, the restaurants need cooks who can start at four in the afternoon and finish at midnight. Add plumbers, carers, mechanics, accountants and the volunteers who coach junior football on a wet Saturday morning.
Every one of those people needs somewhere to sleep. When they cannot find it, the consequences are not abstract. Opening hours shrink. A swim session gets cancelled because nobody can staff the pool. A café closes two days a week. You wait three weeks for a plumber, and the one who finally arrives has driven an hour to get to you.
The town pays either way. It pays in higher wages to attract people who must commute, in services that quietly disappear, and in the slow erosion of the things that make a place a community rather than a resort — the choir, the cricket club, the neighbour who feeds your cat.
A luxury rental is not a home
The new buildings going up are often handsome. Good materials, clever design, decent insulation. The trouble is what they are for. A flat let by the week to visitors, or held empty for eleven months of the year by an owner who visits at Christmas, is not housing in any useful sense. It is accommodation. The distinction matters, because accommodation and homes compete for the same bricks, the same land and the same planning permission.
No individual landlord is the villain here. They are responding to incentives that the planning system created. But the result is a market where a two-bedroom flat is priced against what a visitor will pay for a weekend, not what a teacher earns in a month. Locals do not lose that auction because they are unlucky. They lose it because they were never really in it.
What “affordable” has to mean
The word gets stretched until it means very little. A “luxury affordable” studio at market rate minus ten per cent is not affordable housing; it is a discount. Genuinely affordable homes tend to share a set of characteristics:
- Rents tied to local wages, with the formula published and reviewed annually rather than set by the highest offer.
- Secure tenancies long enough for a family to keep children in the same school and put down roots.
- Protection in perpetuity — a deed restriction or covenant so the discount does not vanish the first time the property changes hands.
- A mix of sizes, including two- and three-bedroom homes. Studios alone will not keep a household in town.
- A sensible location, within walking distance of a bus route, a school and a shop. A cheap home you need two cars to reach is not cheap.
- Decent standards — warm, well insulated and inexpensive to run. Affordable should not mean cold in January and mouldy by March.
The three objections, answered
“It will change the character of the town”
The character of the town is already changing, and not because of new flats for nurses. It is changing because the people who grew up here cannot afford to stay. A street with children in it, bikes on the pavement and lights on after nine in the evening has more character than a row of dark windows waiting for the ski season.
“The council cannot afford it”
Councils rarely build housing alone. They set the rules, release the land and take a share of the value that planning permission creates. Community land trusts, housing associations and non-profit developers do the building, often with employer contributions and long leases rather than outright purchase. Doing nothing is also expensive: recruitment costs, lost services and the steady thinning of the local workforce all carry a price.
“Developers will not build what they cannot sell”
They will build what the rules allow and the land permits. If a scheme is only viable when it includes genuinely affordable homes, schemes will include them. The mistake of the last twenty years was treating affordable housing as something to be negotiated away at the last minute, in private, when a project was already struggling.
Steps the council can take now
- Set a firm requirement in the local plan so larger developments must include a meaningful share of genuinely affordable homes, secured in writing rather than bargained down later.
- License short-term lets and direct the fee income into a housing fund, so visitor accommodation contributes to the homes the town actually needs.
- Release council-owned land on long leases to housing associations and land trusts, rather than selling to the highest bidder.
- Prioritise local workers and residents in the allocation of new affordable homes, with criteria that are clear, published and easy to check.
- Protect existing stock by making it harder to convert older, cheaper homes into short-term lets or to merge flats into single larger properties.
- Publish an annual account of how many affordable homes were completed, at what rent, for whom. Numbers on a public page are harder to fudge than promises in a speech.
What you can do this month
Read the current local plan — it is dull, and it decides more about this town than most elections. Attend one planning committee meeting and speak for three minutes. Respond to consultations: councillors genuinely count the number of replies, and a hundred individual letters outweigh a petition every time. Write to your ward councillor with one specific ask, not a general complaint. Support a community land trust with a small monthly donation, or offer a skill — a surveyor, an architect and a bookkeeper are as useful as cash.
Talk to your neighbours, too. Most people in Aspen agree on this; they simply assume they are in a minority. The debate is usually won in kitchens and on the touchline, long before it reaches the chamber.
If you are facing a rent increase you cannot meet, or a notice you do not understand, get advice from a qualified housing adviser or solicitor early. The options are almost always better the sooner you ask. Housing policy is slow, but your own situation has deadlines.
Aspen is not short of money, imagination or people who care about the place. It is short of homes for the people who make it work. Build those, and the rest tends to look after itself.
Photo: eak_kkk / Pixabay