The Classes Of Aspen

April 19th, 2006 at 01:32pm Michael Conniff 2

Blogger Michael Conniff did not know Nick DeWolf, the Teradyne high-tech pioneer and resident Aspen genius—and the co-creator of the downtown water fountain—who passed away this week, but he was struck by the references to a “classless” Aspen that the eccentric pioneer came to represent in the accounts of DeWolfe’s life.

Those with an abiding concern for the good old days in the city have a tendency to tell the same story in different ways, but the stories about the way things used to be are always the same. Aspen writer Bruce Berger, a “Half-Aspenite,” has even written a book about the way the Secretary of Navy used to sit down next to the dishwasher to hear a lecture after dinner was served. A friend of DeWolf tells a story about not knowing that a friend was a retired partner in a Wall Street firm for thirty years.

We can’t agree on much in Aspen, but one thing we know is that nobody (but nobody) is saying these are the good old days. Because they’re not. Gas prices have been out of sight so long we can’t even see them—and they’re going up and up with no signs of descent. Food prices have to be at least 25 percent above the norm. Put aside employee housing, and the chance for a typical family to buy a house in the valley is skyrocketing out of sight.

So much for the good old days. But if those days are gone, I wonder what we have been left with here in their place. Instead of a classless society, we have a striated stratification that all but guarantees a future of even further division.

Let’s start with the underclass, the immigrants, most of them from Mexico, most of them illegal, all of them with a toehold on the American dream. They do most of the most difficult work: they wash the dishes, they clean the hotel rooms, they build the homes—they do the dirty work. Most of them don’t even speak English, which means they are culturally far removed from the classes who hover above them.

Next up are the ski bum class, the twentysomethings who come to inhabit Aspen by choice, albeit temporarily, from all over the world. They used to do most of the dirty work but now they tend toward waiting tables, working the door at hotels, and generally consuming the ski and snowboard instructor jobs. As a breed, they are shrinking and diminishing compared to days of yore, yet they constitute the face of Aspen to the outside world.

Still moving from the bottom up, the next batch are those who live in employee housing or wish they did. They can’t afford a free market home, so they find low-cost rentals and wait the four-year wait for the lottery. They live in affordable housing and pine for the glorious day when they can enter and even win the lottery. If they win they’re stuck in place, required to live nine months of the year in their subsidized homes, and left with only a modest appreciation rate for their money. It’s not an investment for the future, but merely a way to stay in the same place.

Above the affordable/employee housing group are those who have somehow managed to buy a free-market home in the valley, one that can appreciate like topsy with no top to the market in sight. These are the lucky ones with a foot in the door and a foothold that’s worth real money. But they still have to figure out a way to make it in the valley. Many of them own a business or have a significant position within an ongoing concern. Most of them live midvalley or downvalley. But there’s a lot of living paycheck to paycheck in this group.

The next cohort is a small one: those who came to Aspen long ago and managed to make money off its explosive growth over the last several decades. Real estate brokers figure prominently here, but so do those who understood the importance of owning small pieces of downtown real estate.

Then there are the free market year-rounders, locals with big bucks who retired here or moved to Aspen on wings of family money and/or business success. They tend to be active and involved members of the community, and many of them have interests in local businesses. They are powerful and influential but many of them live literally above the fray.

Finally, the part-timers: those wealthy enough to have Aspen in the picture without taking up the whole frame. These include the jet set, but also include the fractional types who came plunk down $300K for a month in town. That takes real money. It takes big money to have a place in Aspen that complements your other properties God-knows-where. These are the people that many of the locals love to hate.

So there, class, now you have our Aspen class system. I have no doubt that there are other classes in our previously classless world that I have missed or omitted. I’d love to hear what other people have to say about it here on Post. I do know that the classless world of Nick DeWolf and his friends is really nowhere to be seen. It must have been nice. We can only imagine.

Entry Filed under: Aspen, People, Fractional Post