A typical home in Vail, Colorado, is over $1 million, leaving workers with few living options. 4 peo

• Vail is among the most expensive Colorado housing markets, with a median home price over $1 million.
• Resort towns like Jackson, Wyoming, and Park City, Utah, also face unaffordable housing.
• Four people shared how Vail's expensive housing has affected their daily lives.

Allison Weibel, 31, moved back to Vail, Colorado, in 2017 after spending a year studying in Argentina on a Fulbright scholarship. 

At the time, Weibel was working two part-time jobs, one as a high-school teacher and another as a ski instructor with Vail Resorts, which is among the largest ski-resort-management companies in the Western US. The resort offered Weibel employee housing, so she paid a bargain of $600 a month to share a bedroom in a four-bedroom apartment with five other employees. 

Once she left the resort to become a full-time teacher, Weibel said she had to move about 30 minutes away to a small town called Gypsum to find an affordable market-rate unit, even with $60,000 in income.

Weibel's struggle to find affordable housing in Vail speaks to similar issues playing out in other ski towns like Jackson, Wyoming, and Park City, Utah. All these cities have world-class skiing and lifestyle perks such as excellent restaurants. But as the wealthy enjoy days on the slopes and nights at local breweries, essential workers like teachers, cooks, and firefighters are having to move away from these ski towns to afford to rent or buy a home. 

The median price of a home in Vail was over $1.1 million as of January, according to Redfin, an unrealistic price for workers who earn anywhere near the town's median income of $91,000. Renting doesn't offer much reprieve. A person bringing in the median income would have $2,275 a month to spend on rent if they're following the commonly recommended 30% of income towards housing costs. Of the five rentals in Vail currently listed on Zillow, none are priced below $2,500 a month. 

Vail has tried to address these issues by asking people who own Airbnb and Vrbo rentals to open their homes to long-term renters, partnering with local developers to spend upward of $150 million to add more than 90 units to a local apartment complex, and passing a plan to add up to 1,000 income-restricted housing units in the town by 2027. 

In short, earning a decent salary and being frugal to save money aren't enough to buy a house in Vail. Four people shared what it's like to work in a town where housing is unaffordable for many of the people who make the town run.

A teacher who can't afford housing despite having multiple side hustles

Weibel has taught high-school Spanish, math, and English classes for the past five years in Gypsum, a town of about 8,000 people that's a 35-minute drive west of Vail. It's become a go-to destination for some of the town's workers because of its relative affordability and close proximity to the ski resorts. In her spare time, Weibel works part time as a babysitter, a summer-school tutor, and a ski instructor at Vail Resorts.

All told, Weibel brings in about $60,000 a year, but she knows that isn't enough to buy a home in the area. Home prices in Colorado's mountain towns skyrocketed earlier in the pandemic as remote workers chose to live near some of the state's best ski slopes. In January, the median sales price for homes in Gypsum hit $657,000, a 34.9% year-over-year increase, according to Redfin.

"This issue at this point of my life is that I want to become a homeowner, and have wanted to become a homeowner for some time, but that is becoming less and less attainable," Weibel told Insider. 

Weibel said she had to stay in friends' spare bedrooms and rely on other people in her network to help her find a place to rent that hadn't yet been listed. Weibel currently rents a bedroom from a friend of a friend for about $800 a month, which is about half as much as she was paying for her own apartment a couple of years ago.

She said her landlord was looking to rent their spare room to a teacher, and one of her friends introduced the two of them. She added that she had coworkers who had even had to put up advertisements in local coffee shops asking people to help them find an affordable place to rent. 

Weibel said she wanted to stay in the area because she enjoyed her teaching job. But she's starting to question that desire given that a one-bedroom condo is going for about $400,000 in the nearby town of Eagle-Vail, which Weibel said was closer to her school. But the roughly $2,500 monthly payments on a mortgage that size could eat up nearly half her monthly earnings. 

"Teachers, like myself, want to stay here in the community, but doing so requires the stability that homeownership can offer," Weibel said. "It's a sad thing when public employees don't have that option." 

A restaurant owner who offers his cooks and waiters subsidized housing

Business owners like Paul Anders, 46, who co-owns an upscale restaurant known as Sweet Basil and a gastropub called Mountain Standard, are also feeling the pain. 

Vail's lack of affordable housing, Anders told Insider, is one reason his two restaurants have been understaffed since the pandemic began in March 2020. 

Anders said many of his seasonal kitchen employees lived in Vail only during the winter. The more-senior employees often live out of town in places like Minturn, a town of about 1,000 full-time residents that's about a 20-minute drive west of Vail. Minturn's median rent is $1,800, nearly half of what it is in Vail, according to data from Zillow.

Because his restaurants don't have enough cooks or servers, Anders has pulled back on their hours and tables. Sweet Basil has stopped serving lunch on Mondays and Tuesdays, he said, while Mountain Standard has had to reduce its number of seats.

Anders said his businesses had begun offering subsidized housing options to all employees, on top of medical, dental, and vision benefits. Anders and his business partners have bought or leased 11 local apartments in recent years and rent them to their cooks and servers for "below market rate," he said.

In all, Anders and his business partners have housed 30 of their employees, which represents about one-fifth of their total staff, he said.  

"Housing is the single most impactful factor for every business in Vail," Anders said, adding that offering it to his employees was "definitely another layer to manage and worry about, but I see it as an absolute necessity."

An engineer whose crew has to stay in a nearby town while they upgrade Vail's water infrastructure

Sam Stevens, 25, has seen firsthand how Vail's expensive housing market is straining the town's budget for important infrastructure projects. 

Stevens works for a large general contractor in the Denver metropolitan area that routinely tackles projects in Vail after the ski season comes to an end. In April, Stevens and his crew plan to upgrade the wastewater system of the town, which is a 1 ½-hour trek from Denver. 

Instead of driving back and forth to work every day, Stevens said, the crew will stay in a hotel in nearby Avon while finishing the job, which is scheduled to last about eight months. Avon is a popular place for some workers in Vail to lay their heads because it's only about 8 miles west and hotels are much cheaper in Avon than they are in Vail.

Hotel prices in Vail range from about $130 a night at a DoubleTree by Hilton on the edge of town up to nearly $850 a night at the mountainside resorts — and even more on holidays. Stevens booked his crew a block of hotel rooms in Avon, with each room costing about $110 a night. 

But the cost of the hotel isn't coming out of Stevens' pocket. Vail is reimbursing travel expenses for his company while his people work, which may be as much as $20,000 a person if the project finishes on time, he said. This money is coming out of the town's tax collections, Stevens said. The situation is common for many construction companies that do work in Vail during the offseason, he added. 

"It's pretty obvious that there won't be any housing available during the ski season," Stevens told Insider. "But the town should really make sure there is housing available for people like us who do work for them during the spring and summer. Without housing, it makes it hard for our budgets — and the town's budget as well." 

Stevens said the more tax money Vail spent on added costs for infrastructure projects, the less tax money it could contribute to affordable-housing developments for its workers.

A student who works at Vail Resorts and missed out on employee-housing opportunities

Cameron Turner, 22, came to Vail from upstate New York to work on the mountain for the winter before he started his last year of college. 

As a software-engineering student at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Turner is used to meeting tight deadlines. But, he told Insider, he's had a tough time finding an affordable rental after he missed the deadline to apply for employee housing with Vail Resorts.

Turner said he approached a private landlord about renting a room in a condo with four other people. The two agreed that Turner would pay more than $6,700 to move in, a total that included the first month's and last month's rent and a security deposit. He knew the monthly rent of $2,050 would be tough to pay on his $22 an hour salary, but he said he agreed anyway because he was desperate.

Turner said his issues didn't stop once he moved in: His landlord kept the thermostat in the condo set at 60 degrees during January, a month when the average high temperature was close to 24 degrees, according to the Weather Channel. After Turner contacted a lawyer about the condo's habitability issues, the landlord asked Turner to leave, he said. Turner added that he had not yet received his security deposit from the landlord.

He eventually moved in with one of his friends in Eagle-Vail, about 8 miles west of the Vail Ski Resort. He and his roommate split $1,200 a month in rent for a 1,000-square-foot apartment. Turner said luck and a little word-of-mouth networking helped him find the apartment, but he knows there are many employees at the resort who aren't as lucky. 

"I didn't realize I would need to start looking for housing months in advance of my arrival," Turner said. "Otherwise, you might get stuck paying a large amount of your salary on rent."

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