Jackson Hole, Wyo., has tried hard to cling to its Western heritage, even as it becomes an international playground for the super-wealthy. Boardwalks still line the streets and echo with a satisfying thud under foot. The downtown is lined with Old West facades, even if national retailers like Eddie Bauer and Coldwater Creek lie inside.
Jackson, though, is a place that has struggled as much as any Western resort town with the price of popularity. As I travel the Rockies in search of the “next Aspen,” it’s hard to find a better contender than this A-list cow town of multi-millionaires.
If there is a place where the threads of Jackson come together, it’s the Silver Dollar Bar, where residents – some in cowboy hats and handlebar moustaches, some in puffy ski jackets – find common ground. This place has a Western feel it has nurtured since it was built in the Wort Hotel in 1950. Around me, in the shadow of the bar studded with 2,032 inlaid silver dollars, I hear conversations about football at one table, photovoltaics at another.
In a town of ranchers, ski bums and billionaires, finding a place where everyone can sit down together is a feat.
“Our bar is filled with the same people almost every night of the week sometimes,” says Janelle Johnson, the grill manager. “We’ve got a lot of cowboys who come in. We’ve got local snowboarders. We’ve got a lot of people who work locally in town. It’s kind of a meeting place, and that’s what it’s always been, ever since the Wort brothers ran it. It was a social hub of the community. We’ve tried to always keep that environment.”
Home values in this town of 9,200 have soared to a median of nearly $1.2 million, up 28 percent in a year, and double that of four years ago. Growing numbers of workers commute across treacherous Teton Pass in eastern Idaho, and there, too, property values are soaring.
“Pretty much every place can agree that they don’t want to be Aspen or Jackson,” says Jonathan Schechter, executive director of the Charture Institute, a think tank that has worked to preserve the town’s character, partly by dissecting it.
“I’d maintain you are very much at the risk of losing those characteristics that can’t be monetized, like the character and feel of a place,” Schechter says.
The majestic Tetons rise behind Jackson Hole, Wyoming. David Frey photo.
How do you put a value on those Old West storefronts or the elk antler arches at the entrances to Town Square? What’s the value of the toothy grin of the Tetons stretching past town, or the wilds of Yellowstone National Park a short drive away? What’s the price tag on the moose I watch as it plows through fresh snow on Teton Pass or the herd of elk lazing in the National Elk Refuge? How much is it worth to have a community of artists, or cowboys, or locally-owned businesses?
Schecter’s organization has taken an unusual tack, trying to quantify the qualities of small-town life that residents prize in an effort to preserve them. He tries to look past the usual economic data to put numbers to hard-to-quantify qualities. In a 2004 Sustaining Jackson Hole report, he worked with the Chamber and the Northern Rockies Conservation Cooperative to delve into what makes Jackson unique. The usual mess of statistics are just “junk food data,” he says. If you care about art, then how many galleries are there? How many people show up to a theater performance? If you’re worried about the environment, how are wildlife numbers? How’s the air quality? If you’re concerned about the economy, how much do people in Jackson earn? Many of those answers weren’t immediately available, so participants set out to find them.
“The decisions a community makes about itself can be no better than its understanding of itself,” Schechter writes.
Never mind filling potholes or fixing streetlights. Among the town’s priorities is preserving Jackson’s character, from rodeos to friendly waves on the street.
Schechter counts Teton County on his A9 list – eight ski areas and one seaside resort that have boomed not because of industry, not even because of tourism, but because they’re nice places to live. His list also includes the areas around Aspen, Vail, Telluride, Breckenridge and Steamboat Springs, Colo.; Park City, Utah; Ketchum, Idaho and Nantucket, Mass.
Schechter calls these and similar areas PEAS – Places of Ecological and Aesthetic Significance. The top 42 PEAS – resort towns and national park gateways – grew twice as fast as the rest of the country, he says, a pace that threatens to destroy the very qualities that attracted people there to begin with. It’s their uniqueness that makes them special, he argues. Lose that and you lose your most valuable asset.
“These communities are essentially luxury goods that are facing commoditization pressures,” he says. “The more that they can do to sustain their unique qualities, the more successful they can be in the long run. They need to understand what are the qualities that make them distinctive.”
Anne and Pete Sibley perform in their Jackson Hole home, part of the county's affordable housing system. David Frey photo.
Or as Jackson musicians Anne and Pete Sibley put it, “Every town has its song.”
High school sweethearts from Redding, Conn., the Sibleys came to Jackson eight years ago, and they credit the unique town with allowing them to make a living as a folk duo, something they might not be able to do in most towns. It’s not just the resort environment giving them venues for their music. They live in a comfortable Victorian-style home that is part of the county’s affordable housing program. Since officials saw a growing housing problem for the town’s workforce, they created 819 units – 361 ownership units, 458 rentals.
Despite those efforts, growing legions of workers commute over Teton Pass. The trek is precarious, especially in the winter, made worse by “passholes” who speed around the tricky curves on their way from homes in places like Victor, Idaho, 25 miles away, where the prices are lower, but still skyrocketing.
“We were quickly priced out of going over the pass,” Pete says.
Anne worked as a children’s librarian. Pete ran a nonprofit, the Teton Sustainability Project. They landed a deed-restricted home, and that gave them the security to launch what has become a successful music career, with Pete on banjo, Anne on guitar. They have a child on the way.
“Affordable housing feels important to us, just because it gave us an opportunity to be part of the community,” he says. “We’d like to think we’re bringing something positive to the community.”
Community is important to the Sibleys, who find Jackson appealing more for its tight-knit ties than its powder days. In one of their recent songs they pose the question: “Every town has its song/ Even when the memory is gone/ Will I find where I belong?”
They seem to have answered that question for themselves. Many, though, worry about how to hold on to that sense of community as more and more workers live farther and farther away. More than a third of Teton County’s workers commute from elsewhere, estimates the Jackson Hole Community Housing Trust, which builds and advocates for more affordable housing. That’s up from 14 percent in 1990. Among the commuters are 58 percent of the police force and 70 percent of the sheriff’s department. The average fire and emergency response time is three times the national average. Town leaders, including Mayor Mark Barron, call it a crisis.
“What were single-family residences that working blokes and gals would buy are now just priced out of reach,” says Barron, a champion for affordable housing. He points to a modest home down the street from him in a not-so-elite neighborhood that just sold for $900,000.
“I don’t know anyone, with very few exceptions, that have come to Jackson in the past five years that have been able to buy a home here,” says Johnson, the Silver Dollar grill manager. “If you want to make a family here, you’re either going to be commuting from the surrounding areas or you’re going to be renting.”
Johnson counts herself lucky. She rents a place just three blocks from where she works. “I considered commuting when I first moved here. I just didn’t want to drive over the pass,” she says.
A three-year resident who, like many, came for the winter and couldn’t bring herself to leave, she says she’s thinking about buying land now. That will mean Idaho. And that will mean commuting.
“So many people have vacation homes here, and the prices are exorbitant,” she says.
There’s nothing really new about it, Schechter insists. A generation ago, it was skiers displacing the oldtimers. Now, it’s a wave of lifestyle refugees – moneyed classes looking for the next great place –who are driving housing prices out of reach.
Unlike past times, though, well-to-do communities like Jackson have the luxury of contemplating niceties their forebears didn’t. That could put them at the forefront of tackling issues that reverberate far beyond their city limits, he says.
“Resort communities are those places that are the boundary between the human environment and the natural environment,” Schechter says. “My feeling is, if these resort communities can figure out a way to make it there while at the same time allowing the natural environment to thrive, we as a species have a model in figuring out how to make it.”
That’s a big responsibility for a small town, but for communities pinned between natural splendor and international real estate pressure, it’s a dilemma they’ve found themselves forced to wrestle with.
