Everyone wants to be in Colorado. And, because there is no border patrol, newbies will always pour over the passes to taste the sweet life. The hearty ones walked in with a cow and three kids. Today they drive Hummers full of pedigreed Lhasa Apsos.
Truth is, you can fence out cattle but not change, and the West has always been about change: open range vs. fences, cattlemen vs. sheepmen, cows vs. condos, environmentalists vs. everybody. But, as Darwin said, “Suck it up.”
History is about moving up against each other’s watering holes. Today’s push-and-shove is about pretty places and the wealthy, educated, white baby boomers who are inundating them. Pitkin County Commissioner Mick Ireland calls it the “baby boomer tsunami” and warns, “Be afraid. It’s only the beginning.”
According to state demographer Jim Westkott, there are 73 million baby boomers, age 41-59, and some days it feels like every single one of them has moved into my town, although only 1.3 million live in Colorado. They come because they want to stay young. We came into the mountains in the ’60s because we were young.
Baby boomers want to be entertained; we wanted to be left alone. They want to be safe; we wanted to drink at the VFW. They want land- use plans; we wanted to do drugs. They want bike paths, boutiques and symphonies in the park. We wanted to save the world.
We wanted to be mavericks, to fight over fence lines instead of politics. We came so we could cuss and spit chew into empty beer cans. So we could raise pigs in the backyard, buy groceries on credit, drink with the sheriff and play poker with the mayor.
The new boomers are lone eagles, strange location-neutral birds who can work wherever there is wireless. They are engineers, consultants and professionals with big brains and big bucks who jet off to big-city offices or sell stuff on eBay. Ireland claims that the “Fortunate 400,” the richest guys in downtown America, have seen their wealth and housing values double and the value of securities underwriting their retirement quadruple since 1990.
Sixty percent of the housing units in Eagle, Grand, Pitkin and Summit counties are owned by wealthy, middle-aged second-home owners, according to a recent Northwest Colorado Council of Governments study.
These chaps may write checks to United Way but are not going to join the volunteer fire department. Our kids cannot afford to build on the back 40 or buy a fixer-upper in town. They either have to leave or become the cleaning ladies, massage therapists or pest control experts the newbies depend on. We are raising our young to be hired men on the land their grandfathers homesteaded.
Second-home owners are empty- nesters. Why, then, do their nests have to be so doggone big? Their kids only visit twice a year, to ski at Christmas and tube in summer. So why do they require 7,000-square-foot homes, Olympic-size swimming pools, basketball courts and movie theaters?
Where once we fenced out cattle, we now fence to safeguard yard art, waterfalls, irrigation systems and privately stocked ponds. Forget gated communities; we are gating single-family homes. Instead of taking fresh-baked banana bread over to a new neighbor, we are holding conferences on how to “build community.” The problem is, we may not want the community we are building.
