Winter Park – The idea was to buy a vacation place in the mountains. But things turned out differently for Sparky and Linda Lyle.
The Lyles, both retired U.S. Navy officers, wound up liking Grand County so much that they decided to live there year-round. In between their part-time jobs, they golf, hike and bike in the summer and ski in the winter.
“It was supposed to be a second home,” Linda Lyle said of their two-bedroom place outside Fraser. “But my heels were dug in. They couldn’t drag me back to the East Coast and the humidity. I just loved the mountains.”
The Lyles, who moved here in 1998, are part of a demographic wave observers say is reshaping the economies and cultures of resort communities across the West: people moving into vacationland to live, full time.
Some are retirees like the Lyles. Many see an opportunity to start new businesses or continue in their current jobs from new locations with a higher quality of life.
Others come for the jobs created by a residential construction boom whose economic might has eclipsed that of tourism.
From 1990 to 2000, U.S. Census Bureau figures for eight Colorado resort counties show that primary residences became the dominant housing type – growing from 53 percent of the market to 62 percent. They also accounted for more than 90 percent of the increase in the housing stock in that time.
Altogether, Eagle, Grand, Gunnison, La Plata, Pitkin, Routt, San Miguel and Summit counties saw a 54 percent increase in the number of homes deemed primary residences. The remainder of the market, which includes second homes, increased only 5.5 percent.
“A lot of the people that own second homes now talk about taking them out of the market of rental units and using them for people like retirees,” state demographer Elizabeth Garner said. “More people live in the mountains than used to.”
The Western Slope population is growing faster than anywhere else in the state, according to Garner’s office. The full-time combined population of Eagle, Grand, Garfield, Summit, Pitkin and Routt counties is expected to more than double from 192,000 to 389,000 by 2030.
The growth is forcing the culture and economies of mountain resort areas to change, said Jonathan Schechter, a Jackson, Wyo., economist who has studied Western resort towns.
“It has a huge effect,” he said. “All of a sudden, there’s a year- round demand for gourmet coffee or great smoked salmon or a killer bagel.”
Rich Karlin, general manager of the Untamed Steakhouse restaurant in Winter Park, said he is starting to see his business transcend the traditional tourist- driven cycle of big winters and summers bracketed by slow “shoulder” seasons.
Things still slow down in the spring and fall, but his business is not as dependent on holiday and weekend rushes as it used to be – and there are more regulars, he said.
Though second homes seem to be shrinking in proportion, the second-home development industry is a serious driver of the mountain economy, according to a 2004 study.
The Northwest Colorado Council of Governments study, conducted in Colorado’s four leading resort counties, found that second homes generate 34 percent of the dollars spent in the four counties studied and 40 percent of the jobs.
And with the owners of vacation homes seeming now to spend more time in the mountains than some experts thought – an average of 25 percent of the year – it’s getting harder to see the difference between full-time and part-time locals.
“It really becomes this gray area: What’s a second-home owner? What’s a local?” asked Linda Venturoni, the council of governments’ director of special projects.
Consider Jack and Gladys Howard. They spend summers in Grand Lake and winters by Arizona’s Lake Havasu.
“Cold was nice when we were young,” Jack Howard said. “As you get a little bit older, warm is nicer.”
Planners in some communities are struggling to understand the impacts of new temporary and full-time residents and how to pay for them, Schechter said.
“A lot of the revenue-generating mechanisms that these communities have (such as lodging taxes) are pretty dependent on tourism,” Schechter said. “So if tourism is growing much less rapidly than the community … there can be a tremendous shortfall.”
In Steamboat Springs, officials are contemplating a property tax to add more revenue from second homes to the sales-tax revenue coming mostly from full- time locals, said Steve Stamey, the city’s planning director.
Elsewhere, communities are considering new impact fees, said Andy Knudson, a consultant with Economic and Planning Systems in Denver.
But more fees might slow development, said Jack Bestall, proj ect manager for the new 1,300-acre Grand Park development underway in Fraser.
“If you’re having a second- home sector help balance the needs of local communities, then why would we want to burden that?” he asked.
Staff writer Jim Hughes can be reached at 303-820-1244 or jhughes@denverpost.com.
