Aspen
I am shopping in Gracy’s Consignments.
I am looking for something from what I call the Ken Lay Collection.
Hand-me-downs from dead rich guys are the only thing a guy like me can afford in this wealthy resort’s downtown.
I am not alone.
I ask two construction workers eating lunch out of the backs of their pickups where normal people shop in Aspen. They don’t have a clue. They are from Grand Junction, where the middle class has a fighting chance.
Not here.
“I live in Basalt,” said downtown shopkeeper Dan Johnson. “I shop in Basalt. Ninety percent of the people working full time here live outside Aspen.”
This is not a good thing.
There’s a tipping point for resorts, Pitkin County Commissioner Mick Ireland warns. Aspen has probably passed the fulcrum. That means that without some government intervention or a public-private partnership or two to restore middle-class shopping alternatives, central Aspen will soon be a gilded ghost town.
“There are a lot of values – economic, spiritual and moral – that the marketplace can’t capture,” Ireland said.
Johnson, whose T-shirt and kitsch shop bears the ever-so-middle-class moniker “The Shirt Man,” has been in business in Aspen for 23 years. But he hasn’t lived there for a long time.
“I lived in town the first four years I was here,” said Johnson, who arrived from Ohio to be a “ski bum.” “This town was the greatest. It was active. Everyone knew everyone. It’s not that way anymore.
“Along with the wealth, we’re seeing a gradual deterioration of the lifestyle because no one can afford to live here.”
It’s only by the grace of a landlord who doesn’t charge him what his space is worth that Johnson can even afford to work in Aspen.
“I’ve been lucky enough to have a landlord keep me a little under the market,” The Shirt Man said, while selling a pair of $20 T-shirts to a young woman. “There were 17 T-shirt shops when I started. Now, there are six.”
When Johnson’s landlord is done being a nice guy, The Shirt Man is done too. He can’t sell enough low-end items to pay the going commercial rent, which, he said, starts at $130 a square foot.
As it is, Johnson pays five times the rent he paid when he opened his shop in 1983. But today, he has only 72 percent of the square footage he had when he started.
Aspen Mayor Helen Klanderud said multiple merchants have begun sharing a single retail space in order to afford the lease.
This sounds like my son’s living arrangement in Los Angeles. It’s a survival technique, not a lifestyle.
Which brings us back to Ireland’s tipping-point theory. Balance is critical. Wealthy second-home owners give Aspen an ambience and tax base that is the envy of many small mountain communities.
“Either the town’s dying or it’s getting too rich,” Aspen resident Diane Lizotte said of the yin and yang of mountain life and a resort economy. “As locals, we don’t walk around bemoaning the fact that we can’t buy our underwear downtown.”
At the same time, it took a government subsidy to keep Aspen’s downtown movie theater open, said Ireland. It will take zoning restrictions and lower-rent commercial set-asides, similar to Aspen’s affordable housing initiative, to keep anything downtown besides high-end restaurants, uber- priced art galleries, upscale real estate brokers and out-of-reach retailers.
Klanderud has asked the Aspen Business Improvement League and the Commercial Core and Lodging Commission to develop a “commercial diversity” plan around such things as alley shops with lower rents and business incubators.
As he rings up the sale of a $6.46 shot glass, Johnson opines on what Aspen will look like in 20 years if things keep going as they are:
“It’ll be higher-end interval ownership with a steady clientele coming year after year to their second homes. It’ll be very exclusive.”
It will be a lot easier to find an ermine coat than an ice cream cone, and it will be virtually impossible to find the quirkiness that drew many of the rich people to Aspen in the first place.
In the five years since she moved to Aspen, violin and piano teacher Heidi Curatolo watched the Banana Republic, where she could afford to shop, lose its lease to Ralph Lauren, where she can’t. Her students, whom she labels “middle class,” are in the same fix.
“Common folks,” she said, “can’t shop at Gucci or Christian Dior.”
These days, Curatolo, who doesn’t own a car, makes do with The Gap and the Internet.
“A lot of my students shop in Denver,” she said.
And in a pinch, there’s always dead-people designer wear.
Jim Spencer’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at 303-954-1771 or jspencer@denverpost.com.
