Trade off

This is the first summer in five years that my partner and I will live in a house with right angle walls, separate rooms and a working bathtub instead of in the classic Airstream we called casa sweet casa in Jackson, Wyoming. After three years away we moved back to this little northern New Mexico town - no passports required, just a love for chili (red or green), sage brush and quirkiness - in the hopes that we could stretch out into a house. Our home, one we could settle into, sink down roots as we plant trees, build a garden, create a place to connect with community around a huge kitchen table, make art and hopefully babies, a nest but also a launch pad for future adventures. A place we could sink our money into and see it in return as time leads us toward those golden years when our hair is white and our steps slowed, when the rocking chair is more appealing than the chair lift and ski slope. I'm talking about a long time from now...

We've started to house shop and so far that dream place hasn't revealed itself, at least not in the price range we can afford. Our town shares similar economic circumstances to that of many a resort town in the US - high prices in the real estate market due to the large number of vacation homes and rentals, the desirable land priced high at over $100,000 an acre, and a job market that mainly consists of service oriented positions - and yet the appeal of living here still seems to outweigh the challenges. Here you can ski, mountain bike, hike, run the river, etc, and enjoy the mountains, gorge, mesa, forest, etc, while eating delectable food in the company of a diverse range of people who speak myriad languages, all in this small town with its expansive atmosphere.

Jackson had almost as much appeal, and certainly a better wage, but there didn't appear to be a way to stay long term that included home ownership, not when affordable housing means a two bedroom condo that costs $300,000, or the commute from the suburbs is either 45 minutes away and/or over a 10,000 feet pass with 10% grades. Although the American psyche might have the daily commute hard wired into it, I feel that spending a huge chunk of time in a car on a daily basis lowers my quality of life. We could ride our bikes in town up there, but we also moved every spring and fall, into and out of the Airstream, in the attempt to stretch our income and make hay for the future while the sun shined.

Now we're house hunting and I'm back to thinking the Airstream might be a good long term home, especially if we get a significant amount of snow next winter and we can bury it, igloo style. What we can afford is a small assortment of run down structures that might be better served to be flattened and then start over again. The rest is a collection of homes that will probably be bought by out of towners seeking their x number property for rental purposes or the occasional visit to our economically disheartened town. Here, it's not as extreme as the market in Jackson, where 10,000 square feet homes often sit empty, except for their caretakers and the property management workers who keep them ready for their rare use, while the imported Mexican workers and east coast gap year kids live crammed many to a house. There, we were high on the hog in our 20' travel trailer compared to our raft guide friends who lived in the raft stacks at the boat house.

In response to the housing crisis in Jackson, one letter to the editor suggested that those people who can't afford to live in Jackson should leave. This comment fails to consider that without those low wage workers who stay despite the financial struggle - because they love the area as much as you do, dear snob - who will take care of your children, home, feed you, serve you? A 'resort' community needs its teachers (probably the most undervalued profession) and trash collectors as much as it needs its entrepreneurs, doctors and Fortune 500 CEOs. But the real estate market does not reflect this truth in mountain towns, or indeed in many places of beauty, where somehow it's a privilege to live there.

I can't offer a solution to this sad state of economic imbalance that really just reflects the state of our nation, which has become a land of the have nots and have a lots, with the bulk of us struggling along in between. I do know that in my own particular experience, learning to want and need less has increased my happiness. The trade off to living simply is that you can live more and work less, which is our particular dream. Although we hope to own a home, what we seek and what we'll get will probably look less like the average American home and more like a stationary version of the Airstream, with a working bath tub, of course. We won't trade off on quality of life, but rather we will trade off the part of the American that means big, bigger, biggest.

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