Fat City After All: Aspen and the Price of Paradise
Near Aspen, Colorado
Hunter Thompson proposed naming Aspen Fat City to drive away developers. He lost the sheriff's race in nineteen seventy, and in the decades that followed the development he feared arrived more completely than he had imagined.
Aspen's transformation into one of the most expensive real estate markets in the country happened in layers. The skiing era of the nineteen forties and fifties brought a different kind of visitor than the silver miners, but the town remained relatively accessible into the nineteen sixties. The nineteen seventies and nineteen eighties brought the first wave of celebrity residents, drawn by world-class skiing, the cultural prestige of the Music Festival and the Aspen Institute, and the beauty of a valley surrounded by peaks that top fourteen thousand feet. Gradually, the people who had made Aspen interesting were priced out, replaced by those wealthy enough to stay.
By the early two thousands, Aspen had completed the transformation Thompson feared. The ridge north of town known informally as Billionaire Mountain holds some of the most expensive private residences in the United States. The median sale price for a home in Aspen in recent years has exceeded thirteen million dollars, placing it among the most costly residential markets in the country. The workforce that keeps restaurants open, lifts running, and streets plowed now commutes from Basalt and Carbondale and Glenwood Springs, towns thirty and forty and fifty miles down the valley where housing remains within reach. The silver miners who built this place could not have imagined it. Neither, probably, could the skiers who saved it.
