When I was a kid, you could buy a house in Aspen for about $300k and I remember when my parents sold our house on Twining Flats Road in 1979 for $179,000. Fast forward twenty years to Carbondale in 2000, when the first house on your right as you entered Satank was for sale for about $300k. Today, both of those properties are worth millions of dollars and $300k is the real estate value of a lot in the Mountain Valley Mobile Home Park.
In case you haven’t heard, the Mountain Valley Mobile Home Park (behind the diner on Hwy 133) is for sale. There is already an offer for 15+ million dollars, but the residents have started the process of becoming a Resident Owned Community (ROC.) Thistle Community Housing is involved, and I was thinking Habitat for Humanity should chip in— if nothing else, to save themselves the time and expense of building 64 new homes for all the working families who could be displaced.
People who don’t work from home are continuously being run down the valley, forced into longer and longer commutes. As we all learned during the pandemic, without the people who transport and stock our groceries, cook and serve our favorite foods out, or respond early to our emergencies, we won’t have a community. And without affordable housing for the people who work in the insatiable tourism industry upvalley, Carbondale could become the Simone to Aspen’s Kiki (the scary monster-boss in Sirens.) In fact, the endless traffic on Hwy 133 makes me wonder if we are already past the point of no return.
I am grateful it took so long for Carbondale’s real estate market to flare up like the Crepes Suzette it is today. When I was younger, dessert was the Barmuda Triangle: the Pour House, the old Ship of Fools, and the Nugget; perched on our barstools, we ate peanuts and threw the shells on the floor while watching full-moon bike riders go right through the bar.
Nowadays we have fancy shops and restaurants downtown, but with fewer and fewer of us who work there. And we have the added stress of watching out for ICE agents who are kidnapping people and hauling them off to a detention center— or worse: out of the country without constitutional due process. Has anyone looked into who is profiting from building all these detention centers? If we follow the money, I bet we’ll find the true villain behind dear old yam tits’ deportations.
Ah, Trump: the man, the myth, the legend… Of all the used country salesmen in the world, we got the one who can’t even string a coherent sentence together. The man who thinks habeas corpus is Spanish for, “I do what I want.” The deception that his administration is trying to pull on the American people is horrific, and it’s affecting Main Street, America. Taking from the working class to give bigger tax breaks to billionaire corporations? That’s the plan to make this a great place to live?! It’s like a dark and dystopian (redundant, I know) alternate reality Robin Hood. What is the opposite of philanthropy? Oh yeah, good old-fashioned greed.
Don’t they realize that without the rest of us, they’ll just be sitting around waiting for someone to get them a glass of water? There won’t be anyone to clean their house, maintain their property, or keep it from burning to the ground during the next wildfire. It feels like we are all watching Trump light the fuse on a national catastrophe. Honestly, some nights all I can do is make a drink and watch the movie Protocol with Goldie Hawn again— scarily relevant 41 years later!
What do they say? The more things change, the more they stay the same. And if I had a dollar for every time someone in this valley said “affordable housing” while demolishing a trailer park… Well, I could buy the Mountain Valley Park myself. Honestly, I can’t imagine a better way to spend my retirement than keeping the feeling of community in Carbondale by preserving 64 affordable homes at the entrance of our town.
Please support the MVMHP gofundme.
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