GREAT IDEAS

Price of Paradise: Newspaper series focuses on critical need for affordable housing

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In Garfield County, Colo. – the Glenwood Springs Post Independent's circulation area in the shadow of Aspen's wealth – baristas, restaurant servers and raft guides might have master's degrees and tens of thousands of dollars in student debt.

They almost certainly have trouble finding an affordable place to live.

Only about a third of Glenwood Springs' police officers live in town, and Chief Terry Wilson knows that affects their affinity for the community they are paid to keep safe.

"When you have the bulk of your personnel living 15, 18, 20 miles away, I think there's just a little difference in the connection," Wilson says. "They're rooted in the place that their house is rooted."

Teachers in the area's largest school district struggle to get by. Some stay in principals' basements, many share homes with other teachers and work at menial retail or food service jobs.

Nurses paid north of $50,000 a year can't afford to live in the town where they work, which means long commutes, more fatigue and more stress.

To examine the implications of this clash of resort prices against rural wages and an extremely tight and pricey housing market, the Post Independent published "The Price of Paradise" in September. It was both a traditional newspaper series, with five stories, and a modern multimedia project, with a 20-minute video documentary in a market that is not served by a TV station.

This series refocused attention on a longstanding issue that eased during the recession and has returned with a vengeance. Community groups are joining the PI in 2016 to launch discussions about solutions, which started with a forum in February that drew 100 people on a cold Tuesday night.

Randy Essex, editor of the Glenwood Springs Post Independent, said: "We see this work as fulfilling the best purpose of a community newspaper: Engage the community, identify the most critical needs, explore and explain them, then work for solutions."

Through the documentary, readers met neighbors from a variety of walks of life who shared their joys of living in a beautiful spot and their struggles of making ends meet.

The black humor of the region is that people here either have three houses or three jobs. Many of the latter also commute three hours a day, promoting fatigue and killing family time.

Essex says: "To have healthy communities, we need police officers, nurses and other early career workers who are invested in their towns and who live close enough to their jobs to be active in their children's schools, their neighborhoods and local government and volunteer groups. Our series showed the critical need for employers and governments to develop a regional strategy for affordable housing and job growth."

Glenwood Springs, enterprise reporting, Essex
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