




hood river market












northampton amherst route 9


route 5




7 thoughts on “The College and Resort-Town Housing Crisis: a YIMBY Laboratory?

  1. A couple disjointed points:

    1. Princeton is a high-income suburb, so the dynamics of affordable housing fights in high-income suburbs (i.e. fair housing) apply there. It’s also a college town, but housing demand there is driven by wealthy townies and professors.

    2. What’s the housing situation in Northampton like? On the East Side of Providence, housing is affordable, and the same is true in Worcester even near WPI. The big problem with student housing is that unis overcharge for dorms, and have rules forbidding students to live off-campus.

    3. Is there a Beausoleil to Aspen’s Monaco? Housing demand in Monaco is so high that it’s never going to be affordable to even the middle class, but demand craters once you cross the border; the nicer parts of Cap d’Ail and Roquebrune are already affordable on your and your partner’s combined income, and Menton is affordable on a decent working-class income. The situation in Aspen may be vaguely analogous if the marginal apartment building is going to be snatched and mansionized by a tycoon.

    • 1) Fair point.
      2) My friends report it’s pretty bad, and my aunt who lived there for a while always complained about how expensive it is. I think you can buy a decent house starting around $300k, which is pretty expensive for a quasi-rural area but also much cheaper than the coasts. (more expensive than most of New Haven, for sure). The rental market is pretty tight and there’s not a lot of diversity in housing stock. The rentals I’ve seen are roughly equivalent with the nicer parts of the East Side of Providence. In addition to students, Northampton has significant demand from the post-college and wandering hippie queer crowd.
      3) It seems that may Aspen workers have moved down valley to other towns, but I gather the situation there is getting bad too…

      • I’ve never been to Aspen, but I have been to nearby Vail several times and from what I understand it faces similar problems of affordability. Many of the year-round residents who provide services for Vail and another ski resort in the area, Beaver Creek, live about 30 miles and a half-hour away on Interstate 70 in Eagle, a town which itself is becoming more and more unaffordable. There is some new development near Vail (apartment complexes on the north side of the interstate), but not all that much and it is still quite pricey, I believe.

        I think the same thing is true of Aspen and nearby towns of Carbondale or Glenwood Springs, towns that are a good distance away and serve as a bedroom community for Aspen-resort workers. The area being mountainous and there being few through-running roads and much federal land, it is understandable why much of the area is off-limits to development. This is good in the sense that it prevents sprawl, but at the same time it seems that new towns need to find somewhere to pop up – the demand is there for new housing near these hyper-popular resorts.

  2. Cambridge UK has these problems on steroids. It’s a small city with a big student population but also a very active tech and medical industry attracting many workers. Housing costs are second only to London (doesn’t help that commuting to London is also feasible). It’s surrounded by farmland and Cambridgeshire is mainly farming country. There’s also Green belt protected lands and politically lots of support for home building. Except that construction occurs in towns about 10 miles away and public transport is nearly hopeless due to incompetence and a sad history of poorly managed deregulation.

  3. Pingback: Where Can Free Transit Work? | Itinerant Urbanist

  4. Check out Ithaca, NY.

    Mayor Svante Myrick won an overwhelming landslide on a platform of “build more apartments”. Prior to this, it was impossible to find an efficiency apartment which you could rent on the *mayor’s* salary. Now, things are slowly getting better.

    The developers are so eager after decades of not being allowed to build anything tall, that they’ll agree to absolutely any aesthetic conditions on their buildings — which helps.

    Good luck replicating this anywhere else. It’s not common for a mayor to win on a YIMBY pro-housing platform with >65% of the vote, sufficient to make the rest of the city government recognize that he has a mandate.

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s