The Town That Wouldn’t Die—And the Housing Crisis That Might Kill It
How a Colorado Mountain Town Can Preserve Its Future By Building on Its Past
Ulysses S. Grant must have found the scene breathtaking in the summer of 1880. At the oxygen-depleted altitude of 8,885 feet, Crested Butte was already bustling just three years after Colorado Fuel & Iron founded the mining supply center. Smoking a cigar, the former president would have seen the eponymous mountain looming over the town, the jewel of the snow-capped Elk Mountains that crowned the valley. Soon, bituminous coal deposits would be found in those very mountains, and once the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad built a branch there, Crested Butte would become a thriving coal center in its own right. Immigrants from the British Isles, then Greece, Italy, and Croatia, swelled the town’s population to 1,000 and soon supported “a bank, five hotels, several saloons, and three livery stables among its numerous businesses.” While other mining towns went bust, leaving ghost towns in their wake, Crested Butte soldiered on through mine explosions, strikes, and two world wars. People called it the “town that wouldn’t die.”
But Old King Coal eventually would. In 1952, CF&I closed the Big Mine and with it went the town’s big dreams: the descendants of immigrants began to emigrate to economic opportunity elsewhere, the railroad was closed, then the high school. Some old-timers clung on, but by 1960, fewer than 300 people remained. Yet Crested Butte did not die. Instead, it found a second life by preserving its history and natural beauty while embracing a new identity as a recreation hub.
In the 1960s, just as things hit rock bottom, entrepreneurs bought a ranch two miles from town, carving a ski resort into the slopes above. The resort breathed new life into the community, and the town down-mountain began to recover as visitors arrived in the thousands, and then the tens of thousands. A new middle school would open in the old train depot, and eventually the high school would reopen, too. Aptly, there’s a trail up on the mountain called “Resurrection.” Today, Crested Butte has nearly 1,700 residents, and in many ways, it still looks much as it did a century ago—at least in the historic downtown. But up-mountain, a very different version of the town took shape.
I spent last week skiing in Crested Butte, wisely skipping the black-diamond-rated Resurrection, unsure I was as invincible as the town. My friends and I stayed in the base area, closer to the ski lifts, instead of in the walkable historical town in the valley. Our Airbnb was in a four-story, condo building with glorious views of the mountains and less-than-glorious views of the resort's main parking lot. This wasn’t the only difference between the ski resort and downtown.
The area at the base of the mountain was incorporated in 1973 as the independent town of Mt. Crested Butte—partly out of necessity, as the growing ski resort needed infrastructure and governance separate from Gunnison County. The immediate catalyst? An elevator. County commissioners accustomed to ranching and mining had never had to consider “high-rise” construction before. In that era of stagflation and disco, the idea of a freaky-deaky, three-story, above-ground elevator in the Colorado mountains must have seemed pretty far out. But soon, the base area sprawled around an ersatz town square, vaguely resembling a Swiss alpine village. Meanwhile, downtown Crested Butte was designated as a National Historic District in 1974.
Today, the historic downtown’s colorful false-front Victorian architecture lines the densely-packed Elk Avenue, where tourists fill the many saloons and restaurants, gobbling up merch at the various T-shirt and gift shops in-between rounds of IV-hydration and oxygen therapy. New buildings must conform to the town’s Design Standards and Guidelines, a 247-page tome that regulates zoning, massing, scale, and form. Chain stores and traffic lights are banned. Beautiful restored homes, as well as plenty of newer ones, fill out the surrounding walkable grid, first laid out in 1878. With the mountain catching the setting sun, it’s all incredibly beautiful and charming—an idyllic mountain town.
And the median home lists for $1.5 million ($820 per sq. ft.), while a 2-bedroom rental costs $5,970/month. Up-mountain isn’t much cheaper.
High prices aren’t the only sign of a housing crisis.
The menu at the popular Secret Stash pizza parlor encouraged patrons to “hook up the kitchen crew” with $1,000 tips—which the owners would match, up to $25k per six-month season. Quoth the menu:
With affordable housing dubbed the “most important local issue,” here's your chance to help someone move on up. Tell your server you want to add a special "Kitchen Contribution” to your bill. Or just drop some cash in the tip jar and RING THAT BELL!
A chalkboard sign announced that one local shop would offer new retail associates signing bonuses. A docent at the Crested Butte Museum complained to us about the real estate prices. Like many resort towns, Crested Butte is struggling with the competing demands of tourism, historic preservation, and the livelihoods of the local residents and workforce. Many locals are wondering whether a town so dependent on tourism can save its soul.
Crested Butte survives on recreation—it’s also a major summer destination for hiking and biking—and so most of the year-round economy is tied to hospitality. Vacationers and seasonal residents have long competed with year-round residents for housing, but, like everywhere else, the pandemic fueled an influx of moneyed migrants. Some 30% of homes in the historic town and 45% in the ski village sit vacant most of the year, while short-term rentals represent 17% of local housing stock. When housing prices rise out of proportion to local wages, the locals can’t afford to stay, which in turn strains local businesses that struggle to staff up during peak seasons.
Recognizing that “the current lack of available, affordable workforce housing is threatening the livelihood and character of the Town, its citizens, and its businesses,” Crested Butte officially declared a housing emergency during the height of the pandemic. But the problem is not a new one. The town website notes that it has been trying to provide workforce housing since 1989 and has since designated 25% of the local housing stock as deed-restricted for local residents. The town has further capped short-term rentals at 30% of all local homes. It also paid $2.3 million to buy and convert a bed-and-breakfast into housing for seasonal workers when it couldn’t hire six summer employees due to a lack of housing. In declaring an emergency, the town legalized tent camping and RVs on private residential property and allowed the town council to suspend parking requirements that require two spaces per unit. Meanwhile, the county is spending $130 million to build a 252-unit mixed-income development just south of town—but the area is still short of an estimated 1,500 housing units.
As one administrator lamented, the town “cannot build their way out of this crisis.”
But…what if it could?
As the emergency suspension of parking requirements indicates, the lack of supply in the region is largely a man-made problem. Local zoning rules make it fairly easy to build seasonal single-family mansions, but much harder to build denser multifamily housing. Leaders hand-wringing about their inability to build their way toward a solution are missing the obvious answer hidden in plain sight: the historic pattern of mountain-town urbanism all around them.
The historic town’s grid, nearly 150 years old, looks much the same today as it would have when President Grant stopped by for a visit. The total land area of that historic town is only 0.836 square miles, which gives it a population density of 1,960/square miles—equivalent to that of Corpus Christi, Texas. Meanwhile, neighboring Mt. Crested Butte—with its “high-rise” buildings—has a population density of just 460/square miles across slightly more than 2 square miles of town. If the mountain village had been built out at the same density as the downtown, it could house four times as many people as it currently does. Instead, the condos and hotels are spread out and surrounded by driveways and parking lots, leading to extremely poor land utilization. Compare this to a real alpine village like Sankt Anton am Arlberg in Austria, where I skied last year: a compact, walkable town where mixed-use development is clustered efficiently in a narrow valley, linked by free shuttle buses. Instead of driveways and parking lots, St. Anton prioritized pedestrianization with direct access to the slopes. In Mt. Crested Butte, the upshot is that, with the exception of the base area, the ersatz ski village is not very walkable—but perhaps by redeveloping some of its parking lots and older low-density buildings, it could one day look and feel more like the real thing. On the other hand, the two towns already run a free, year-round shuttle bus connecting downtown and the ski resort, which we relied on almost exclusively after parking our car. This is something they can literally build on.
Crested Butte is sorta getting it. That new 252-unit development will include 476 bedrooms on only 15 acres of land, with a Mountain Express shuttle stop. If only one person occupies each of those bedrooms, the density of the project will be 10x that of downtown—even while preserving nearly 47% of the lot for open space. After a long fight about the project’s density, Mt. Crested Butte has meanwhile approved a large but scaled down mixed-use development comprising 400 residential units, 100 hotel rooms, and 120,000 square feet of commercial space. And the historic town is considering zoning changes that would allow more height or less parking for projects that include deed-restricted units.
And that’s the “sorta” in their getting it.
Every square foot of open space that is required to be within the footprint of a project is a square foot of open space that is sacrificed in the great outdoors outside the project. The original footprint of the town kept the valley around it largely untouched, but many of these new projects still require bringing the valley into the projects, and paving a lot of it over for parking spaces. Instead, Crested Butte could be expanding its original grid, allowing slightly larger structures while preserving its historic character and surrounding open space—absorbing excess housing demand without sprawling into the valley. Mt. Crested Butte could meanwhile redevelop its large parking lots into something more like an actual alpine village a la St. Anton. Nevertheless, by embracing higher, transit-enabled density, both towns will help to make Crested Butte a place more livable for locals and still enjoyable for tourists.
To save itself from a housing shortage, The Town That Wouldn’t Die doesn’t need to move mountains—it just needs to build more like the original mountain town it fought to preserve.
Crusty Butt 4evah.
Not to quibble because I think the solutions discussed are in the ballpark.
But eager urbanists often miss some important points about historic development patterns and why they changed. The mining population lived in a walkable town because they had no choice. And people spread out as soon as they could because no one wants to live at that density when sanitation is provided by outhouses and heat by burning coal. I don't know where it is in the Butte, but in the mountain mining towns I know more about, you can always go find the spot where the women and kids left town to camp out all summer because they understood that their children's health depended on getting out of that grid you admire so much. Nor did their living at that density leave the valley and adjoining mountains untouched. There was extensive logging for mine timbers and construction, there was massive grazing of all the draft animals involved. A cloud of coal smoke hung over. There was extensive damage to the watershed by those activities and the town itself. Besides the effluent from the outhouses (CB soils are not suitable for outhouses, but they were the only choice in the beginning), the grid pattern left way too little riparian and wetland area (and that not by intention, but only because of frequent flooding) to maintain water quality in Coal Creek and the river. The verdant valley you see driving from Gunnison these days is not the original. It is a relatively recent restoration, created by [mostly] healthy ranching practices.
I also disagree with the strict division you seem to be positing between the urban and the natural. Our cities are better wherever they are permeated with vegetated open spaces. Leaving corridors of green along drainages and slopes does not preclude providing higher densities and housing choice. It makes the higher densities more livable. The Butte would be a better place with a wide public use corridor along the creek.