Want a job and housing in Aspen?<\/p>\n
We have 300-plus employees of the city of Aspen (bennies! housing!), but we aren\u2019t teaching our kids to be bureaucrats; we\u2019re teaching them to be chefs and wait staff (no bennies! no housing!).<\/p>\n
The alternative to a city job or winning the Aspen-Pitkin County Housing Authority lottery is to be a real estate broker and sell as many 50,000-square-foot mausoleums as possible. Who needs open space? We don\u2019t need no open space. We just need that one view from that one window \u2014 and a plastic elk.<\/p>\n
I can feel what\u2019s trickling down, and it ain\u2019t quality of life. Want free market and a meritocracy? I say, \u201cChoose the arts.\u201d \u201cThe arts don\u2019t pay,\u201d you say. I say, \u201cBull****.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sit through all those credits at the end of a Marvel movie that\u2019s the \u201cbelow the line\u201d credits the \u201clittle people\u201d without the mansion or the stretch. Every one of those people has a job which pays enough for their home and for their kids to go to college. Every. Single. One. (That\u2019s what collective bargaining can do, folks) Do you think Food & Wine or X Games would happen without the airtime? The arts are not just paint.<\/p>\n
We certainly have our share of artists who were born and raised here \u2014 successful professionals in their fields. They can afford to live here but they don\u2019t work here \u2014 they don\u2019t bring their business back home. What would it take to fix that? Just my opinion.<\/p>\n
Ziska Childs<\/p>\n
Aspen<\/p>\n