Schwartz: Housing our essential workforce is crucial

With the holiday season upon us, we often reflect upon the importance of having a place to call “home”. It’s more than just a place we head to after a long day at work or school. It’s that place where we nurture and raise our children, tuck them in at night, and relax with our friends. In essence, home is that place where we feel safe and find comfort, and it’s where many of us will soon gather to give thanks and share a special Thanksgiving meal with our families and friends. Unfortunately, this special sense of home is not shared by all.

Homeownership has long been considered key to the “American Dream”, and indeed it is the cornerstone of sustaining any community. Ideally, what makes us feel like we belong to a community is to live and work there. Whether you have lived in our valley for over 50 years, as my family has been fortunate to, or you have just arrived, you doubtless appreciate and take pride in the fact that you live in a very special place. Increasingly, we realize that it takes a virtual army of workers to keep this place special and support a smoothly functioning economy. Yet today, our economic vitality is coming at a significant cost to so many of our essential workers who are not able to realize the American Dream, or anything close to it, for themselves and their families.

Until recently, most of our local workforce was able to live fairly comfortably within our communities, or relatively nearby. But increasingly, we know that our essential workers have had little choice but to move further and further away from their jobs, or leave the region entirely in order to find an affordable future for their families. This problem has only intensified since Covid brought a whole new wave of residents eager to take up residency and housing in this valley. Our essential workforce now spends hours per day commuting to their jobs in a seemingly endless stream of cars and trucks heading up and down Hwy 82 every day to serve us. They are no less essential to the well-being of our local communities, but they are increasingly less and less a part of them.

A core part of our mission at Habitat for Humanity in the Roaring Fork and Colorado River Valleys is to make our communities more inclusive by housing more of our essential workforce in the communities they serve. We strive every day to make dreams come true by building net zero homes that working families can actually afford.

Building affordable housing is mission critical at Habitat, and is the work that our entire team puts their hearts into every day. This week we lost one of our greatest champions, former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, who together with President Jimmy Carter, also poured their hearts into Habitat for decades throughout the world. It is this work to which we humbly ask you to join with us – as a volunteer, as a donor, or as a shopper at the ReStore – so that our valleys can remain vital and strong, and so that our essential workers, the very backbone of our communities, feel like they are welcome here and are truly appreciated for their contributions to our very special way of life.

Gail Schwartz is the president of Habitat for Humanity of the Roaring Fork Valley. As a former Colorado state senator, business owner, and community planner, she has a unique understanding of the affordable-housing crisis on the Western Slope and in the greater Roaring Fork Valley and is committed to being part of the solution. gails@habitatroaringfork.org.