The Optimist – A town with audacity

What makes Aspen different than the many other wonderful mountain towns in North America? Certainly, we are situated in a uniquely beautiful section of the Elk Mountains. Despite desert 100 miles to our west, our little mountain pocket is unusually lush and green. But Ouray, Telluride, Jackson, and others can each make their claims to similar natural beauty.

If you go back to old pictures of Aspen from the post-mining era, you start to see a clue about what really makes us different. In old photos, the landscape looks relatively bare, denuded of trees in many places, the residue of our mining past. But the post-mining generations that arrived in the 1940s and 1950s had the vision to see what the area could be – physically and as a hub of ideas, progress, culture, and community. This post-Depression period was the Big Vision era for Aspen.

Imagine rolling into town as a former winter soldier with the 10th Mountain Division and having the vision to create what would become one of the world’s great ski destinations. Or imagine the audacity to dream the impossibly broad, yet realized vision, that the Paepckes had — that a former mining town of about 1,000 people could become one of the great hubs of culture and ideas.

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Impossible made real.

And the foresight and vision continued in the 1970s and 1980s. Leaders made a bet on the future when they saw the long-term need for affordable housing, launching what would become the leading affordable housing program in the Mountain West. They launched the predecessor to RFTA around the same time. In the 1990s, a consortium of local governments bought the right of way corridor that we now know as the Rio Grande Trail. Speaking of foresight, amidst the terrible loss in Southern California, has anyone noted the general absence of power lines in the upper valley? Here too, it appears we can thank local leaders from the 1970s and early 1980s who drove projects to bury many power lines for aesthetic reasons, back when wildfire did not loom so fearsomely.

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Did we lose a little vigor somewhere? Perhaps. “No” and “NIMBY” have grown in power. The gears started grinding more slowly. We started playing small ball, like trying to address affordability by capping residential demolitions at six per year. We also lost a step on efficient, cost-effective execution of bigger projects, like the Lumberyard.

It’s time to rediscover our mojo.

A vision for the next 50 years should start by considering the external forces that will buffet our valley in that time:

1. Migration. We will not stop being a desirable place to live and visit. If anything, we should expect that remote work and climate risks will make living in and visiting the Roaring Fork Valley even more attractive. With certainty, we can bet that demand pressure — whether from would-be residents or visitors — will continue. Always and everywhere, migration pressure creates a sensation of change and displacement. Crowding, road congestion, and skyrocketing real estate values are symptoms, as is anger when people feel dislocated from their community. Our recent efforts to manage this pressure have lacked both realism and vision. We need to talk about the elephant in the room — housing supply. But supply alone will be insufficient to ease migration pressure and its impact on affordability. We will need to get very, very creative.

2. Climate. We are vulnerable to a changing climate. Our local water supply relies on flowing creeks. Our glorious winters rely on steady snowfall and our amazing summers on snowpack. It is not a stretch to say that our entire economy and way of life depends on the climate we have known for past centuries. Most of all, we are vulnerable to fire. Nearly all of us know we have not been paranoid or urgent enough about this risk. It is existential — first to life, second to community. Our vision around fire prevention can simply not be big enough.

3. Social connection. Polarization, enhanced by the profit-seeking algorithms of social media, seems likely to continue in the US and around the world. Leaders now reap greater profit by demonizing and driving dissension, rather than celebrating shared strengths, uniting, and moving forward on policy that gets 80% right. Where once we had FDR, Lincoln, and Churchill setting the tone, we now live in the age of Trump and Musk, along with variants of this leadership model around the world. Can we stand as an island against this trend?

Unlike most other communities around the globe, we have unique advantages. For our size, our financial resources are extraordinary. Between the city of Aspen, Snowmass Village, and Pitkin County, local governments have budgeted to spend just under $630 million in Pitkin County in 2025, equivalent to about $38,000 per resident. We also have an incredible brew of talent — long-time citizens who understand the past and citizens of all tenures with extraordinary talent and energy. The magnet that the Paepckes energized 75 years ago has drawn exceptional talent locally. Many already appreciate the power of our local social contract — with the privilege of being a resident or second homeowner in such a remarkable community comes a reciprocal obligation to make the community better.

For the next several months, I will look for audacious ideas and people to cover in this column. Realism and audacity are compatible. Our national history abounds with audacious ideas, executed well. And our local history is a study in audacity made real. If you have audacious ideas or know people who do, please reach out at optimistaspen@gmail.com.

Greg Goldfarb lives in Aspen.