Re: The Rafta Rafta - The Speed Part 1 In Hindi Dubbed Free Download
Agathe Thies
Michael Roberts: Probably the most popular Outside story I've worked on in the last 20 years was a feature titled, "Did AirBnB Kill the Mountain Town?" We published that pieceby Tom Vanderbilt in 2017, and it got a lot of people fired up, as you might guess.
Roger: We lived up the, uh, on the other end of Main Street by Shadow Mountain. And, and my friend lived right on Main Street, and he would come over and tell me they're, they're running the sheep through town, so we'd run to, to Main Street right up there by the Hickory House. And we'd just watch 'em.
Paddy: Today the goats and the single speed Schwinn's have been replaced by a constant flow of BMWs and Range Rovers, along with construction workers and big box trucks carting around building materials for mega mansions, which you'll hear in the background.
Roger: Now we're standing across the street from the hotel Jerome. When I was a kid, that's where we did our swimming lessons. It was kind of funny. It wasn't a heated pool, so it wasn't a really fun place to, to do, uh, swimming lessons.
This is in the seventies. Yeah. And there were like, there were topless women sitting around the pool and there were, you know, hippies lived in the hotel, Jerome, it was, uh, it, it was a cheap, probably one of the cheapest places in Aspen to live.
Roger: Well, it's one of the nicest hotels in Aspen and super expensive. They have the Jay Bar that used to be kind of a happening local place, but it's, you know, $27 hamburger and a $8 beer. How much fun can you have?
Now this is what I wanted to show you. This is the old Aspen Times building, and as you can see, it's, it's still the same front of the Aspen Times, and it says right on at 1881. That's when the paper was established.
When I started writing for the newspaper 20 years ago. This was one of the most happening spots in town. But now it's a private club. Yeah, it's a, it's a private bar I've never been in here since it wasn't the paper.
Paddy: As we walked around town, Roger pointed at stores like Prada and Gucci and fancy restaurant chains that had pushed out beloved and locally owned joints like Cooper Street Pier, O'Leary's, the Slope, and the Tipler,
Roger: They'd have live music after skiing. They had, you know, dollar beers. And it was just obvious, when you finished the day of skiing, you were gonna go one or the other place.Those places, after about nine o'clock they turned into discos.
Paddy: Of all the iconic local haunts that served as de facto community centers, none is more sorely missed than the Red Onion, which had been open for nearly 130 years before it closed for renovations in 2020. And maybe nobody misses it as much as Roger.
Roger: My grandpa was a bartender there. And, there's an old story that, uh, when my dad was younger, he and my grandpa had some sort of disagreement and my dad went in there and he had a shot of whiskey and he threw the shot glass through the mirror behind the bar.
Roger: My oldest daughter was just, you know, sort of coming into her own after college here, she moved back and she hung out here with her friends and, and I think one of her, coming of age moments was when she danced on the bar here, with her friends.
Roger: Yeah. Something you'd never admit. But just like the Aspen Times building, it's gonna look better than ever when they get finished. And it's still gonna be called the Red Onion. But, you know, they're just, they gutted it metaphorically. And actually.
You know, You'd start with someone like Ralph Jackson, who skied around the mountain in a seal skin coat. He'd put one ski behind his head and he wore a top hat and he had a, a cigarette with a long stem handle on it.
As far as modern characters, there's a guy named Benny the blade. And he wears cutoffs year round. And he rollerblades everywhere he goes. And he's got long stringy surfer hair and nobody knows what he does for a living. But he's everywhere and everybody knows him.
And even during those famed, wild ski years of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, the drug culture killed and imprisoned many of his friends. Mental health issues were rampant in the valley but far too taboo to discuss, and access to treatment was nonexistent.
Roger: There are a lot of pieces of this that are not worthy of being saved, to be honest. But below all that, there, there is some goodness and some wholesomeness and some true love within the community that should be saved. Cuz that's what's really valuable.
The really great thing about Aspen when I was growing up is that we were just a town with a ski area. Everybody who worked there lived there. They've been replaced by people with just basically a lot of money. And I think the main attraction for those people is, maybe the investment quality of the real estate there or the opportunity to show off their wealth there. That's the crazy. Aspen now is just how much money can you spend and not blink.
Roger: I mean, the development and everything that comes with ostentatious wealth. It's money and a greater demand than ever before, forcing the price of real estate so high that you actually can't afford to live in the town you work in.
Paddy: This isn't just a feeling Roger is having. In 2021, 205 single family homes were sold in Aspen, a record number of sales in any 12-month period. The median home sale was $9.5 million with the average sale price reaching $11.4 million, roughly an 82% increase in home prices since 2018. It's estimated that 60 to 75 billionaires own commercial or residential properties in Aspen. That's a lot anywhere, but especially for a town of less than 7,000 residents.
Even though me and all my pals are quick to claim Aspen weirdo-ness and call it our home ski mountain, we have all been priced out of the housing market since the mesozoic period. We all live elsewhere in the Roaring Fork Valley, either mid-valley in Basalt or Willits, or at the mouth of the valley in Carbondale or Glenwood Springs.
My pal Luis Yllanes moved to the valley from Miami with his wife and two children in 2009. Even though he was taking a job that had a great salary with the famed Aspen Art Museum, living in the city limits was not in the cards.
And so the first place we rented was a, a house in Willits, a single family home that at the time you could negotiate rent. They were asking 2,400. And we said we'll give you two. And they're like, great. Okay.
Paddy: Despite the economics, Luis says that he and his family quickly fell in love with Aspen, and the rest of the valley, for its natural beauty and ease of outdoor access. More importantly, it matched his family's value set: love of the arts, philanthropy, environmentalism, community, connection.
Paddy: The Roaring Fork Valley has a storied history of being a rough place to make ends meet. Originally, the valley was serene Ute hunting grounds, which were stolen in the late 1800s, under the guise of capitalism and American elitism.
But, of course, the boom years didn't offer opportunities to everyone. Skiing is infamous for being an activity primarily accessible to able-bodied rich white men. There are roughly 15 million skiers in the US, 63% are male, nearly 90% are white, and more than half earn an annual income over $100,000. Asian and Latino skiers make up less than 6% of the skiing market respectively. Black skiers make up just 1.5% of the skiing market, and Native Americans only account for 0.6%.
Luis: I always saw skiing as like, something like, oh, that's what rich people do. You know, growing up a Latino in South Florida, it's like, it was so foreign to me. I mean, winter sports were an oxymoron.
But I think that to me is kind of indicative of kind of like wealth, right? Like you don't actually have to work to get up there. Like all of a sudden you're carried off and placed at the very top. That ease of like, here you go, magically lift it off away from all your problems and then enjoy the experience.
Because it's tied to that, it's always gonna have the wealth inequality issue. You can't, you can't separate it unless you can get more out of basically wealth to help support everyone else at the bottom it's not gonna change.
But we're gonna keep fighting to try and save it because places like Aspen are unique, right? Because of its history, its unique character. That beauty that surrounds it. Everything it has to offer. It's worth saving because you're, you're not gonna find another place like that and I'm gonna fight every day to kind of keep the vibe that's here as close to what it can be.
Paddy: Aspen truly is a unique place, but the issues it faces are not. Go to any mountain town and you'll encounter the same challenges. Which is why I wanted to talk to Danya Rumore, a professor at the University of Utah and certified small town expert.
Danya Rumore: They're super overwhelmed. The pressures are only getting worse for a lot of these places. More places are getting discovered. It's kind of go time. Right. Because if we don't get on some of these issues, we are gonna lose the things that make these places special.
Paddy: To better understand what is choking the life out of mountain towns I love, including Aspen and the rest of the mountain hamlets that make up the valley I live in, I had to chat with an expert.
Danya: I am Danya Rumore. I'm a professor of planning and law at the University of Utah. And I really nerd out on the issues of what we call gateway and natural amenity region communities, communities that are proximate to high quality natural amenities, whether that be ski areas or national parks, and therefore have become very attractive places to live and visit.
Paddy: In addition to being her area of expertise, these communities hold a special place in Danya's heart. She grew up in Sand Point, Idaho, a town of less than 9000 that sits on Idaho's largest lake and is surrounded by the Selkirk, Cabinet, and Bitterroot mountain ranges.
And that got me really intrigued by this question of, hmm, how pervasive is this throughout the west in these communities that are really defined by their nearby natural amenities? And, are these communities similar in their trajectories and the challenges they face?
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