When my lovely woman moved to Nevada from Cincinnati to come be with me, we both took jobs at a small private college in Incline Village, NV, just a stone's throw from the shore of Lake Tahoe. Having lived in the Northeastern California area for the past 20 years, I had traveled many times previously to Lake Tahoe by motorcycle, but had never much cared for the place, primarily because of the crush of humanity that descends upon the area in weather nice enough to ride motorsickles in. It's just as bad in the dead of winter, mind you, but since I don't ski and don't care much to see 20 feet of snow (I got enough of that growing up in northern Michigan as a boy) I had no reason to head into the basin. Tahoe is one of those places that draw people by way of spectacular beauty and their hunger for a return to a spiritual/primal connection to the land. Unfortunately, by escaping to paradise, paraphrasing Joni Mitchell here, they turn paradise into a parking lot and in the process, completely destroy what attracted them to the area in the first place. Tahoe today is just a ridiculous hodgepodge of crummy low-end souvenir shops and old cabins sitting under the shadows of mansions belonging to the super-rich. In fact, there's a saying by the locals in the little town I worked in: "Incline Village, where the billionaires are pushing out the millionaires." So my lovely lady, who was no stranger to wealth in her "previous life," originally fell in love with the beauty of the scenery and wanted to buy a house. She felt supremely confident that she would be able to do so with about the same effort it takes for most of us to fill a car with gas (this of course should be compared with the pre-Bush era of affordable fuel). Imagine her surprise when homes that here in Nashville might go for $130,000 were listed at the bargain basement price of a cool half mil - if the shack on its postage-stamp sized yard had even a sliver of a view of the lake, it was considered "filtered lake view" and the price immediately went to a mil and let me tell you, if you didn't make a full price offer on the day the home was listed, fuggedaboutit. Most folks who want property in Tahoe simply over-offer on the list price; bidding wars happen all the time up there. Aghast at the cost of owning a home in Tahoe, she then discovered that even if you could afford to purchase a home in the basin, the restrictions and regulations on property improvement put in place by the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency made it impossible to renovate your new home, unless of course you had tons of money and disposable time needed to obtain the necessary permits, each of which came with a substantial price attached. Even trimming a branch on a live tree on your property was forbidden unless you obtained a permit. Then she began recognizing the destruction of spirituality the lake and basin originally had. I'm not talking about religious/Christian church going spirituality here; rather, I'm talking about that primal connection to the land and the wilderness some of us experience when we go to wild and free places. Not all of us undergo this spiritual awakening when we visit these places; my father in law always called Tahoe "another hole in an old mountain." But those of you who have been moved in a universal connection kind of moment when gazing out on amazing landscapes will understand immediately what I'm talking about. As I mentioned however, one can really only experience this...experience by visiting in solitude. As soon as it fills with the trappings of 21st century commercialism and "development," that connection is cut off until such time as the earth reclaims it's own- for our purposes, this equates to being permanently destroyed. This has occurred in Tahoe. I knew it, felt it - or more appropriately, didn't feel "it" from the very first time I visited, and there is no doubt that Tahoe once had "it" - anyone who has visited the area will know this immediately. Now the super-rich are simply trying to buy it back by pricing everything in the area so far out of reach of the average person that only the wealthy "elite" are able to "enjoy" it. What they don't seem to understand is that by buying it up, they are in the process bankrupting its spiritual impact so any enjoyment is purely superficial, which in an odd way, seems very fitting, indeed....
This Land Is Their Land: How the Rich Confiscate Natural Beauty from the Public
I took a little vacation recently -- nine hours in Sun Valley, Idaho, before an evening speaking engagement. The sky was deep blue, the air crystalline, the hills green and not yet on fire. Strolling out of the Sun Valley Lodge, I found a tiny tourist village, complete with Swiss-style bakery, multistar restaurant and "opera house." What luck -- the boutiques were displaying outdoor racks of summer clothing on sale! Nature and commerce were conspiring to make this the perfect micro-vacation.
But as I approached the stores things started to get a little sinister -- maybe I had wandered into a movie set or Paris Hilton's closet? -- because even at a 60 percent discount, I couldn't find a sleeveless cotton shirt for less than $100. These items shouldn't have been outdoors; they should have been in locked glass cases.
Then I remembered the general rule, which has been in effect since sometime in the 1990s: if a place is truly beautiful, you can't afford to be there. All right, I'm sure there are still exceptions -- a few scenic spots not yet eaten up by mansions. But they're going fast.
About ten years ago, for example, a friend and I rented a snug, inexpensive one-bedroom house in Driggs, Idaho, just over the Teton Range from wealthy Jackson Hole, Wyoming. At that time, Driggs was where the workers lived, driving over the Teton Pass every day to wait tables and make beds on the stylish side of the mountains. The point is, we low-rent folks got to wake up to the same scenery the rich people enjoyed and hike along the same pine-shadowed trails.
But the money was already starting to pour into Driggs -- Paul Allen of Microsoft, August Busch III of Anheuser-Busch, Harrison Ford -- transforming family potato farms into vast dynastic estates. I haven't been back, but I understand Driggs has become another unaffordable Jackson Hole. Where the wait staff and bed-makers live today I do not know.
I witnessed this kind of deterioration up close in Key West, Florida, where I first went in 1986, attracted not only by the turquoise waters and frangipani-scented nights but by the fluid, egalitarian social scene. At a typical party you might find literary stars like Alison Lurie, Annie Dillard and Robert Stone, along with commercial fishermen, waitresses and men who risked their lives diving for treasure (once a major blue-collar occupation). Then, at some point in the '90s, the rich started pouring in. You'd see them on the small planes coming down from Miami -- taut-skinned, linen-clad and impatient. They drove house prices into the seven-figure range. They encouraged restaurants to charge upward of $30 for an entree. They tore down working-class tiki bars to make room for their waterfront "condotels."
Of all the crimes of the rich, the aesthetic deprivation of the rest of us may seem to be the merest misdemeanor. Many of them owe their wealth to the usual tricks: squeezing their employees, overcharging their customers and polluting any land they're not going to need for their third or fourth homes. Once they've made (or inherited) their fortunes, the rich can bid up the price of goods that ordinary people also need -- housing, for example. Gentrification is dispersing the urban poor into overcrowded suburban ranch houses, while billionaires' horse farms displace rural Americans into trailer homes. Similarly, the rich can easily fork over annual tuitions of $50,000 and up, which has helped make college education a privilege of the upper classes.
There are other ways, too, that the rich are robbing the rest of us of beauty and pleasure. As the bleachers in stadiums and arenas are cleared to make way for skybox "suites" costing more than $100,000 for a season, going out to a ballgame has become prohibitively expensive for the average family. At the other end of the cultural spectrum, superrich collectors have driven up the price of artworks, leading museums to charge ever rising prices for admission.
It shouldn't be a surprise that the Pew Research Center finds happiness to be unequally distributed, with 50 percent of people earning more than $150,000 a year describing themselves as "very happy," compared with only 23 percent of those earning less than $20,000. When nations are compared, inequality itself seems to reduce well-being, with some of the most equal nations -- Iceland and Norway -- ranking highest, according to the UN's Human Development Index. We are used to thinking that poverty is a "social problem" and wealth is only something to celebrate, but extreme wealth is also a social problem, and the superrich have become a burden on everyone else.
If Edward O. Wilson is right about "biophilia" -- an innate human need to interact with nature -- there may even be serious mental health consequences to letting the rich hog all the good scenery. I know that if I don't get to see vast expanses of water, 360-degree horizons and mountains piercing the sky for at least a week or two of the year, chronic, cumulative claustrophobia sets in. According to evolutionary psychologist Nancy Etcoff, the need for scenery is hard-wired into us. "People like to be on a hill, where they can see a landscape. And they like somewhere to go where they can not be seen themselves," she told Harvard Magazine last year. "That's a place desirable to a predator who wants to avoid becoming prey." We also like to be able to see water (for drinking), low-canopy trees (for shade) and animals (whose presence signals that a place is habitable).
Ultimately, the plutocratic takeover of rural America has a downside for the wealthy too. The more expensive a resort town gets, the farther its workers have to commute to keep it functioning. And if your heart doesn't bleed for the dishwasher or landscaper who commutes two to four hours a day, at least shed a tear for the wealthy vacationer who gets stuck in the ensuing traffic. It's bumper to bumper westbound out of Telluride, Colorado, every day at 5, or eastbound on Route 1 out of Key West, for the Lexuses as well as the beat-up old pickup trucks.
Or a place may simply run out of workers. Monroe County, which includes Key West, has seen more than 2,000 workers leave since the 2000 Census, a loss the Los Angeles Times calls "a body blow to the service-oriented economy of a county with only 75,000 residents and 2.25 million overnight visitors a year." Among those driven out by rents of more than $1,600 for a one-bedroom apartment are many of Key West's wait staff, hotel housekeepers, gardeners, plumbers and handymen. No matter how much money you have, everything takes longer -- from getting a toilet fixed to getting a fish sandwich at Pepe's.
Then there's the elusive element of charm, which quickly drains away in a uniform population of multimillionaires. The Hamptons had their fishermen. Key West still advertises its "characters" -- sun-bleached, weather-beaten misfits who drifted down for the weather or to escape some difficult situation on the mainland. But the fishermen are long gone from the Hamptons and disappearing from Cape Cod. As for Key West's characters -- with the traditional little conch houses once favored by shrimpers flipped into million-dollar second homes, these human sources of local color have to be prepared to sleep with the scorpions under the highway overpass.
In Telluride even a local developer is complaining about the lack of affordable housing. "To have a real town," he told the Financial Times, "Telluride needs some locals hanging out" -- in old-fashioned diners, for example, where you don't have to speak Italian to order a cup of coffee.
When I was a child, I sang "America the Beautiful" and meant it. I was born in the Rocky Mountains and raised, at various times, on the coasts. The Big Sky, the rolling surf, the jagged, snowcapped mountains -- all this seemed to be my birthright. But now I flinch when I hear Woody Guthrie's line "This land was made for you and me." Somehow, I don't think it was meant to be sung by a chorus of hedge-fund operators.
See more stories tagged with: public space, inqequality
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of thirteen books, including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, Harpers, and the Progressive, she is a contributing writer to Time magazine. She lives in Florida.
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