The city’s high school principal lives in a camper. A small business owner lives out of his truck. A family of six lives in a two-car garage. All in a small town where the average home costs $1.2 million.
Welcome to Sun Valley, Idaho.
A playground for the rich and famous since it was founded in the 1930s, Sun Valley’s real estate only got more expensive after the pandemic attracted wealthy Silicon Valley and Wall Street workers in search of beautiful work-from-home locations far away from crazy blue-state lockdown restrictions.
Now the surrounding towns can’t find affordable homes for their teachers, nurses, and police officers. According to the New York Times, the fire department that covers Sun Valley has started a $2.75 million fundraising campaign to build housing for firefighters and their families.
“It’s affected so many of my friends and family,” Sun Valley firefighter native Ricky Williams said. “I came back here to this community to give back. And I kind of see it slowly dwindling away. It’s pretty heartbreaking.”
The New York Times doesn’t mention it, but one of the big reasons why housing is so expensive in resort towns such as Sun Valley and similar locations such as Jackson Hole, Wyoming, is because the rich (almost exclusively liberal) people moving in not only spend a ton of money building opulent second homes, but they “give” tons of money to make it harder for other people to build too.
As Justin Farrell documents in his book Billionaire Wilderness, wealthy second-home owners will often buy “conservation easements” on the land surrounding their own, thus making new home construction impossible. These easements count as environmental conservation, so the property owners get a nice little charitable tax deduction that also just so happens to make their own already-developed property worth more.
It’s a win-win for the rich and famous but a lose-lose for the middle-class families who live in the state year-round.
“People say one thing, and then behind closed curtain they’re doing another,” sandwich shop owner Gretchen Gorham told the New York Times.
The push to preserve scenic playgrounds for the ultra-wealthy is bringing unprecedented levels of income inequality to rural America. Teton County is now the most unequal county in the country. Sun Valley’s Blaine County isn’t too far behind.
If these rural communities are going to survive, the wealthy are going to have to let everyone else build more homes.
