On the side of a road that leads to some of the most coveted slopes in the world, in a snow -covered parking lot, an affordable form of housing has emerged.
Here in cars, trucks and trucks, behind the neblin windshields and with sleep bag closure, those who serve the vacationers who come to enjoy the snow tried to fall asleep in a recent night: two ski instructors, two snow drivers, a ski lifting operator, an ice fishing guide, a sled guide, the employee of a ski resort whose work includes passes of ski ski skiing, two skins nurses. Pharmacy, multiple servers in local restaurants, as well as Kristine Litchfield, which wins $ 24 per hour in a skiing store that fits people for their boots.
At 6 in the morning, the 62 -year -old woman woke up under several blankets in the bunk she built on the back of her Ford T250 truck. It was negative 8 degrees. “He didn’t feel cold at all,” he joked.
What Mrs. Lithfield and the more than two dozen of others sleeping in their vehicles that night really needed: the right to sleep in the cold subsequent in a landscape that looks like a snow balloon, was a local payment piece.
As the lack of housing rises to the highest registered level, parking lots like this have opened from coast to coast, offering a refuge to those who no longer have a sleeping house, but still have a car.
But the reaction of the neighbors has often been fierce, and to avoid that, the municipalities have imposed an increasing number of rules to the Parkers. The lot in the city of Frisco, a 30 -minute trip to Vail, 14 minutes to Brekenridge and nine minutes to the Copper Mountain dust, where the US skiing team trains. UU., It seems to be the only lot in the country that requires that those who sleep there demonstrate that they are part of the local economy.
In the public imagination, the lack of housing resembles the man with dirty clothes sleeping on a metro grid or the woman looking at a tent under an elevated passage of the road. But in cities and towns that have the highest concentrations of homeless people, many, and sometimes most, of those who do not live in shelters are in cars, not in the streets, according to the annual census known as the “recount of points over time.”
In Los Angeles County, for example, two thirds live in vehicles. In San Mateo County, which includes part of Silicon Valley, is even more: 71 percent.
“The American dream of having a house is dead unless you are one billion dollars,” says Litchfield, sitting in the front seat of his truck.
His turn in the ski store begins at 7:30 am in a nearby shopping center. Customers are already queuing, hoping to reach the clues of some of the most coveted races in the world. The vacationers wait behind a cord as in an airport line, then go up to a small platform that rises on Mrs. Litchfield that measures their feet and proposes a starting size.
Mrs. Litchfield spends another part of her seven -hour shift remakeing an exhibition of jackets from the north face, then sells a heater from the client and a couple of glasses to another before returning to the lot.
Although it earns more than the minimum red salary of $ 14.81 per hour, the $ 2,874 that earns each month is not enough to pay more than a windshield between it and the majestic snow. According to Zillow, the studies here rent for $ 2,500 per month, which means that Mrs. Litchfield would need to spend 87 percent of their income for rent, leaving very little to pay their other needs.
Housing property is even further from reach, since the average sale price is around $ 1 million.
“We cannot afford to buy a house, so people began to think, well, fuck it,” he said. “Why should I get as much debt just to live in a house? And that is how people are here,” he said gesturing the ice cream windshield in the snow -covered asphalt. “This It is the American dream. Living in a truck. Living in your car, ”he said.
Employers are joined to affordable housing activists to press for parking lots as in which Mrs. Lithfield lives. Local business owners struggle to hire and retain workers in Summit county, where it is Frisco and was once classified as the sixth richest county in the United States.
The waitresses live three and four of an apartment, and in the skiing stations, head holders J-1, designed for guest workers from abroad, share literas.
Andrew Aerenson, former member of the Board of the City of Frisco, the parking lot believes that the parking lot has created affordable homes to virtually no cost for the city: “We sat down and we have constant conversations about housing of workforce,” says Mr. Aerenson, a retired lawyer and a skiing instructor in Breckenridge, who stimulates that it costs that the city costs $ 150,000 of a single unit of a single unit of affordable, a house that is used.
“This is obvious to me,” he said about the parking lot where workers pay $ 75 per month to rent their place, a rate that compensates for costs, including the portable bath. “We want these people here.”
The lot here has existed for almost six years, its location moves from a church to a sports port to a library.
Although its model has been copied elsewhere, other communities have not been so cozy, and similar programs have failed after the setback of housing owners.
After the opposition of the neighbors, two similar lots, one that opened in 2022 in a city of rivers in Rivers in Colorado, and the other that was scheduled to open in 2024 in a hiking destination In Arizona, they were closed. Both lots required employment proof.
“Imagine talking to his grandmother about this he wants to do, and every little fear that appears in his brain, suddenly he has to address,” said Salty Riggs, who helped create the lot in the city of Rafting out of exit, colo. The location next to a park with space for 15 The vehicles were approved in 2022 and operated for two years before closing silently, after the list of rules became so long and onerous that Parkers began to feel unpleasant, he said.
In Sedona, after the City Council approved a change in zoning in the spring of 2024 that would have allowed homeless workers to park in a public lot, enraged residents organized a referendum that closed it a few months later, before someone parking there.
To survive in Frisco, the organizers of the lot of a group called Unshelrtred in Summit have treated lightly and have tried to ensure that the lot is mixed with the landscape.
Their discretion is described in a PowerPoint presentation that the organizers eliminate when necessary for elected leaders or members of the local rotating club. The first slides show a drug addict collapsed in the pavement and an abandoned truck with addressed windows. A posterior slide shows one of the lots ordered and ordered in Frisco. One of the areas used also serves as a parking lot for the city’s utility vehicles, so a visitor that occurs in the lot would have difficulty distinguishing which cars are inhabited and which are not.
On one side there is a laptop. A new bright track painted garbage container has a combination block. The Parkers are given the code only if they are approved.
Another slide points out that the most organizers want to convey: parking at noon is empty, because their residents are working.
Paul Minjares, the 41 -year -old guitarist, is working to organize an “open doors” with members of the community. “Basically, to show that it is not skid row,” he said.
It earns additional money working as an admission coordinator, whose duties include managing the lot and research of applicants. Perform a long interview process, first by phone and then in person, looking for a red flag that indicates that the person is not working. The applicant can provide a piece of payment or an employment letter.
Mr. Minjares has lived in the lot for three years, and as some of the other cars inhabitants, he said that there is a new freedom in not having to pay the rent, which allows him to save at the same time that he can live in a place of impressive alpine beauty. A close recreation center offers Parkers a place to shower, as well as multiple swimming pools, a hydromassage bathtub and a steam room.
When he interviewed Mrs. Lithfield two years ago, she sat in her truck to meet her, and then provided an email from the ski store that indicates her start date.
Before going to sleep, Mrs. Litchfield explodes hot air in the truck. A piece of velcro through the roof of the truck allows you to hang a curtain, catching the heat on the back. “I heat my truck and then I was telling you about the fabric that I put? So, is it right on your head, here. So that is reduced,” he said, explaining how he divides the space.
She puts her diffuse socks and multiple layers of clothes. “Once it drags me into my bunk, I close the curtains. So now you have all the hot air that rises in the back of the bunk with me there and I with my sweats and my blurred blankets and a quanto of feathers and a diffuse pillow box and then if I am cold in the middle of the night, let’s say that I woke up, it is three in the morning, and I like it, it is really cold, it is really cold. I get up, let the fabric fall, turn it on.
An electric blanket
Beside him, Mr. Minjares is also preparing for bed. An intricate gadget that has created using a hitch in the back of its RAV4 pumps hot air from a diesel heater, through a duct, in one of the windows of its car, opening wide enough to let the conduit pass. It is roasted inside.
But when the snow fell, he realizes that a woman in a van is fighting.
The 45 -year -old ATM in Target ended in his Toyota Tacoma after his building was sold and his rent doubled. Now, Maegan Sport crawls in the bed of the truck covered by a caravan housing, its fiberglass skin, the only barrier that separates it from the anullante wind outside. A small propane heater allows him to warm up, but he is afraid to fall asleep with him, could he be a victim of poisoning by carbon monoxide?
To spend the night, Mr. Minjares lent him an electric blanket, which plugged into a power strip, fed by a rechargeable battery. “It helped a lot,” he explained. “As I said, it hasn’t been easy.”
The next morning, he wakes up to go to his work at Target, where he wins $ 22 per hour.
