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Jobs Sit Empty in the Public Sector, So Unions Help Recruit

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Shortages of state and city personnel, especially those who must work on site, are so dire that unions are helping to get people in the door.The State of Minnesota, like nearly every public-sector employer across the country, is in a hiring crunch.Not just for any job, though. The desk jobs that can be done remotely, with flexible schedules? Applicants for those positions are relatively abundant. It’s the nurses, groundskeepers, plumbers, social workers and prison guards — those who are on site, sometimes at odd hours — that the state really can’t find.“It’s terrifying, if I’m being honest,” said Mitchell Kuhne, a sergeant with the Department of Corrections staffing a table at a state jobs fair in Minneapolis this week. “People just don’t know about the opportunities that exist. It’s a great work force, it’s a great field to be in, but it’s a really intimidating thing that isn’t portrayed accurately in the movies and media.”Understaffing requires employees to pick up many hours of mandatory overtime, Mr. Kuhne said. The additional income can be welcome, but also makes home life difficult for new recruits, and many quit within a few weeks. So his union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, is playing an unusual role — helping their bosses recruit workers.It’s a nationwide quandary. While private-sector employment fully regained its prepandemic level a year ago — and now sits 3 percent above it — state and local governments remain about 1 percent below the 20 million people they had on staff in February 2020. The job-opening rate for public-sector positions is below that of private businesses, but hasn’t come down as much from the highs of 2022.Private-Sector Employment Bounced Back. State and Local Government Hasn’t Recovered.Employment level as a percentage of employment in February 2020

Source: Bureau of Labor StatisticsBy The New York TimesIn historical perspective, it could be worse: State and local government employment had only barely recovered from a long slide after the 2007-9 recession, which left many public services underpowered as states and cities lacked the funding to return to full strength.This time, the problem is different. Tax collections recovered more quickly than expected, and the federal government helped with transfers of cash to local jurisdictions to offset the effects of the Covid-19 crisis. That helped many governments award temporary pay increases to retain key personnel, and hire others into departments that had been cut to the bone, such as public health.But officials then faced a new twist. Wages in the private sector were growing faster than they had in decades, drawing people away from government jobs that had, for some, become too stressful. Civil servants also tend to be older than other workers, and more of them retired early rather than put up with mounting strain. As federal relief funds peter out, governments face difficult questions about how to maintain competitive pay.Public needs, however, have only increased. Minnesota, along with recovering from a hiring freeze early in the pandemic, has passed larger budgets and new laws — regulating cannabis sales, for example — that have added hundreds of positions across several agencies. At the same time, the federal infrastructure bill is supercharging demand for people to manage construction projects.That’s a victory for labor unions, which typically push for more hiring, higher wages and better benefits. But it doesn’t help them much if positions stay empty. A survey of local government human resource officers, released in June by the nonprofit research organization Mission Square, found that more than half the respondents had to reopen recruitment processes very often or frequently for lack of enough applications. In Minnesota, the vacancy rate for state government jobs rose to 11.5 percent in the 2023 fiscal year from 7.5 percent in 2019.That’s why the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, known as AFSCME, decided it needed to pitch in on a function usually reserved for human resources departments: getting people in the door. The union has started a national campaign to generate buzz around frontline positions, while locals are contacting community organizations and even families of union members to spotlight opportunities.“Our employers are feeling the heat,” said Lee Saunders, the union’s president. “They understand that services are not being provided at the level that they should be provided. It’s a team effort as far as bringing fresh blood into the public service.”That was the point of the hiring fair in Minneapolis. Seventy-five job seekers filtered through, often looking for more stable or higher-paying positions than the ones they held, usually referred by a friend or relative in the union.Cassandra Crawford spoke to someone at nearly every table, looking for something better paid and more active than her remote job in health care administration. “The older you get, the more you want to move your body,” she said. Speaking with recruiters in person was also more encouraging than sending her résumé to an automated portal. “I think they might remember me,” she said, laughing.Joel Shanight, 43, a disabled Army veteran and Peace Corps volunteer with experience in hostile environments, expressed confidence that he had landed a job doing roadway assistance on state highways. After doing unsatisfying accounting work in the private sector, he was glad to have learned about positions that could allow him to help people again.“I can’t find that in the corporate world,” Mr. Shanight said. “There’s no compassion anymore.”Also present were high-level officials from the state government, including Jamie Long, the House majority leader, who praised the union for helping out. Other government unions — like the American Federation of Teachers, which represents a field that saw an exodus during the pandemic — also have programs to try to bring more people into the classroom.AFSCME plans to create a national training and development center that will maintain a database of available union-represented jobs and centralize apprenticeship programs to build the next generation of public servants.Joseph McCartin, the executive director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University, said he hadn’t seen anything similar since World War II, when unions joined the federal government to fill positions essential to the military effort. Unions can be trusted messengers in communities, he said, and have a better understanding of what job seekers are looking for than employers do.A tour bus used for recruitment by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, a trade union of public employees, at the hiring fair in Minneapolis this week.Tim Gruber for The New York Times“I think it’s an extraordinary development,” Dr. McCartin said. “It’s a great advantage when you have a partner that’s going to be working with you to try to help you solve this problem.”Some states that limit collective bargaining in the public sector think that not having to deal with labor organizations allows them to adapt compensation more quickly in response to staffing needs. But they still deal with their share of difficulty in hiring.Take Idaho, whose population boomed during the pandemic. By the 2022 fiscal year, the state was facing vacancy rates as high as 20 percent at the Department of Corrections and 15 percent in the Department of Health and Welfare. A benchmarking analysis found that state jobs paid 24.6 percent less than the private sector for comparable positions, and annual turnover had reached 21.8 percent.The state ramped up recruiting, eased formal education requirements for some positions and brought on contractors to fill labor gaps, which is expensive. Those moves didn’t solve the problem, especially for less attractive shifts at hospitals, prisons and veterans’ homes, which couldn’t fill available beds because of understaffing.So in early 2023, Gov. Brad Little, a conservative Republican, asked for an 8.5 percent across-the-board pay increase for state workers over two years, with another 6 percent for those in public safety. Next year the governor plans to seek the same bump for workers in health care, information technology and engineering.The Legislature generally went along with those recommendations, with a few tweaks. But given the continuing constraints, Lori Wolff, head of the Division of Human Resources, said she was looking for ways to provide services with fewer people, especially for tasks like enrolling people in state benefits.“There’s a lot of jobs that we’re going to have to start looking at technology to solve,” Ms. Wolff said.The state’s 199 municipalities have an even tougher time increasing pay and adopting automated services. The state has limited their ability to raise revenue through property taxes, so it has been more difficult to compete. Skyrocketing housing costs are compounding that problem, fueled by high-income remote workers who moved out of bigger cities during the pandemic.Kelley Packer, director of the Association of Idaho Cities, said she had recently spoken with a member whose public works director had been forced to live in his car.“It’s a really interesting balancing act to allow for the growth to happen, and meet the needs of the housing crisis that we’re in, and still be able to provide services with a restricted property tax system,” Ms. Packer said.Of course, it’s not all about salary. Rivka Liss-Levinson, research director with Mission Square, said people usually listed three primary motivations to work for governments: job security, job satisfaction and robust retirement benefits. Conveying the value of comparatively generous health care coverage and pensions, plus the public service mission, is still the basic strategy.“Those things haven’t really changed over time,” Dr. Liss-Levinson said. “States and localities that are able to address these needs and concerns are the ones that are going to thrive when it comes to recruitment and retention.” More

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    Oregon Town’s Marijuana Boom Yields Envy in Idaho

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    Tax revenue has surged since cannabis stores opened in Ontario, Ore., fueling a push in neighboring Idaho to legalize sales and get in on the action.For John Leeds, the hour-and-a-half commute to and from his job as assistant manager at Treasure Valley Cannabis Company is exhausting, but logistically unavoidable.Like nearly half of the other employees, Mr. Leeds, 39, lives in Idaho and travels along Interstate 84, past sprawling alfalfa and onion fields, to the marijuana shop just across the Oregon state line, where cannabis is legal.“It’s really two different worlds,” Mr. Leeds said. “A lot of whiplash on this issue just in a car ride up and down the highway.”Every day, hundreds of customers and workers like Mr. Leeds make the pilgrimage from Idaho to Ontario, Ore., a small city nestled along the Snake River that is home to 11 dispensaries — roughly one for every 1,000 residents. They can compare the aromas of various strains of marijuana and gather the staff’s insights on THC levels in edibles.The cannabis boom is helping to drive a thriving local economy — and tax revenues that have paid for new police positions, emergency response vehicles, and park and trail improvements.Missing out on the action has become increasingly frustrating to some politicians and longtime residents in Idaho, where the population and living costs have surged in recent years.Because the sale or possession of marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, many states — and in this case neighboring ones — have landed on drastically different approaches for whether and how to decriminalize, regulate and tax cannabis. Since 2012, 23 states have legalized it for recreational use, and more than three dozen allow medical marijuana.Eleven states, mostly conservative-leaning, have enacted extremely limited medical marijuana laws. Aside from cannabis-derived drugs approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for limited medical use, Idaho has not legalized any cannabis sales — a prohibition that has helped its more progressive neighbors.“Our cannabis market caters almost exclusively to Idaho residents,” said Ontario’s mayor, Debbie Folden. “This has been an economic boom unlike any this city has seen.”The patchwork of laws, which vary by state and often by county, have created similar commuter-propelled booms in other parts of the country as well, said Mason Tvert, a partner at VS Strategies, a national cannabis policy and public affairs firm in Denver.Texans travel to Colorado to stock up on their favorite strains or edibles, and Indiana residents make the trek to Michigan, he said. “Demand will be met by either the illegal market or by a legal market in another state,” Mr. Tvert said.That proposition, and the larger economic equation, are not lost on officials in Idaho.Last year, the state approached two million residents, a swell attributed largely to people moving from California and looking for overall cheaper costs of living. Only Florida grew faster.At the same time, property taxes have increased 20 percent since 2018, according to a report from the Idaho Center for Fiscal Policy, a nonpartisan group. And the state’s budget — currently showing a surplus — is expected to come under strain, the group noted, citing legislation that cut income taxes by roughly $500 million over three years even as population growth put new demands on health care, education and transportation.Some longtime residents of the state are tired of seeing the marijuana tax dollars go elsewhere as prices increase from the newer residents arriving.Legalizing and taxing cannabis sales could bring in revenue and help offset any budgetary concerns, said Joe Evans, a lead organizer for Kind Idaho, a group pushing to legalize medical marijuana.“That money should not be leaving the state of Idaho,” said Joe Evans, who supports the legalization of medical marijuana in the state.Ellen Hansen for The New York Times“That money should not be leaving the state of Idaho,” said Mr. Evans, who noted the entrepreneurial spirit of the region, home to Joe Albertson, who started a local grocery store chain, Albertsons, and laid the foundation for a multibillion-dollar national business.But for Mr. Evans, who served with the Army in Iraq and Afghanistan and knows fellow veterans who use cannabis for pain relief, legalization is also about something bigger than money. It is long past time, he said, for his state to legalize a substance that can offer relief for some medical conditions.Patients who use marijuana, especially older or chronically ill Idahoans, shouldn’t have to drive an hour or more to Oregon, he said.“This is about patient advocacy,” said Mr. Evans, who hopes the state will next year consider a measure to legalize cannabis for medicinal use.It would not be the first try.Initiatives to legalize cannabis for medicinal use failed to qualify for the ballot in 2012, 2014 and 2016. In 2020, supporters of a ballot measure suspended efforts to gather signatures because of the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the next year a bipartisan group of state lawmakers introduced a medical marijuana bill that failed to get out of committee.As those efforts foundered, customers in Idaho increasingly made the trek to Oregon, where voters legalized cannabis for medical use in 1998 and for recreational use in 2014.Ontario, Ore., is home to 11 dispensaries — roughly one for every 1,000 residents.Ellen Hansen for The New York TimesFew areas in the state have benefited as much as Malheur County, home to Ontario.The city, which voted to legalize local recreational sales of marijuana in 2018, is the only part of the county with dispensaries. Even so, Malheur County racked up roughly $104 million in total cannabis sales last year, outpacing each of the state’s 35 other counties except Multnomah, which includes Portland.In 2020, the first full year in which Ontario allowed cannabis sales, the city took in $1.8 million in resulting tax revenue. The next year, the revenue increased 65 percent.The area is a conservative pocket in a progressive state — a movement called “Greater Idaho” wants the region to secede from Oregon and become part of Idaho — and Mayor Folden, an Ontario native, calls herself a conservative Republican.That hasn’t blocked the city’s emergence as a cannabis capital. The tax revenues, the mayor said, have been a municipal lifeline. But the city is stockpiling its reserves, Ms. Folden said, because she expects that within five years, Idaho will move ahead with some form of legalization.Treasure Valley Cannabis is one of the businesses that have led to a surge in tax revenue for Malheur County.Ellen Hansen for The New York Times“We know that this will not last forever, so we’re being prudent,” Ms. Folden said. “We know the economic winds, as they say, might shift.”In the fall, a poll for The Idaho Statesman, a Boise newspaper, found that 68 percent of residents backed legalizing marijuana for medicinal purposes. For recreational use, 48 percent supported legalization, while 41 percent were opposed.Gov. Brad Little of Idaho, who is in his second term, staunchly opposes marijuana legalization. In an emailed statement, Mr. Little, a Republican, said that “legalization of marijuana triggers numerous unintended consequences.”But some local politicians in Idaho have begun to consider the economics of the issue.Patrick Bageant, a Boise councilman, said the need for alternative forms of tax revenue was increasingly urgent.“Legalizing marijuana can help bring in different forms of cash,” Mr. Bageant said. “Just look around the country — we as a state should be more forward-looking.”Adam Watkins, a software engineer and a constituent of Mr. Bageant’s, has lived in the city’s West End neighborhood for the past decade. His home value has doubled since 2018, when he paid $3,200 in property taxes; now he pays close to $4,200.“You look around at other states that have legalized marijuana decades ago, when it comes to medical marijuana, and you just cannot help but think, why are we so backward on this issue?” said Mr. Watkins, who supports legalization for philosophical and fiscal reasons.“This is a drug with proven health effects, and we are just leaving this issue to other states to solve,” he added. “We are turning blindly, like this is not an issue, when it clearly is.”Back in Ontario on a recent afternoon, red, white and blue license plates emblazoned with the phrase “Scenic Idaho” lined the parking lot of Treasure Valley Cannabis. (A federal law prohibits transporting marijuana between states.)John Leeds commutes an hour and a half to and from his job at Treasure Valley Cannabis, where he manages a staff of 45.Ellen Hansen for The New York TimesMr. Leeds manages a staff of 45 employees four days a week. He used to work five days, but made a deal with the owner, Jeremy Archie, to work four to cut back on his commute.That day, Mr. Leeds and Mr. Archie walked the floor past vape pens, various strains of cannabis, and sweatshirts acclaiming the company and the state.They greeted customers and shared stories of patients battling health issues like cancer, who use their products to ease pain. On one wall hung a poster board proclaiming a 25 percent discount for customers car-pooling with at least three people.A small gesture of thanks, Mr. Archie said, for their Idaho customers.“The Idaho market has made this a very successful business,” he said. More

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    States Turn to Tax Cuts as Inflation Stays Hot

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    WASHINGTON — In Kansas, the Democratic governor has been pushing to slash the state’s grocery sales tax. Last month, New Mexico lawmakers provided $1,000 tax rebates to households hobbled by high gas prices. Legislatures in Iowa, Indiana and Idaho have all cut state income taxes this year.A combination of flush state budget coffers and rapid inflation has lawmakers across the country looking for ways to ease the pain of rising prices, with nearly three dozen states enacting or considering some form of tax relief, according to the Tax Foundation, a right-leaning think tank.The efforts are blurring typical party lines when it comes to tax policy. In many cases, Democrats are joining Republicans in supporting permanently lower taxes or temporary cuts, including for high earners.But while the policies are aimed at helping Americans weather the fastest pace of inflation in 40 years, economists warn that, paradoxically, cutting taxes could exacerbate the very problem lawmakers are trying to address. By putting more money in people’s pockets, policymakers risk further stimulating already rampant consumer demand, pushing prices higher nationally.Jason Furman, an economist at Harvard University who was an economic adviser under the Obama administration, said that the United States economy was producing at full capacity right now and that any additional spending power would only drive up demand and prices. But when it comes to cutting taxes, he acknowledged, the incentives for states do not always appear to be aligned with what is best for the national economy.“I think all these tax cuts in states are adding to inflation,” Mr. Furman said. “The problem is, from any governor’s perspective, a lot of the inflation it is adding is nationwide and a lot of the benefits of the tax cuts are to the states.”States are awash in cash after a faster-than-expected economic rebound in 2021 and a $350 billion infusion of stimulus funds that Congress allocated to states and cities last year. While the Biden administration has restricted states from using relief money to directly subsidize tax cuts, many governments have been able to find budgetary workarounds to do just that without violating the rules.Last week, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed a $1.2 billion tax cut that was made possible by budget surpluses. The state’s coffers were bolstered by $8.8 billion in federal pandemic relief money. Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, hailed the tax cuts as the largest in the state’s history.“Florida’s economy has consistently outpaced the nation, but we are still fighting against inflationary policies imposed on us by the Biden administration,” he said.Adding to the urgency is the political calendar: Many governors and state legislators face elections in November, and voters have made clear they are concerned about rising prices for gas, food and rent.“It’s very difficult for policymakers to see the inflationary pressures that taxpayers are burdened by right now while sitting on significant cash reserves without some desire to return that,” said Jared Walczak, vice president of state projects with the Center for State Tax Policy at the Tax Foundation. “The challenge for policymakers is that simply cutting checks to taxpayers can feed the inflationary environment rather than offsetting it.”The tax cuts are coming in a variety of forms and sizes. According to the Tax Foundation, which has been tracking proposals this year, some would be phased in, some would be permanent and others would be temporary “holidays.”Next month, New York will suspend some of its state gas taxes through the end of the year, a move that Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, said would save families and businesses an estimated $585 million.In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, has called for gradually lowering the state’s corporate tax rate to 5 percent from 10 percent — taking a decidedly different stance from many of his political peers in Congress, who have called for raising corporate taxes. Mr. Wolf said in April that the proposal was intended to make Pennsylvania more business friendly.States are acting on a fresh appetite for tax cuts as inflation is running at a 40-year high.OK McCausland for The New York TimesMr. Furman pointed to the budget surpluses as evidence that the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package handed too much money to local governments. “The problem was there was just too much money for states and localities.”A new report from the Tax Policy Center, a left-leaning think tank, said total state revenues rose by about 17.6 percent last year. State rainy day funds — money that is set aside to cover unexpected costs — have reached “new record levels,” according to the National Association of State Budget Officers.Yet those rosy budget balances may not last if the economy slows, as expected. The Federal Reserve has begun raising interest rates in an attempt to cool economic growth, and there are growing concerns about the potential for another recession. Stocks fell for another session on Monday, with the S&P 500 down 3.2 percent, as investors fretted about a slowdown in global growth, high inflation and other economic woes.Cutting taxes too deeply now could put states on weaker financial footing.The Tax Policy Center said its state tax revenue forecasts for the rest of this year and next year were “alarmingly weak” as states enacted tax cuts and spending plans. Fitch, the credit rating agency, said recently that immediate and permanent tax cuts could be risky in light of evolving economic conditions.“Substantial tax policy changes can negatively affect revenues and lead to long-term structural budget challenges, especially when enacted all at once in an uncertain economic environment,” Fitch said.The state tax cuts are taking place as the Biden administration struggles to respond to rising prices. So far, the White House has resisted calls for a gas tax holiday, though Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said in April that President Biden was open to the idea. The administration has responded by primarily trying to ease supply chain logjams that have created shortages of goods and cracking down on price gouging, but taming inflation falls largely to the Fed.The White House declined to assess the merits of states’ cutting taxes but pointed to the administration’s measures to expand fuel supplies and proposals for strengthening supply chains and lowering health and child care costs as evidence that Mr. Biden was taking inflation seriously.“President Biden is taking aggressive action to lower costs for American families and address inflation,” Emilie Simons, a White House spokeswoman, said.The degree to which state tax relief fuels inflation depends in large part on how quickly the moves go into effect.Gov. Laura Kelly backed a bill last month that would phase out the 6.5 percent grocery sales tax in Kansas, lowering it next January and bringing it to zero by 2025. Republicans in the state pushed for the gradual reduction despite calls from Democrats to cut the tax to zero by July.Understand the 2022 Midterm ElectionsCard 1 of 6Why are these midterms so important? More

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    It’s Summer in the Ski Towns, 2.0

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    Last year, mountain resorts were overrun by travelers in search of space and fresh air. The visitors are expected back, but now the towns have expanded activities and plans in place to deal with the crowds.For their vacation this summer, Susan Tyler and her husband have booked a house in the small ski resort town of Red Lodge, Mont., with a group of friends. As they message daily about the trip, the anticipation grows, said Ms. Tyler, a performing arts administrator in Texarkana, Texas. “Being outside with friends is smart and renewing, and it feeds your soul,” she said.True, but not when the trailhead is so packed you can’t find a place to park. Last summer, pandemic travelers, remote workers and an unprecedented number of new full-time residents descended on mountain towns in search of space and fresh air, prompting longtime locals to complain about overcrowding and quality-of-life concerns. This year promises more of the same.The difference? Resort towns are prepared, with on-mountain activities back to operating at full capacity, programs in place to educate visitors on outdoors etiquette, plans to address overcrowding and new attractions that highlight the alpine environment.A mid-May report from DestiMetrics, which tracks lodging in mountain resort destinations, describes bookings as “surging” for this summer, with July, August and September already well ahead of the same time period two years ago, which was itself a record-setting summer for resort visitation and revenue. At the same time, average daily hotel rates were 32 percent higher than they were in summer 2019.“We’re seeing earlier demand than we’ve ever seen before and at higher levels,” said Anna Olson, the president and chief executive of the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce, who noted that lodges in nearby Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks that had closed for most of last summer have reopened, increasing the number of rooms available near the Wyoming resort town; additionally, the Cloudveil, a new Autograph Collection hotel, has opened.Not just for skiingOf course, summering near ski resorts is nothing new. Some towns, like Jackson and Whitefish, Mont., have historically attracted warm-weather visitors because of their proximity to national parks. Others, like Colorado’s Aspen and Telluride, have drawn vacationers with longstanding cultural events, like the eight-week-long Aspen Music Festival and School and the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. And many ski areas have long offered scenic chairlift rides to hiking and biking trails. But now resorts are increasingly promoting themselves as warm-weather destinations and adding more outdoors-oriented activities like purpose-built bike parks, forest canopy tours, mountain coasters and via ferratas, a European-derived system that consists of permanent steps and ladders bolted into a rock face; users attach themselves with carabiners to steel cables to prevent big falls.Summer visitors have long been drawn to ski towns for cultural events like the Telluride Bluegrass Festival in Colorado. Benko PhotographicsFor one, there’s the desire to create more of a year-round — and less snow-dependent — economy. Additionally, passage of the Ski Area Recreational Opportunities Enhancement Act in 2011, and subsequent policy guidelines issued by the U.S. Forest Service in 2014, eliminated cumbersome aspects of the permitting processes on federal land, making it easier for many mountains to develop summer recreation.Vail Resorts was one of the first to capitalize on the new legislation with its Epic Discovery summer program, introduced at Vail Mountain and Breckenridge in Colorado, and Heavenly in California, starting in 2016. Zip lines, alpine slides, ropes courses and more, along with educational components, aim to let visitors immerse themselves in the mountain environment. Since then, many other resorts have followed suit. This June, for example, Telluride, in southwestern Colorado, introduced its first canopy tour, with zip lines, aerial bridges and rappels.The approach has been working. Some would even say too well. “Now at most mountain destinations in the West, and at many in the Northeast, the summer occupancy is as high or higher than during the winter months,” said Tom Foley, the senior vice president for business operations and analytics for Inntopia, a resort marketing and e-commerce firm. (He adds that lodging prices, however, still lag behind winter’s peak rates.)Even resorts that long had infrastructure in place have benefited. Vermont’s Killington introduced its bike park (which sits on a combination of state and private land) 30 years ago. But from 2016 to 2018, visits surged to 30,000 from 12,000, said the resort spokeswoman, Courtney DiFiore. She attributed the growth to new beginner and intermediate trails, more programming for children and an all-season pass option.This year, resorts expect summer visitation to ramp up several notches, in reaction to the pandemic. “It’s unreal how much demand there is for Jackson right now,” said the ski area spokeswoman, Anna Cole. “Jackson by nature is outdoors and pretty distanced, and people want to get in their cars and drive,” she said. “We fit the bill on all fronts.”In the summer, visitors enjoy the patio of the Piste restaurant at the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort in Teton Village, Wyo.Natalie Behring for The New York TimesThe ski area continues to expand its offerings. The Sweetwater gondola is running for the first time in summer, hauling riders and their bikes to new routes within a growing trail network, and last summer the mountain added to its guided via ferrata routes.Other resorts, like California’s Mammoth Mountain, have also built via ferratas. For some ski areas with rugged winter reputations (including Jackson Hole), offering hikers the challenge and reward of safely ascending rock features is a fitting alternative to more passive experiences. “We’re not looking for zip lines or mountain coasters,” said David Norden, the chief executive of Taos Ski Valley in New Mexico, which added a via ferrata last August. “We want people to engage with the mountain and get that sense of accomplishment.” Colorado’s Arapahoe Basin delves into summer operations for the first time this year with its own via ferrata — topping out at 13,000 feet in elevation, it’s North America’s highest — along with an aerial adventure course.Taos also introduced lift-served mountain biking last year, tapping into another summer growth area, as resorts across the country have introduced or expanded existing bike parks. Though these projects have taken at least a couple of years to plan and construct, they coincide fortuitously with the pandemic-inspired surge in cycling.For instance, New Hampshire’s Cranmore Mountain Resort, near North Conway, opened a family-friendly bike park last year, while nearby Loon Mountain opened its version in fall 2019. In Idaho, lift-accessed mountain biking returns to Sun Valley’s extensive trail network after a year’s hiatus and Snowmass, Colo., continues to add trails to its park. Even Mammoth, which was the world’s first resort to offer lift-served mountain biking back in 1986 and now hosts California’s largest park, is still expanding, adding some e-bike-specific on-mountain trails last summer.Goodbye to the slow seasonBut the increase in visitors has come at a cost, especially in summer, when recreation takes place across more outdoor venues with greater impact. The upsurge of people vying for space on trails and in restaurants in the summer months means resort towns never get a break. “Discussions about overtourism in mountain towns have been going on for a long time,” said Inntopia’s Mr. Foley, who also noted the scarcity of affordable housing for workers, especially given the recent run up in prices as new home buyers have sought refuge from the pandemic in the mountains. “Every problem that existed before the pandemic is still there and probably worse.”Many longtime locals say the growing number of visitors, especially those who may not be familiar with low-impact outdoors practices is having a negative effect — and they are taking their objections public. Perhaps the most notorious instance took place in Lake Tahoe last August, as groups of residents, fed up by the onslaught of tourists and an avalanche of litter, staged protests at several busy intersections.The Taos Ski Valley Via Ferrata, situated at 11,500 feet in a sub-alpine ecosystem, features beginner-through-advanced climbing route challenges, a 100-foot skybridge and a double-cable catwalk. photo via Taos Ski Valley.As a result, mountain towns are planning to greet this summer’s visitors with messages about how to encounter wildlife and engage with other people, especially given the ever-changing Covid regulations and staffing shortages in the hospitality industry. “We need the summer of courtesy and kindness,” said Rose Abello, the director of Snowmass Tourism.Remember to be niceWhitefish, home to a large ski area and a gateway to Glacier National Park, encourages visitors to Be a Friend of the Fish by limiting social media tagging on popular trails, staying calm in lines or traffic, packing out trash and keeping a safe distance from wildlife. Similarly, Sun Valley’s Mindfulness in the Mountains campaign asks visitors and newer residents to practice good environmental stewardship and adjust their pace and expectations to the area’s “modest, unpretentious, down-to-earth feel.” Jackson Hole’s Wild Rules tool kit provides expectation-managing emails and social media posts for businesses to share with guests, ideally before they arrive. And Breckenridge touts its new B Like Breckenridge program, which emphasizes respect for wildlife, using good trail etiquette, consuming less and walking more.The town of Mammoth Lakes, home of Mammoth ski area, opted to fund a community host program, with both paid and volunteer ambassadors answering questions and handing out maps that show where dispersed camping is allowed and list important backcountry basics, like how to douse a campfire and bury or pack out human waste. At many resorts, hikers will be encouraged to cut down on trailhead crowding by going midweek or earlier or later in the day or by choosing less-frequented but still rewardingly scenic trails.How travelers will respond and whether or not this new outreach will have a positive effect could go a long way toward decreasing friction between residents and tourists. “We’re a resort town but also a tight-knit community,” said Laura Soard, the marketing director for the Steamboat Springs Chamber, in Colorado. “It’s newer for us to be giving visitors behavior expectations, saying we want you to come visit us, but we want you to follow our rules and respect our community.”The return of signature summer events, from outdoor concerts to food festivals, may mean fewer people all heading to the trail at the same time. Last summer, “we saw trailheads being stacked with cars, camping sites full and recreation stores sold out of gear,” said Ray Gadd of Visit Sun Valley. “This summer will have much more of a feeling of normalcy,” he said, mentioning annual gatherings like a multiday wellness festival and well-known writers’ conference that are once again on the schedule.At New Hampshire’s Cranmore Mountain Resort, a new bike park features lift-serviced, beginner-friendly downhill mountain biking.Josh BogardusAs for traffic, road trips will likely still be a popular form of travel this summer, but resorts hope to alleviate congestion by encouraging visitors to return to public buses and shuttles or to bike around town. New transportation options that make a rental car unnecessary have special appeal this summer, when cars are in short supply. Taos Ski Valley’s airline, Taos Air, offers new direct flights from Texas and California to a small nearby airport, and then shuttle service to the resort. Travelers to Breckenridge can book a United Airlines package that offers seamless transfer to the resort: They’ll board a 35-seat motor coach directly on the tarmac at Denver International Airport, along with their luggage, for the drive to their final destination.Among the most important messages mountain towns hope to convey this summer: Plan and book well in advance, whether for lodging, restaurant reservations or guided outdoor activities. “Booking early helps us prepare and makes for a more relaxed experience for guests,” said Abe Pacharz, the owner of Colorado Adventure Guides in Breckenridge. You’ll get a spot on a trip, and perhaps advice on acclimating to the altitude, what gear you’ll need and what activities are the most appropriate.“You have to have a reservation,” said Ms. Olson from the Jackson Hole Chamber. “The idea that you can come to national parks or ski area destinations and find somewhere to stay or camp is very limited. It may not be their vision of being on the open road and making last-minute decisions, but the reality of coming to these beautiful places with limited resources is that people have to be planners.”Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places list for 2021. More

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    The Californians Are Coming. So Is Their Housing Crisis.

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    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Californians Are Coming. So Is Their Housing Crisis.Is it possible to import growth without also importing housing problems? “I can’t point to a city that has done it right.”Construction of homes in Eagle, Idaho, in 2018. The Boise area has become one of the fastest-growing areas in the country.Credit…Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesFeb. 12, 2021Updated 10:11 a.m. ETStatistically speaking, Idaho is one of America’s greatest economic success stories. The state has low unemployment and high income growth. It has expanded education spending while managing to shore up budget reserves. Brad Little, the state’s Republican governor, has attributed this run of prosperity to the mix of low taxes and minimal regulation that conservatives call “the business climate.”But there is another factor at play: Californians, fleeing high home prices, are moving to Idaho in droves. For the past several years, Idaho has been one of the fastest-growing states, with the largest share of new residents coming from California. This fact can be illustrated with census data, moving vans — or resentment.Home prices rose 20 percent in 2020, according to Zillow, and in Boise, “Go Back to California” graffiti has been sprayed along the highways. The last election cycle was a referendum on growth and housing, and included a fringe mayoral candidate who campaigned on a promise to keep Californians out. The dichotomy between growth and its discontents has fused the city’s politics and collective consciousness with a question that city leaders around the country were asking even before the pandemic and remote work trends accelerated relocation: Is it possible to import California’s growth without also importing its housing problems?“I can’t point to a city that has done it right,” said Lauren McLean, Boise’s Democratic mayor.That’s because as bad as California’s affordable housing problem is, it isn’t really a California problem. It is a national one. From rising homelessness to anti-development sentiment to frustration among middle-class workers who’ve been locked out of the housing market, the same set of housing issues has bubbled up in cities across the country. They’ve already visited Boise, Nashville, Denver and Austin, Texas, and many other high-growth cities. And they will become even more widespread as remote workers move around.Housing costs are relative, of course, so anyone leaving Los Angeles or San Francisco will find almost any other city to have a bountiful selection of homes that seem unbelievably large and cheap. But for those tethered to the local economy, the influx of wealthier outsiders pushes housing costs further out of reach.According to a recent study by Redfin, the national real estate brokerage, the budget for out-of-town home buyers moving to Boise is 50 percent higher than locals’ — $738,000 versus $494,000. In Nashville, out-of-towners also have a budget that is 50 percent higher than locals. In Austin it’s 32 percent, Denver 26 percent and Phoenix 23 percent.Riverfront Park in downtown Nashville. Redfin, the national real estate brokerage, found that out-of-towners had a home buying budget that was 50 percent higher than locals.Credit…William DeShazer for The New York TimesFrustrating as this is for prospective home buyers, the real pain is felt among low-income tenants, a quarter of whom — about 11 million U.S. households — are already spending more than half their pretax income on rent. As rising costs filter through the market and the rent burden gets more severe, food budgets get squeezed, families double up and the most vulnerable end up on the streets.In city after city, studies have shown that homelessness has a distinct financial tipping point. As soon as the local rent burden reaches the point where renters on average spend more than a third of their income on housing, the number of people on the streets starts to rise sharply, according to researchers at Zillow and elsewhere.Cities are built around jobs, and the nation’s inequality reflects that. In a trend that has been exhaustively documented by economists and journalists, over the past four decades the U.S. economy has bifurcated into high-paying jobs in fields like tech and finance and low-paying jobs in retail and personal services. It could be described as two separate societies, but in U.S. metropolitan areas these societies are intertwined.This is as true in Boise as it is in San Francisco. Some work has to be done in person. No matter how high housing costs get, there is not, as of yet, a way to telecommute to a cleaning job. So unless the hordes of expatriate Californians flocking to cheaper cities expect their children to be in remote school forever, to never again eat at a restaurant, to always tidy their own homes — and unless companies leaving California expect to do without the services of janitors and security guards — the underlying problem will persist in every next city that has the misfortune of becoming desirable.Scholars started documenting California’s affordable housing crisis in the mid-1970s, and since then liberal and conservative economists have identified stringent zoning regulations and not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) politics as leading causes of the nation’s housing problem. Both Republican and Democratic administrations have taken up the NIMBY issue. Jack Kemp, the secretary of housing and urban development for the first President George Bush, convened a housing advisory commission whose 1991 report was called “Not in My Back Yard: Removing Barriers to Affordable Housing.”President Barack Obama spoke against “rules that stand in the way of building new housing” in a speech in 2016, and President Donald J. Trump, echoing Mr. Bush, signed an executive order in 2019 establishing a White House council on affordable housing. (Mr. Trump reversed course a year later, ending an Obama-era program intended to combat racial segregation in the suburbs.)The problem is that opposition to new housing also has bipartisan agreement. Blue cities full of people who say they want a more equitable society consistently vote to push housing costs onto others. They will vote for higher taxes to fund social programs, but also make sure that whatever affordable housing does get built is built far away from them. Red suburbs full of people who say regulation should be minimal and property rights protected insist that their local governments legislate a million little rules that dictate what can be built where. What does it mean to respect property rights? In zoning fights, it gets fuzzy.“Normally we think of ownership as determining who has a right to use a piece of property in a certain way,” said Emily Hamilton, an economist and director of the Urbanity Project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. But when a city tries to add density, she said, it’s common to see this framed “as harming the property rights of people who could experience changes in their neighborhood.”It’s a distant memory now, but in the weeks before the pandemic shut down the economy, housing policy was having a minor political moment. The field of Democratic presidential candidates, including President Biden, had released a flurry of federal housing proposals that varied in their particulars but revolved around a series of tax breaks, affordable housing funds and promises to encourage intransigent local governments to make it easier to build.The track record of previous administrations suggests that the federal government can accomplish only so much. That’s why Dr. Hamilton, who closely follows local housing policies, is encouraged that there are also a flurry of proposals coming out of state and local governments.In 2018 the City Council in Minneapolis voted to outlaw the practice of declaring some neighborhoods off limits for apartment buildings — what’s known as single-family zoning — becoming the first major U.S. city to do so. Since then, a half-dozen states have introduced bills to limit single-family zoning. Various others have passed laws to prevent cities from banning backyard cottages and require them to permit more apartments. Ms. McLean, the mayor of Boise, recently started an effort to rewrite the city’s zoning code.The action might be local, but the message should carry nationwide: The only way to solve the housing crisis is to address it in every city it visits. Otherwise, we’re just spreading it around.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More