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Short-term rental, long-term crisis

To the editor:

I write in reply to the letter published in the Nov. 15 issue of this paper, “Placid has to embrace being a resort town.” I write in rebuttal as someone also quite familiar with Park City, Utah, which the author frequently referenced. Here, however, is where our similarities end.

I am a recent transplant to Saranac Lake from Park City’s neighbor, Salt Lake City. I worked in health care in Park City for two years, giving me an intimate familiarity with the town similarly dominated by short-term rentals. I begin by noting that the author owns not one but two houses, in two of the country’s most expensive real estate markets. This represents a profound difference in understanding between the author and we who make the Tri-Lakes our permanent home.

Park City is dominated by ostentatious displays of wealth and is almost completely devoid of a working-class population. It is functionally impossible to live in Park City as one of the front-line workers who prop up Park City’s tourism industry and the lifestyles of the American kleptocracy. I have two bachelor’s degrees and worked on the front lines of clinical medicine. I and a large number of my colleagues could not afford to live in Park City or its environs, despite our compassionate dedication to working there. Short-term rentals, however, were easily at hand.

My eyes were opened to the extent of the separation of Park City and its workforce when I learned of the staff at the McDonald’s in Park City. Most of the employees there were shuttled every day by a company van from Evanston, Wyoming — an hour-and-15-minute drive in good weather — to perform the most basic of service industry tasks. Nearby rural communities have similarly been transformed with real estate prices grossly inflated by those of nearby Park City. Even those of us luckily enough to have pursued higher education had similar commutes. Park City is a community completely divorced from its workforce.

If we allow ourselves to become overwhelmed with short-term rentals held by absentee landlords, our already shrinking workforce will be priced out of the community in which they live, work and contribute to. Because we live where we work, we are more motivated to better the community because it is ours. We need the money that tourism provides, and in 2019 that means short-term rentals. However, if we allow their unfettered expansion, our already impoverished, aging and sparse workforce will be forced out of the communities in which they are invested. If anyone believes this is just, sustainable or congruent with the American dream, they should look to Park City as an example. They will not lift all of us. They will only further the gap between the working class and the American elite. In this case, the distance is literal.

Best regards,

Zachary Kermitz

Saranac Lake

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