Here is what I have said about Estes Park, CO. Shows why hard and fast statements must be made with some caution:
The locals, many of whom hail from the Midwest, are friendly, exuberantly so, in the way similar to what they call in another state "Minnesota nice." City sophisticates would probably be skeptical of this, as we were, coming from Miami Beach, but it delighted us nonetheless. The clerks at the grocery store and post office, the workers at the gym and coffee shops, the patrons of the Sunday winter concerts at the Stanley Hotel, auto repair shop owners, secretaries, airport shuttle drivers—nearly everyone was congenial and polite. Our mail carrier delivered a package to our doorstep after his work hours, and the Federal Express driver left us his cell phone number and said he would make a return trip if we called him and he was still in the area. When I went away for two weeks to teach in Amherst, Massachusetts, the woman who runs the laundromat offered to help my wife in any way she could.
We have learned in our extended tour of the nation that when you scratch beneath the surface of a place, you find that appearances are deceiving. Estes Park was no exception. There is a wide social and economic gap between tourists and townspeople. Julie Dunn tells us in a Denver Post article (July 9, 2006) that in 2005 31 percent of overnight visitors reported an annual household income of more than $125,000. At the same time, the locals often struggle to get by. Much of the day-to-day work is done by immigrants: Brazilians, Mexicans, Nepalese, Byelorussians. To afford substandard housing, workers—whether immigrants or not—must have more than one job and cannot always find year-round employment. In summer it is common for workers to labor eighty hours a week, but in winter they might not have work at all. Too many people, even those in their fifties and older, live catch-as-catch-can, cleaning homes and working in small shops, living in houses without indoor toilets. By September you notice the beaten-down look on their faces, exhausted from long days of toil waiting on tourists. You can almost feel the aching limbs of the immigrant women who have just spent sixty to seventy hours a week cleaning motel rooms. Many of the houses and condominiums in Estes Park are empty a large part of the year; they are the second homes of visitors. In the Denver Post article cited above, we learn that "more than 50 percent of transactions are now second-home purchases." Most are very large—several thousand square feet—and priced beyond the means of the locals. "In late June [2006], 25 million-dollar homes were listed in the area, compared with five homes in that price point two years ago . . . ." So, ironically, there are empty houses and a housing shortage at the same time. New expensive developments are always being built or planned, blotting the landscape, although they do provide construction jobs for workers, who need the employment.
The yearly influx of tourists has given the town a hefty budget surplus (over $13 million), and to some extent the money has been used for the benefit of the community—a good library with free high-speed Internet connections, inexpensive or free entertainment for children and adults, well-maintained streets—but more could be done. The town owns its electric utility and electricity is less expensive than anywhere else we’ve lived. But the surplus could be used to lower the price further. There doesn’t appear to have been a need for the rate increase imposed lastthis winter, unless it had to be used for the inordinately high salaries of town officials. The chief of police earns nearly $100,000 per year. More could be done to provide low-cost housing, especially for immigrant workers and senior citizens. Much praise was given the owner of a mobile-home park who donated the used trailers to American Indians in South Dakota. However, it went unmentioned that his property was going to be used for another high-priced development. Low-rent trailers were eliminated in a town where people desperately need housing. And the trailers were given to people of color, when people of color are those who most need housing here.
At first sight, Estes Park seems like a pristine community. It is certainly the cleanest place we have ever lived. By comparison, Manhattan and Miami Beach were overwhelmed with pollution, congestion, noise, and litter. Yet even here there are troubling signs of environmental degradation. The suburban and industrial development east of town, on the plains facing the front range of the mountains, is sending pollution into Rocky Mountain National Park, reducing visibility and damaging plant and animal life. It is not unusual to see a ring of smog surrounding the nearby towns of Loveland, Boulder, and Denver. The U.S. Forest Service is planning significant land sales to private developers, which will reduce the public patrimony and at the same time further divide rich and poor as more expensive homes are built on this land.
There are other things about the area I came to dislike. Although there is a local peace group, strongly opposed to the war in Iraq, the politics of the town are very conservative. There are quite a few retired military here, and, as they do everywhere, they tend to make a place less democratic and tolerant. And since Colorado is the national center of extreme right-wing Christianity, this only adds to the conservative tendencies of the community. For a predominantly white, small town, we heard many racist remarks. There is also a notable lack of curiosity about what is happening in the rest of the nation and in the world. This made it difficult for us to build friendships; there is only so much you can say about the weather.