USA - What Happens When Middle-Class Surfers Are Priced Off the Coast?

When Winter Park fires up its ski lifts for the coming season, there just might be enough employees to load butts into them, maintain the hits at Lower Rail Yard, bus tables at Doc’s Road House and crank out tune-ups at Divide Board Shop. The resort just invested in a housing project to provide a roof over the heads of some 330 employees. Not only does the mix of studio and single-bedroom units ensure that there’s someone to deliver pizzas this winter, but it’s an opportunity for a young skier or snowboarder to live near the hill. Likewise, Vail Resorts has some 2,000 beds in Summit County and another 1,200 in Eagle County for employees. This is happening in ski towns across the country as the price of real estate has literally doubled since 2019 and the days of five shred kids finding an affordable three-bedroom duplex that smells like wet boots and cheap weed are long gone.

It's an opportunity that surfers don’t very often have.

This year the average single-family home price in California is $730,000. That’s a stretch for anyone, much less a person who values the kind of free time it takes to have any kind of surf life. It also doesn’t guarantee that you’re anywhere near a wave (unless it’s the Surf Ranch. And you can’t afford to do that either.)

There’s no such thing as workforce housing if you want to ride your bike to T-Street. And it would seem that pretty soon, Gen Z’ers on 5’4” twinnies and millennial couples may not be able to live within any kind of close approximation to the zone that inspires our very beings.

Much like the old mountain pads once rented by noodle-eating snow shredders, generations of young surfers once packed into apartments, converted garages, bungalows and casitas. If we wanted to live near the beach, we’d work and pay reasonable rent and still have money to hit Mainland Mex. As we matured or mated, we rented nicer studios, condos or cottages. The goal was to eventually buy a home where you could still run down to the beach if the wind died down.

And that worked out well for coastal towns, which were heavily tourism-based and needed an army of young (semi-reliable) folks to cut bait, lifeguard, give surf lessons, make sandwiches, and clean pools. As they got older, they became the managers, charter captains, massage therapists, electricians, realtors and contractors.