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The Realtor Strikes Back

By Chris Bettin

I'm a realtor for a ski-resort developer. I can almost hear the boos as I type. I grew up in the real-estate business, and swore I'd never do what my parents did. Then I had a child, a child with special needs, a child whose needs needed money, more than I could imagine. So, I figured I'd have to compromise, maybe get a bolo tie and leather vest. There's money in real estate - or so you might think. The average realtor in my town makes less than $25,000 a year, but I needed something without limitations, where averages weren't ceilings.

I couldn't tell my friends. I said I worked for a ski resort when people asked what I did. I wouldn't elaborate. I figured I'd have to subjugate my idealism, sell out, work with Republicans, pretend to like them, agree with them. I'd have to be fake and laugh loud and convincingly at bad jokes. Or so I thought.

Here's what really happened. I started to like my customers more than some of my friends. My customers wanted desperately to give their families something wholesome: life in a small mountain town devoid of pretension and intimate enough to know names in the grocery store. My friends seem to have forgotten they came here for similar reasons. You're smirking at my naivety. My customers valued my place, admired my lifestyle, wrote to me often and lived vicariously through things I'd forgotten to appreciate: hikes, the luxury of a few ski runs in the afternoon, pristine natural beauty in every direction. And when they came to town we'd do those things together, talk about our kids, eat dinner and laugh genuinely.

It's a tricky conundrum - at what point does the influx tip the balance against the things we hold dear? And if growth is somehow improbably disabled, don't prices respond to scarcity and expedite gentrification?

My friends . . . some like to tell me I'm a sellout. Sometimes after a few beers they'll just come right out and say it, sometimes it's more subtle. I've had friends tell me that my customers are what they hate about what I'm doing, as if the people buying property here are ruining the place. It's not me; it's those bad rich people (which reminds me of that Dylan Thomas line, "An alcoholic is someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do." Rich people are relative.). Or it's my resort that's ruining this town, building places for rich people, pushing out the little guy, like them (us). My friends are forecasters of doom, pessimists. I was/am too. Having a child made me want to be optimistic.

My friends like to talk about how this is all hurting the "little guy." Many of them have benefited personally from the property value increases resultant from all of the bad stuff I'm engaged in and hardly resemble the "little guys" they invoke. Some have sold out and headed for places where the bad stuff hasn't really hit town yet.

Sure, there's bad development, money grubbing and thoughtless disenfranchisement. And the skepticism about the possibility of symbiotic opportunities where each stakeholder sits at the same round table with a mind toward managing the growth that none of us seem to actually control is deeply imbedded in our small town culture. There are people who work tirelessly in our small government with a visionary zeal to invite us all to that table, but I hear too much belligerent criticism to believe many others possess that kind of optimism. You're smirking again.

Here's what I smirk at: People who are my neighbors who take a pretentious and contentious view of the work I do along side their other neighbors. I'm insulted by the kind of boneheaded and misguided diatribes launched by the anachronistic sentimentalist writers/naysayers/curmudgeons who use worn-out nostalgia invoking "the good old days" to encase disdain and effectual ignorance about our intentions. There are more than 200 people who work where I do, live in this community, have long histories here, have come for many of the same reasons our more pessimistic brethren purport, while simultaneously valuing the work they do.

"Us against them" gets a little bumpier when the "them" is us. The perception of a gilded room full of fat cats and "movers, shakers and money junkies" making distant and corrupt decisions with capricious disregard for people and places is often misguided. I realize that the bad guy is a titillating enterprise full of portent, but I tire of its black-and-white simplicity.

I'm guilty as hell. I used to squint my eye and take potshots at the big yellow fat cats with my pen. I'm a bit of a hypocrite, or so my friends like to point out. But I'm also old enough to remember the good old days of skiing. We'd get to the lift at 8:30 a.m. to line up for the 9 a.m. opening. Lift lines were 45 minutes long on a good day. We'd freeze our asses off waiting in line watching some lifty/comedian read Trivial Pursuit cards. We'd get in 10 runs a day if we didn't break for lunch or stop for hot chocolate and if we skied until the lifts closed because we had to get our money's worth. My dad would say things like, "I paid $15 for these tickets and we're going to ski, goddammit!," no matter the temperature or visibility. It was the mid-70s. Skis were heavy, straight and inflexible. Bindings had straps not brakes, and falls were a prelude to a ski bludgeoning. Boots were intolerable and made me walk like a Chinese concubine once discarded. I'm almost certain this period of my life kept me from excelling at basketball. Ah, the good old days. And then everything went to hell.

Chris Bettin lives, writes and sells in Durango, Colorado.