JACKSON HOLE, Wyo. — The real estate market has taken a hard turn into bizarro world, especially in Jackson Hole where cash buyers are outbidding each other at open houses, waving fistfuls of dollars well over 10% of the asking price.
It’s not unlike the rest of the country where pent-up demand far outpaces inventory, but, in Jackson, ‘beast mode’ doesn’t even begin to describe the market.
Welcome to the land of excess. Where the monthly mortgage payment ($332,776*) of a Jackson Hole property is comparable to the median listing price ($344,000) of an entire home anywhere else in Wyoming.
(*Based on the $69,500,000 home offered in Bar B Bar with 10% down, 30-year fixed.)
Realtors fiddle the tune as Rome burns. Media outlets virtue signal entire issues devoted to the housing crisis even as they also include glorious, colorful double-trucks from every real estate agency in the county in between the pages of cosplay despair.
Parking? You’re driving in it.
Highway 22 widening won’t even dent what’s happening now. North bridge? Tribal Trail connector? It’s like telling your barista to keep the change on an $9.25 latte with a tenner. Big whup.
Hotel reservations? Hope you made them a year ago. Camping? Ditto. Locals, who keep this place afloat in the offseason, are being told by some stranger at their favorite restaurant that tables are booked out through the end of August.
Get a bike, they said. Now everyone has them and no one is pedaling. Hipsters on crowded pathways race doofuses in RVs to see who will arrive at the coffee shop first to be told it’s an hour wait. Or read a sign pasted on the door: “Closed Today, no employees.”
Sustainable? Hardly. Wildlife and quality of life suffer. Jackson Hole becomes a 1-star pan on TripAdvisor, and still the hordes keep coming. Throwing their trash anywhere, trying to make left-hand turns in broad daylight (the audacity!), and buying up everything that isn’t nailed down.
How did we get here; more importantly, how do we get back? To something that looks like Jackson from the 80s, the 60s, the 1800s?
It’s probably too late. Many have cashed out or crapped out. They watch their hometown denigrate from safe social media distancing.
“Glad I got out when I did,” they say.
“Not the small town I remember,” they write.
This ‘story’ isn’t meant to have the answers. Perhaps there are none, anymore. Past the tipping point kind of thing. It’s just something to bond together over, to gather around a dying campfire on a bone-chilling night. You aren’t alone. You are not imagining this nightmare.
Pull up a chair. Hurry, before someone else sits in it or buys it. Join us here at the Way It Was Club. Pass the popcorn. This place has lost its mind.
Thanks for telling it LIKE IT IS! Our local paper
REFUSES to confront the issue of greed and
entitlement as you do.The very same is happening here and across the west as you well know but the discussion of WHY and how to return to some sort of past “normal” never occurs!!!Ketchum has changed forever and in my opinion the elitists can have it..Maybe the ONLY positive is theiy’ll learn to mow a lawn,change a flat,do dishes & make a bed!!No need to learn to chop wood because they all live in mega glass steel monstrosities!!THANK YOU for writing truth!!
Sadly, this situation is not unique to Jackson Hole. It’s getting just as bad over here in Ketchum. Why do the leaders of towns like ours think overdevelopment is a good thing for the people who they represent? Maybe it’s time to take a breath and revisit what we want our futures as mountain towns to look like.
It’s very similar in Sun Valley! Can half the people just go back to where they came from?
This has been years in the making, the north bridge was vetoed by the “down town businessmen” in 1988 with the excuse, as read in the JH News, “We would lose a quarter of and acre of valuable elk habitat.
I have written many times Spring Gulch needs to be the Truck Route but you can’t do that because rich people live there. Whenever I was driving a set of Evan’s 140,000 doubles I’d get to Millward and Broadway and ask myself; “why is this truck legal downtown. Same when I was driving smaller trucks from the gravel pits to the north of town.
Be careful what you wish for, realtors, airport board, chamber of commerce has and teton village marketing. Soon it will take an hour to get from Whole Foods to REI!
An emotional piece on a website with the word “press” in it but no byline… We all feel this way, but anonymous pieces don’t carry the weight. I mean, I have to give my name to make this comment, but the writer, not so much.