Park City has no shortage of debates about housing. Where should it go? How dense should it be? Who should build it? What will it do to traffic? What counts as affordable? Those are important questions. But I think there is a simpler one underneath all of them. What happens to a community when the people who keep it running increasingly cannot afford to live there? I have thought about that question because I have spent the past few years working some of the jobs Park City’s economy depends on. I have worked at Deer Valley, Park City Mountain and Utah Olympic Park. Today, I work at a local wellness business. I am hardly unusual. Every morning, thousands of people arrive to operate ski lifts, clean hotel rooms, serve food, teach lessons, drive buses, staff stores, maintain properties, care for patients and do the countless other jobs that make Park City function. Then, at the end of the day, most of them leave. According to Park City’s own housing information, more 85 percent of the city’s workforce live somewhere else. Think about that for a moment. The people who make Park City work can increasingly afford to work here, but not live here. That distinction matters. A worker who lives here does more than fill a shift. That person shops here, volunteers here, knows neighbors, joins organizations, raises children and becomes invested in what happens to the place. Someone who commutes a long distance may care just as much about Park City. But when getting to work and getting home consume hours of the day, participating in the community becomes a lot harder. And the problem is about to get bigger. Deer Valley East Village is expected to employ roughly 6,000 people when fully developed. That is an extraordinary number of new workers for an area already struggling with where its existing workforce can live. Where are all those people going to come from? I don’t mean which labor market. I mean literally, where will they wake up in the morning? Heber? Kamas? Salt Lake City? Heber and Kamas are hardly inexpensive alternatives anymore. How much farther away will workers eventually have to live just to afford a place to sleep? There are legitimate disagreements about every proposed housing development in Park City and Summit County. I don’t pretend to know which parcel should contain which number of units, and I don’t think every project labeled “workforce housing” should automatically be approved. But the larger problem is difficult to ignore. We want world-class resorts, restaurants, hotels, recreation, healthcare and services. All of those things require people. Those people have to live somewhere. If the answer is always “somewhere else,” eventually we should ask what kind of place we are creating. Park City will always be a destination. Tourism built much of the economy we have today, and there is nothing wrong with wanting people from around the world to come experience this place. But Park City is also a community. And a community cannot consist only of the people wealthy enough to own property and the people wealthy enough to visit. It also needs the people who show up every morning and make the place work. The housing debate will continue, as it should. There will be arguments over projects, density, traffic and development. But beneath all of those arguments is a much more basic question. Can the people who keep Park City running still have a place in Park City when their shifts are over? Jay Werther lives in Summit County and is the founder of the Fair Identity Project, a public-interest initiative focused on fairness, identity and second chances. The post What if the people who run Park City can’t live here? appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less