Businesses are stingy. There is no question about that, but they have to be in order to be profitable. However, businesses aren't the problem. We, the residents, are. We oversold the valley and we drove real estate values sky high. For 10-plus years we continued to market to the world that if you want a better lifestyle, leave the city and start a new life here in the valley, but you'll have to pay and now we are going to pay. National Geographic just ran an article about our lifestyle and noted that our median cost for a home is $750,000 in Hailey...uh...what? The timing of this article is perfect because the numbers of foreclosures in the valley are up, way up, and getting worse.
Here's a thought for the affordable housing advocates: Why don't you get someone to litigate all of the foreclosures? If you do you'll have plenty of affordable housing without the cost of building, and in fact the families that are already in the home I'm sure will stay now that they can afford it.
We are so upside down that we have to recruit Habitat for Humanity in order to build a home for a local officer and his family; EMTs can't afford to live here and the latest headline is that five sheriff's deputies are leaving. What's next? I don't care what the state numbers say about wages in our valley because it's relative to one thing: real estate values. It's no wonder why the rest of the state believe 5Bers are crazy—look at what we have done to our own space.
Real estate is the one-and-only problem. We will see more businesses close in the upcoming months because much of our economy is directly tied to real estate. When the building stops, and it has, the buying stops. Then what happens?
I just saw Jim Spinelli on television in an interview advocating that people should move to Hailey because there are jobs. Yes, I'll give him that—there are jobs but salaries range from $10 to $35 per hour. Show me how a family with dual income in that salary range can afford a median cost of $750,000? Wait—let's take it down a notch to, oh, $300,000. Again, show me the math where a family can make it. We don't have an economy to support what we have oversold and as foreclosures continue and businesses struggle, we continue to sell it as though nothing has happened. Agents are double dipping on the both sides of the market and we just put our heads in the sand and look the other way. We talk about being a tight community and yet we continue to drive it into the ground. It's time for a new direction, or better yet maybe we need to create a new economy rather than real estate and tourism.
Bottom line is that real estate values are too high and they need to come down to resolve this issue of affordability. The values need to align with salaries and what our business economy can support.
Rod Kelly
Hailey
