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M. John Fayhee checks out the ski resort competition

"What if what you do to survive

Kills the thing you love?"

– Bruce Springsteen, "Devils & Dust"

When Patrick Conlin arrives on time, I’m so badly stunned I almost drop my still-frothing pint of amber ale. For 25 years, I’ve covered the real estate profession for a succession of small-town Western papers, most of them located in places where real estate is king. In all those years, I do not remember a single "real estate professional" ever arriving on time for a meeting.

Conlin, who has graciously been trying to schedule a meeting with me for several days, barely manages to squeeze in an hour between back-to-back-to-back property showings. His phone rings at least five times while we sip our beers and talk about the real estate boom, in which he finds himself bobbing like a cork in a whirlpool. He seems frazzled to the core.

"The real estate market here is unreal," he says, in the same detached-yet-panting tone in which Edward Abbey described Arches in Desert Solitaire . "It’s bigger than us; it has a life of its own. Right now, I am working all the time."

Conlin’s breakneck schedule typifies the lives of those who have answered the higher calling of real estate in hot-market towns like Ketchum, Park City, Jackson, Prescott and the various resort communities of the Colorado high country, where I live. But what is sobering here is that we are in none of those places. Conlin and I are talking in the Silver City Brewing Company in Silver City, New Mexico.

Silver City has always been my relocation fallback point, the town I have long suspected I would flee to when the development craziness of the Colorado high country finally wore me down. I lived here from 1976 to 1982. I hoped, by the time I was ready to go back, that Colorado’s development craziness would have appreciated my home’s value enough so I could afford to sell out and pay cash for a house down here. (And it certainly has appreciated; I must say I appreciate it.)

But in the past couple years, Silver City has started to emulate the place I am getting ready to hightail it from. Along with the brew pub, Silver City now has a wine bar that serves only products from New Mexico. It also has a brand-new martini bar, a handful of impressive java huts, several new bistros, a great farmers’ market, a couple of bookstores and an amazing arts district. Few of these things would be here without the influx of newcomers, who run the stereotypical gamut from retirees to telecommuters to lifestyle-migrants.

Conlin is one of them. A native of Chicago, he came to Silver City after several years in Seattle, where he worked in the conference-planning business. "I fit the demographic of the people who are moving here perfectly," he says. "I’m from a major metropolitan area. I was looking to simplify my life, and I was looking for a progressive, eclectic town with a university. I was able to sell my house in Seattle and make enough to move here without a job, but not enough to retire."

Less than a year later, Conlin, who has a degree in public health, decided to get into real estate. Business has been bonkers ever since.

But every yin comes with a yang. There are palpable downsides to the boom that are tough to mitigate: Property taxes are going up, which is hurting locals. Rising housing costs are making it more difficult for lower-middle income people to enter the market. Silver City is sprawling in every direction, impinging on the surrounding wildlands and straining the town’s precarious water supply. And there are impacts on the local culture, the roots of which go back many generations.

For me, the transformation of Silver City from blue-collar copper-mining town with a small college (Western New Mexico University, my alma mater) to a vibrant real estate boomtown, boasting double-digit annual inflation and more than 500 properties listed, has been absolutely mind-boggling. My first reaction is: Man, if Silver can become a real estate hot spot, then, hell, anywhere can. Which is exactly the problem: Anywhere already has. Almost everywhere has. Unless you’re talking about Medicine Bow, Wyo., or Saguache, Colo. — towns that are flat-out dying — then, if it’s in the West, it’s most likely exploding.

According to Thomas Michael Power, professor and chair of the Department of Economics at the University of Montana, the West’s real estate boom is fueled by "investors looking for a productive place to park their money, given low interest rates and a dormant stock market."

The boom would hardly be more than a pop without certain pieces of the U.S. federal tax code, which encourages people to buy second homes, and to buy and sell real estate like so many stocks. In the case of Silver City (and not a few others) the transformation got a little help from the likes of Outside magazine, National Geographic Adventure , the L.A. Times and, yes, even Oprah.

In the West, it’s long been said, real estate follows "amenities." That used to mean ski areas, but the very definition of "amenities" is transmogrifying, says Patrick Holmes, with the Colorado College State of the Rockies Project. Amenities now include sunny weather, golf courses, horseback riding, quaint downtowns, music festivals, senior-friendly health-care facilities, and, if you read Outside magazine’s annual "Dream Towns/Where To Live" issues, charter schools, organic farmers’ markets (no ordinary farmers’ market for Outside ’s readers!), hiking trails less than five minutes away, and the availability of yoga classes conducive to the needs of breast-feeding mothers.

"Lift-lines and gondola rides are the naive dreams of those who haven’t spent much time in the West," Holmes says. "Most people come here to live an idealized lifestyle, and many are probably finding that the ski towns, with all of their hubbub and condo-land, can’t provide that lifestyle anymore. People are looking for other things... climate, slower pace of life, lower cost of living, space. And, more and more, they are taking themselves and their money to relatively unknown parts of the West that offer those things."

So, great: More of us are inclined — and can afford — to pick and choose which out-of-the-way, up-and-coming, as-yet-"undiscovered" towns we will call home. The question that needs asking, then, is: What impact does that hyper-mobile fiscal reality have on places like Silver City, N.M. — the towns that now present amenities packages that are up to snuff for portfolio-bearing emigrants seeking that perfect lifestyle investment they can call home?

To me, this is much more than a dispassionate journalistic question, because this is a story about my yearlong search for my next hometown. I really can’t say how many towns I have scrutinized, because, like a lot of people who have grown tired of the ruination of the Colorado high country, every time I hit the road, I envision the possibility of moving to whatever town I happen to be passing through. And I’ve passed through an awful lot of towns, from Alaska to Brazil.

Here’s the double karmic whammy: Selling your 83-year-old house in ski country after 17 winters for as much money as possible drives yet another nail into the socio-economic coffin of the town you’re leaving; while taking that money somewhere else, where the housing costs are cheap by your distorted resort-town standards, only further pushes housing prices out of the range of most of the locals, so that you’re hammering yet another nail into your new town’s socio-economic coffin. Yes, I would be contributing in not one but two places to all the bad things we Westerners talk about when we’re drinking beer and lamenting how things "around here" ain’t like they used to be — no matter where "around here" is.

Patrick Conlin, however, is unencumbered by such remorse. As Silver City’s most successful broker/agent for the last three years (he made more than 100 sales in 2005 alone), Conlin is riding a seemingly unlikely fiscal crest all the way to Fat City. "I think the real estate market here is very healthy and very sustainable," he says. "I see the market increasing the next three to five years, with prices continuing to go up, along with demand. There’s no sign of it letting up. Without real estate, Silver City’s economy would crash."

I wish I shared Conlin’s enthusiasm, but after he dashes out into the midwinter night, I sit and ponder a couple of salient questions: Is it possible to move to a new place in the West without contributing to the killing of that place? And can you cash out of the old place without leaving behind a nasty karmic wake?

My main I-would-love-to-live-here fantasy town has long been Cicely, Alaska, the fictional setting of my all-time favorite TV show, Northern Exposure . The show was actually filmed in Roslyn, Wash., and, so, like many people, I inaccurately and unfairly overlap the two, to the degree that, when I visited Roslyn last August, I expected at any moment to see characters like "Chris in the Morning" walking down Main Street.

An old coal-mining town, Roslyn, population about 1,100, managed to maintain its unpainted cultural underpinnings — a cross between aging redneck miners and the hippies who came here 30 years ago, when you could buy a house for $1,000 — despite being just 100 miles from Seattle and despite the fact that, from 1990 to 1995, the town was beamed in situ into the living rooms of several million adoring Americans every week during the Emmy-Award-winning heyday of NX.

Stunningly, the Northern Exposure influence scarcely scratched Roslyn’s surface. When the show was cancelled, Roslyn was still Roslyn. For about five years, that is. Then Suncadia, the largest resort development in Washington state history, reared its imperialist head a mere mile outside of town. Suncadia, when it achieves build-out in 10 years or so, will have 2,500 homes and three championship golf courses spread about its 6,600 acres. (Most of those homes, according to Suncadia media relations person Alex Hillinger, will be second homes, which opens up a whole ’nother can of real estate boomtown worms, which we’ll get to later.)

One of the side effects has been that the price of local housing in Roslyn has literally doubled in the past four years, according to the town’s mayor, Jeri Porter. You might think that the locals, long accustomed to scraping by, would be dancing in the streets, counting their fiscal blessings and checking out timeshares in Puerto Vallarta.

Not so, said Cheryl Cox, a fourth-generation Roslyn resident who owns Lefty’s, a java hut/restaurant/natural-food store. (It’s right across Pennsylvania Avenue from "Joel Fleischman’s" Northern Exposure office, which now serves as one of the few reminders that NX was ever there; it is a gift shop specializing in "Cicely, Alaska" T-shirts and coffee mugs.)

"A lot of people moving here now just don’t get it," Cox said as we sat outside in the rare Cascades sunshine. "They effuse about the increased property values, telling us that, if we don’t like what’s happening in town, we can cash out with enough money to retire and go somewhere else. But where do we go? We don’t want to leave. We like it here."

Roslyn is starting to see the development of parallel cultural universes. For example, according to Cox, the Suncadians have their farmers’ market in the middle of town, with no concern whatsoever about the impact that organic produce has on the business that she’s worked five years to build. "I have an organic grocery section, and, on the days when they have their farmers’ market, my business takes a big hit," she said. "Not once has anyone come over and asked if I would like to participate in the farmers’ market."

The next day, Arnold Palmer helped dedicate the first of Suncadia’s three championship golf courses. More than 500 people watched as Arnie hit a few shots down a perfectly coifed fairway. I scanned the crowd for familiar Roslyn faces. There were none. I made mention of this to several townspeople later that day. "I don’t know of anyone here who was invited," was the unanimous answer.

"Why would we have invited any of them?" was the response from Hillinger, Suncadia’s media guy. "They don’t own homes at Suncadia."

I picked up a copy of Roslyn’s MLS listings and spent an afternoon wandering the town’s back streets. When I did the same thing two years prior, I seriously thought I could cash out of Colorado and move here. Now, not only were the prices completely out of my range, but the town’s vibe just flat-out felt different. There were more new SUVs parked around town. And the houses, which had remained pleasantly unpainted for 100 years, were now blazing in bright Victorian pinks and purples.

On the surface, all this may seem good, or, at worst, benign. But I couldn’t help but notice that the local workmen were giving me what can best be described as the hairy eyeball as I walked around, assessing $300,000 fixer-uppers that, like the new Suncadia resort residences, are increasingly the domain of second-homeowners. (Apparently the workers figured that since I was looking, I was one of "them.")

"What do you think this town will be like in 10 years?" Cox had asked me, knowing that I lived in the belly of the real estate beast. I was tempted to ask her if she’d ever visited Telluride, Colo., but I didn’t. "It will be different," I said, in the same honest-but-evasive tone Kevin Costner used in Dances With Wolves , when asked how many white people the Sioux ought to expect for dinner.

Actually, I have no earthly idea what Roslyn will be like in 10 years, because I don’t know how things work in the Pacific Northwest. But I do know that I have, with a heavy heart, checked Roslyn off my potential relocation list, the same way I have, one by one, eliminated towns as disparate as Homer, Alaska, Silverton, Colo., and Jerome, Ariz., and for the same reason: Too damned late.

Next week: Taking a stand.



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