FINDING BALANCE
A new study of five Colorado mountain communities offers insights about residents’ views on their quality of life and the tourism economy.
BY TOM FOLEY, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE, INNTOPIA
In collaboration with the North- west Colorado Council of Governments (NWCCOG) and the Colorado Associa- tion of Ski Towns (CAST), we conducted a detailed study of five Colorado moun- tain counties to understand residential quality of life and determine where those counties sat on a spectrum between fully tourism-centric and fully resident-cen- tric. We call that spectrum “Continuum.” CONTINUUM Continuum is a scale that measures centricity from different perspec- tives, including those of residents, sec- ond-home owners, and government officials, further broken down by vari- ous characteristics (age, income, gender, homeowner, renter, and many more). First, it methodically quantifies 29 ‘‘soft” quality-of-life traits across the res- ident base and applies scores to those qualities before slicing the data by a wide series of traits that reveal significant vari- ances in what’s important to residents. It measures whether quality of life is improving, declining, or unchanged. Importantly, it also quantifies where respondents feel their community is on a continuum between resident centric- ity and tourism centricity, and where respondents would like it to be. We call the difference between these two points the “departure gap;” it represents the degree of work that needs to be done to achieve perceived balance. The result is a set of KPIs that mea- sure the understanding of 1) the com- munity’s current numerical position on Continuum (start point), 2) the desired numerical position on Continuum (tar- get), and 3) the work required to shift
In January, The Insights Collective, a think tank comprised of longtime mountain and resort tourism profes- sionals, suggested that the post-pan- demic environment in mountain com- munities needed some “balance,” a new way of thinking about commu- nity wellness and economic stabil- ity. Specifically, we proposed that communities have an opportunity to systematically address emerging post-pandemic conflicts between the requirements of the tourism economy and the quality of life of residents to achieve equilibrium (“Questions of Balance,” SAM , January 2024). Mountain resort communities met the realities of the pandemic and post-pandemic churn head-on. As the dust settles, whole communities are faced with shifting perceptions about quality of life and sentiment toward their tour- ism economy. The needs of the residents and the economic engine are at odds. With an electorate looking for solu- tions, town officials and their resort operator partners face the challenge of finding the right balance between qual- ity of life and sustaining the benefits of tourism. But that raises a complex ques- tion of what balance is, with different parties looking for different things from their community, most generally influ- enced by home ownership, residency status, and time in the community, but also by family status and income, among other factors. New tools are needed to quantify the degree of separation between residential quality of life and the economic goals of the jurisdiction, and to measure the work to be done to achieve balance.
from the current to desired state (depar- ture gap). A few things are clear as we analyze this first look at the findings: • Second-home owners have a dra- matically different take than full-time residents on both what’s important to quality of life and on tourism versus res- ident centricity. • Quality of life is largely perceived as negatively impacted by over-visitation, and quality of life has been deteriorating in the last several years. • Residents in all five counties studied feel their community is too far toward the tourism side of the continuum and seek a shift toward resident centricity. • Elected officials perceive their com- munity as more stable than their constit- uents.
“PROXIMITY” DRIVES PERSPECTIVE
There was a significant variance in responses based on residential status of full-time, year-round resident (68 per- cent of respondents) or second-home owner (32 percent), and many of the key takeaways were derived from these foun- dational differences. Because differences in response based on residential status
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