Can Natural Character Of South Jackson Hole Endure Without Limits On People?
Claims that community must grow to fix the affordable housing crisis are not only based on faulty logic but are destroying valley's beloved sense of place, Robert Frodeman writes
Photos like this one offered up by planners for Jackson and Teton County, Wyoming paint a quaint, sanguine picture of what's proposed for the Northern South Park Neighborhood. In fact, Robert Frodeman says, it will exacerbate traffic congestion that is already bad, further fracture wildlife habitat and will not make an appreciable dent in the lack of affordable housing which is driven by market forces. In Big Sky and Bozeman, too, developers claim they need more land to to build affordable housing units but it's coming a huge cost to other things citizens value. Is it a good trade off or is it just a ruse promoted by the construction industry? Photo courtesy Jackson/Teton County planning offices
by Robert Frodeman
Teton County, Wyoming is unique. It’s 97 percent public land, consisting of the southern part of Yellowstone National Park, Jackson Hole and the Tetons, the headwaters of the Snake River and the National Elk Refuge, the Gros Ventes and the northern end of the Wyoming Range.
It’s as lovely a place as you can find in North America, which is why millions visit and dream of having a place here.
With all this beauty, you know there’s going to be a dark side. It’s a place where millionaires and billionaires are driving out the middle class (the poor already live elsewhere). Wealthy transplants and remote workers are attracted by the state’s tax shelters as well as the scenery. They have made Teton County the wealthiest of the 3,143 counties and parishes in the United States, fully 50 percent higher than the next richest (the borough of Manhattan in New York City). Home prices now average more than $5 million—perhaps $6 million by the time you read this.
But in the midst of all this distinctiveness, good and bad, Jackson and Teton County is also symbolic of the future of the American West. It’s a future that will be shaped by limit.
Limited space to develop has caused a housing shortage for the folks who work in restaurants and backpacking stores, serve as nurses, high school teachers, and EMTs. This is what lies behind the current controversy over a package of land just south of town known as Northern South Park.
That land has a storied history. The area was homesteaded in 1898 by Stephen Leek—the man whose photos of starving elk in Jackson Hole led to the creation of the National Elk Refuge in 1912—who sold the land to Bruce Porter in 1938. Porter’s descendants now want to develop some of the still-working cattle ranch into a combination of market-based and affordable housing. Teton County commissioners are weighing their proposal this spring.
At first glance, the controversy seems manageable. The landowners have private property rights and the community needs more affordable housing. The current plan tries to balance these interests. It would set aside 70 percent of the new units for affordable housing in exchange for new zoning, which would allow 30 percent of the units to be sold at market rates. The property owners make money and the community gains affordable housing. It seems like a pretty good deal.
But when we think through the logic of the situation, things start to get foggy. As land use planners pondering growth issues know, growth recreates the problems that it’s meant to solve. The process is called induced demand.The classic case is transportation: traffic is bad so you expand the roads, which makes the commute quicker, which encourages more people to commute from further out, which makes the traffic bad again. But a version of this is also true for housing.
Northern South Park in Jackson Hole would add 1,500 units on the south side of the two lanes of High School Road—in a county with 6,150 dwellings, a 25-percent increase. Now imagine that on average there would be 2.5 people per unit. That’s 3,500 people. Next, let’s guess that there would be two cars for every three of these people. That would put an additional 2,300 cars on High School Road making daily trips—in a town whose current population is about 10,000 and where there are already wicked traffic congestion problems.
Northern South Park in Jackson Hole would add 1,500 units on the south side of the two lanes of High School Road—in a county with 6,150 dwellings, a 25 percent increase. Now imagine that on average there would be 2.5 people per unit. That’s 3,500 people. Next, let’s guess that there would be two cars for every three of these people. That would put an additional 2,300 cars on High School Road making daily trips—in a town whose current population is about 10,000 and where there are already wicked traffic congestion problems.
Now watch the dominoes fall. This development would put pressure on the authorities to widen the main access of High School Road. With a turning lane it would become five lanes. This would involve years of disruption during construction, at considerable cost. And when it’s done what will we have? A road more suited for Atlanta than Teton County, out of keeping with the rural and environmental values that have defined the community. Any wildlife hoping to cross this expanding grid may make it across once or a few times, but eventually movement will end.
Nor is this all. Those additional cars will mostly turn left at the traffic signal toward Jackson. This means additional traffic going north toward the intersection with Highway 22 that runs to Wilson and Teton Pass and east toward the iconic town square. This will increase the pressure to make Highway 22 five lanes as well, and spur the building of other feeder roads through meadows and ranchland. Then remember that the Wyoming Department of Transportation has its own imperatives: when traffic reaches a certain level it will be time to build a cloverleaf intersection in the middle of town to handle the traffic without stoplights. Jackson now begins to take on the appearance of a prototypical suburb.
This is happening on top of a different controversial development approved by the Jackson Town Council in a 3-2 vote in early February that will add 195 apartments and bring more traffic to South Park Loop. It caused Town Councilman Jonathan Schechter to question whether planning efforts and subdivision approvals are consistent with protecting the environment, which was a priority in the Teton County Land Use Plan. He wrote a piece that was published in Mountain Journal titled "If Jackson Hole Is On the Wrong Path, What's The Right One?"
Similar realities will afflict other areas. Check out Big Sky, Montana, where the negative impacts on a formerly extraordinary natural landscape are jaw dropping—and not in a good way. Or Bozeman and Gallatin County, where elected officials talk about addressing the lack of affordable housing, yet give little attention to how accommodating development to create more housing will exacerbate the loss of farm land and ecological health.
Similar realities will afflict other areas. Check out Big Sky, Montana, where the negative impacts on a formerly extraordinary natural landscape are jaw dropping—and not in a good way. Or Bozeman and Gallatin County, where elected officials talk about addressing the lack of affordable housing, yet give little attention to how accommodating development to create more housing will exacerbate the loss of farm land and ecological health.
Some will say that this account is one-sided. Sure, there will be a few downsides to developing Northern South Park. But we will also provide a substantial number of affordable housing units for the people who teach our children and who serve us our meals. In Jackson, they’ll say we’ve gotten people off the couches where they’ve been sleeping and out of making the daily commute from Star Valley (25 miles to the south) and Teton Valley, Idaho (25 miles to the west over Teton Pass). At least we’ve solved some of our problems.
But have we? The people who used to drive in from Star Valley, Wyoming and Driggs, Idaho did much of their shopping and eating in those places. Now they will be going to Jackson restaurants and grocery stores. This means hiring more employees for these establishments. Where will these new employees sleep? On the recently vacated couches in Jackson and in the now-available housing in Star Valley and Teton County, Idaho. Induced demand applies to housing as well as traffic: we have simply recapitulated our problems at a higher level. We’re caught in a cycle in which growth ramps up until we’ve wrecked the things that attracted us in the first place.
View the matter in another way: we are failing the test of thinking holistically about a world-class natural ecosystem that is tied to national and international trends.
View the matter in another way: we are failing the test of thinking holistically about a world-class natural ecosystem that is tied to national and international trends.
The United States has some 330 million people. From the perspective of Teton County (population 25,000) there is an endless supply of people who want to move here, young people in St. Louis or Durham, North Carolina, who see Instagram videos that show extreme skiing and amazing hiking and older people with the wherewithal to pay for market-based homes. Some of those folks will be discouraged once they see the (now worsened) traffic and find out that they will be sleeping two to a room. But not enough to stop them from filling up the housing vacated in Star Valley and Victor, Idaho, by people who have moved to Northern South Park.
In the end we will have fixed nothing. The development of Northern South Park allows the current landowners to cash out, at the cost of worsening daily conditions for all of us (construction delays, then traffic delays) while also aggravating our housing problem.
The only remedy, partial and unsatisfying as it is, is to recognize that the growth must stop. We need to ponder limits within the context of carrying capacity—the same way nature handles habitat carrying capacity in the persistence of species.
There’s another element to consider. What of the original inhabitants? I mean not only the Indigenous peoples who have been driven to the periphery of Greater Yellowstone and forced onto reservations. There are thousands of animals to consider: the elk and deer and pronghorn and wolves and bears that have struggled to survive as their habitat disappears. They will get pushed into other lands that already have resident animals—and become the victims of road accidents, their lifeless bodies littering the highway. No new super wildlife crossing structure will save them.
What’s the solution to these perplexities? How do we provide housing for the essential workers who keep a community operational, and space for our animal neighbors? In one sense there is no solution. We’re not going back in time; the past is irretrievable. We are stuck with our housing and traffic problems. Attempts to fix them through growth—additional housing and wider roads—leads us back to the same situation at a more intense level.
A dead moose that was killed by a collision with a vehicle along Moose Wilson Road in Jackson Hole, a stretch that has produced a lot of moose casualties. The South Park area traditionally has been a place where elk, mule deer and some moose move through. Will those animals be able to persist there as habitat gets steadily built upon or whittled away? Photo courtesy Matty Deehan
A great organization working on wildlife-related growth issues in Teton County is the Jackson Hole Wildlife Foundation but every day its struggle to find solutions to problems of connectivity and fragmentation of habitat gets tougher.
The only remedy, partial and unsatisfying as it is, is to recognize that the growth must stop. We need to ponder limits within the context of carrying capacity—the same way nature handles habitat carrying capacity in the persistence of species.
Teton County gives an image of our common future. America in general, and eventually the entire world, is facing a fundamental change. Big Sky, take heed; Bozeman, too. Adjacent valleys, wake up. The negative spillover is coming your way faster than you know.
There are no more frontiers; look far enough and you can see the end of the age of endless growth. The phenomenon is worldwide (compare Venice and Hallstatt, Austria), but there is as much as stake in the Greater Yellowstone as anywhere. We need to transition to a steady state population and a steady state economy. The only question is how much further damage will be done before we acknowledge this.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Also read Warning Signs Are Flashingby Susan Marshabout wildlife-vehicle collisions in Jackson Hole.
About Robert Frodeman
Robert Frodeman writes on environmental philosophy and public policy, the philosophy of science and technology, and the future of the university. He lives south of Jackson, Wyoming. His edited volume, with Evelyn Brister and Luther Propst, A Watershed Moment: The American West in the Age of Limits, will be published by University of Utah Press in 2024.
