Chad Cornish doesn’t want to leave Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley. Originally from upstate New York, Chad, 34, moved to the valley 10 years ago. Back then he was a skier, and what better place for a skier to live than the base of Aspen and Snowmass Mountains? But when he rode Government Trail for the first time, he saw a Roaring Fork Valley beyond the resorts, one that was “tough, beautiful, desolate.”

The Roaring Fork Valley is one of only six gold-level International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA) Ride Centers in the world. With over 300 miles of singletrack in the valley between Aspen and Glenwood Springs, Chad has no shortage of trails to ride. Life in the valley is pretty sweet. It’s where Chad settled down with his wife, started their family, built singletrack for the county, and taught his daughter to ride a bike. But Chad often feels cynical about the current state of housing in the valley, especially where he lives in Aspen. It was expensive before the pandemic. Now, even condos cost an average $2.5 million.

Tourism-related housing pressures are nothing new—ski resort areas such as Aspen have struggled for decades to provide workforce housing. The difference now, says economist Megan Lawson, is that a town doesn’t need a multimillion-dollar ski resort to feel the housing squeeze; a good trail system can be enough to tip the scale.

Lawson’s research for the nonprofit think tank Headwaters Economics shows that even before the pandemic-fueled exodus of Americans from big cities, people with higher incomes were already moving to recreationally rich (and often rural) counties at a higher rate than counties without recreation. In 2020, Lawson’s research found that the cost of housing in these communities was higher than places that didn’t have recreation, while the local wages were lower.