In resort towns, working class squeezed out as rich move in

ASPEN, Colo. (AP) -- At first, Loly Garcia didn't have to travel far to her jobs in the chic hotels of this fabled tourist town. She shared a tiny studio apartment with her father, brother and a cousin after arriving from El Salvador more than 20 years ago.

But after she married and wanted a home of her own, she had to drive 23 miles west, past tracts of empty land and vacant mansions whose owners visit only a couple of weeks a year, to the mobile home park where she now lives.

The drive eventually wore her down, and she decided to take lower-paying work closer to home. "That commute — it becomes 10 hours a week. It's like working an extra day," said Garcia, 49. "It's hard to live here."

Resort towns like Aspen dramatically demonstrate an unnerving trend: Across the country, the rich are getting richer while the rest of the country is essentially treading water. From 2009 to 2012, inflation-adjusted income for the wealthiest 1 percent of U.S. households surged 31 percent, according to economist Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley. For everyone else, income inched up just 0.4 percent.

In Aspen, the division is especially stark because it goes beyond mere money. The wealth gap is also a geographic divide.

The people who clean the vacation homes, maintain the mansions' gardens and work in the hotels must find housing in mobile home parks or subdivisions squeezed into the few acres of developable space dozens of miles to the west. A lucky few — about half of Aspen's year-round population of 6,700 — are able to score units in the town's unusual affordable housing program that, on the open market, would sell for millions of dollars.

Meanwhile, residents who struggle to find affordable real estate watch an increasing number of houses in town become rarely inhabited vacation properties.

"It's a mirror image of Detroit, where wealth, not poverty, is driving population down," said Mick Ireland, a former three-term Aspen mayor.

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