Eagle County Small Businesses Face Housing Crisis and Rising Costs

Aspen —Eagle County’s economy isn’t broken. It’s just expensive to fix.

That is the counterintuitive truth hiding in plain sight behind the latest U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Index. The national data shows nearly seven in 10 small businesses are healthy. Most expect revenue growth. Many plan to hire. The engine is running. It’s just sputtering on the cost of gas.

Local business owners in Eagle, Edwards, Gypsum, and Vail are feeling that sputter. They report optimism mixed with deep frustration. Business is good, but costs keep climbing. They want to hire, but the labor pool is thin. They find the right candidate, but that candidate can’t afford to live near work.

The short version: The problem isn’t a lack of demand. It’s a supply chain failure in housing and labor.

Romer, writing for the Vail Daily, makes no mistake about where the pressure points sit. He notes that business owners aren’t asking for special treatment or government handouts. They are asking for a fair shot. Specifically, they want predictability. When a contractor in Gypsum or a retailer in Avon makes a major investment, they want to know the ground rules won’t shift under their feet due to new state mandates or fees.

That desire for stability is reasonable, but it clashes with the reality of living in a high-cost mountain county.

Housing is the single biggest bottleneck. If employees can’t find a place to live, businesses can’t fill positions. If they can’t fill positions, they can’t grow. It is that simple. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey confirms this nationally: inflation remains the biggest concern, and confidence in local economic conditions has slipped. Fewer businesses are planning to increase investments because the cost of doing business is eating their margins.

Romer argues that we need to keep working together on practical solutions: housing, childcare, transportation, and workforce development. These are investments that help both residents and local businesses succeed. But he also urges caution before adding new layers of cost or complexity through mandates, product bans, or fees.

Read that again. He isn’t saying we should stop regulating. He’s saying we need to weigh the cost of new regulations against the existing burden of high living expenses.

The Vail Daily piece highlights a specific tension. We have a lot working in our favor. People from all over the world want to visit here. Families want to build a life here. Entrepreneurs want to start businesses here. But success isn’t automatic. The businesses that serve residents and visitors every day — the restaurants, retailers, contractors, guides, and manufacturers — are what make this place work. They are the ones feeling the squeeze.

The official line from many local leaders is that we need more growth to solve our housing crisis. More people means more tax revenue, which funds more infrastructure. That logic holds up on paper. But it ignores the immediate pain point for the small business owner trying to keep their doors open today. They are dealing with a labor shortage that isn’t about the number of people in the county, but the ability of those people to afford a bedroom.

Romer’s argument is that we are treating the symptom (lack of workers) instead of the disease (housing affordability and cost of living). If we keep adding regulatory layers while ignoring the housing crisis, we risk driving out the very businesses that make Eagle County a "good bet."

We are not looking for guarantees. We know there is risk in starting and growing a business. But when the cost of compliance rises faster than revenue, the math stops working.

The U.S. Chamber data shows that small business owners still believe in themselves. They are just less certain about everything around them. That is a dangerous combination for a local economy that relies on service and small-scale enterprise.

If we want to keep Eagle County a good bet, we have to stop treating high costs as an inevitable feature of mountain living and start treating them as a solvable problem. That means prioritizing housing supply over new regulatory burdens. It means recognizing that a business owner who can’t find staff isn’t lazy; they are trapped by the same housing market that traps their employees.

The ground rules can’t keep changing while the foundation is cracking.