People who are unfamiliar with these communities may not be aware this is going on in these towns.
By (Natasha Lynn)
Published: Mar. 23, 2022 at 12:15 AM MDT|Updated: Mar. 23, 2022 at 12:32 AM MDT
GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. (KJCT) - The former owners of ‘Hot Tomato,’ a pizza restaurant in Fruita, are making a documentary about the difficulties faced by restaurants in small Rocky Mountain communities.
The two former owners, Anne Keller and Jen Zeuner, have always wanted to dive into film and finally got the opportunity after selling the restaurant a year ago. They were inspired by this idea last summer when taking a trip through various Colorado mountain towns. They found that a lot of the local restaurants were closed multiple days out of the week and operating under reduced hours.
“One of our friends who’s a Crested Butte local when we were about to head into town called us and was like, hey just so you guys know, you really like a lot of the restaurants here but just to give you the heads up, all the places in town are closed multiple days out of the week or they’re operating under reduced hours because no one can find staff,” said Anne.
Anne and Jen visited a few other Colorado mountain towns that summer and saw the same exact problem.
“There is no shortage of business in these towns,” said Anne. “Tourists are coming in droves. But you can’t find adequate staff to support the business. So it’s an entirely different story than restaurant shutdowns due to Covid.”
Anne says the pandemic taught us what remote work could look like. Which brought a lot of wealthy people from big urban cities into small mountain towns because all of the sudden they could.
After speaking with people affected in these towns, they heard that these locals want to stay, live and be a part of the community they work in and have history in.
“A lot of these business owners open up their restaurants because they want to have a gathering place,” said Jen. “For us, we opened the Hot Tomato and it wasn’t about pizza. It was about a gathering place for everybody in this town to sit together and share a meal.”
They did research and found that the economies in small towns used to be limited and based on the jobs within the towns. But now it’s not. People with money can now move into these towns and work remotely that wouldn’t have been able to before.
“Someone coming from San Francisco, they look at a $2 million dollar house in Crested Butte, they can pay cash for that,” said Anne. “How does the local barista compete with that? They can’t.”
“When that goes away, the town just feels dead,” said Jen.
Anne also brought up the mass influx of ‘Air BnB’s’ in these towns that get used minimal amounts out of the year. Which takes those homes out of the housing market for locals, and skyrockets prices for the remaining.
“In all of these communities there’s this trickle down effect,” said Anne. “If you cant afford Crested Butte, you move to Gunnison. Now Gunnison is getting priced out. When you think about Aspen, people live in Rifle who commute to Aspen in order to work there. People live in Montrose and commute to Telluride.”
She says some restaurant owners are even paying for their employees rent because they were being forced out due to skyrocketing prices.
“Having people living out of their vans, living in tents, in cars,” said Jen. “They don’t have a place to take a shower, and then we expect them to be that face of our community.”
“It gives me this sense of deep dread for operators,” said Anne. “I don’t envy people in this position right now, and it stabs us at our heart because of our background doing this.”
Anne said knowing the industry like they do, it felt like the right thing to do to start documenting it. So last fall they went back to nine different communities and started interviewing business owners, employees and town officials. Including Crested Butte, Telluride, Ridgeway, Ouray and Moab.
“A lot of people want to live in these communities,” said Jen. “If we push them out by high cost of housing, what’s going to happen in five years? Truth is these towns are going to become ghost towns, and that makes us really sad.”
The purpose of Jen and Anne making this film, “Ghost Town,” is to bring this issue to light on a broader level. They say people who are unfamiliar with these communities may not be aware this is going on in these towns. Some of the tourists they ran into didn’t understand what was going on and were just getting mad that restaurants were closed.
Anne says their end goal is to make a feature length documentary. However, they need help raising money for post-production crew. They’ve set up a “GoFundMe” page here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/ghost-town-a-love-story-about-Community?member=14649251&utm_campaign=p_cp+share-sheet&utm_medium=copy_link_all&utm_source=customer
For more information on the film, visit: https://indd.adobe.com/view/ddf3af9d-de90-44b9-a2f3-aa011a91e578
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