“Cowboy up”: Gender, labor, and workforce housing in Colorado ski country

Abstract

Workforce housing does not reproduce all workers equally. So, what kind of workers does “workforce” housing reproduce? Whose reproduction is prioritized, whose is devalued, and how? A case study of housing access and design in three elite Vail Resorts enclaves in Colorado shows that workforce housing prioritizes the reproduction of a young, flexible androcentric workforce who can be cheaply and easily housed. Extending McIntyre and Nast’s theorization of racial subsidies, I argue that resort capital awards unearned gendered subsidies to privileged workers and instantiates what Susanne Soederberg calls “displaced survival,” or recursive dislocation, for women workers and those with dependents. I detail how twin processes of displaced survival and gendered subsidy emerge in resort communities using data from interviews, survey, ethnographic observation, autoethnography, and municipal records. By attending to the lived experiences of workers in this niche industry, this paper contributes to literature on geographies of exclusion and expands scholarly understandings of how the gendered political economy of labor is sedimented in housing regimes.