Welcome to the first of what I hope to be an ongoing series called something like profiles of the rich white men who develop our valley for profits they surely don’t need.
As our valley drifts closer and closer to becoming a company town, owned by a handful of wealthy elite, almost exclusively white, almost exclusively male, and generally richer than you will ever dream of being, the wealth and power within the valley and region collects in fewer and fewer hands. Many of these developers live in Aspen and continue to find ways to to recollect the small trickle of money that slowly leaves Aspen by investing in businesses, land development, and other things down valley.
We have become not only a source of cheap labor, but also an opportunity to make profits off of our trying to get by. As more of our valley becomes bought and built by these select few, the greater the odds that someone could end up scrubbing toilets to pay their rent to the same person who wrote their paycheck.
Sadly I have missed many great opportunities to talk about a number of developments that slid under the radar in the haze of COVID this year, including Builder’s First Source, a fortune 500 company, building a lumber yard in Carbondale because we can’t be bothered to find more equitable systems than bringing in giant corporations to harvest hard earned money from our area. But I do digress.
Today we are talking about the upcoming Eastwood 133 LLC storage units being built by Eastwood Development, also doing business as far as I can tell as Eastwood Snowmass, Eastwood Highlands LLC, Eastwood Highlands Investors LLC, Eastwood Investments LLC, Eastwood Aspen Ventures LLC, Samuel Sarick Limited, and Eastwood Developments inc.
The list of developments for Eastwood and related entities I have found include “majority owner of the commercial real estate in the Aspen Highlands base.”
https://www.aspentimes.com/news/aspen-highlands-base-has-new-owner/
“In 2016, our Eastwood Snowmass team, led by Jordan Sarick and Rob Cairncross, purchased the Snowmass Center”
And plans to redevelop that.
https://snowmasscenter.com/development-team/
https://snowmasscenter.com/about/
And in Canada
“Toronto, Ontario
The Addison Hall Business Park has been draft planned and is currently in the development phase and will include 200 acres of business park”
http://sarick.com/development/
And what appears to be a number of other developments or owned properties in Canada and possibly more.
“We own and manage over 1.2 million square feet throughout our portfolio of buildings. Our tenants range from entrepreneurs with under 1,000 square feet to a Canadian Crown Corporation with over 100,000 square feet”
And now Sarick is trying to push through yet another development here in Carbondale.
Currently the Carbondale Trustees are in the final approval stages for annexation of the land between the Roaring Fork Tire Center and the power substation on Highway 133 near the Cowen Center.
The request for annexation includes Eastwood 133s proposal for the storage units, which means once the annexation is approved the development is well on its way toward being approved. Final approval for the annexation will most likely happen at the next Carbondale Trustees meeting on Tues Nov 24th.
Now I should say that Sarick and his development team seem to be decent enough and as well-intentioned as the extremely wealthy can be expected to be. It does seem they want to do good in their efforts to make a profit, and they are taking some steps to go above and beyond an economy self-storage facility. One can hope they are doing so because they want to and not just because they know this would be a hard sell to a town like Carbondale unless they put a little extra effort into it. They are working to make it look nice, working with Carbondale Arts to display art and to give it some Carbondale style. They are also talking about adding sidewalks and beautifying the land along the bike path a little. These things are admirable and would make the community a little nicer. I know some are opposed to storage units going here or more storage in Carbondale, but the fact is that storage is hard to find in the valley. Perhaps that says other things about our consumerist nature, or the instability or high cost of housing here, but whatever the case it is currently in high demand.
I am not completely opposed to more storage in Carbondale, but if we want to work towards greater social, racial, and economic equity, we need to start doing things differently. If we want a community that is designed by the community and for the community in a way that works best for the community, we need to start doing things differently.
If we want to keep money circulating in our community, we need to design systems that make that happen. We need to develop land in ways that achieve that goal. Using a nonprofit and/or community-invested and -oriented development, we can start building a Carbondale that is better for everyone. We can do it in a way that profits or benefits the whole community instead of funneling money into the pockets of the select few. We can build housing, storage units, and infrastructure, and instead of making profits, we can make rent cheaper or put any extra money back into the community through funding new projects or paying higher wages. New systems like this keep more money circulating in the lower, middle, and middle-upper class. It benefits all of society and the planet, with the only sacrifice being slightly reducing the income of the most wealthy.
We are currently working to build a new framework, new systems, and this new paradigm that would allow more equitable land development, as well as other systems to work towards greater equity, a more vibrant community, and a more equitable distribution of resources and wealth. To do this we will need support from the community, both in standing in resistance to the old inequitable ways of doing things and in support of building these new more equitable systems. We will also need financial support and investment in making forward progress and always hope those with more wealth and resources than they need would be interested in investing in society and the planet and support us in building these new systems. Perhaps Sarick would be interested in looking to help build a more equitable system that keeps more money in the community and allows the local residents to design and build and operate in ways they feel is best for their community.
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