A New TV Series Turns the Mountain Town Housing Crisis into a Game Show

In a ski town, every conversation eventually leads back to the same topic: real estate. Here are a few gems I overheard while riding the gondola at Colorado’s Keystone Resort a few days ago.

My nephew and 14 of his buddies are all living in the same three-bedroom condo! The guy who invented toothpaste bought that slope-side mansion and plans to spend two weeks there each year! My neighbor just sold his doghouse for $4.7 million! 

OK, I may have made some of those up, but you get the point. Home values are booming in ski towns—pricing out everyone but the wealthy—and after thorough coverage by the national press, many Americans are cognizant of this fact. And now, there’s a new television program that is further exploring this compelling topic.

Our friends at HGTV (Home & Garden Television) are currently airing a real estate-themed gameshow that takes place in Breckenridge, Colorado, one of the most competitive home-buying markets in the state. Called Battle on the Mountain, the series centers on professional home flippers—yes, those handymen and women who swoop into your neighborhood, purchase a fixer-upper, slap some new paint on the walls, and then attempt to sell it for $200,000 over asking. For Battle on the Mountain, three teams of flippers will each renovate houses in Breckenridge with the ultimate goal of driving the property value sky high. The team that raises its home’s sticker price by the greatest amount wins a $50,000 prize. Here’s how HGTV describes the rules:

With a $100,000 budget, each team has to determine which renovations will lend to the biggest payoff in their mountainside homes. Teams will also be tasked with weekly custom-build challenges, as well as team-building field trips. At the end of each challenge, guest HGTV judges will tour each of the spaces to determine the winner of the week, who will receive the subsequent $3,000 cash prize. At the end of the entire competition, judges will analyze the renovations in full, while real estate experts will value each of the updated homes.  

Episode 1 of Battle on the Mountain aired this past Tuesday, and I flicked it on with morbid curiosity. As a lifelong Coloradan—and a frequent visitor to Breckenridge—I wanted to see the actual houses they had chosen to repair. I watched in horror as two contestants toured their mountain getaway and complained about the wood paneling, worn carpet, and outdated appliances. I immediately flicked the thing off.

You see, there are literally thousands of people in Breckenridge and the greater Summit County region who would love to live in that house—any house, really—no matter the shabbiness of the carpet. As has been covered in Outside and in other mainstream publications, the ballooning cost of housing in mountain towns has made life miserable for the people who live and work in the communities. Nary a day goes by without a new media report on this devastating dynamic. Just this week, the Summit Daily News reported that Breckenridge opened a lottery for 56 units of subsidized housing set to open later this year. After just four days, 776 different people had applied.

Elsewhere in Colorado, the search for housing is even more dire. More than 100 migrants from Venezuela recently came to Carbondale, seeking jobs in the resorts and service industry. When they couldn’t land employment, many resorted to living in their cars. Officials approved a plan to transform city hall into temporary housing for them.

Meanwhile, HGTV is glorifying the individuals who are making livable homes even more out of reach for workaday people in these communities. Some readers may recognize this conceit from the streaming show The Curse, a comedy series in which Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder attempt to launch a reality show about flipping houses in—and gentrifying—a working-class town in New Mexico.

Look, I get it—television is supposed to entertain audiences, and not every program needs to explore heavy topics like displaced workers and people living in cars. But I still think Battle on the Mountain represents a missed opportunity for HGTV. You see, the housing crunch in mountain towns has created a bottomless trove of utterly bonkers real estate-themed stories that would be great for television. Just ride the ski lift at your local resort and you are bound to hear one. And I guarantee that the individuals impacted by these situations are far more compelling than home flippers.

If any HGTV executives are reading, I have written pitches for several housing-adjacent programs that are just waiting to be filmed in Breckenridge, Crested Butte, or any other ski town in Colorado.

I Rent the Bathtub!

For powder-chasing ski town dwellers, one way to afford skyrocketing rent is to cram multiple people into one condominium. Tenants will rent out the bedrooms, couches, and yes, even bathtubs as a living space! In this series, we profile six bathtub renters in Summit County, Colorado, and see how each has made his or her bathing basin into a livable space through creative design and efficient storage. Our bathtub renters will each be given a budget of $80 in Kohl’s Cash to decorate his or her space, and judges will award the winner a new set of extra-plush bath towels.

Party Animal Property Manager

Dave works for a property management company in Snowmass Village, and his daily duties include flushing toilets and checking the electricity at slope-side megamansions owned by billionaires that go largely uninhabited for 50 weeks out of the year. But Dave is also a party animal, and he cracked the code for throwing the best shindigs. He transforms these empty dream homes into private nightclubs for his friends! But after every great party, Dave must complete a huge cleanup. In this series, viewers will watch Dave plan his epic blowouts, sidestep his wealthy clients, and then hire armies of cleaners, plumbers, and sometimes carpenters to pick up the pieces after each epic bash.

Beat the Airbnb Police!

The patchwork of laws governing short-term rental units in Telluride seems to shift every few weeks, creating major headaches for property owners who use Airbnb, VRBO, and other lodging websites. Luckily, real estate attorney Steve Jones Esquire is on the job. Steve helps his clients sidestep onerous taxes and restrictive regulations through creative legal wrangling. Watch Steve declare a converted basement condo a place of worship! See him tell Airbnb renters that they will need to fill out W-9 taxation forms and become temporary employees of a phony shell corporation in order to receive the keys to their rental unit. Will Steve convince a pair of tourists to legally change their surnames to that of a property owner in order to get a great rate on weekend lodging? You’ll have to tune in to see!

Alone: Vail

A cast of hardened survivalists—who also happen to work in ski lift operations for Vail Resorts— take on the ultimate bushcraft challenge. Using just ten survival items purchased at the Home Depot over in Avon, the Alone cast members will attempt to live on National Forest Land just outside the resort boundary for as long as they can. Watch as they build shelter, hunt squirrels and deer, and still show up to run the high-speed quad on time. How long can these lifties make it in the wilds of Eagle County? Tune in to this very Colorado edition of the famed survival series.