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Income, Income Inequality, and Charitable Giving

The November edition of CoThrive focused on an astonishing fact: According to recently-released Bureau of Economic Analysis data, in 2017 Teton County, Wyoming had the nation’s highest per capita income: $251,728.

One quarter-million dollars, plus $1,728. An all-time record – not only for Teton County, but the nation as a whole.

Today, I’d like to examine the 2017 income data in more detail, focusing on three topics:
• Teton County’s income inequality;
• Teton County’s actual charitable giving; and
• Teton County’s potential charitable giving.

Before diving into these topics, though, let me offer one more tidbit regarding Teton County’s quarter-million dollar per capita income.

OMG

In second place behind Teton County was New York County, New York, the island of Manhattan. In 2017, New York’s per capita income was $193,940, 77 percent of Teton County’s.

That same year, America’s per capita income was $54,446. Add the two together – New York’s $193,940 and America’s $54,446 – and the total is $248,386. Or $3,342 less than Teton County’s figure.

In other words, in 2017 Teton County’s per capita income exceeded that of second-place New York City and the nation combined.

Regardless of whether you view things statistically, from an OMG perspective, or in some other fashion, Teton County’s 2017 per capita income figures are beyond extraordinary.

Why?

These astonishing figures raise the question of “Why?” As in “Why is Teton County’s per capita income so incredibly high?”

For answers, let’s turn to 2017 Internal Revenue Service (IRS) data.

Each year, the IRS breaks down income tax returns by Adjusted Gross Income categories (AGI). The lowest of the seven categories covers tax returns with an AGI of under $10,000; the highest covers returns of $200,000 or more. As Graph 1 shows, for the first six income categories, there’s little per-return difference between Teton County and the rest of America.

Once we get to AGIs of at least $200,000, though, Katy bar the door.

Graph 2 is the same as Graph 1, but adds the final IRS income category: returns with an AGI of $200,000 or more. In this category, Teton County’s per-return income figure is 2.5 times higher than Wyoming’s, and 3.5 times higher than the nation’s. What’s really astonishing is that without Teton County, Wyoming’s per-return mean falls by around $250,000, a full third.

Hence the short answer to the “Why?” question: Teton County’s per capita income figure is so high because of the income generated by households earning over $200,000/year.

Who are those people? While the IRS doesn’t identify individuals, we do know this.

In 2017, 14,410 households claimed Teton County as their residence. Of these, 1,870 – 13 percent, or roughly one-eighth – reported an AGI of $200,000 or more. This is high by national standards, but not dramatically so. (Graph 3)

What is dramatic is captured in Graph 4. In America as a whole, the 5 percent of households reporting a AGI of at least $200,000 accounted for 36 percent of the nation’s overall income. In Wyoming as a whole, the figures were essentially the same. In Teton County, however, the 13 percent of households reporting $200,000 or more in AGI accounted for an astonishing 84 percent of income. Meaning the remaining 87 percent of us earned just 16 percent of the county’s total income. (Graph 5)

America’s Greatest Income Inequality

Do the math, and in 2017 the 87 percent of Teton County households making under $200,000 had a mean AGI of $32,212. For the 13 percent of households making at least $200,000, the figure was $1.82 million, 57 times greater.

Simply put, Teton County has not only America’s highest per capita income, but also its greatest income inequality. And as with per capita income, the “contest” isn’t even close. (Graph 6)

Charitable Giving – Actual

Which raises another interesting question: “What are we doing with all that income?”

One thing is giving it away. Thanks to our well-to-do residents, Teton County led the nation in overall per-return deductions for charitable giving, averaging $16,516. And to sound like a broken record, no one else was even close: The per-return figure for second place Benton County, Arkansas, where Walmart’s world headquarters is located, was $11,864, 30 percent below Teton County’s figure.

Dig a little deeper, though, and a more complicated picture emerges.

In particular, among households earning $200,000 or more, Teton County did not lead the nation in charitable giving per return. While our mean charitable deduction figure was huge – $119,567 – it was 30 percent below Benton County’s figure of $164,464. As a result, our well-to-do households ranked only second in per-return charitable deductions.

Even more striking is that on a percentage basis, the 6.6 percent of AGI donated by our well-to-do residents ranked us only 90th in the nation – barely in the top three percent. The leader? Tattnall County, Georgia, whose well-to-do residents donated an astonishing 17.5 percent of their 2017 AGI to charitable causes.

Arguably, because Tattenall County has only 110 well-to-do households, it may not be fair to compare us to them. But Benton County has four times as many well-to-do households as Teton County, and their charitable deductions totaled 13.2 percent of their AGI, twice our percentage.

In fact, looking at the 100 US counties with the highest percentage of charitable giving among their well-to-do residents, Teton County’s mean AGI was 309 percent greater than the Top 100’s mean figure, but our percentage of AGI donated was 14 percent lower. (Graph 7)

Charitable Giving – Potential

Which leads to the next question: “What if Teton County led the nation in not just mean Adjusted Gross Income, but also in percentage of charitable giving?” Or perhaps more fairly, what if our giving rate equaled that of Benton County, Arkansas?

Running the numbers for 2017, if Teton County overall had donated at Benton AR’s overall rates, we would have collectively donated an additional $136 million to charitable causes. If Teton County’s well-to-do had donated at the same rate as their Benton County counterparts, the figure would have been an additional $228 million.

The bottom line is that, had Teton County residents given at the same rate as Benton AR residents, we would have roughly doubled the amount of money we gave to charitable causes. How much of that would have gone to local non-profits isn’t clear, but the IRS data suggest Teton County has a lot of additional charitable giving capacity.

Why Does It Matter?

One final question to ponder: “So what?” More precisely: “What difference does it make if Teton County has the nation’s highest per capita income?”

At a certain level, not a lot. Why? Because a community’s level of wealth doesn’t really affect its day-to-day life.

By this I mean that, regardless of income, we all have to eat, shop, get around town, and the like. And most of the costs associated with these basics – e.g., groceries, gas, and clothing – don’t vary much with a community’s wealth.

Where our wealth does matter, however, is in the price of Teton County’s scarcest commodity: land.

Specifically, of America’s 3,100 counties, only one has less private land than Teton County: Esmeralda County, Nevada: Population 826 (4 percent of Teton County’s) ; per capita income $40,113 (16 percent).

That Teton County has a limited amount of private land isn’t new, of course, but until 30 years or so ago, that scarcity wasn’t much of a problem. Why? Because our geographic isolation also isolated us from regional, national, and global economic forces, resulting in land prices being reasonably well-connected to the the local wage base.

No more. Instead, as changes in technology and the economy have increasingly stretched, frayed, and severed the umbilical cord that connects where we work to where we live, the demand for Jackson Hole’s incredibly scarce land has become essentially unlimited.

As it has, land prices have followed the basic law of supply and demand and gone up, up, up. As they have, those most able to buy that increasingly-dear land have been those with the highest incomes; i.e., those whose incomes are based either on investments or location-neutral jobs. And as that’s occurred, those whose incomes are based on “traditional” Jackson Hole industries such as tourism and construction have found themselves increasingly out-competed.

The resulting asymmetry has produced a host of consequences, affecting who can live here, commuting and traffic patterns, and community character. And while the consequences are clear, far less clear is what, if anything, we can do about them, especially given that the root causes of these issues – our wealth and income disparity – are unmatched in the nation.

Making our situation even more complex is the fact that we need to address all these issues while simultaneously ensuring the health of our ecosystem, for it is the foundation of everything vital to Jackson Hole. Added together, all of this presents a challenge as magnificent as our ecosystem; as extraordinary as our wealth.

Note: If you would like to make a tax-deductible donation to support CoThrive, please click here to donate to its parent organization – the Charture Institute/1% for the Tetons – through Patagonia’s match program. Through December 31, 2019, Patagonia will generously match donations up to $10,000.

Thank you so much, and happy holidays.

The Quarter-Million Dollar County

$251,728.

In mid-November, the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released its 2018 economic data for America’s counties.  Using 2017 income tax data, the BEA calculated Teton County’s per capita income to be $251,728.

One quarter of a million dollars, plus $1,728. That, according to the BEA, was the mean amount of money earned by every one of Teton County’s 23,081 permanent residents. Regardless of age, gender, work status, or what have you.

We’re the quarter-million dollar county.

Never before in American history has a county had an annual per capita income of one quarter of a million dollars. Indeed, only five times in American history has a county had a per capita income of $200,000 or more:

• Teton County in 2014: $200,044
• Teton County in 2015: $202,833
• Teton County in 2016: $214,020
• Teton County in 2017: $227,753
• Teton County in 2018: $251,728 (Figure 1)

$251,728 ranks Teton County first among America’s 3,113 counties, and 2018 marked the 15th consecutive year Teton County has ranked first in the nation in per capita income. Never before has it been by such a large amount, though. Before Teton County took over in 2004, New York County, New York (the island of Manhattan) had led the nation in per capita income for 19 years. Since Teton took over, New York has been relegated to second or third place.

To put Teton County’s $251,728 figure into context, America’s per capita income was $54,446, or 22 percent of Teton County’s.

Of America’s 3,113 counties, only Teton had a per capita income greater than $200,000. In second place behind Teton County was the aforementioned New York County, with a per capita income of $193,940, 77 percent of Teton County’s figure. In 19th place was Goochland County, Virginia, with a per capita income of $100,545, 40 percent of Teton County’s figure. Every one of America’s remaining 3,094 counties had a per capita income of under $100,000. (Figure 2)

Teton County’s unprecedented-in-world-history income levels are due to its unprecedented-in-world-history levels of investment income. In 2018, Teton County’s per capita investment income was $185,891. Except for New York County, this investment income figure alone was higher than any other county’s total per capita income. (Figure 3)

74 percent of Teton County’s total income came from investments, a figure that also led the nation. (Figure 4)

Interestingly, Teton County also ranked in the top 1 percent nationally for wage income: Our per capita wage income alone was $59,809, ranking us 25th among all US counties, and a figure higher than the total income in 92 percent of all of the nation’s counties. But because our wage income accounted for only 24 percent of our total income – the nation’s second-lowest percentage – that nearly $60,000 figure seems relatively inconsequential. Unless, of course, you depend on wages for your income…

Between 2017 and 2018, Teton County’s per capita income grew $23,976. To repeat a now-familiar refrain, this was the nation’s highest figure, and that growth alone was greater than the total 2018 per capita income in America’s 14 poorest counties. (Figure 5)

Not surprisingly, of our 2017-18 income growth, $19,091 – 80 percent – came from increased investment income. The national average growth in investment income was $875, 5 percent of Teton County’s figure. No other county saw its per capita income grow by more than $8,230, 43 percent of Teton County’s figure.

I could keep going, but the two basic points are clear:

• By the widest margin ever, on a per capita basis Teton County retains its title as the wealthiest county in the wealthiest country in the history of the world.
• The source of that wealth is investment income

While Wyoming’s status as an “on-shore, off-shore” tax haven is the obvious reason for our tremendous income, and in particular our tremendous investment income, there’s more to it than that. Far more, actually, for if it were just tax considerations driving our success, other Wyoming counties would enjoy a similarly high income and similarly high proportion of investment income. But they don’t. Not even close. (Figure 6)

Instead, Teton County enjoys its singular place in history because of a combination of factors, including Wyoming’s tax-friendly status PLUS all of the hard and important conservation work done in the region over the past 150 years PLUS all that has been done to build the community’s human elements: its people, culture, and character.  

Which leads into a statement of the obvious: Very few things in life are purely good or purely bad. From that perspective, there are clearly downsides to Teton County’s record-setting wealth.

For one, Teton County’s record-breaking per capita income figure also means Teton County will retain its title as the US county with the greatest income inequality.

For another, the unprecedented amount and growth in income has had, and will continue to have, profoundly distorting effects on the qualities that attract people to Jackson Hole in the first place, including socio-economic diversity and the sense of community that flows from it.

All of these and more are subjects for exploration in further essays. First, though, it’s worth taking a moment to simply stand in amazement at the idea that, for the first time in American history, a county is so rich that in one year, its “average” resident earned one quarter of a million dollars. The mind boggles.  

In mid-September, the Joint Interim Committee on Corporations, Elections and Political Subdivisions of Wyoming’s legislature met in Jackson. While here, they breathed new life into HB 277, a bill killed in the 2019 session but which now may be re-heard in 2020.

Exactions help offset the costs new developments place on a community. Depending on how the final bill is worded, if passed the re-introduced HB 277 will strip away local government’s ability to levy some, if not all, exactions. This would be a big change for Jackson and Teton County, for both governments have levied affordable housing-related exactions since 1995, and other exactions even longer. Absent that tool, it will be much harder for local government to address the already fiendishly difficult challenge that is workforce housing in Jackson Hole. (For more about exactions, see box.)

Worried about maintaining local control over local issues, a number of organizations have teamed up to keep the bill from passing, including the Jackson Town Council, the Teton County Commission, Teton County’s legislative delegation, and several statewide advocacy groups. As a town councilor, one of my contributions to our effort is to counter advocates’ arguments that exactions are bad for the local economy. As a result, I’ve been doing a lot of research into the socio-economics of Jackson Hole over the past several decades. In this piece, I’d like to share some of my findings.

My research has covered a lot of topics. In each case I’ve tried to go back to at least 1990 to get a before-and-after sense of whether those exactions might have harmed the economy.

My basic conclusion? If housing exactions have harmed the economy, it’s sure hard to tell. Different flavors of housing exactions have been in place for nearly 25 years, and during that period Teton County has been an economic house afire. In fact, you could argue that, rather than harming Teton County, the exactions have instead actually benefitted us. How? By supporting our community character.

I say this because Census data about our seven “peer” Rocky Mountain resort counties – the locations of Aspen, Breckenridge, Park City, Steamboat Springs, Sun Valley, Telluride, and Vail – show that only 49 percent of their collective homes are occupied by full-time residents. In Teton County, the figure is 65 percent. No other resort county has even 60 percent. (Figure 1)

Having two-thirds of our homes occupied year-round helps keep Jackson Hole a community rather than a resort. Exactions have played a key role in keeping our housing stock locally-oriented, and as the data below suggest, tney have done so without compromising our economic vitality.

A dozen key facts

As I’ve come to see it, a dozen key facts paint a clear picture of just how robust Jackson Hole’s economy is.

1. Jobs per resident

My point of departure for my exactions research was the work I did for last month’s blog, which looked at Teton County’s workforce.

Specifically, a proximate reason why Jackson Hole’s local governments implemented workforce housing exactions in 1995 was what happened during the previous decade: a sharp rise in the number of jobs per Teton County resident. (Figure 2)

Specifically, between 1982 and 1990, Teton County’s per-resident job figure jumped from 0.82 to 1.23, a growth of 0.51 jobs per resident. To put that figure in perspective, in 1990 the US as a whole had an essentially-identical 0.55 jobs per capita – in eight years we added as many per capita jobs as the nation had overall.

To help address the resulting concerns, housing exactions were put in place. Yet even with this tool, today Teton County has 1.41 jobs per resident. This places us second among America’s 1,800+ counties with more than 20,000 residents, trailing only New York City and its 1.87 jobs/resident.

2. Constricted supply of land

97.2 percent of Teton County’s land is publicly owned. This ranks Teton second among America’s 3,100+ counties, trailing only the BLM-dominated Esmerelda County, Nevada, with a population of 826 and median age of 55.7. (Teton County’s population is 23,081, and our median age is 39.8.)

3. Virtually unlimited demand for housing

One-third of Teton County’s property tax bills are mailed out of the county. Teton County’s property owners live in 16 countries, in every state except North Dakota, and in 20 of Wyoming’s 23 counties.

Further, demand tor Jackson Hole housing is so great that it is spilling beyond Teton County’s borders, helping spur active real estate markets in portions of Fremont, Lincoln, Sublette, and other northwest Wyoming counties. While this Jackson Hole-driven growth is exposing people to Wyoming’s wonders beyond Jackson Hole, there is no evidence it is reducing demand for housing within the valley.

4. Nation’s highest income

In 2017, Teton County had by far the highest per capita income of any county in America: $233,869. This was one-third higher than second place New York City’s figure of $175,960, and 4.5 times higher than the national figure of $51,460.

In large measure Teton County’s sky-high per capita income is due to us having the nation’s highest per capita investment income, a result of Wyoming’s favorable income tax and trust laws. To this point, in 2017 Teton County’s per capita investment income alone was $174,804, essentially the same as second-place New York City’s per capita total income.

Between 1990-2017, Teton County had the highest per capita income growth of any US county. It also led the nation in per capita investment income growth.

5. Nation’s greatest income inequality

At the other end of the spectrum, Teton County also has the nation’s greatest wealth inequality. Two factors are at play here: our wealth and our job mix.

Regarding wealth, as noted above, Teton County residents have by far the nation’s highest per capita total and investment income.

Regarding job mix, historically Teton County’s economy has been oriented toward the tourism industry, whose business model depends on large numbers of relatively low-wage employees. In fact, for decades Teton County has ranked among the top 20 among all US counties in proportion of tourism jobs (retail, recreation, lodging, and restaurants).

Today, the average Teton County tourism job pays an annual salary of around $34,000. That’s one of the nation’s highest figures for tourism-related jobs, but it’s still only around one-fifth of our per capita investment income figure, and one-seventh of our total per capita income. This kind of gap makes it essentially impossible for much of our workforce to compete for our very limited housing stock.

Which leads to…

6. There is a huge gap between income and home prices

Teton County has high demand for a small supply of housing. As a result, according to the 2017 Census, Teton County’s median home price was $739,100, the nation’s eighth highest. (This will likely be much higher when the 2018 Census figures are released.)

Dividing Teton County’s median home price by the county’s median wage income of around $51,000, the result is 14.5. That is the nation’s second-highest figure, trailing only Nantucket’s 17.3.

In the US as a whole, the median home price divided by median income figure is 4.2. For Wyoming overall, it’s 4.4.

7. The market favors building high-end homes

Because of Jackson Hole’s supply and demand dynamics, high-end homes are the most profitable to build and sell. As a result, for two decades Jackson Hole’s housing developers have increasingly emphasized high-end homes, further squeezing the supply our workforce might be able to afford.

8. None of this is constraining Teton County’s population growth

Between 1990 and 2018 – i.e., from before we enacted housing exactions through today – Teton County’s population grew 108 percent. This was the highest growth rate of any Wyoming county, and ranked us in the top four percent of all US counties.

During that same period, as Teton County, Wyoming housing became more expensive, the population of Teton County, Idaho boomed. Its 229 percent growth rank the Teton Valley 15^th in the nation, placing it in the top 0.5 percent.

9. Nor our growth in residential construction…

Jackson Hole’s initial housing exactions went into effect in 1995, and affected both residential and commercial building. Following implementation, building activity may have slowed down some (the records are not clear on this). However, within a couple of years construction came roaring back, and between 1990 and 2018 Teton County’s housing stock nearly doubled.

During that same time, on a percentage basis, among Wyoming counties only Sublette had more housing growth during than Teton County: 108 percent for Sublette versus 99 percent for Teton. And only three Wyoming counties – the much more populous Campbell, Laramie, and Natrona – added more homes overall.

Despite this rapid growth in supply, from 1990-2018 Teton County’s median home price rose over 450 percent, over three times the national average and twice the Wyoming average. Viewed through the lens of the basic laws of supply and demand, these data strongly suggest an essentially insatiable demand for Jackson Hole housing.

10. Or commercial construction…

Unfortunately, historic town and county building permit data leave much to be desired. That noted, all available evidence suggests that, as with residential construction, Teton County’s commercial building economy quickly adjusted to our system of exactions. In particular, since 1995, Teton Village has undergone a spectacular commercial building boom, and the Town of Jackson has been revitalized with hundreds of thousands of square feet of new hotels, retail space, office buildings, and the like.

11. Or tourism

Grand Teton and Yellowstone national parks changed their visitor counting methodologies in 1993, and did not update previous years’ counts.

Between 1993 and 2018, Grand Teton’s recreational visit count grew by three-quarters of a million people, a 28 percent increase. Yellowstone’s figures were 1.2 million and 41 percent. Roughly two-thirds of the parks’ combined growth came during the four summer months.

During that same stretch, both the number of skier days at the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort and the number of commercial enplanements at the Jackson Hole Airport more-than-doubled.

12. Tetons tourism packs quite a sales tax punch

Among Wyoming’s 23 counties, Teton County ranks ninth in population but sixth in amount of taxable sales. The counties it trails are either heavily dependent on extractive industries – Campbell, Converse, and Sweetwater – or have populations four-to-five times larger: Laramie and Natrona.

Conclusion: The Big Disconnect

Among the reasons economics is called the dismal science is that it’s not very tangible – so much of economics boils down to little more than arguments over figures on a page.

If we consider the more tangible aspects of Teton County’s economy, though, things have really grown over the past 30 years. In particular, during that time we’ve experienced extraordinary growth in a variety of areas, including:

• Three-quarters of a million more visitors to Grand Teton National Park
• Twice as many homes
• More than twice as many airplane passengers
• More than twice as many Teton Village skiers
• More than twice as many residents

What about that less-tangible stuff? There’s an interesting paradox at work.

During the most recent twelve months, Teton County’s merchants sold around $1.6 billion of taxable goods. In 2017, the figure was around $1.4 billion. These numbers are important because both the Town of Jackson and Teton County are very dependent on sales tax revenues for funding their general operating budgets: In FY 2020, Jackson estimates 74 percent of its operating revenues will come from taxable sales; Teton County’s figure is around 50 percent.

Now consider this.

Also in 2017, roughly $1 billion in Teton County real estate was sold, and residents earned another $1.2 billion in wage income. None of this $2.2 billion worth of economic activity – 50 percent more than total taxable sales – directly contributed a penny to local government coffers.

Add the three figures together – $1 billion in real estate sales PLUS $1.2 billion in wages PLUS $1.4 billion in retail sales – and the total is $3.6 billion.

Which is a lot of money. But it’s also $500 million less than the $4.1 billion Teton County residents earned in 2017 in investment income alone.

Do a bit more math, and in 2017 Teton County had at least $6.3 billion of economic activity that contributed nothing directly to local government’s operations: $1 billion in real estate; $1.2 billion in wages; and $4.1 billion in investment income.

Contrast that to the community’s $1.4 billion of taxable sales, and the bottom line is that we’re asking perhaps one-sixth of the county’s economy to support all we ask local government to do.

Including provide affordable housing. Hence the importance of exactions. Why? Because exactions give local government a housing-related funding tool unrelated to taxable sales, injecting a little balance into Wyoming’s wildly unbalanced system of funding local government.

Wyoming’s system for funding state local government was developed in the 1970s, and has proudly and stubbornly refused to change even as the world around it has. With our nation-leading status in so many economic categories, Teton County is about as far removed from the economy of the 1970s as any place on Earth, and all indicators are this disconnect will become only greater in coming years. As it does, the strains manifesting themselves in the kerfuffle between the Corporations Committee and Jackson Hole are only going to become more acute.

Hello, and welcome to the first edition of the CoThrive blog.

CoThrive will replace the Corpus Callosum column I no longer write for the Jackson Hole News&Guide. Like that column, it will examine issues affecting Jackson Hole, the greater Tetons/Yellowstone region, and similar communities outside our region.

For the remainder of 2019, CoThrive will be offered without charge. If you would like to subscribe, please click here.

The research and analysis underlying CoThrive is representative of the fact-based, action-oriented work my Charture Institute does. If you would like to support our work, please click here to make a tax-deductible donation to Charture through Old Bill’s Fun Run.

Below, you’ll find that this initial edition of CoThrive is divided into four parts:

• Some background on CoThrive (click here)
• The logistics of CoThrive (click here)
• This month’s main essay: The Jackson Hole Paradox: Big City Traffic and Jobs; Small Town Population (click here)
• An addendum with additional information I unearthed researching this essay (click here)

Thank you so much for your interest in Charture. I look forward to your feedback, and thank you in advance for supporting our work through Old Bill’s Fun Run.

Cheers!
Jonathan Schechter

Please support our work by donating to Charture through Old Bill’s Fun Run

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To contact us, please call (307) 733-8687, or e-mail js@charture.org

CoThrive: Background

In late May, 2018, I announced my candidacy for Jackson’s Town Council. When I did, the Jackson Hole News&Guide and I agreed to suspend my Corpus Callosum newspaper column until after the election.

Happily, I won my race, but being an elected official creates its own conflicts. As a result, until I leave office, I will not be writing for the News&Guide.

Hence this blog: CoThrive. Its organizing principle will be an idea I’ve become increasingly obsessed with over the past few years: To the best of my knowledge, since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago, Jackson Hole is the only community, region, or nation on Earth to develop a successful post-agrarian economy without fundamentally compromising the health of its ecosystem.

That’s a remarkable concept. At a number of levels. Both locally and globally. Yet at its most elemental level, this only-place-in-250-years idea illuminates the most fundamental fact about our community: If Jackson Hole wants to continue to thrive as a human community, we have no choice but to figure out how to keep our ecosystem healthy.

Unfortunately, there is no roadmap for us to follow. Indeed, 250 years of history suggest we’ll fail in that effort. Rather than succumb to pessimism, though, I decided to launch CoThrive as a real-time tool to help all those who care about this region figure out that which no community has ever done before.

And if we get it right, our roadmap can become a guide for other places looking to co-thrive.

“Co-thrive” is a term I coined to describe the state in which a human community and the ecosystem in which it lies simultaneously thrive. Building on this theme, the CoThrive blog will primarily focus on the Tetons region’s human community, its ecosystem, and the nexus between the two. Because the issues facing the region are so complex, however, and because no one really knows how to achieve a state of co-thriving, I’ll also use the CoThrive blog to explore ideas and events outside the bubble that is the greater Tetons/Yellowstone region.

Please support our work by donating to Charture through Old Bill’s Fun Run

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To contact us, please call (307) 733-8687, or e-mail js@charture.org

CoThrive: Logistics

CoThrive is a logical extension of the work of my Charture Institute, whose five-part focus is “Learn. Teach. Inspire. Act. Fund.”

My hope had been to launch CoThrive months ago, but the drinking-from-a-firehose quality of learning my Town Council job has proven nearly all-consuming. One result is that I don’t know how frequently I’ll be able to produce new editions of CoThrive. My desire is to produce at least one lengthy analytical piece per month, with additional smaller features offered on an irregular basis. Whether the actions of the flesh can match the willingness of the spirit, though, remains open to question.

Because of this uncertainty, for the remainder of 2019 CoThrive will be offered for free. That will give the blog four months to hit its stride, allowing us to figure out both a publishing schedule and a pricing model that work for both the readers and us. Until then, enjoy it with our compliments.

That noted, while CoThrive may be free to readers, it is not free to produce. Far from it. To support this work, Charture Institute accepts tax-deductible donations – please click here to do so through Old Bill’s Fun Run.

Old Bill’s matches donations to its recipients. Old Bill’s donations are accepted through 5:00 pm MDT on Friday, September 13.

Please support our work by donating to Charture through Old Bill’s Fun Run

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To contact us, please call (307) 733-8687, or e-mail js@charture.org

CoThrive: Main Essay

The Jackson Hole Paradox:
Big City Traffic and Jobs; Small Town Population

Around dinnertime a couple of weeks ago, I drove east on Snow King Avenue. Heading west were three-quarters of a mile of bumper-to-bumper traffic, stretching from Scott Lane to the Fair Grounds.

To tell you what you already know, the same thing happens in Jackson Hole pretty much every day, especially on the highways in and out of town. And often in both directions. And, increasingly, not just in summer. Clearly we have a traffic problem, and that got me wondering about its root causes.

Here’s my basic conclusion. Jackson Hole creates jobs like a big city, resulting in big city traffic problems. Because we have the population of a small town, though, we lack the critical mass of people needed to make mass transit work well.

Exacerbating this job-production reality is our tourism economy. Combine our jobs-created traffic plus that generated by thousands of tourists and the result is an extraordinarily vexing transportation problem.

Special challenges, and a unique challenge

Jackson Hole is not the only place facing traffic problems, of course – we’re special, but not unique. Indeed, we face the same suite of problems facing every other special place to live on the planet, including traffic, affordable housing, and issues related to increasing wealth inequality.

On top of these special problems, Jackson Hole also faces a truly unique challenge: Preserving the health of our ecosystem. To the best of my knowledge, Jackson Hole is the only place on Earth that currently has both an advanced post-agrarian economy and a basically intact ecosystem. Making matters more complicated still is a further reality: No blueprint exists for successfully addressing any of the challenges we face, whether special or unique.

Rather than despair, let’s take the first step needed to successfully address any problem and examine the root causes of our traffic issues.

Jackson Hole’s “peers”

Context is important, and among the 3,113 counties in the United States, Teton County, Wyoming is one of 1,815 – 58 percent – with a population greater than 20,000.

I’m focusing on these more-populous 1,815 counties because they are home to 96 percent of the nation’s population and 97 percent of its jobs. Do the math, and in 2017 America as a whole averaged 0.60 jobs for every U.S. resident, be they child, retiree, chronically unemployed or actively in the workforce. In counties with a population greater than 20,000, the per capita job figure was a bit higher: 0.61 jobs per resident. In the less-populated counties, the figure was lower: 0.50 jobs per resident.

In 2017, eight of the 1,815 more-populous counties – 0.4 percent of the total – had more than one job per resident. Leading the way was New York County, New York, the island of Manhattan, with 1.87 jobs per capita (each of New York City’s five boroughs is also its own county – Figure 1).

New York’s per capita jobs figure is so high – three times the national average – because around two million people pour into New York City every day to work, only to return each evening to their home outside of Manhattan. And because some 20 million people live in the greater New York City metropolitan area, both financially and logistically the region can afford to have a large and effective multi-modal mass transit system.

Ditto four of the other seven counties with more than one job per resident: Washington DC (1.30 jobs/resident, and 6.3 million people in the metropolitan area), Atlanta (1.08 and 5.9 million), San Francisco (1.07 and 4.7 million), and Boston (1.06 and 4.9 million).

Ranking seventh among the eight more-populous counties with more than one job per resident was Summit County, Utah, with 1.03 jobs per resident. Summit County is the location of Park City, and its job count is a reflection of the fact that tourism is a labor-intensive industry. Happily for that community, because it is part of the Salt Lake City metropolitan area (population 2.4 million), Park City has access to some, although by no means all, of the mass transit solutions available to big cities.

In eighth place, at 1.02 jobs per resident, was Williams County, North Dakota, the epicenter of the Bakken Basin oil boom. In 2007, Williams County had 0.75 jobs/resident; five years later, 1.51 jobs/resident; five years after that, 1.02. This is a classic boom/bust pattern, and when an economic slowdown occurs, the resulting decline in oil prices will likely lower Williams County’s job figures.

And then there’s Jackson Hole.

Jackson Hole

In 2017, among America’s 1,815 counties with a population greater than 20,000, Teton County had the second-most jobs per capita: 1.41. More jobs per resident than Washington DC. Or Atlanta. Or San Francisco. Or Boston. Or, saving New York City, any other American county with more than 20,000 residents.

Yet rather than being home to millions of people, our “metropolitan area” has around 45,000 residents; i.e., about one percent (if that) of most other job-producing Meccas. And with a population our size, it is profoundly difficult to run an affordable and well-utilized mass transit system.

Hence we get traffic. Lots and lots of traffic. How much?

Hard to say exactly, but along with more than one job per resident, we also have more than one vehicle registered per resident. And over the last ten years, our total vehicle miles traveled have increased faster than our population.

Making it harder still to run an affordable and well-utilized mass transit system in the Tetons region are two additional realities.

Two additional realities

The first is population density. Teton County’s population is not only a mere fraction of major metropolitan areas’ populations, it’s also far more dispersed. For example, the private lands in just the southern half of the Jackson Hole valley can hold two islands of Manhattan. Yet in an area that could hold 3.3 million New Yorkers you’ll find only about 10,000 Jackson Hole residents. This means Manhattan’s population is 330 times more dense than ours, and its subway system alone serves around 1,800 times more riders than does START.

The point is that if you have New York’s population density, you can make an effective mass transit system work both logistically and economically. In contrast, if you have Jackson Hole’s population density, it’s much, much harder.

Second, even if you have a small population, it’s still possible to do effective mass transit. Case in point: Butte County, Idaho. Located four counties to our west, Butte County has the greatest number of jobs per resident of any US county. Its population is tiny, just 2,600 or so. But because Butte County is the location of the Idaho National Lab (INL), in 2017 it had over 8,600 jobs – 3.3 per resident.

Yet here’s the crazy thing. Despite having a population only one-tenth that of Teton County, Wyoming, Butte County has a great mass transit system. Or, more precisely, INL has a great mass transit system, serving thousands of people daily on five different routes.

What makes this possible is that the INL bus system is a hub-and-spoke model: Buses from all over the region head to one place at about the same time each morning, then reverse the process each afternoon.

Contrast that to our situation in Jackson Hole. With the exception of Teton Village in the winter, our region has no major employers, hubs, or times of day with overwhelming peak demand. Instead, we have lots of employees coming from different places, going to different places, and doing so at different times of day. Ditto people who are out-and-about for non-work reasons.

To serve this kind of population requires a point-to-point system – think of New York’s subways. Such systems work well if they serve a population of millions and have a ridership of billions. They can’t, however, if those population and ridership numbers are chopped into not just percentages, but fractions of percentages.

Why so many jobs?

To take this analysis to another level, why are we such a job-producing machine? A large part of it has to do with tourism.

Tourism is extraordinarily labor-intensive, and in 2017, 36 percent of all of Teton County, Wyoming’s jobs were in the four main tourism-related industries of retail, recreation, lodging, and restaurants. This 36-percent-of-all-jobs-in-tourism figure ranked Teton County 19th among the nation’s 3,100+ counties.

Drilling a little deeper, in 2017 nearly one-quarter of all of Teton County’s jobs were in the combined category of lodging and restaurants, over three times the national average and ranking us 11th out of all US counties. We’re similarly strong in the “Arts, Entertainments, and Recreation” category, where our five percent figure – over twice the national average – ranked us 49th overall.

This matters because one hallmark of tourism-related jobs is the odd hours they require. The bakers at Persephone arrive to work not too much later than the bartenders at the Cowboy head home, and not only do they work far apart from one another, the chances are they live far apart. Apply that reality to each of our 12,000 or so tourism jobs, and from a mass transit perspective it creates the worst of all possible worlds: a ton of workers going and coming to different places at different times, yet without the critical mass needed to allow for effective public transportation solutions. So they, like so many of us, rely on their cars.

The one tourism-related employment category where we aren’t in the nation’s top one percent or so is retail. Despite the industry’s prominence in Jackson Hole – it’s the single biggest generator of local taxable sales – just eight percent of Teton County’s workforce is employed in retail jobs, 20 percent below the national average.

One other area of note regarding employment and traffic is that the second biggest single employment category in Teton County is construction, which accounts for roughly ten percent of our jobs. This ranks us in the top eight percent of all US counties, and before the recession we were in the top four percent. Why does this matter? Because contractors need their trucks, and Teton County’s roughly 3,000 construction jobs put a lot of vehicles on the road every day.

On top of all this, of course, is the traffic generated by our tourists. But the point these data make is that the combination of four factors – Teton County’s prodigious job-creation engine, our small population, our limited amount of private land, and the constraints we face regarding our transportation infrastructure – means traffic-related woes will be with us for some time, regardless of our tourism situation.

What to do?

So what do we do? If we had the population base of other major per-capita jobs communities such as New York or Boston, we could build a crackerjack mass transit system. But if we had that kind of population base, we wouldn’t be Jackson Hole.

Alternatively, we could try to improve our road system, but at this point its basic contours are pretty well set. Plus, because of our where we’ve put our houses and businesses, it would be pretty hard to do much more than merely tinker with our current road system.

And even if we do add new roads or widen existing ones, it’s wishful thinking to believe this will “solve” our traffic problem. This is because, as has been shown in city after city, whatever congestion relief new roads produce is quickly negated by a phenomenon called “induced demand,” which shows that regardless of how big you make a new road, its traffic will eventually expand to fill it to capacity once again.

Two lousy choices

This leaves just a couple of choices, neither of them great.

One is to fundamentally alter our approach towards mass transit and parking. This will cost a lot of money, though, and almost certainly require a tax increase of some sort.

This begs a fundamental question. What do Jackson Hole residents like less: traffic congestion or higher taxes? If it’s the former, there are clearly steps we can take, including developing a low-cost, expansive, and frequent bus system; congestion pricing for our roads; paid parking; and a vigorous alternative transit system. But such solutions are not cost-free – far from it. So if what really matters most to Jackson Hole residents is keeping our personal tax burden among the nation’s lowest, then we need to accept traffic congestion.

Put another way, we’ve had Champagne tastes and a beer budget for decades now, and traffic is the most obvious symptom of why that can’t continue.

Following this thought process through to its logical conclusion, if, after a thoughtful debate, the community decides lower taxes are more important than less traffic, then the only other realistic choice we have is to acknowledge that greatly increased traffic is an unfortunate but inescapable consequence of our astonishing economic success. While many long-time residents can remember when traffic wasn’t much of a concern, and while others have moved to Jackson Hole to get away from the types of problems exemplified by traffic jams, the reality is that today’s traffic is part of the price we’re paying for our economic vibrancy. And if we don’t want to buy our way out of those problems, recalibrating our traffic-related expectations may be our only other alternative.

Please support our work by donating to Charture through Old Bill’s Fun Run

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To contact us, please call (307) 733-8687, or e-mail js@charture.org

CoThrive: Addendum

To produce pieces like The Jackson Hole Paradox, I start with basic research.

Sometimes such research proves to be profoundly meandering and excruciatingly inefficient, especially when it takes me down data-mining cul-de-sacs that don’t prove useful. More often than not, though, my research produces little nuggets I find really interesting, but which don’t neatly fit into what I end up writing.

This need to edit was a real problem when I was writing for the Jackson Hole News&Guide, because columns were so space constrained that I invariably left at least a few interesting snippets on the editing room floor. Because the blog format allows me more room, however, I thought I’d use addenda like this to include items that strike me as interesting, but don’t naturally flow into the final cut. In this case, as I researched jobs I came upon the following.

New York City has about three times as many jobs per resident as does the US. Teton County, Wyoming has about twice as many. This wasn’t always the case, though.

As Figure 2 shows, on a per capita basis, Teton County’s job situation really shifted in the 1980s. Up until 1980 or so, per capita jobs grew at a steady pace. After leveling off in the early 1980s, the per capita job number skyrocketed, growing from 0.82 in 1982 to 1.23 in 1990. Then, save for the recession, things continued their pace of slow-but-steady growth.

What happened? As Figure 3 shows, the answer lies not in the numerator (i.e., the number of jobs), but in the denominator; i.e., Teton County’s population.

In 1982, Teton County’s population totaled 10,653, its highest ever to that point. Starting in 1983, though, the population began declining, and would not return to 1982’s level for seven years.

In 1990, Teton County’s population went above 11,000 for the first time. The 1990 total of 11,328 means that, on a compounded basis, Teton County’s population grew just 0.8 percent/year between 1982-1990. In contrast, during that same eight year stretch, the number of jobs in Teton County grew from 8,650 to 13,924, a compounded annual growth rate of 6.1 percent.

As the 1990s began, Jackson Hole entered into its current post-tourism economic era. In fact, 2016 marked 30 consecutive years of population growth for Teton County. Even more remarkably, with the exception of the two immediate post-recession years of 2009 and 2010, the number of jobs in Teton County’s has grown every year since 1969.

Put another way, barring a catastrophic occurrence in the last five months of this year, 2019 will mark the 48th year in the last 50 that Teton County’s job market has grown. In contrast, in that same 50 year stretch, the United States has seen job declines five separate times.

Before 1990, Teton County’s economy was deeply dependent upon tourism, a reality best exemplified by the fact that, in the mid-1980s, Teton County’s leaders were so concerned about local tourism’s future that they lobbied Wyoming’s legislature to create the state’s first-ever lodging tax.

In 1990, though, construction surpassed government as Teton County’s third-largest job-creating industry. And by the end of the 1990s, the number of jobs in the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate sector (FIRE) eclipsed those in government. Viewed another way, as late as the mid-1970s, Teton County has more jobs in agriculture and government combined than we had in construction, finance, and real estate combined – more ranchers and rangers and lawmen, if you will, than nail-bangers, bankers and real estate agents. By 1990, that had changed, creating a different take on “The Last of the Old West.”

The data also reveal another fascinating shift in Teton County’s economic history: the increasing importance of self-employment.

In 1969, 83 percent of Teton County’s jobs were wage and salary jobs, with the remaining one-sixth held by self-employed people (many of whom were ranchers). Jump ahead a generation, and that ratio really hadn’t changed much: in 2000, 78 percent of the county’s jobs were still wage-based (although there weren’t too many ranchers left).

Since 2000, though, the percentage of wage-based jobs in Teton County has fallen sharply, from 78 percent to 66 percent. As a result, today fully one-third of Teton County’s jobs are held by self-employed folks.

The fact that 34 percent of all Teton County jobs are held by entrepreneurs puts Teton County in the top six percent nationally. What’s really striking, however, is that, on a per capita basis, over the past ten years Teton County’s number of self-employed jobs has been the nation’s highest.

Unfortunately, the data don’t reveal the breakdown of those self-employed jobs by industry. But they do tell us that, in 2017, there were 0.48 self-employed jobs for every resident of Teton County. Meaning that, on average, if two years ago you weren’t working a self-employed job, either your spouse or your neighbor or your buddy was.

Given those numbers, it’s no surprise that efforts such as Silicon Couloir, Pitch Day, and other facets of our growing entrepreneurial ecosystem have been so favorably received. The market is clearly there.

Please support our work by donating to Charture through Old Bill’s Fun Run

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To contact us, please call (307) 733-8687, or e-mail js@charture.org