The Town That Can't Find Workers
Won't Let Them Live Here on Their Terms.

There is a restaurant owner in Moab, Utah who spent two years navigating permits, engineering surveys, and the Utah Department of Transportation just to build five RV hookups behind her kitchen. Not a housing development. Not an apartment complex. Five parking pads with electrical hookups so her kitchen staff had somewhere to sleep. Zinzi Chamanifard, owner of Hidden Cuisine, started down that road six years ago after watching the same story repeat itself: find someone good, build something with them, then lose them — not because the job wasn't right, but because there was nowhere in Moab they could afford to live.

Chamanifard is not a housing developer. She is a restaurant owner who ran out of other options. In that, she represents every small business operator in every outdoor town in America who has looked at the staffing crisis and concluded, correctly, that no one else is solving it.

The Towns Where It Is Happening

In Moab, the numbers are not ambiguous. A 2023 housing plan commissioned by Grand County surveyed ninety local employers and found that 88.9% had experienced significant difficulty fully staffing their companies because of the lack of affordable workforce housing. Of those ninety employers, 76.7% reported that they had actually lost workers to the housing shortage — not failed to hire them, but lost workers they already had.

The Moab Times documented what that looks like on the ground: nurses living in vans, school-district staff renting spots in long-term campgrounds, public agencies unable to deliver basic services because their departments are perpetually understaffed. Moab City Police Chief Bret Edge told the paper that the crisis had become impossible to manage around.

A KSL Television report from October 2024 captured the new arithmetic of running a small business in an outdoor tourism town. A Moab business owner with approximately sixty workers in company housing described what starting a business now requires:

Read that again. Where are these people going to live? That question now precedes, for many employers in outdoor America, the question of whether the business itself is viable.

In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, a regional housing needs assessment presented to Wyoming and Idaho elected officials found vacancy rates across the entire Teton region at essentially zero — meaning, as consultant Wendy Sullivan told officials, that people trying to fill jobs in the area simply cannot find a unit. The assessment calculated that the region needs 5,300 housing units to address the current crisis, at a public investment cost of roughly $2.2 billion — approximately 25 years of the combined annual budgets of Teton County and the Town of Jackson. The Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce surveyed 240 local businesses and found that the vast majority pointed to housing as the primary driver of their inability to hire. Wyoming Public Media reported that the labor shortage caused multiple businesses to close their doors or limit hours in a single summer season. Grand Teton National Park's superintendent stated the reality without diplomatic softening: the lack of available housing had become "our primary constraint for hiring." Not wages. Not conditions. Housing.

In Telluride, Colorado, the Telluride Ski Resort — the town's largest employer — exhausted its own workforce housing and began purchasing and leasing private homes just to keep the season staffed. Their dedicated facility, Big Billie's Apartments at 146 units, was already full before the season began. Workers like regional mogul coach Zak Watkins found themselves hired and then stranded.

Telluride Ski Resort spokesperson Pepper Raper described what employers across these towns were experiencing: "We've had a housing crunch before. 2003–2007 was tight, but it's never been this bad. We lose employees every day because of it."

And then there is Sedona, Arizona — where the crisis became national news in March 2024 when the city council voted 6-1 to create a "Safe Place to Park" program: designated overnight vehicle parking with showers, restrooms, and on-site management, for workers who could prove local employment. The numbers that drove the decision were stark: average rent in the city starts at $1,800 a month. Average worker income: $1,100 to $1,800. Average home price: $971,000 — up 50% since 2020.

A mayor who ran out of ideas. A police chief demanding a paradigm shift. A restaurant owner who built her own employee housing because she could not wait any longer for someone else to act. A ski resort buying private homes. These are not policy failures at the margins. These are the people responsible for keeping functional communities running, doing what they can because the systems around them have produced nothing adequate.

The Worker Behind the Number

A public outreach effort in Sedona ahead of the Safe Place to Park vote found 32 people living in their vehicles while employed in the city. They worked at Whole Foods, Safeway, a hotel, a wood-fired pizza restaurant, a juice shop, a spa, a coffeehouse. One wrote to the city council that their rent had jumped 35% in two years. Another reported showering at a gym before their shift at a local supermarket. The Washington Post, which covered the Sedona council meeting in national detail, described what these workers were and were not asking for: not subsidized housing, not a government program, not charity. A place to park legally overnight so they could keep doing the job they already had.

One Sedona resident's letter to council, published in the Washington Post coverage, captured what should have been the closing argument: "These are people who work in our town and we all depend on them. We must support them. Denying this program will not make our homeless population go away. Let's give them a ray of hope."

The council passed the program 6-1. Then the residents gathered signatures and put it on the November 2024 ballot. Voters overturned it.

A city council identified the problem, designed a solution, funded it with $875,000 in outside grant money, and the community voted to keep suffering rather than accept the answer. That is not a housing crisis. That is a values crisis wearing a housing crisis's clothes.

What the Regulation Is Actually Protecting

The local governments enforcing vehicle dwelling bans will tell you they have legitimate concerns: sanitation, public safety, maintaining a tax relationship with mobile residents. There is a partial truth buried in that argument. A person sleeping in a van has no fixed address. No fixed address means no property tax base, no utility account, no clear jurisdictional hook for the systems cities use to track and fund services.

But the absence of a tax relationship is not a reason to ban the person. It is a reason to create a framework that establishes one — a simple permit or registration system that gives the city a trackable, fee-paying connection to the mobile resident without requiring a lease they cannot afford. The tools to do this exist. The political will to use them has, in most jurisdictions, not materialized. Sedona came close. Its voters dismantled it.

Vehicle dwelling bans do not create a single unit of housing. They do not reduce the demand for low-wage labor. They do not improve public sanitation — they move the problem to the next town, or push it into the forest, where workers get roused by police, as Mayor Jablow described, because they had nowhere else to go.

What the ordinances do accomplish is to protect the aesthetic preferences of existing property owners and the political comfort of officials who would rather not manage complexity. That is a legitimate interest in a narrow sense. It is not a legitimate interest when weighed against the economic viability of the community — the open restaurants, the staffed lodges, the functioning businesses that the tourists these same property owners depend on actually come to visit.

The Bridge They Keep Burning

Vehicle dwelling in high-cost outdoor communities is not a permanent condition for most of the workers practicing it. It is a bridge. Someone arrives in Moab or Jackson or Sedona for the season, lives in their truck, earns a wage, pays essentially zero rent, and saves at a rate that conventional housing in those markets makes mathematically impossible. In eighteen months of disciplined saving at near-zero housing cost, a hospitality worker earning a modest wage can accumulate a meaningful down payment. The vehicle is not the destination. It is the strategy.

In Moab, a household needs to earn $147,746 annually to afford the median home, according to the Grand County housing plan. That number is not reachable on a hospitality wage in any reasonable timeframe when rent consumes the majority of take-home pay. It is potentially reachable — over several seasons — when housing cost is near zero. The parking ban doesn't just remove a place to sleep. It removes the only viable savings mechanism available to a working person in that market.

There is a version of this that works. It requires a different relationship between local government and mobile workers — one built on integration rather than exclusion, on light regulatory frameworks rather than bans, on infrastructure that solves the real sanitation and safety concerns without criminalizing the people who have none of the problems the ordinances claim to address.

That version exists. We know exactly what it looks like. That is what Memo 006 is for.