Emily Markstein, a sinewy rock climber and skier who has spent seven years living and working in the Sierra resort town of Mammoth Lakes, opens a large sliding door and welcomes a stranger into her home.
One of the gleaming multimillion-dollar mansions nestled among towering pine trees and granite peaks in this exclusive mountain enclave? Not exactly.
Markstein, who has a master’s degree in historic preservation and has coached skiing, taught yoga, trimmed trees, and waited tables at one of the fanciest restaurants in town, lives in a 2006 GMC van.
A rare sign for new home sales in the Eastern Sierra town of Bishop.
Like countless other adventure seekers drawn to California’s rugged and remote Eastern Sierra, Markstein, 31, initially embraced “van life” after scrolling through social media posts that made it look carefree and glamorous. She continues because she genuinely likes it, she said, but also because, even in this big, beckoning land full of wide-open spaces, there’s almost nowhere else for working people to live.
Official statistics are hard to come by, but Markstein spitballs the percentage of hourly workers in Mammoth Lakes who are living in cars and vans as “less than 50 but more than 20.” In every place she’s worked since moving here, she said, “there have been at least two of us living in our vans.”
Like so many others, she tries to hide that uncomfortable truth from tourists so as not to shatter their fantasy about escaping to an untroubled mountain paradise. But it takes effort.
“I had to play the part of the fine dining expert, like, I know my wines and I know good food,” she said with an easy, infectious grin. “But you haven’t showered in a week and a half and you’re putting deodorant on, and all these sprays, trying to make yourself look like you don’t live in your car.”
“During COVID, I was showering in the creek,” Emily Markstein says of van life. “Right now, I rotate through my friends’ houses to get my weekly shower.”
The notion of an acute housing shortage in this wild and sparsely populated region — there are about four people per square mile in Mono County and fewer than two per square mile in neighboring Inyo County — can be hard to wrap your head around.
It’s due, in large part, to the fact that more than 90 percent of the land is owned by conservation-minded government agencies: the U.S. Forest Service, the federal Bureau of Land Management and, most controversially, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
Those large, distant bureaucracies have little interest in making land available to the fast-growing ranks of outdoor enthusiasts — hikers, climbers, skiers, anglers with fly rods — flocking to this mostly unspoiled part of California near the Nevada border.
So when any sliver of private land or an already existing home hits the market, there’s usually a long line of well-to-do professionals and would-be Airbnb investors from coastal cities ready to drive the price out of reach for even the most industrious working people. As a result, essential workers are left out in the cold.
“That has always been a problem here,” said Mammoth Lakes Mayor Pro Tem Chris Bubser. But it has become noticeably worse since the pandemic, when so many well-paid professionals discovered they could work from anywhere, and so many long-term rental units became Airbnbs to accommodate them.
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