TELLURIDE (AP) – Business is booming in Telluride, with a major Hollywood production coming to the area and construction cranking, as more people want to call the town home. But the box canyon can only fit so many people, and with such high demand, the rental housing market for seasonal winter employees is expensive and highly competitive.

Applicants to Shandoka and Village Court Apartments – the area’s two biggest affordable housing complexes, with roughly 350 combined housing units – are being told not to expect openings until next spring, said San Miguel Regional Housing Authority Executive Director Shirley Diaz.

The Telluride Ski Resort, the area’s largest employer, has begun to purchase or lease private houses for seasonal employees because their 146-unit housing project for seasonal employees, Big Billie’s Apartments, already is full.

They’ve also offered all residents of Big Billie’s the option of sharing their unit with incoming winter workers, according to Telski spokesperson Pepper Raper, although she said few people so far have opted to split their studio and kitchenette with another person.

“We’ve had a housing crunch before; 2003-2007 was tight, but it’s never been this bad,” Raper said. “We lose employees every day because of it.”

Telski has purchased or leased three properties so far: one in Mountain Village, one in Ilium and another in Fairway Four. Between the three houses, there are eight new bedrooms, and Raper said they might end up as double-occupancy rooms.

BootDoctors, another of the area’s largest employers during the winter ski season, considered buying a house in Norwood for their employees. But owners Bob and Penelope Gleason decided against it over concerns about the environmental impact of employees whose work hours don’t align with the public transportation schedule having to make the roughly 30-mile drive every day for work.

Plus, Penelope Gleason said, it’s hard enough being a small business owner. Adding landlord responsibilities on top of that would be difficult.

“Many times I have had employees live with us, with Bob and I,” Penelope Gleason said. “Someone lived with us last year until January.”

“There’s definitely some creativity going on,” she added.

One of their current employees built himself a yurt since he couldn’t find traditional housing, Gleason said.

The company has had three winter employees back out of jobs so far because they couldn’t find housing, Gleason said. And some recurring employees from previous years who were supposed to return this winter have told her they’re going elsewhere for the same reason.

One former BootDoctors employee, Zak Watkins, is struggling to find housing for the upcoming winter season. Watkins was hired as the new regional mogul coach for the Telluride Ski and Snowboard Club but can’t find a place to live.

He’s scoured Craigslist and popular Facebook group Telluride Sweet Deals, and he has reached out to his friends and former co-workers in town to try to find a room for the winter season but has struck out so far.

Now, Watkins is just looking for a place to park a trailer for the winter.

“I can’t even find a place to put the trailer if I found one,” Watkins said. “It’s definitely quite the adventure.”

He’s received offers to park a trailer down valley, but he wants to live close to work.

“If it comes down to it, I might just grab a trailer and have to deal with a 40-minute drive every day,” he conceded.

More than just seasonal employees are struggling with housing. Year-round residents are also feeling the crunch, with young professionals living with roommates in lofts and living rooms in order to make rent.

Telluride resident Ben English lives in an attic apartment unit with two other people and a dog. They’ve subdivided the upstairs loft into two bedrooms, with a sheet serving as a door. It makes rent cheaper, but the space feels more like a college dorm than the residence of three young professionals.

The most recent regional housing needs assessment, published in September 2011, indicates that there are 1.82 jobs for every one housing unit in Telluride. Thirty percent of the workforce is imported from surrounding communities such as Norwood, Montrose, Ophir, Ilium, Placerville and Sawpit, according to the survey.

Seventy percent of survey respondents said the reason they commute to jobs in Telluride but live elsewhere was the lack of affordable local housing, according to the survey.

A majority of survey respondents – 50.5 percent – said housing was one of the more serious issues facing Telluride. Just over 20 percent of respondents in Telluride said it was the most critical issue facing the town.

At a recent intergovernmental meeting between Telluride, Mountain Village and San Miguel County, several public officials stressed that those housing numbers have probably gotten worse and said that an updated housing needs assessment should be completed, as public officials grappled with how much additional affordable housing the area needed.

“My wish as a business owner, what we would love to see is for the county and the two towns to actually collaborate and come together and really have a powwow about our housing and our transit situation,” Penelope Gleason said.

She wants to see a regional master plan for housing that doesn’t rely heavily on commuting, which she said impacts the culture as well as the environment of the Telluride region.

“Really, at this point we are all one community and we need to address this as one community,” she said.

“The only way to solve the housing problem is to have everybody working on it, not just government,” said Telluride Mayor Stu Fraser.

For some local residents, the housing situation has become a political tinderbox and a call for action. But for others, cramped quarters and having roommates as a young professional is just the price one has to pay to live in a place as beautiful as Telluride.