At Home in Yosemite: The hidden challenge shaping the park’s future
by Kimiko Martinez, Yosemite Conservancy Chief Marketing & Communications Officer
Yosemite has always inspired a certain kind of devotion.
People travel across the world to stand beneath El Capitan or watch sunlight move across Half Dome. For the millions who visit each year, the park offers a rare kind of awe; it’s a place where towering granite, ancient sequoias, and rushing rivers feel almost timeless.
For those who work here, that sense of wonder often becomes something deeper: a commitment to protecting one of the most iconic landscapes on Earth.
But living in Yosemite has never been simple.
“The first thing — and it’s the thing that draws all of us here — is the beauty and the fairy tale aspect of it all,” says Cory Goehring, Yosemite Conservancy’s senior naturalist and outdoor programs manager, who has spent 18 years working in the park. “But the reality is that it comes with massive challenges.”
Among the biggest of those challenges — and one most visitors never see — is housing. In and around Yosemite National Park, a severe shortage of local, affordable, and safe housing for park employees and their families is making the dream of living and working in Yosemite nearly impossible.
“This is an existential issue for the park,” says Yosemite National Park Superintendent Ray McPadden. “If you can’t house them, you can’t hire them. That’s the reality.”
Single-family homes nestled in Yosemite Valley. Many of the homes visitors see in the Valley are designated for Yosemite Hospitality employees. National Park Service housing (some pictured above) is mostly limited to seasonal employees and first responders. Photo courtesy of Jacob Myhre.
Life Beyond the Postcard
For those who choose to build a life near Yosemite, the rewards are substantial: daily life in one of the world’s most remarkable places, a community where neighbors are emergency contacts, and children run loose at evening gatherings while parents linger over food and music.
“We all have this shared passion for place,” Goehring says. “But we also have the same shared struggle, and it doesn’t work without community.”
But that sense of community is built on an unstable foundation.
Housing near Yosemite is scarce, expensive, and for many employees, simply out of reach. Much of the housing visitors see in Yosemite Valley is dedicated to Yosemite Hospitality, the park’s concessionaire. The limited National Park Service (NPS) housing that does exist is often designated for required occupants like first responders or seasonal employees — meaning that, for some staff, a career advancement or changing positions can result in moving out of park housing entirely.
“With a lot of jobs [in Yosemite], when you get a career advancement, it doesn’t come with housing, so, with that career advancement comes all these sacrifices,” Goehring says. “The closer you get to Yosemite, the further it pushes you away.”
Goehring remembers spending two and a half years living in Mariposa after he and his family were displaced from their long-term housing in Foresta, a small community within park boundaries. The drive back and forth — on winding, steep roads and in unforgiving summer traffic — could easily consume three or more hours a day. To avoid the summer rush on days when he and his wife had to be in the Valley early for work, they often opted to camp or crash with a friend who had housing inside the park.
He’s not alone in that experience.
Options narrow quickly for those without park housing: a long commute, a shared room, a van parked in the back of a friend’s driveway, or living in trailers, sheds, or other temporary structures. Mariposa County’s own housing study documented new NPS staff accepting positions and then quietly living in their vehicles in undisclosed locations — or quitting without notice when no housing materialized.
“They live in their cars and temporary structures like Tuff Sheds, and they shower at the gym,” says Mariposa County Supervisor Jennifer Kiser.
For those who do find a way to stay, the housing challenge is only the beginning. The park’s remote location adds its own set of pressures. Because the park sits deep in the Sierra Nevada and far from the services many modern individuals and families rely on, living here often means long drives along narrow mountain roads simply to handle daily life: groceries, a doctor’s visit, a school pickup.
“The closest amenities are 45 minutes away in Mariposa … and Mariposa is even a remote town,” Goehring says. “Really, it’s an hour-and-a-half drive toMerced for the normal day-to-day things.”
Cell service remains spotty in many areas, and internet, whether it’s DSL or Starlink, can be unreliable.
The area’s only childcare facility serving park staff — supported in part by Yosemite Conservancy — runs Monday through Thursday, closes early when weather or illness strikes, and operates not in Yosemite Valley, but 30 minutes outside the park in El Portal.
The park’s remoteness can also translate to tourism-driven prices for staff.
Gas at El Portal can run $1 to $2 per gallon more than in nearby gateway communities. For employees already stretched by housing costs, that commute — essential for anyone living outside the park — compounds quickly.
“It’s like living inside Disneyland. The prices are all wild for the amenities offered,” Goehring says. “Along with housing, it’s the main reason we can’t attract people to work here. It’s a beautiful paradise, but the people that build a life here have to make sacrifices.”
A Region Under Pressure
The housing shortage extends throughout the Yosemite region, and it’s been getting worse.
Ben Goger, a former NPS employee who’s now a senior planner for Mariposa County, has spent years mapping exactly how the housing market unraveled. Home sale prices in Mariposa County have jumped by nearly $200,000 in the past decade. Average rents have climbed to roughly $2,000 a month.
That may seem affordable for Californians living in major metropolises. But for many park employees, that number is simply out of reach.
About 130 of the 400 permanent NPS positions in Yosemite earn under $50,000 annually. That means under standard affordability guidelines, an employee at that salary can reasonably afford about $1,250 a month in rent.
Many park staff live in small, dormitory-style rooms — most seasonal staff share bedrooms — with shared bathroom and kitchen facilities. Photo courtesy of Jacob Myhre.
“That’s (more than) $700 extra that people are paying every month for housing,” Goger says.
Add in the rising cost of groceries, fuel for the hour-plus commute, and other necessities, and the costs to live and work in the Yosemite region can quickly become overwhelming.
It’s a pattern McPadden has watched compound over time: “We’ve always been held back by our housing shortages. The forces driving it have simply grown stronger.”
The problem, Goger is quick to note, extends beyond the park.
“It’s not just National Park Service employees,” he says. “It’s everybody who’s doing community-service functions right now struggling with the cost of housing.”
Kiser frames it plainly: “When teachers, nurses, deputies, social workers, and county staff can’t find a rental, we don’t just lose employees, we lose service capacity.”
What’s Changed and What’s at Stake
Two forces have turbocharged the region’s housing crisis in recent years. The first is the explosion of short-term rentals (STRs), such as Airbnb and VRBO. In Mariposa County, active STRs grew from roughly 243 properties in 2010 to more than 900 by 2024, now accounting for nearly 9% of the county’s entire housing stock. The ripple effect on long-term rentals has been severe.
“It has completely changed the market around Yosemite National Park,” McPadden says.
The second force is fire insurance — or the near-impossibility of getting it. Even where housing is available in the private market, many employees simply cannot afford insurance coverage at a price that makes buying a home viable.
“The financial risk to the individual person — especially one at these pay grades,” McPadden says, “it just can’t be done.”
Inside the park, the housing that does exist is often aging, and repairs, retrofits, and remodels are severely underfunded. Some units are more than a century old and prone to losing power for days at a time during storms. Some employees have to walk in the dark from restrooms or shower facilities back to tent units. Others live in trailers up to 40-plus years old — a legacy of a decades-old attempt to address housing shortages.
According to McPadden, the NPS’s annual construction budget for the entire national park system is about $150 million and hasn’t changed in years. With inflation, that budget is quickly eaten up by the NPS’s most pressing issues and emergency repairs nationwide. There’s nothing left for fixing aging units or building new housing in places such as Yosemite.
For visitors, McPadden says those consequences are not abstract. For example, without enough housing to recruit and retain snowplow drivers, Tioga Road and Glacier Point open later or not at all. Without high-voltage electricians, vital infrastructure would go unmaintained.
“Our critical systems can fail,” McPadden says. “We end up closing areas, not being able to open areas, or opening them very late.”
A Path Forward
When asked what it would take to fix the housing inside the park — new units, renovated ones, the whole picture — McPadden doesn’t hesitate: “It’s mainly money.”
Solutions exist, but none of them are simple or cheap. Goger and Kiser point to a suite of county-level tools already in motion: accessory dwelling units, new limiteddensity rural building standards that restrict short-term rental conversion, and a multi-partner workforce housing project — now in development in Mariposa — designed specifically to address the “missing middle” of workers who earn too much for subsidized housing but too little to compete in the private market.
Critically, Kiser says, the community is ready for it. “People are not asking for urban density; that’s not what we’re looking for here,” she says. “But targeted housing where it fits near services, with infrastructure, deed-restricted where possible — that’s 100% the political appetite.”
Acting Housing Manager Clarice Henry and Administrative Assistant Rachel Chan stand in front of a NPS housing unit in Yosemite Valley. Photo courtesy of Jacob Myhre.
McPadden acknowledges the enormity and complexity of the issue.
“The issue is on steroids here around Yosemite National Park,” he says, “by virtue of the interest in the park itself and the ability of people to use properties for short-term rentals, and to make significant money that way.”
But he’s cautiously optimistic that momentum is building. For Yosemite Conservancy, the work is already underway. Over the past decade, the organization has grown from zero to 25 beds of employee housing in El Portal. In doing so, it has built something harder to quantify than beds or square footage: the ability to retain institutional knowledge and expertise that keep the park running well year after year.
“With the ability to offer someone not only a position but a stable place to live, we’ve been able to retain people with a deep understanding of the park,” says Adonia Ripple, the Conservancy’s chief of Yosemite Operations. “That continuity is foundational.”
A Place Worth the Effort
Late in the day, when the crowds thin and the valley quiets, it’s easy to remember why so many people stay.
Granite walls glow pink in the fading light. The Merced River moves slowly past the meadows. Somewhere nearby, a naturalist prepares for tomorrow’s program, a ranger finishes a shift, a scientist checks field notes before dark, and a park custodian completes their rounds.
For those who work here, Yosemite is more than a place to visit.
It’s home — if they can find a place to live.
Yosemite Conservancy supports workforce housing at Yosemite through investments in El Portal employee housing and ongoing partnerships with the National Park Service and Mariposa County.
This article was originally published in our Spring/Summer 2026 magazine. Read the full magazine issue here.
