I was born and raised in a small ski town that was a "hidden gem" for a long time. This article covers the issues well.
In one year, it all changed. Housing prices and rent increased drastically -- sometimes by 2x or 3x. Half of my friends and acquaintances have had to move out of town and commute for work. What does it say when a city's essential workers cannot vote on city issues anymore?
The city is not legally allowed to regulate short term rentals, so AirBnB is taking up a significant portion of housing. The city tries to make developers restrict short term rentals on the units they develop instead but with limited success.
Any attempt at new housing is met with fierce resistance by a loud minority with expensive lawyers. Nobody wants the town to change. Everyone who moves here wants to prevent anyone else from following. Some of the people advocating for affordable housing are the same ones trying to jack up property values. So affordable housing is not actually affordable for anyone who needs it.
Businesses are struggling to find employees, and many have closed or limited their hours. At the same time, commercial rents are increasing.
I think part of the problem is that while maybe wages will be pushed up a bit, eventually the equilibrium is still a situation we won't like. Like long commutes and bad living situations.
If someone is willing to trade the time and cost of a long commute, can’t we trust that they decided it’s worth it?
I keep hearing how we need to make the Bay Area affordable, but I’m also thinking “price is a signal” and people deciding to live elsewhere is exactly what we want.
I spent time in a developing country and the government is struggling to creating new economic centers but failing miserably (mostly due to poor people willing to sacrifice for higher wages). If they had their way they’d love to not have a metro area of 15M but two metro areas of 7.5M.
Not sure we should be accommodating everyone in the Bay Area (or wherever), people deciding to move to Austin is a good thing.
Idk, we do live in a bit of a climate emergency so using government policy (not the free market) to discourage density seems like a bad way to achieve that. Also I guess I left out the worst bit of the high cost of living equilibrium. Homelessness has been connected pretty cleanly to high housing costs. It isn't even that surprising, people find moving difficult and even more so when you're at the bottom of the economy just scraping by and then you actually run out of money. There's also a common feeling that forcing people to move is a bad thing. That seems at least reasonable to me.
I think it doesn't really seem like that's the equilibrium. Instead it seems like it causes long commutes. In the bay area huge numbers of people commute into sf from huge distances. It does seem like the situation being different would be better.
Yes, often it is a bad equilibrium. When prices rise, taxes rise, and often people who were able to live somewhere no longer can. They're forced to move, eventhough they'd rather stay. This also happened in the bay area, where people were involuntarily forced out of their homes.
These stories don't really make sense to me though, why are single elderly people living in the home that housed their whole family with children, now that the children have moved out? Shouldn't a family home be used for a family? And shouldn't prime location housing in the middle of big cities be used for the people that contribute most and are most needed there?
I think it's perfectly normal for a single senior citizen to "move over" and let another family take over their family home, while they downsize to an apartment, or relocate to a different location, since they are not required by work to live there.
I don't understand where this sentiment comes from, that a person should live in the same home their whole life, and once you have moved into a home it becomes someone else's problem to make sure you stay there the rest of your life, regardless of money and income? That is really unrealistic and obviously an incredibly inefficient use of resources.
I'm getting really tired of the fact that the boomers are the richest group of people in society, by far, and still the ones who are the most entitled and complaining. They already get hugely compensated for "having to move" by cashing out on the old houses, so what's the problem?
Edit: That's the whole purpose of the real estate tax, to avoid people hoarding big houses that they don't need. It's just working as intended.
Wait till you’re old and live in a house filled with memories.
And especially when you’re older, you should be able to rely on your friends and family around you, and not be forced to move to a new area where you know nobody, and cannot ask anyone for help.
I actually like the idea that you buy a house, pay it off and keep it in the family for next generations. I bought it, it’s mine, I paid for it, and now some else determines I have to move away to make room for someone else?
If you like that idea, that's fine, and sure it's "nice" from some point of view. But it's also obviously inefficient and therefor it will cost extra, and it makes sense for the country to have those incentives.
If you are promoting the traditional way of the family home for generations, then your kids and grandkids would live in the same house for that to make sense, not having an empty huge house for 1 single divorced boomer
Amazon and eCommerce in general is really well positioned to fill the gaps left in failing towns, which means the quaint stores that die off in the interim have a much different landscape to return to. Cafes and restaurants don't tend to have as much trouble, but small goods, homewares, boutiques and so on can really struggle to fit into the new paradigm.
Yes, it will take a while. I feel like the problem is that everything happened too quickly. The growth has been happening for a long time, but suddenly we got ten years worth of growth in one year. It will take a while to even out.
Presumably it should have made many o the old residents a lot of money, though, so it isn't all bad? The value of their homes increased threefold, after all?
I imagine they would have rather kept their town than a bundle of cash. If it's just a matter of shifting suburbs in a big city that's one thing, but people who choose a ski town to live in do it for the community and way of life.
It's not an ultimatum where they had control over the outcome, the community was already changing around them, so they either live with inflated prices for everything and a fracturing community, or they sell and try somewhere new. You can see the writing on the wall in other words.
You also have to be able to afford to not sell when where you live gentrifies, prices for everything go up, local taxes go up, restaurants get fancier, services cost more, groceries go up, if you were renting then you get priced out.
What are you expecting to have happened? The town to get together and everyone refuses to sell?
Like I said it wasn't an ultimatum people were given to sell or keep their town, it didn't just spring on them one day in a town meeting where they could vote to gentrify or not.
Some people are going to sell because they're moving on, some people die and their estate sells, it's just going to happen. Over time more of them get sold to holidaymakers and investors, and you can start to pick up on what's happening, but it's not like you have personal agency over the problem anymore. You could refuse to sell, but your neighbor might not. Prices are going up, the town is changing whether you like it or not.
The market value of their home grew enormously, and with it their property taxes. They live frugally on a low, fixed income and eventually the tax burden grew too much. So yeah, they got a nice capital gain, but they had to move away from the home they bought as newlyweds and raised their family in. It probably would've been better for their children's inheritance if they hadn't sold the house, too.
Yeah but they were still forced to do something that actually makes sense, I mean considering the big picture it's good that an actual family now get to live in that home, that really needs a big home. And the couple downsized to a suitable home, and got a big pile of cash for the inconvenience. Seems like it's working great if you ask me, what's the issue here and how is it any "better" if we would spend tax money for singles/couples to live in large family homes that they don't need and can't afford?
It sounds insane to me - so basically if you want to buy your own home to be safe against rent inflation, you can still be priced out of your own home. How does that make any sense?
Well, only if your home is really oversized. The "issue" is that retired people are "forced" to move to a home sized for 1/2 people and not stay forever in a home made for 6 people, unless they have savings to pay for the property tax. And that's "sad" somehow
Think of a young couple, new kid, want a bigger house in their home town, no longer possible because their wages at the ski lodge don't actually let them afford a home the size they need. They sell their current one and leave. I'm not saying feel sorry for them, just using it as an example.
But then it's the same people who wanted to "own their town" who are raising the prices for their neighbors, not some alien invaders pushing the poor locals away.
Prices also went up because the housing supply disappeared. There simply weren't any houses available to buy or rent
for a while. People were willing to pay a ton of money for anything thay they could find. So, naturally, many land lords increased rent to force the old tenants out, and then rented to new, higher-paying tenants from out of town.
> Half of my friends and acquaintances have had to move out of town and commute for work.
And I guess they also made huge amounts of money selling their homes in town, and now live in houses much bigger outside of town... Or if they were renting, they were taking a risk to begin with and can't really expect that work/life-balance opportunity to exist unchanged forever.
As someone growing up in a smaller ski town in Norway:
Yes, it's an issue. But it's often far too easy to blame the new people or the tourists. Hating them while happily taking their money or needing them to fill work. I mean, without being a tourist hotspot, the town I'm from would have died. Towns close by without the same skiing opportunities struggle with all young people moving to study and never returning. So the population is ending up being very old and declining.
With that said, there are of course issues. But I feel our zoning laws have worked great. An area is either for cabins or primary residents. Those for primary resident, must have someone living there. The cabins don't. Thus there are two markets, one for those wanting the convenience of their own place to stay when visiting, and one for those wanting to live their full time. A house for full time is also in a different areas than the cabins, so you won't have lots of empty hosues as your neighbors.
This is reflected in the prices. A cabin is probably 2x-3x as expensive as a similar house. But that helps on not pricing the locals out. Of course, someone externally could buy a house as an investment and rent it out longterm, thus pushing the price higher. But at least that doesn't take away some housing for people living there.
By people observing their neighbors are never there. In small communities everyone knows everyone, and it's in our own interest having a vibrant community, not lots of empty housing only being used during high season.
But mainly it's checked by seeing if any person has their primary residence registered at each address zoned to housing. Or by filling in a form saying it's rented out to someone living their temporarily, like seasonal workers, students at the ski academy etc.
But people do try to skimp around it by living there on paper while actually living somewhere else. But than at least part of their taxes paid goes to our county. County can force them to sell, though.
they are taxed differently. you would not get the upper hand trying to live primarily in something classified in a secondary/fun/vacation home.
there's also the matter of your person registry information being wrong all the time (since it has to be tied to something zoned as a primary residence). would be death by a thousand cuts since so many services and programs refer to this registry to automate things.
Many counties are actually fine with people living full time in their cabins. It's the opposite that's problematic, using normal housing as cabins. But as you say, it can be an expensive and troublesome way to live, compared to buying something zoned properly.
The problem is pretty simple; the stock of mountain resort towns has not kept up to satisfy demand.
Imagine 15 or 20 years ago, a trip to a somewhat remote mountain town had a lot of inconveniences like bad internet, unpredictable weather/travel conditions, etc. In the current year, it's very easy to book an entire trip to Vail/Tahoe in 30 minutes. The amenities and infrastructure are decent making it a viable place for remote work as well.
Building enough short term housing is difficult and many people can only afford it if they book as a very large group (15 to 20 people is not uncommon) which means that the local 'lodging' supply is insufficient which creates a market for vacation rentals.
The polices these places put in place to combat the housing crises aren't actually designed to provide affordable housing. The post common policy is limiting the occupancy of vacation rentals such that large >6 adult parties are no longer allowed.
IMO it's pretty obvious that the local lodging industry absolutely hated competition since those 15+ person family reunion style groups were paying half as much on a VRBO a few miles from town vs an in-town hotel/townhouse setup. The second big lobby/group is the wealthy people who want to own a vacation home/2nd home outright for there own personal use rather than personal+rent use. Does anyone really thing that these small mountain towns have the kind of jobs to support owning a 4000 sqft house as a primary residence without some supplemental income/wealth?
So what happens is the wealthy retires/2nd home buyers support and advocate for housing policies designed to make their homes cheaper while actually constricting the short-term lodging supply further which in turn means more affordable homes are converted to short-term rentals. It's very easy to assume that limiting the use of homes as vacation rentals would increase the housing supply but in reality it only increases the supply for the wealthy - not the workers in these towns.
IMO I think the only solution is to create more mountain towns and ski resorts. Otherwise the only solution is trying to limit* the number of tourists and visitors.
> the local lodging industry absolutely hated competition since those 15+ person family reunion style groups were paying half as much on a VRBO...
It's not just the cost--the market has changed. Hotels are like cable companies or pre-iTunes record labels. People prefer renting a private, detached, house rather than a bunch of hotel rooms because it's a nicer experience having a shared space with your whole group away from strangers.
Families can dry their ski clothes by the fire while hanging out in a living room while grandma makes her famous gnocchi for dinner. Then they can go to bed at a reasonable hour. Meanwhile, a group of friends can get drunk in another rental until the sun rises. These two incompatible personas don't have to interfere with one another[0]
Okay, yes, there are hotels with cabins. These are still too close together and not big enough to accommodate what the market wants out of a vacation experience. It's the difference between five friends paying $4k for business class seats versus spending $20k to charter a private jet and splitting it.
[0] We're assuming the friends stay indoors and aren't a neighborhood nuisance--certainly not always the case, but sometimes people get drunk responsibly.
There also are wealthy people who just buy or rent an entire floor of a hotel or a cruise ship suite as a second (or fifth) residence. So according to the logic of Airbnb, the entire town is essentially now a hotel of this nature.
>IMO I think the only solution is to create more mountain towns and ski resorts.
Almost impossible given environmental constraints. (Whether one agrees or disagrees.) Even expanding existing resorts is tough. And it's not clear the economics are there given demographics even leaving aside any climate change factors.
ADDED: More rural towns with very limited facilities may be possible given Starlink, etc. But they're not going to be world-class ski resorts or what most people think of as the associated mountain towns.
I grew up in the Rockies in the Wyoming/Montana area. There is absolutely enough open mountain space to open more resorts. There are ski resorts open now that are not doing that well financially.
The problem is not the mountain side ski hills, it’s access to the flow of rich people. Ski resorts 2 hours from the Bozeman airport struggle because that’s too inconvenient.
The ski towns that suffer from these problems are a small minority of ski resorts that meet the criteria of:
- town actually right next to a ski resort (many ski resorts don’t have a convenient town attached)
- airport with commercial flights to major hubs within 45 min to an hour drive at most
I don't disagree with any of that. Though I'd point out that just because there's lots of open mountain space doesn't mean it would be anything like straightforward to get the permits to develop and operate a destination ski resort there.
But, as you say, a lot of destination ski resorts don't even really have an associated town at all or they have a somewhat distributed sprawl of related properties and they're inconvenient to get to. Even most of the Colorado resorts aren't especially quick to get to from commercial flights. And if you don't have a destination resort (or other) you just have a small rural town that may not have much in the way of jobs in the first place.
While there have actually been more small ski areas created since than I would have expected, it looks as if Deer Valley is the newest major resort from the early 80s--and that's in a town that already existed and already had an associated major ski area.
Not to mention the quality of the attraction itself -- there are plenty of B-level Colorado "resorts" that most upper middle class won't bat an eyelash at because the vert/terrain/natural snowpack just isn't as good as what you'd get in, say, Breck.
Maybe. Certainly there are enough people on these pages promoting all sorts of unrealistic BUILD BUILD BUILD programs in all sorts of contexts that it's hard to tell the difference between satire and something else.
I’m sure that environmental concerns are a factor, but ski lifts and snowmaking aren’t cheap, there are plenty of reasons why making a new ski area is daunting.
The main environmental constraint I’ve seen is rain in December wiping out all the manufactured snow killing the holiday season. (I am talking about New England so YMMV)
The problem described in this article is not a shortage of housing for those who want 2nd homes in places like Crested Butte (although that may well be a problem of its own).
The problem being described is the infeasability of the people who work in these towns to be able to live there.
You can double or triple the number of mountain resort towns, and perhaps that would ease the "challenge" of being able to afford a 2nd home there. But by itself it will have almost no impact in the challenge faced by the people who work in these towns.
As the article noted, and as others have highlighted in comments, most mountain resort towns are intensely space-constrained, "just build more" is generally not an option for a given town. I doubt that "just build more mountain resort towns" is a solution either.
By bringing down the price of a 2nd home in a mountain resort town, the locals can also more easily afford to live in one. That is, if it were easy to magically create more mountain towns, without other effects on supply and demand.
The gap between what locals can afford and what the houses generally purchased as 2nd homes cost is vast. You saying "bring down the price" as if that's a fairly trivial thing, but to bring them down enough to make them affordable for locals is not a trivial thing at all. I suspect that in general, it just isn't possible.
Even if you owned the land already, price of construction being what it is in the western US, the home will be several hundred thousand dollars. That's out of reach to a lift operator making $12/hr.
... which of course shows another, arguably deeper, aspect of the problem: the general share of GDP that goes to labor, particularly lower paid labor, and how that compares with increases in the cost of fundamental things like housing. Somehow, we've ended up with an economy and a culture where someone can work 40 hours a week but not be paid enough to afford a lot of what our culture also assumes to be basic. This isn't an accident, and has effects way beyond just mountain resort towns, though the effects are particularly acute and visible in such places.
What is tough is that most other things are generally not that expensive in many of these expensive places. It's still roughly $14 entrees $9 appetizers and $8 bud lights in many of these expensive cost of living areas just like downtown midwestern cities anywhere else these days from what I've been finding myself personally. Other than the bay area or nyc where you really might see a costly big mac on the menu, it feels like the pricepoints for food service, movie tickets, concerts, car washes, cocktails, in state college tuition, groceries, and most other things are pretty much fixed across the country in metro areas at least whether its LA or Pittsburg you are comparing. It's only rent and housing costs that seem to vary so dramatically in my experience.
>IMO I think the only solution is to create more mountain towns and ski resorts
Not a great solution. The mountains are sensitive ecology, with poor access for the most part, and even the big mountain towns that do exist are under constant threat of going up in smoke in the summer.
The local effects of atmospheric warming are pretty hard to predict and sometimes completely non-intuitive.
Increased evaporation, changes in the dynamics of cloud formation, winds, could mean more rain in some places as well as more snow in others.
In europe, low-altitude ski resorts have been dying for a while and had to diversify into non-skiing activities (which also alters the busy season as that’s more of a summer thing), and middle-altitude resorts are starting to get hit.
Only the wealthiest stations have the means to cover the entire thing in artificial snow (some resorts are already 80% artificial snow at times) or helo down snow from higher altitude as happened last year during the very mild February.
I quite like the rules in the Tirol - you can only own property if you live there. No second homes, no big hotels, no renting out houses. Just small owner operated hotels and locals.
This is what they do in Banff National Park in Canada (which has several resorts). You can't buy or rent unless you're a resident who lives full time and/or works in the town.
You couldn't build most buildings in Tirol in the US due to zoning restrictions. When we lived in Innsbruck, we had an apartment with no parking spot. Here in Bend, there is tons of parking, because people regard automobile storage as more important than places for people to live.
And still rents and apartment prices are exploding in Innsbruck. Even couples that broke up keep living together for months because the affordable housing situation is dire
Not sure how you are going to convince people who live in a blizzardy mountain town to start walking to work en masse. Snowmobiles are popular in the winter at least.
My wife, baby daughter and I lived in Innsbruck and walked or biked to most things. They clear the streets and sidewalks pretty well. It gets a lot of snow - they hosted the winter olympics there twice.
Innsbruck is not a mountain town, it's the biggest city in the Tirol with >100k residents. I have yet to see someone riding a snowmobile through the city
What happens if you live there, and then you don't? Are you forced to sell?
I don't have a house in a mountain resort area, but I do have one by the beach (not on it, but 5 minutes walking) in a town/area that gets significant summer tourist traffic. I have it because that's where I lived for a decade, but pre-COVID, I moved to the bay area for career reasons. I plan to live in it again one day, so I'd hate to have to sell it - in the meantime it's rented to people we know at a significant discount (like, a third of market rate these days) because they needed somewhere to live and we don't want a vacant home across the country. We didn't intend to buy a second home or a rental, but it became that. What happens in that sort of situation in places like Tirol?
While this is an edge case for most people, you are allowed to keep it, rent it out, whatever. The regulation doesn't work that well, as there are some loopholes and there are still significant numbers of mostly uninhabited second homes.
A lot of places in the Tirol have issues with affordable housing for workers while at the same time new hotels are being built and existing hotels expanded, increasing the demand for affordable housing by increasing the demand for workers.
There is also a small workforce crisis going on since covid, as a lot of people lost their jobs in the pandemic (hotels and restaurants closed) when lots of workers left the sector and many of the seasonal workers are not returning.
I think a lot of places should have rules like that. At least they should heavily tax any home that isn't used as a primary residence (either by the owner or a renter).
I don't know if south tirol (part of Italy) has any regulation similar to the one mentioned for northern tirol (part of Austria). I wouldn't be surprised
A similar rule is valid in Switzerland. People voted on it and the mountain cantons still keep grumbling but it's neccessary, I am afraid. A few years ago I went to Nendaz the autumn, a ski station in Valais. Chalets with closed shutters everywhere and few people on the streets. That was a bit sad.
Wouldn't this mean people who earn enough to rent, but not buy (ex. service workers) wouldn't be able to live there (since there wouldn't be a stock of rental housing they can rent), and thus would have to commute?
Why wouldn't there be a stock of rental housing? Nothing stops a full-time resident from owning rental property. If you want to own one (or more) houses there you have to live there. Seems perfectly reasonable to me. I wish this could be tried in the USA, but voters (rich property owners) would never allow it. There are a lot of places (not just ski towns) that are ruined by rich people bidding up property and then leaving it vacant 358 days of the year.
I don't know about Tirol, but in Banff, the restrictions don't prevent construction of multi-unit buildings specifically for renters. I don't know exactly how ownership of these buildings work, but I think they're owned by the town through some non-profit org.
I don't live in Banff and I'm sure there are issues with this system, but it seems pretty reasonable. Service workers would definitely be priced out if every condo/apartment was owned privately and available as a short-term rental.
Same thing is happening in Asia. I know a few local towns, one in particular where some foreign guy now has his Japanese real estate license and access to a bunch of foreign investors looking for places.
It's becoming an unmitigated disaster. The population of the town is somewhat severely aged; However, rather than that being an opportunity for young people to get a start, this property snake steps in an steals everything at a higher price than the locals could afford and makes up a bunch of stories of why he should have it. He pays people for information so we can get the jump on places.
It's really quite stressful, it seems there is nothing that can stop the guy.
A second similar property snake has arrived too, with a similar back story, access to huge pool of money from China/Hong Kong/Maylasia.
We moved here recently because we wanted to live in a community, but it's getting pretty hammered now, we wil hang on for the time being and try find a place, not ready to give up yet.
I don't think your view is representative of "Asia", or even Japan. Housing in Japan is by world standards extremely affordable and generally depreciates in value instead of appreciating, making it a terrible investment. If your town is "somewhat severely aged", that means the youth have already made the call to head for the cities and it's lack of jobs, not lack of affordable property, that's driving that. There are a couple of foreign-investor hotspot blips like newly trendy ski town Niseko, but for the vast majority of the country, prices are down, down, down. Many rural towns are now handing out essentially free houses because they've been abandoned (akiya), although the costs of renovating them into something livable are often considerable.
In "most" of Japan, that might be the case, but the article is about Ski towns. There is plenty of young people who have tried to move to ski towns from large cities and have already been priced out.
I'm not talking about some random country side spots, I'm talking about mountain towns, inline with the article.
"There are a couple of foreign-investor hotspot blips like newly trendy ski town Niseko"
Do you have any idea how much money has gone into Niseko? It's not new and trendy, that's been going on for quite some time now and continues to do so. The people who have made their money screwing that place over are now looking for their next victims.
Well, "new" as in over the last 20 years, not too long on the Japanese time scale.
You obviously have strong feelings about this, but can you expand a bit more on who exactly the "victims" here are? I'll readily admit I haven't been in the area for a long time, but my understanding is that the Niseko boom largely involves the construction of net new housing (Swiss-style chalet apartments etc), since the Australian/Chinese jet set fueling it is not particularly interested in typical cramped and disposable Japanese-style housing.
One of the biggest problems that is hitting ski towns is the hyper cheap season passes that everyone buys. The model has created a huge surge of demand for people to go skiing in winter which has put pressure on the local ski towns (more short term rental demands, second home buyers) and the resources at ski mountains (aka the insane lines on a good ski day now).
It's interesting because it has allowed a lot more people to get into skiing but the trade off has been that with more volume on the ski hills - more demand on the local real estate and more crowded infrastructure. Businesses have done well since they sold more but locals who are on a tighter budget have inflating home costs. Pandemic also made things get extra strange.
I guess it could mean that the resorts in the Ikon/Epic networks are experiencing these problems while out of network locations are seeing slumping business (which does anecdotally appears true) but I don’t think that alone is driving the issues.
I think what that broad set of data is a poor marker as its opaque in its accuracy and has no ability to drill down further into the data. It is a good starter point - and I do appreciate a counter information to my theory.
1. Those are gross volume but the distribution of visits per location has changed dramatically as a result of the Ikon and Epic passes - ie local demand pressure in certain localities.
2. What is the distribution of one time buyers versus season pass holders?
3. International vs domestic?
4. Over that time period how many people have actually left ski resorts and started to backcountry ski instead (a not insignificant amount) - which is demand that would be unaccounted for.
5. The other challenge with skiing is it is highly weather dependent - so a bad snow year will limit the amount of visits. I imagine if you were to divy up this plot by states - there would be a strong correlation with big snow years in California and large movements in the numbers merely as a function of scale.
I’ll follow up and say I think one place that the networked season passes might be driving on the real estate front is that I think they make it less attractive for “locals” to get started skiing and to stay local. The massive increase in day pass prices means where once someone in Seattle, Sacramento or Denver might just try a few days skiing to see if they like it, they now have to make a much more major commitment up front to get into the sport. Those “locals” would just drive in an hour or two rather than rent a ski town property.
The multi resort passes make it much more attractive to take a dedicated ski vacation than just check out a different nearby resort.
Been looking through the Vail annual reports. In FY 2010 Season/Epic passes were 35% of ticket revenue, FY 2019 it was 47%, FY 2021 61%. I think your theory has legs.
It’s also an intentional strategy by Vail to shift sales into season passes. A day pass is incredibly expensive, $229 at the ticket window. For about $600 you might as well buy a season pass just in case you get to use it a bit. They are taking a page out of the gym membership model.
It's really the theme park model that they are learning from. Disney and Universal are in an arms race perfecting this science. A lot of people end up buying annual passes from Disney or Universal since you end up ahead after a couple visits. If you are local that's pretty easy to do. Suddenly you are in the park more often, in arms reach of their $14 entrees and merchandise shops in every corner. Having you in the park/skilodge more often means more chances they can upsell you on stuff they make some real money on, like $12 beer on a 10x markup. Even if you show up every single day and really milk your season pass to these sorts of places, the resort still ends up ahead due to all the other sales you might make for them. Gotta take a break for food at some point when skiing or going to disneyland no matter what.
Thanks. I've been a skier for a long time and have a market / data mindset and I have been watching the changes on ski mountains/communities over that time.
For me personally the hyper cheap passes have a had a positive effect in getting people into skiing that wouldn't be able to afford the commitment. It has, unfortunately, lowered the quality of skiing as on good weather conditions the volume of runs you can get / time spent in line has dropped significantly. That and the quality of snow decreases (ie more people chew up the snow faster). That is admittedly only a concern for skiers/snowboarders who are at a certain level of ability to take advantage of those conditions (most people don't care).
I think one of the unintended consequences of the ski industry doing this is that they have (and probably don't really care) made it skiing worse for locals (via higher housing costs, more competition for resources (snow, food), congestion. Maybe it has helped the local business owner, and maybe there are more jobs but I would wager the jobs are not career jobs but more like dead end jobs. It is an age-old problem between corporate ownership of ski mountains and crusty locals -- the power dynamics lie in the favor of the corporates.
The model plays well for the traveling skier type who is willing to travel and stay on mountain accommodation. They lower the costs of acquisition and recoupe on spend on site. To everyones point - the disney model / theme park model.
Theres lots more to it - but probably as far as I am willing to think about it at this point :)
That's also because vail has been buying up mountains. The epic pass even works for the little podunk midwestern ski slopes I used to ride on, since vail bought them within the past decade or two.
The epic pass works in places outside the US as well so some Europeans buy it if they are planning one US trip and some days in the areas in the Alps that are covered.
Lift tickets are like 2x what they were 7 years ago. Prices are matching demand, I doubt it's vice versa. Personally, I think social media is the culprit for the increased demand. Previously people in most places barely knew skiing was an accessible thing to do. Now you have mimetic desire from their friends posting glamor shots at the resort for all to see.
The consolidation of ski resorts by just a few companies (e.g. Vail), and the creation of the Epic Pass has dramatically increased affordability and access. Just a few years ago a trip to Vail was a big deal; now it's an easy weekend trip for anyone with Southwest Rapid Rewards and an Epic Pass.
Anecdotally, in Whistler (now owned by Vail), day tickets are nearly double what they were a decade and a half ago. While season passes are nearly half the price.
Sure, but long, straight skis are harder to control, causing more accidents for less skilled riders. Many people skiing reasonably well today would have a really hard time using classic material from the 80s-90s
I lived in Park City, UT throughout much of the 1990s and early 2000s. My family had a home in Telluride, so I’m familiar with the situation there, as well. I have an idea for a solution that I’m surprised was not mentioned. It’s simple: impose a heavy tax on unoccupied vacation homes but offer an exemption for owners who house one local worker on the property year-round. The concept is that the owner of a big vacation home would build a small apartment, perhaps in a basement or in the rear of the home, or even detached, that could house 1-2 locals, and would rent it out for an affordable price. In exchange, the owner gets a break from the hefty tax and they have an on-site theft deterrent.
Back in my ski town days, I had several friends who lived in peoples’ vacation homes as on-site keepers for the absentee owners. They’d keep the property secure, shovel snow if needed, stock the fridge before the owner visited, etc. In exchange, they lived there for free, or at a much-reduced rent.
> It’s simple: impose a heavy tax on unoccupied vacation homes but offer an exemption for owners who house one local worker on the property year-round.
TFA mentioned explicitly that CB's proposal (not approved by the electorate) was a tax on unoccupied vacation homes with an exemption for owns who house one local worker on the property for at least 6 months of the year.
They really should just have this on the business owners. Make them have to provide housing for the labor they require to make their money vs having homeowners who might not even be patronizing the business front this overhead of theirs. In places like Catalina Island where there isn't much housing, you will see job ads for the coffee shop offering employee housing along with the job. You want to open a starbucks in a mountain town? Better make it a mixed use building with some apartments upstairs for the staff.
The whole reason why housing costs are so high is because there is an imbalance in the number of jobs and units of houses available, so if you mandate that all these employers provide housing for the jobs they bring into the area, you alleviate this imbalance immediately.
This sounds interesting! My sister worked in Park City, UT for several years.
How would you account for the J-1s (Brazilian immigrants in town ONLY for the winter season)? What about the families that need more than a 1 bed room?
My sister mentioned that the "poor class" extended up to a family whose dad was a lawyer. I'm not sure this is true, but I am sure the COL was pretty friggen high (there are, what, 2 grocery stores and one of them is a Whole Foods).
With seasons seemingly getting shorter and/or worse (due to what I assume to be global warming) and the lines just getting absolutely ridiculous [1], I think I've accepted the fact that skiing/snowboarding is going to be a different experience for my kids.
That experience probably won't be at a traditional mountain like Killington, Vail, etc. The lines will be too long, too expensive, just overall it will suck.
Honestly, I'm considering doing a hike up to the mountain/ski down thing because the alternative is to go to even more exotic locations (Niseko, maybe Lebanon?) which would cost even more money.
Purg, Wolf Creek, & Loveland haven't had big lines any times I've been there. My mother said Los Alamos, Santa Fe, & Taos lift lines are far better now on powder days than when she grew up thanks to more chairs on lifts + high speed lifts.
In the case of Loveland, you just have to contend with the snarl of traffic on I70. It's right before the Eisenhower tunnel, so it isn't as bad as Vail or Copper just up the road, but I70 traffic has gotten pretty brutal over the years. I've had routine 1 hour drives to/from a resort turn into 3-4+ hours more often than not.
Wolf Creek makes sense though - that's a bit more of a commitment. Your typical skier is probably going to be there for a few days and not just swinging up for a Saturday (at least coming from the front range.)
I-70 is the reason I didn't apply to jobs in Colorado. I don't know how much people carpool, but at least there's some infrastructure for it now. I just wish the state would put some extra tax on the resorts to fund a free ski bus with dedicated lanes where convenient. How sick would that be?
I liked what Vail resorts (and maybe others, dunno) implemented last year due to COVID: a reservation system to limit the number of people on the mountain. Lines during the middle few hours of the day were still pretty bad, but not the 30 minute logjams we've been seeing during the last decade. Early and late in the days, no lines at all. I wish they'd kept the reservation system this year. I fear we'll be back to the usual circus this season.
> and the lines just getting absolutely ridiculous
Leave the US.
I worked at a mountain in the US where it was quite normal to have a line from 30 minutes before opening until after closing. I would load passengers on every single chair, all day, every day.
I moved up to Canada. It was quite common to go 15-20 minutes without a single person getting on my lift. I regularly ski runs and don't see a single person for the entire run. I often only cross/see my own tracks.
Colorado has 32 ski resorts and Vermont 26. I don't think you need to go to the backcountry to avoid the crowds, just to a smaller lift serviced mountain.
Agreed. It has been trending up for years with better equipment, but COVID opened up the floodgates. Now the NPs have to employee "ski rangers" to help assist the chaos that is bc skiing in popular spots. I don't like where this is headed. Serenity and solitude get removed from the outdoors more and more every season. Summer and winter.
I am really torn. Part of me wants everyone to enjoy nature and outdoors, but the other part of me wants to keep it pristine. These desires seem at odds with each other.
> For the right to change the covenants of a deed, Vail pays the homeowner 15 to 20 percent of the home’s market value—on average, about $69,000. The owner can collect that payout today, without selling their house. When they do eventually sell, their deed restricts eligible buyers to residents who are employed by an Eagle County business.
This is the key part of the article. Interesting short term solution; but I'm wondering what happens in the long term.
The principle I've long held is that cities and towns should primarily be for those who reside in those towns.
In this case, only residents should be voting on things like ballot measures. This article talks about a few towns, some where I'm sure there are a lot of residents with multiple homes, some of which I'm sure that isn't the case. But nonresident owners shouldn't be dictating public policy, period.
So the first thing you do is you is put in a city income tax and make all homeowners residents for tax purposes. And that's tax on all your income. To those who say they'll just hide behind LLCs and trusts, you do two things:
1. You tax the beneficial owner of the property;
2. Properties with no clear beneficial owner are simply taxed punitively with property tax.
This article is just further evidence that AirBnB is a cancer on housing, as if we needed further confirmation (which we didn't).
At a higher level, we need to do something about the ultra-rich borrowing to avoid tax. A good starting point is that any borrowed funds, or at least any borrowed funds for certain purposes such as buying real estate, are treated as repatriated or realized income and taxed accordingly.
And while we're at it, let's starting non-primary residences on unrealized capital gains unless it's a long term rental.
I don't own a second home, for the record. I do think it would be difficult and have second order effects to ban AirBnB.
But, what about a tax on vacancies, rather than on revenue you get when renting it out? Incentivize people to keep their places filled?
I agree with the general sentiment that AirBnB has altered housing options for low income people for the worse. And, it seems inevitable.
Maybe we need to alter our perceptions of what housing is for people as well? Meaning, people need to start thinking of housing as temporary and governments can force people to open their vacancies to people in need of housing.
Perhaps a new law that makes it so empty vacant houses are available to house-less people? That would be interesting.
This is what Vancouver has tried [1]. It doesn't seem to have worked.
The problem here is that it's too easy to game. You can put in a token resident. The same can apply to having income limits on houses. You have a low income resident who just happens to have rich friends who visit.
I think we need to attack the idea that rich people use real estate to park money and avoid taxes.
I (strongly) suspect that will not stand up to judicial review. Income that has no nexus in the state, let alone the municipality, is not going to be taxable for part-time visitors to the state.
Supreme Court denied hearing New Hampshire v Massachusetts on Jun 28, 2021, and basically told individual taxpayers to fight being taxes by states they have not set foot in.
I know quite a few people who have not stepped foot in NY state for nearly 2 years now and have been paying NY state income taxes the whole time.
I suspect we haven't heard the last of these cases though.
As I understand the NH and MA case, this is about continuing to collect state income tax from NH residents who are no longer commuting. Presumably, it does not apply to remote NH residents who never commuted to a MA location. (The situation of course gets even more complicated when a NH resident is remote to a company that has offices in many states. Why would MA have any particular right to state income tax just because an MA office is closer?)
States are getting very grabby in this regard though. Quite a few are going after business travelers who may have spent as little as a day in the state.
> (The situation of course gets even more complicated when a NH resident is remote to a company that has offices in many states. Why would MA have any particular right to state income tax just because an MA office is closer?)
I do not see it as complicated. Either a state is restricted to being able to tax income from work performed within its geographic boundaries, or it is not. If it is not, then I do not see why every state cannot tax every single employee of any business that has any presence in the state.
Very surprised this Supreme Court declined to hear it with only 2 Justices disagreeing.
It's complicated in that states have a bunch of different rules, are apparently inconsistent in applying them, and there is also apparently not clear precedent. I agree that this seems a case tailor made for SCOTUS to have taken.
Here's just one "it's complicated" example. Say I lived in NH (I don't) and worked remote. (And let's simplify and imagine I never went to an office.) My closest office would be, in fact, be in Massachusetts but HQ is in North Carolina. Why would I pay MA given that I don't live or work there? Maybe I should pay NC? But now you've created a situation where heavily remote companies should establish HQs in no income tax states.
As I also noted, there are a bunch of theoretical rules related to business travel that haven't been historically enforced in most cases but seem to be increasingly so. Which may mean that a lot of employees may increasingly have to file multiple state returns depending upon various thresholds.
(It’s a small enough group of people and the per-game incomes high enough to go after as compared to my income for the days I attend a conference somewhere.)
I think I knew that. And I've also known execs who spent substantial time between multiple offices who tracked for tax purposes.
However, for example, Concur now has an auditing service through E&Y for business travel in the US generally. It was implemented fairly recently and I unsurprisingly haven't traveled much but I did have one trip that triggered a "Is it correct you worked in this state for these three days" email so I guess I'll see what happens.
I imagine the Swiss have dealt with similar situations, I wonder what they would suggest? Pay employees way more is probably step one. I'm the "build more housing" guy, but it looks like the Swiss have chosen a different path?
Superior public transport (quite a few villages ban cars entirely), much higher wages and ruthless exploitation of immigrant labor are also factors though.
Switzerland has more immigrants as a portion of total population than any country outside of Australia, Jordan, Persian Gulf states and a bunch of micro-states/city-states[1].
In Switzerland I can walk out of my urban flat carrying my skis, get on a train, and get dumped at the base of a lift an hour or two later. One or two-transfer public transportation from city center to base lift. There's no reason you have to live at the ski areas.
You can do the same from many places in Salt Lake City. If you live close to the canyons it can be as little as 25 minutes via Bus - but if you live that close you might drive to make it 15.
>There's no reason you have to live at the ski areas.
For you maybe.
There is lots of good reasons to live there if it's your passion. As in, you expect to be on-hill three or more days a week. Not to mention: Just getting there before the crowds arrive is a game changer.
For the skier, maybe not. How about the line cook who prepares breakfast at a hotel, diner or other restaurant? How about the people who work for the search & rescue or fire departments, or the police? How about the staff at the hardware store that sells to the cook, the police and the school teachers?
When you have proper public-service transport designed to accommodate varied work hours, those people can commute too. (Though building adequate housing in employment areas is still a good idea).
They have much better trains / public transit to bring both workers and day tourists in and much denser towns with lots of old small living spaces.
I'm no expert but do live in a western mountain town and have an old climbing friend who just bought a closet to live in in the Alps.
Part of the issue here is towns have very limited sewage and water systems so its not like you can just build new apartments/duplexes/tiny houses/trailer parks on the outside of town ... you need a pretty big lot to put in a septic system and well and at that point you buy a lot you might as well build a 3+ bedroom McMansion to maximise returns.
Agreed - I live in rural New Hampshire and the constraint to growth is the cost of civil infrastructure that has to be built through granite.
With the book from the panic, people have bought lots all over thinking they could just build… it doesn’t work like that. The rock doesn’t always agree w your plans.
If the market could build its way out of this, it already would have. There's not enough money in building and leasing units to rent to burger-flippers and dog-walkers, when there are millionaires lining up to make all-cash purchases.
You either have to pay people enough to afford a mortgage in the area, or you watch all your manual laborers move to the big cities.
> If the market could build its way out of this, it already would have
I believe the author mentions that there was a proposed large apartment building (250 ish units) that could, presumably, have alleviated some of the demand but that it was voted down by nimby types to avoid CB “becoming aurora”
I’d think then that it’s less so the market preventing building than it is voters and activist home owners
The free market is precisely what gave this particular makeup of voters and activist home owners the keys to the kingdom. If you can't afford to pay to play in that municipality, you don't get to vote.
The "free market" didn't give those activists the right to veto development, the political processes and rules of their communities did. It's silly to treat that veto as a natural result, it's just as contingent as any other political rule.
How did they get to be able to vote? As TFA describes, they could afford property within the incorporated propery of CB, unlike those forced to find places to live outside it. Their wealth gave them access to the vote, and they are using their votes to further their own interests.
Being able to buy whatever you want for whatever price works for you and the seller sounds quite a bit like a "free market" to me.
Neither is voting a law of nature, and nor is property ownership. So what's your point? That we don't have to do it this way? Well, sure. But what's the actual alternative?
It's not really weird at all. It's a big enough country with enough different conditions that it does make some amount of sense that there is a heirarchy of levels of control. That looks something like:
|+-- incorporated municipality
Federal -> state -> county -+
|+-- unincorporated land
In the case of an incorporated municipality, the people who live there have a political process to make decisions about planning/zoning/construction, but these (in general) cannot override the rules from the county, state and federal levels.
In the case of unincorporated land, the county makes the rules, and so these are controlled by a political process involving the entire population of the county, rather than just those who live on a particular piece of land (because "there is no there, there"). Again, the county generally cannot override rules from the state and federal level.
In general, the state doesn't really set planning rules that affect specific placement of things. There may be environmental and health regulations that would prevent X being built in a particular location, but the state doesn't normally control whether single family only zoning (as an example) should be used in a given neighborhood - that's up to the incorporated municipality to decide.
The federal level really doesn't set any planning rules other than high level environmental and health regulations.
* If the market could build its way out of this, it already would have.*
Residential development isn’t a free market. The locals control who gets to build what. And very few locals want their single family home in the shadow of a new mid-arose condo.
There are a lot of comments about eliminating investment properties and providing subsidized housing. Why don't we let the market work itself out? Let's see how magical Crested Butte is in a few years with no intervention. I suspect you'll be able to get a nice ski-in/ski-out condo at a significant discount when there are no longer any businesses open in the town.
Another way of describing this process might be "let the people who work in the town take all of the pain, and essentially force them to leave, and only at the very conclusion of the process will those with the money to own 2nd homes there feel any noticeable pain, at which point, the town's economy will have been decimated, and a massive amount of opportunity cost will be required in order to restart it".
I think the real "market" solution here would be to remove the ability of both out-of-town owners and locals to block new housing development. The article cites an example of a 200+ unit development in Brush Creek that was effectively vetoed by local NIMBYs; this in an area where only 800 people voted in the main Crested Butte elections.
The core tenet of democracy is that local inhabitants make local decisions. Doing otherwise is... I don't know what, but it's anti-democratic. If a small mountain town doesn't want outside investors to blow up the place, they have the right to make that choice.
A second-home-owner who spends a few days a year in town is a "local inhabitant" but someone who commutes there every day because they can't afford the rent in town isn't? That doesn't seem very democratic to me.
And a core tenet of government should be handling tragedy of the commons type situations that arise when every locality acts in it own self interest in a globally sub-optimal way for all of them.
> The core tenet of democracy is that local inhabitants make local decisions.
What if the local inhabitants pass a law saying certain race of people are not allowed to enter that area, would you still say they have the right to make that choice?
Did 'the market' build the roads, sewerage and power grids that made it viable to have a township there, or did the government decide they should exist and fund them directly?
Remote mountain towns never pencil out. It's incredibly expensive to maintain even typical suburban sprawl let alone frontier outposts in the wilderness.
Unless you wish to dissolve the local governments in these towns, there is no way to do this. It's a constant struggle between monied interests enacting ordinances that allow them to remain monied, and locals trying to keep them at bay.
Markets tend to be pretty bad at dealing with huge and relatively sudden shocks without causing a ton of harm to incumbents (i.e. existing residents who live and work there).
The world is changing rapidly year by year. And if change is necessary to accommodate it, we’re better off realizing all the negative consequences sooner rather than later… especially if later means it has snowballed into something far larger and more painful (e.g. US mortgage subsidies).
Markets tend to just look bad, but I think they’re more realistic. While the government will pay someone for a job/pension to do something that was made obsolete in the 70’s, the free market appropriately makes him redundant. The former isn’t better. It’s a deadweight loss to society, even if it appears more humane.
Why not take a look at other holiday locations where this has been a problem for years to tell you whether or not that actually works? You could start with Cornwall.
Famous last words; would love to see where Crested Butte is at in five years. The only business that will be left will be the ones supporting the rich second homers why wouldn't it just stay like that or even get worse?
>I suspect you'll be able to get a nice ski-in/ski-out condo at a significant discount when there are no longer any businesses open in the town.
You won't see that. Vail already offers some housing for their employees. If ski town business owners can't net workers, these owners will end up getting some spartan accommodations together for their shift workers like what is done in a lot of other touristy, housing constrained areas around the world.
Won't Amazon and Uber Eats step in to fill that gap? I sadly worry that technology will fill in the holes. When reading the article I was thinking to myself: "what if people who lived there could pool their collective cooking skills and offer up meals to their neighbors (letting their neighbors skip cooking, a need previously filled by local restaurants)."
The people who live there are the ones who can afford to own a second home that sits vacant much of the year.
You really think people that well off are going to cook food to sell? -And- drive it (since who else is going to drive the Amazon or Uber Eats vehicles) until self-driving, on mountain roads, becomes a reality?
My partner has lived in Crested Butte for 18 years and I just came back from a weekend there. Restaurant prices are already high and each one has "help wanted" signs out front because nobody can work for minimum wage and not even afford to live there. Raising prices of a $20 cocktail to $25 does not allow the restaurant to pay hourly, local workers enough money to afford a house that's over $800k or rent that's over $2k/mo. The numbers just plain don't add up.
Resort towns should be considered more like cruise ships. I wouldn't expect a deckhand to afford a condo on a oceanliner, but if their labor is needed it seems its not an issue for the employer to provide housing. Plenty of industries provide housing for their workers. If housing is such an issue for labor to cover itself, capital should just pay for what its labor requires to exist. Somehow along the line we went from developing commercial properties with a second or third floor apartment along our mainstreets into properties devoid of any housing but perhaps plenty of space devoted to someone parking for twenty minutes. It's time we go back and enforce this stipulation on housing. Let's see the inevitable new starbucks in town manifest as a mixed use building instead of yet another drive through that bogs down another intersection.
This is where it's headed. The complete Disney-ification of ski towns. 2 or 3 mega resort companies will control the entire economy surrounding the resort: hotels, restaurants, spas, theaters, etc. Some of the amenities will operate at a loss, but their presence will push up the value of the higher margin amenities.
Frankly, this is true for any "tourist attraction." The attraction has limited geography. The population is increasing. Housing supply is relatively fixed, demand isn't.
Either these attrictions build vertical, or suddenly more tourist attraction locations come online, or mortgage rates increase significantally for any home after the first one.
Many of the ski resort companies do offer housing, which is great. There are two primary issues with that at the moment: not enough housing and, the bigger one, when your housing is directly tied to your job what happens if you are fired? Colorado, for example, is an "at will" state--that means someone can be let go for any or no reason with no notice. If the company is providing housing, then the person is forced to up and move...but where do they move to?
Raising prices, and thus pay, would work if the people who drove up housing costs occupied those houses. But the houses are vacant. So they'll eventually drive out the locals, which will cause local businesses to close because they can't get workers, which will then decrease the value of the vacant houses. The investors will then sell, and the cycle will restart.
Landlords being allowed to increase rent on existing tenants at will makes these shifts so fast. In Germany, you cant do that and therefor people with existing leases are not being displaced that easily.
We have seen this issue locally and traveling, North America and Europe.
A very good solution, but requiring cooperation and strong town Council (and perhaps some retro-action) is that every single business in town,
provides staff housing - alternatively builds staff housing above their business.
Imagine if their was an apartment for every employee.
Isn't that de facto what already happens? If these workers were fired with the status quo, they'd be unable to afford an apartment locally, and the end result is the same as if their employer fronted them an apartment. Plenty of people working in ski towns already do live in resort owned housing. Tons of jobs tie employment with living circumstances not just in this industry, it's not an unusual arrangement at all.
Honest question, have any of these ski towns tried allowing the construction of a significant amount of housing? I.e. housing growth that actually scales with the growth in demand? None of the ones I've visited seem at all dense. (Been to Vail, Beaver Creek, Park City, and all over Tahoe.)
All the consternation over the housing crisis is maddening to me because it seems like universally (in the US), we're willing to try everything and anything except the one thing that basic economics suggests would actually work. We're like a person who needs to drive a screw but will only use wrenches, hammers, and saws.
There's also a kind of preservation of the culture of the town. Which I kind of agree with.
Then there is also the fact that a lot of these places aren't used for housing, they're used as play houses or AirBnB's. So just adding more houses will likely mean more empty stuff in the town, probably making the problem worse.
So make empty houses (and AirBnB's) illegal (aka super taxed out the wazzoo). The people that live in a place should be able to say what they do and do not want in their town.
I'm not convinced this is quite it. The housing demand (by real, live physical people, not remote investors) is likely seasonal. Town like Tahoe might have 10x the number of people in them 12 weeks of the year. Unless we're setting up tents, we'll need permanent structures available for short term rental.
>So make empty houses (and AirBnB's) illegal (aka super taxed out the wazzoo).
Tourism industry runs on cash and being unscrupulous is pretty much a required bar for entry so taxing shit won't solve anything unless there's some magical enforcement mechanism that can be used without the industry that pays the bills voting the people who enact the taxes out of office.
It’s not hard to come up with solutions that seem likely to work (build a ton of new housing, tax unoccupied housing, etc). It’s hard to come up with solutions that seem likely to work and will be selected democratically by the voting populace.
This is true in general; it’s completely obvious how to end the COVID pandemic and stop global warming (universal vaccination and massive reduction in burning fossil fuels, respectively). But people will just not choose these obvious options.
If you can figure out why, and how to change that, you’ll have an incredible life ahead of you in politics.
The irony is that most of these towns depend entirely on tourists for theirs existence. Those tourist dollars depend on Airbnbs (no one is permitting new hotels in these towns).
the tourist dollars do not in any way depend on AirBnB's because most of these resorts were built before AirBnB and were planned, approved, and built with a plan based on hotel capacity. the number of hotel beds and the lift capacity the resorts are tied to each other. similarly, the number of bars and other tourist amenities also gets decided bases on hotel capacity, and while that may have changed since AirBnB started ruining everything, for the most part it's the same as the resorts - they built enough restaurants and bars to service the number of guests the resort was built for.
the AirBnB's are causing the resorts to run at over their designed capacity, making long lift lines for everybody, making the bars too crowded, and making the town's tourist experience worse in addition to making it worse for residents.
There’s a reason airbnb is the recognized brand being discussed. Yes, competitors have existed before. But Airbnb made it popular, easy, and safe enough for any random person. Pre-airbnb scale of VRBO was barely a blip on the hotel market.
It's worth remembering that the lack of density is what people like so much about the towns. I can say personally an apartment building makes it hard to enjoy the mountain view when you're on a stroll through the town :) The unfortunate reality is that I think the only way to truly prevent this is to only allow someone who is working in town to own a home with a percentage allowance for remote workers. The biggest step being to prevent vacation homes from being a thing. Even still I don't think this fully solves the problem as most of the positions in mountain towns are low skilled so generally aren't super well paid.
There's a few compounding factors that the article touches on but doesn't really put much emphasis. I'm up in the Canadian Rockies but I have friends spread out among a few of the towns so I'll try and give some perspective across the areas.
Lake Louise:
Not really worth commenting on this as almost all homes are owned by local businesses due to national park rules.
Banff:
Limited due to how land ownership works within the national park as well as limits the Federal government puts on expanding the town. Thankfully due to the land ownership constraints it avoids the vacation property issue some what although not entirely.
This town also pickups spill over from Lake Louise.
Canmore:
Catches the remaining spill over from Lake Louise and Banff further constraining holding it's own workers. This is the closest town to the national park so lots of people own vacation homes here. This town is surrounded by a national park, provincial park, and by Aboriginal land so it has no room to grow. The town has put limits on where air bnb's can be run but they're so profitable people eat the current fines.
An interesting side note with this town is that at the start of the pandemic a lot of the people with vacation homes went here overloading the local grocery stores ability to supply things. The shelves were extra bare for weeks which was quite frustrating.
Fernie:
Was doing alright before the pandemic but was feeling the squeeze a bit. As soon as working from home was the norm for people houses disappeared in a flash and what was left almost doubled in price over the two years. In those two years my friends got priced out of the market.
A lot of developers here got burned in the oil crash in 2008 which will probably slow any quick growth to expand the town.
Golden:
Don't have any friends here but from what I've seen there's been lots of aggressive development but more on the nicer vacation home side. Nothing that would fit as a good starter house for a family.
Is lack of housing really the problem? The resorts themselves are already far too crowded, and it's not like there's a unlimited amount of skiiable area to expend to. Not to mention how awful dense housing would be in a supposedly remote area. It would turn it into "only some can access this area" to "everyone can access but no one can enjoy it."
Yes, lack of housing is a huge part of the problem. The entire article is about how housing has gotten so expensive in these areas that few of the locals can afford to live there anymore, which leads to crippling worker shortages and many other problems.
That's interesting; where I'm from, people only get votes at one municipality (I they qualify for multiple, they choose one as the primary residence), so any people with secondary homes for vacations or rentals are automatically outvoted by the actual residents in local elections.
It's not about voting, it's about showing up to Planning and Zoning meetings and opposing anything that might obstruct scenic views or negatively impact property values. Most significant developments require rezoning and therefore a public input period.
Then there are outsized impact fees and red tape from the city and county once it gets past P&Z.
Actual residents may be concerned about pissing off the 2nd and 3rd home owners, who can be quite vocal even if they don’t have a vote. Locals depend on them for revenue, and might know them personally and like them. This is covered somewhat in the Outside article.
Nobody should get a vote. Residents are the worst about opposing more housing.
The ONLY constitutional basis for getting a say over how much housing your neighbor builds is excluding Black people (see the appellate ruling, Ambler Realty v City of Euclid). All zoning in the United States is based on the power of that ruling to keep Black people out.
Wierd. While I don't disagree with you that one of the primary uses of zoning has been racial discrimination and segregation, Ambler v. Euclid was about industrial land use in the context of otherwise residential property. The decision may indeed have to led to an expansion in the use of zoning for racist purposes, but it was not in and of itself about such a purpose.
SCOTUS did explicitly address the apartment buildings and gave what to many contemporary eyes would be an absurd judgement:
"With particular reference to apartment houses, it is pointed out that the development of detached house sections is greatly retarded by the coming of apartment houses, which has sometimes resulted in destroying the entire section for private house purposes; that in such sections very often the apartment house is a mere parasite, constructed in order to take advantage of the open spaces and attractive surroundings created by the residential character of the district. Moreover, the coming of one apartment house is followed by others, interfering by their height and bulk with the free circulation of air and monopolizing the rays of the sun which otherwise would fall upon the smaller homes, and bringing, as their necessary accompaniments, the disturbing noises incident to increased traffic and business, and the occupation, by means of moving and parked automobiles, of larger portions of the streets, thus detracting from their safety and depriving children of the privilege of quiet and open spaces for play, enjoyed by those in more favored localities-until, finally, the residential character of the neighborhood and its desirability as a place of detached residences are utterly destroyed. Under these circumstances, apartment houses, which in a different environment would be not only entirely unobjectionable but highly desirable, come very near to being nuisances."
Yes - they made up a way to avoid the explicitly racist appellate case entirely, by claiming housing was a nuisance without saying the real reason the city considered it a nuisance out loud.
Which major Canadian resorts are in parks besides Lake Louise/Sunshine? I know Mt. Tremblant is in a park, but only the mountain itself and not the town for example.
A few of the towns in the article have vacancy rates greater than 50%. If the free market can support a 50% occupancy rate, there isn't a great reason to think that it can't support a 90 or 95% occupancy rate. Increasing the housing stock by 50% to house 5% of the towns population seems inefficient for both investment owners and workers.
"None of the ones I've visited seem at all dense. (Been to Vail, Beaver Creek, Park City, and all over Tahoe.)"
Would you want that ?
When you visited these places, did you wish they had more, and larger, buildings ?
Visiting or living in a "ski town" is, ipso facto, an aesthetic choice that one makes. It is not imposed on anyone nor is it a right to be conferred.
I am open minded to the idea that some people prefer a never-ending monoculture of marginally dense just-barely-sub-urban living areas. I hate this idea, however, and I hope you will look elsewhere to pursue it.
Logistics. Crested Butte is 3 hours from the nearest larger town, Grand Junction. Assuming good weather.
You need workers and materials to build new housing. There is already a shortage of workers.
Builders in Grand Junction can make far more profit by building in Grand Junction, vs driving 6 hours each day to Crested Butte and back. Same with hauling materials.
Crested Butte is not just a ski town. Most ski towns in CO are not just ski towns. But CB is especially popular with mountain bikers and is busy almost year round.
I think one issue is places like Vail, PC, Tahoe are already spread out. Going there on vacation doesn't feel special at all, just feels like you're in some generic suburb. Places like Tremblant are nicer as there is a compact walkable town where all the buildings are 5 stories tall.
New people want more housing but can’t vote because they aren’t residents. Old people want high real estate prices and can vote because they’re residents or own property.
Guess who wins when it’s time for local political leadership to decide on important issues.
Now if housing wasn’t considered an investment and prices were kept flat somehow, that would solve the nimby problem immediately. But it would also bankrupt several generations of existing homeowners so we can’t do that.
If they are being asked about why they voted against expansion wouldn't it be in their best interest to provide a subjective reason that is difficult to argue against instead of saying "money"
"Wobus, Small, and their coauthors simulated natural snow accumulation at 247 winter recreation destinations across the CONUS. They incorporated five climate models and two emission scenarios: RCP4.5 (moderate emissions) and RCP8.5 (high emissions). In this as in other studies, high-emission scenarios present more worrisome forecasts than moderate-emission scenarios, especially toward the end of the century.
Under both scenarios, winter season length could be cut short by more than half in some locations as soon as 2050. Shorter ski seasons “could result in millions to tens of millions of foregone recreational visits annually by 2050, with an annual monetized impact of hundreds of millions of dollars.”"
Same story pretty much everywhere -- wealthy property owners can't be bothered to allow the minimum amount of development that would let the workers they depend on find decent housing.
>Unchained from their desks, the hordes of newly remote white-collar workers descended upon all the magical mountain towns, and in just one year, the median list price for a home in Crested Butte jumped 40 percent, to $895,000. Rents soared, too—20 to 40 percent in Colorado ski towns like Crested Butte, according to one June 2021 report.
The market adjusts if it is correct to adjust, at least probably, according to the probably efficient market hypothesis. The question is whether it's correct for the market to adjust.
Is it a durable trend for computer-based work to be performed from the comfort of far-flung locales? Because this would probably change the demand for, and therefore the construction and presence of, housing all over the place. Crested Butte happens to be first on the list; just wait until they discover Ocracoke.
But housing can't just appear and disappear willy-nilly. It's heavy, for one thing. So yes, the solution to a durable increase in housing demand is to build more housing.
What about a transient increase in demand? Suppose a bunch of people want housing but won't in five years. Suppose we know this, just for the sake of a simpler analysis (cf. for the sake of argument). What then?
The most common suggestion I've heard, in the second scenario, says you probably want some way to ensure that the people who are likely to stick around don't all get driven out. This is where you start to look at policies like rent control and property tax abatements for long-term owners. This also includes affordable housing incentives of various kinds.
But these policies conflict with construction and therefore long-term planning in municipal policymaking. Over the long-term, concealing a durable increase in demand with stringent tenant protections creates a double standard and a new kind of inequality. This is one case where a political debate turns into a prognostication contest. Unfortunately, fortune-tellers have a poor track record regardless of political leanings.
Optimistically, we can plan for both eventualities at once, as long as we're clear about what we're doing. A major barrier to the compromise option is the tendency for political polarization to poison the well. Advocates of tenant protection raise spurious "positive-feedback" objections to upzoning, citing effects that disappear in well-controlled studies. Advocates of housing deregulation overestimate the impact of modernized affordability incentives, and underestimate or ignore the possibilities for innovation and general social benefits thereof.
I'm arguing for uncertainty. I generally support housing construction wherever it's fiscally sound. But we can't expect that construction to materialize where the market isn't convinced it's necessary, simply because it would meet our social objectives. And we can't ignore the future to meet social objectives right now.
> I generally support housing construction wherever it's fiscally sound.
TFA describes a town where (a) construction is limited by forces beyond the town's control (geography, federal land ownership) and (b) construction (at least of certain kinds of housing) is prevented by existing residents who vote against it.
The state of housing construction in Crested Butte does not sound as if it is governed by any sort of notion of "fiscal soundness" at all.
So this is a pretty good example of a non-constructive response created by polarization. Obviously we are only interested in the returns to modifying (b) under the constraints of (a). Obviously markets can price this kind of thing.
But no, let's obsess over any technicality in a critique of our ideology (in your case, the deregulation position) until the Sun explodes.
The markets have priced this kind of thing. TFA is about the result.
You could argue that the situation described in TFA is contigent or temporary or something like that, and to the extent that everything about any town fits that description, sure, you're right. But it's no help to anyone to say "oh, this situation will be different in 50 years anyway".
You could (and probably would) argue that the problems described in TFA arise from the political control exerted by local voters to limit housing styles and availability, and not "the market". That's certainly true to some extent, but there's no way out of that unless you propose to strip towns of political systems entirely - perhaps some libertarian scenario in which ownership is everything and no political process can prevent an owner from using something unless it causes harm to others, harm defined, of course, by the owner or the owner's political and economic allies. That's a debate I no longer get into.
>But it's no help to anyone to say "oh, this situation will be different in 50 years anyway".
Yes, that's why I covered mitigations in the paragraphs you ignored.
>You could (and probably would) argue that the problems described in TFA arise from the political control [...]
No, I explicitly rejected that argument in my original post. In fact, the very next sentence after the one you quoted says this:
>But we can't expect that construction to materialize where the market isn't convinced it's necessary, simply because it would meet our social objectives.
This is why I don't bother arguing. People don't even read what you said.
Your original top-level comment more or less opens with an affirmation that markets will do the right thing:
> The market adjusts if it is correct to adjust, at least probably, according to the probably efficient market hypothesis. The question is whether it's correct for the market to adjust.
But that's not the question. The first question is whether this hypothesis is correct, and there's plenty of evidence that it's an inadequate model of the real world, particularly in contexts that involve external factors that cannot be controlled (like geography and federal ownership).
Then you move to:
> So yes, the solution to a durable increase in housing demand is to build more housing.
But a solid part of TFA was about how "build more housing" is not an option in these towns, at least not in the same that it might be in other geographic locations.
Shortly thereafter, you introduce a question that I don't see comes up from TFA at all:
> What about a transient increase in demand?
Nobody in the TFA is discussing a transient increase in demand, unless you are trying to classify "we live in a time where a bunch of people can afford to spend $1.8M on a 2nd home in Vail" as a transient phenomenon.
> Over the long-term, concealing a durable increase in demand with stringent tenant protections creates a double standard and a new kind of inequality.
There's a serious argument that the phenomena described in TFA are not a "durable increase in demand", but a more complicated pattern. Why? Well, first of all because the housing stock that has been subject to price pressure is in a different category from the stock sought out by the local workforce. Although the pricing across categories (e.g. a 5k sq ft mountain home vs. a studio apartment above a restaurant) are connected, it's not simple linear relationship, and a town could have a surplus of one and shortage of the other, and it would not cause the sort of pricing shifts that would occur in a homogenous market. Second, because the reason for the mismatch in supply/demand is not just that new construction hasn't happened yet, but because new construction is actively discouraged by the geography and the local politics.
So, these mountain resort towns are not in the same situation as, say, Atlanta, which simply has a large number of people who want to move there, across many different socio-economic demographics, and where the construction of new houses, while not entirely free of political control, is not functionally prevented from any attempt to meet demand.
> But we can't expect that construction to materialize where the market isn't convinced it's necessary, simply because it would meet our social objectives.
I didn't explicitly cite this sentence because it just seems so obviously misguided to me that I tried to get at the bigger picture. You appear to see a rational, efficient market making decisions ("where the market isn't convinced that it's necessary"), whereas I see something quite different at work.
> And we can't ignore the future to meet social objectives right now.
We regularly and intentionally do this. It just typically works out that the "social objectives" that are met by ignoring the future are the ones set by people who already have power and wealth.
OK, I think I see the problem. It's not that I didn't read what you said. It's that I don't agree with you.
Ironic coming from one of the media outlets responsible for destroying so many mountain towns by putting them on "must-visit" destination lists for the IG crowd.
But those $200 camp chairs and $800 puffy jackets aren't going to sell themselves, I suppose...
Man, those people are awful aren't they? Telling people about nice places and nice things. It's supposed to be for the special people, like us. Idiots, blabbing about our stuff, ruining it.
There’s nothing wrong with Outside sharing nice places with world, but it’s ironic that they would also publish an article decrying the very popularization that they themselves often cause.
Lack of housing is, of course, a major part of the problem. And why might you suppose that previously affordable housing in what might have once been a relatively obscure locale is now in tremendous demand?
Knowing a number of folks personally who have been priced out of these places -- often the hometown where they hoped to spend their lives -- might give me a different sense of perspective than you seem to have.
>might give me a different sense of perspective than you seem to have.
I've lived in these towns and know lots of these people too. I've never heard one of them seriously complain about Outside Magazine (or similar publications) being responsible for the lack of affordable housing. I mean yeah, I guess they are partly responsible for it in a very round-about way... but you might as well be mad at the internet, ski movies or the Olympic Games. It's a pointless exercise.
No mention of "demand" and only one of "supply:" "The limited supply of affordable housing for workers has been a challenge for decades." Prices occur where demand and supply intersect. There are two ways to lower them: lower demand or raise supply. Supply restrictions raise prices.
There are a lot of words here that fail to deal with price fundamentals.
What are you even saying? Prices go up because the locals are being priced out by people buying second homes and AirBNB takes up all the available rentals. The mayor of the town nearly got evicted because his landlord was going to convert it.
This obviously isn't true. You can absolutely use legislation and fiscal policy to impact market prices. You're being incredibly reductionist and I'm not quite sure why, but if you read the article, you would have come across the case of Whistler, where they've effectively used policy to improve the availability of affordable housing.
Also, we're not talking about a commodity like smart fridges or something, we're talking about one of the fundamental human needs — shelter. Your frivolity is unnecessarily callous.
Living in a ski town isn’t a fundamental human need. There are lots of cheap places to live in the USA they just are not in what are currently the desirable locations.
Ehh, that might be a shallow search. The issue of limited supply runs throughout the piece: towns being surrounded by protected lands where building isn’t possible and NIMBYism.
In one year, it all changed. Housing prices and rent increased drastically -- sometimes by 2x or 3x. Half of my friends and acquaintances have had to move out of town and commute for work. What does it say when a city's essential workers cannot vote on city issues anymore?
The city is not legally allowed to regulate short term rentals, so AirBnB is taking up a significant portion of housing. The city tries to make developers restrict short term rentals on the units they develop instead but with limited success.
Any attempt at new housing is met with fierce resistance by a loud minority with expensive lawyers. Nobody wants the town to change. Everyone who moves here wants to prevent anyone else from following. Some of the people advocating for affordable housing are the same ones trying to jack up property values. So affordable housing is not actually affordable for anyone who needs it.
Businesses are struggling to find employees, and many have closed or limited their hours. At the same time, commercial rents are increasing.
It's a sad mess.