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Comment by mastax | Hacker News Reader

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?

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Your typical Swiss ski resort village is stacked full of multilevel apartments, cleverly disguised as rustic chalets:

https://chalet.myswitzerland.com/holiday-rentals/grindelwald...

Superior public transport (quite a few villages ban cars entirely), much higher wages and ruthless exploitation of immigrant labor are also factors though.

> exploitation of immigrant labor are also factors though.

I thought Switzerland does not have lot of immigration.

There are a lot of people from balkans working there for a few years or decades before returning home.

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].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...

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.

Utah sucks, go to Colorado

>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.

I wonder what approach the French take - they have a few vast ski areas including the largest in the world - the 3 Valleys.

Edit: I suspect as most of the larger French ski towns are purpose built you don't have quite the same problems for "locals".

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.

Tying voting to property ownership is not some law of nature.

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?

Where I live planning rules are set on a national level. The whole notion of incorporated and unincorporated land seems like a weird US-ism.

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.

Most YIMBYs are not at all "markets solve all our problems" kinds of people. But this is anything but a free market.

> If the market could build its way out of this, it already would have.

Indeed, if it was legal to build it would have been done already.

* 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.

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