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Comment by SwagGrocery | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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".

No thanks.

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.

No, if you don't live somewhere you don't live there.

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?

Democracy is not prescriptive about who has a stake, and in fact the trend has been over time to broaden the definition of "voter" or "stakeholder".

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?

No Denver pays for those.

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 neighbour is nicknamed “Scratch’n’sniff.” I do not wish to eat any of his cooking.

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