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> 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'm pretty sure

> the only solution is to create more mountain towns and ski resorts

was meant as a strawman.

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.

Like the person you're responding to, I didn't get that impression.

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.

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.

since you bring up big macs it is perhaps notable that mcdonalds was actually priced out of aspen.

>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.

Ok, then let's just create more mountains. :)

In New Mexico, if you want to hunt from out of state, you have to go through a lottery system. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don't.

I think global warming is going to make it harder for "mountain resort town" supply.

Is your hypothesis that it won’t snow anymore?

That there's going to be shorter seasons, and the snow line is going to move up. This is already starting to happen.

It’s been happening for a while really.

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.

Thank you for that context. I didn't know that about European resorts.

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.

When dealing with mountains, ground water scarcity is a serious issue, so “just build” is fairly tough to do.