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> On the slopes, at my coworking space, and around the campfire in the Summer Your answer is pretty much right there. Make the ski resort into a world-class ap

> On the slopes, at my coworking space, and around the campfire in the Summer Your answer is pretty much right there. Make the ski resort into a world-class apres-ski destination that many people would love to live around that environment or visit on the weekends from the Montreal metro of 4.3m or Boston CSA of 8.5m people. Then you'll have the second-order effects of buses, coworking places, cafes, restaurants, and breweries.

iamthepieman 3y ago
We've kind of got that already. It's not world class but it is quite nice. We do have world-class competition at Stowe and Killington though so not sure how well we could compete. I really do think that the bigger issue is the housing. That and NIMBYism. We have the Wildflower Inn nearby that I used to vacation at with my family when I was a kid. It was run by a family for 40 years before it was sold a few years ago to a guy who had fallen in love with the area. I've ridden the lift with him a few times and chatted about all the problems he had trying to get approval for his development ideas. The original owners did some beef farming on the land around the Inn. The new owner wanted to take the old barns and pastures and build a bunch of vacation cabins and camping spots with shared public spaces. The area was set back and not visible from the road. It would have been visible from the mountain biking trails but that's it. He got so much push back from the town and locals that he canceled the project. Of course, he could just subdivide into the minimum rural 3 acre lots and the town could do nothing about it and then we'd have 40 individual driveways and large houses obstructing the view instead.
ok_computer 3y ago
That’s what’s awesome about Jay peak tho in VT. If you want gaudy corporate attractions ski town then go to Stowe. There’s plenty of west coast and rocky mountain ski town targets too for that type of bland investment and redevelopment. Jay peak is awesome how it is as a low key border community. There was a corner store there that sold milk to the Canadians at CAD parity to USD around 2018. Not every town needs to become a tech hub. And VT basically locked itself in a time capsule by their regulations on development ensuring that the only land owners are wealthy people who can afford to buy large areas of farmland. Also the environmental aspirations of the state don’t support a population boom. They don’t have new landfills and restrictive waste policies that keeps the place awesome now but is not universally economically achievable with larger population centers.

iamthepieman 3y ago

We've kind of got that already. It's not world class but it is quite nice. We do have world-class competition at Stowe and Killington though so not sure how well we could compete. I really do think that the bigger issue is the housing. That and NIMBYism. We have the Wildflower Inn nearby that I used to vacation at with my family when I was a kid. It was run by a family for 40 years before it was sold a few years ago to a guy who had fallen in love with the area. I've ridden the lift with him a few times and chatted about all the problems he had trying to get approval for his development ideas. The original owners did some beef farming on the land around the Inn. The new owner wanted to take the old barns and pastures and build a bunch of vacation cabins and camping spots with shared public spaces. The area was set back and not visible from the road. It would have been visible from the mountain biking trails but that's it. He got so much push back from the town and locals that he canceled the project. Of course, he could just subdivide into the minimum rural 3 acre lots and the town could do nothing about it and then we'd have 40 individual driveways and large houses obstructing the view instead.

ok_computer 3y ago

That’s what’s awesome about Jay peak tho in VT. If you want gaudy corporate attractions ski town then go to Stowe. There’s plenty of west coast and rocky mountain ski town targets too for that type of bland investment and redevelopment. Jay peak is awesome how it is as a low key border community. There was a corner store there that sold milk to the Canadians at CAD parity to USD around 2018. Not every town needs to become a tech hub. And VT basically locked itself in a time capsule by their regulations on development ensuring that the only land owners are wealthy people who can afford to buy large areas of farmland. Also the environmental aspirations of the state don’t support a population boom. They don’t have new landfills and restrictive waste policies that keeps the place awesome now but is not universally economically achievable with larger population centers.