3 ms·

The current top comment is from a former mountain-town resident who says that most of the houses are kept empty outside of the peak season.

• toast0 3y ago
  It's hard to rent a house to a local during off-peak and then rent to tourists during the peak season. And it doesn't address the problem of not enough capacity at peak. You've got to either increase housing or limit population (including seasonal workers and tourists). Traditionally, short term rentals are served by hotels, and you can limit the short term population by limiting the number of hotel rooms. That doesn't really work anymore, if there's insufficient hotel space, it's now very easy to book short term rentals everywhere else. If it was just that people don't want to stay in hotels anymore, no big deal --- locals could sublet their places to tourists and stay in the hotels during the season. But I think you'll find hotels are full during the season as well. Mountain-towns often have a real need to limit population, as they don't have the infrastructure to support metro level population density. And it wouldn't be the mountain town people want to visit if you built it up to metro level.
• davidw 3y ago
  That indicates that they are not rented out. Perhaps more AirBnB's would be preferable to people just leaving housing empty? The overall solution is 'more housing', but perhaps a vacancy tax would create some incentives to not let it just sit there.