Wednesday, May 8All That Matters

How Corporate Consolidation is Killing Ski Towns

by GeminiArk


How Corporate Consolidation is Killing Ski Towns




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13 Comments

  • SisKlnM

    Ski towns have been ultra-rich for decades. I won’t cry tears for their loss. It sounds to me that they have brought skiing to the masses when it was forced from them from the ultra-rich. It also looks to be a model that avoids small resorts closing entirely which would further the decline of the sport.

    Reply
  • NickSwardsonIsFat

    Who cares? There are still tons of tiny mountain towns eg in Colorado you can go live in if that is what you want – just none with world class downhill skiing right in your backyard.

    Heck, Nederland is still a funky, off-beat ski town and it has El Dora right down the road. Also the closest place to ski from Boulder.

    Reply
  • NUMBERS2357

    Only partway through this but it seems like the core issue is that skiing is expensive, and the towns being hurt is downstream of that.

    Skiing being expensive is an issue for skiiers, but I don’t know how much of an issue the towns are beyond that. Like they said, the other option for these towns would be to become failed ghost towns because the other main industry – mining and such – left a long time ago.

    And there are places in the world where you can live near a ski resort without that resort being Vail or Aspen, and even more places where you can live in a mountain-y winter wonderland.

    As for skiing being an issue – maybe we just need to allow more to be built. There are a lot of snowy mountains in the West.

    A related issue is that these places depend on not-super-expensive labor, for instructors, ski patrol, even the guy fitting boots on people, and if that labor gets priced out of the town, how is the resort going to run. Compounded by the fact that the mountain town doesn’t necessarily have a lot of space to build housing on.

    EDIT: also they emphasize rising housing costs … but I bet a lot of the locals who it’s saying got “priced out”, actually sold their houses at a big profit, moved to a town that’s still an idyllic mountain town but without a super expensive resort nearby, and … doesn’t actually seem like a bad deal?

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  • Fakecolor

    I grew up in a ski town and was a local. You get your quiet time back and the “tourist” places close including restaurants and rental shops. It didn’t really bother locals at all

    Reply
  • martixy

    I’d probably enjoy living in an off-season town like that. Like how it was sometimes during the pandemic. Eerie, but charming. But that’s just me.

    Reply

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