I'm not convinced this is quite it. The housing demand (by real, live physical people, not remote investors) is likely seasonal. Town like Tahoe might have 10x the number of people in them 12 weeks of the year. Unless we're setting up tents, we'll need permanent structures available for short term rental.

That is called a hotel. What is wrong with building a hotel and pricing it accordingly?

>So make empty houses (and AirBnB's) illegal (aka super taxed out the wazzoo).

Tourism industry runs on cash and being unscrupulous is pretty much a required bar for entry so taxing shit won't solve anything unless there's some magical enforcement mechanism that can be used without the industry that pays the bills voting the people who enact the taxes out of office.

It’s not hard to come up with solutions that seem likely to work (build a ton of new housing, tax unoccupied housing, etc). It’s hard to come up with solutions that seem likely to work and will be selected democratically by the voting populace.

This is true in general; it’s completely obvious how to end the COVID pandemic and stop global warming (universal vaccination and massive reduction in burning fossil fuels, respectively). But people will just not choose these obvious options.

If you can figure out why, and how to change that, you’ll have an incredible life ahead of you in politics.

The irony is that most of these towns depend entirely on tourists for theirs existence. Those tourist dollars depend on Airbnbs (no one is permitting new hotels in these towns).

the tourist dollars do not in any way depend on AirBnB's because most of these resorts were built before AirBnB and were planned, approved, and built with a plan based on hotel capacity. the number of hotel beds and the lift capacity the resorts are tied to each other. similarly, the number of bars and other tourist amenities also gets decided bases on hotel capacity, and while that may have changed since AirBnB started ruining everything, for the most part it's the same as the resorts - they built enough restaurants and bars to service the number of guests the resort was built for.

the AirBnB's are causing the resorts to run at over their designed capacity, making long lift lines for everybody, making the bars too crowded, and making the town's tourist experience worse in addition to making it worse for residents.

> these resorts were built before AirBnB

Ever heart of VRBO (est. 1995) or the entire VRMA (est. 1985)?

There’s a reason airbnb is the recognized brand being discussed. Yes, competitors have existed before. But Airbnb made it popular, easy, and safe enough for any random person. Pre-airbnb scale of VRBO was barely a blip on the hotel market.

Crested Butte was incorporated in 1880.

Crested Butte Mountain, the ski resort, opened in 1960.

I'd imagine these towns survived just fine without AirBnBs for the last hundreds of years?

Yes and I'm sure they'll be content going back to the standards of living from hundreds of years ago.

What does AirBnb have to do with the overall standard of living for mountain residents?