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by B2B_human 1799 days ago
You sound like a big city person (i used to be one - 5 years ago before moving here). I live in Truckee. town of 16,000 people.

> If the local residents are wealthy enough to live in the area, perhaps businesses have to bite the bullet, raise prices locally, and pay more for essential services like bartenders, wait staff, retail, etc

I love your definition of "essential services" are bartenders and wait staff. You sound like a real great person to be planning for critical events, such as wildfires which occur in our area.

Also "If the local residents are wealthy enough to live in the area" - lol, do you realize in our Town of 16,000 people, there are more than 50% of our houses that are NOT locals. On a busy weekend we expand to about 55,000 people. The problem is not the full time locals, but the temporary residents who exacerbate this problem. Their houses remain off the market for local residents to rent because they want to (rightfully so) njoy their second home for a few weeks a year - which precludes a long-term leaser. It doesn't matter how much wages rise, locally - there are CFO's of local businesses who have had to move because they cannot find housing.

Yes, we live in a national forest, so simply building more housing is slowed down by natural beauty and environmental assessments, and the usual NIMBYism too. But the town is quite aligned behind trying to solve this problem somehow.

2 comments

You sound exactly like the people who moved up to Lake Arrowhead and ruined it, I ended up leaving when I got told by a flatlander to leave “their” mountain, where they’d lived for a lot shorter time than I had. I realized then it was losing its appeal and wouldn’t be a place I’d continue to enjoy with those sorts increasingly moving up there. For a resort area the people who work the service jobs are essential. Those businesses are the backbone of the community most of the time. Without them it would lose the traits that make it desirable to live.
> For a resort area the people who work the service jobs are essential.

I am the OP the commenter was referring to. I wasn't going to bother responding to a nitpick on my use of the word "essential" but you summed up my meaning perfectly.

If all the bars, restaurants, cafes, dry cleaners, etc. go unstaffed (as they are right now), headlines start being made. We don't need to lump people into brush-fire fighters and bartenders in terms of who is essential.

To top it off I'm not a city person and I used to live in Truckee, CA, where this poster is living.

If it's the vacationers causing problems, isn't it quite easy to enact local laws to deal with those problems? Those vacationers aren't there to oppose the solutions.
These towns are owned in many ways by Vail resorts. Economically and politically.