It seems every ski town across the world suffers from many of the same issues. A key theme is lack of staff mainly due to affordable housing for workers during winter.
Open up the news section of any resort area publication and you will find the same old story. Business struggling to stay open or closed due to not having enough staff.
The Snowy Mountains of NSW are currently experiencing this issue. And will the Sydney lockdown until the end of July temporarily masking the problem, all through summer and leading into winter most business had the "we are hiring" sign at the front door, plus promoted their positions via social media and other avenues. All to no avail as staff who may have wanted to come could not find accommodation.
In a recent article on Skiing Magazine in the United States, the town of Jackson in Wyoming is having the same problem. Last year it was a story on Vail or Crested Butte in Colorado.
With people relocating or purchasing holiday homes, most of which are then offered for holiday letting, the lure of more revenue rather that renting to staff seems to be a common trait.
From Skiing Magazine on their Jackson story.
I walked over to the Stagecoach Bar for lunch last week, a local favorite at the bottom of Teton Pass, only to discover a sign on the door: “Sorry, closed until 5 p.m. due to lack of staffing.”
The housing crisis isn’t a new issue for ski towns like Jackson, Aspen, and Crested Butte, where the local workforce has been struggling with an expensive, unstable, and competitive housing market for decades. “The last year homes were affordable to the local workforce in Jackson, meaning the median home sale correlated to the median earning household, was 1987,” says April Norton, Teton County Housing Director. “But people are starting to hit their breaking point.”
You can read the full story here
Pandemic Exacerbates Ski-Town Housing and Labor Shortage | Ski Mag
