Yeah I should've clarified too. People around here have always rented out their places for a couple/few weeks a year to cover their bills, taxes, etc. That totally makes sense. What I see is more on the Industrial level scale of renting. Our townhomes have people who own multiple units. They are in it solely for renting and their units are empty a few weeks a year instead of the other way around. Then by owning multiple units they control the HOA, etc. Next thing they are trying to get folks to pay for a heated pool because they control more HOA votes and heated pool goes better on their listings and charging more money. Many decisions made are not for the better quality of living necessarily but what works better on a VRBO listing. That's my personal druthers, ha ha.
There are also corporations buying up property, homes, condos, townhomes, etc around here for rentals... so you know there will never be an actual owner living there at any point in time. I get cold calls personally from companies looking to buy my place, ha. To me the balance might be limiting the number of weeks you can rent a property? Something that tries to make sure it is actually someone's second home/vacation place and not owned solely to be a stand alone mini-hotel operation?
I do like the positives you pointed out though. Its good to remind myself of that sometimes. We could live in the country with nothing around us but chose to live in Stowe because we also like seeing some humans, eating out, bars, restaurants, breweries, music, festivals, etc. That wide variety of food, drinks, breweries, etc that is often on par with small cities is all because the town is popular. Property values too... ours has tripled since buying in 2012. Not a bad investment. And 95% of the days in a calendar year are perfectly fine, normal days. So much of this rabble rousing is for under 5% of days annually.
@bwt3650 you think very much like me, ha. I've always used the football stadium or concert analogy too! No matter what happens, if you go to say Foxboro on a Sunday for a Pats game. You are waiting in traffic. There's no way around it. You cannot have that volume of people arrive and leave at similar times and not wait. There may be capacity at the end of the road (the stadium) but the road itself will bottleneck hard. Even rush hour into or out of a city. The Mountain Road here is like I-93 into Boston but on a much smaller scale obviously. The office buildings all those people go to is like the chairlift capacity (it's there, it can handle it) but getting to that office building or chairlift is all via the same roads and thus, bumper to bumper traffic.
Even during AIG days there were traffic problems. Maybe people want to pay $2200 and have traffic a half dozen days vs. paying much less and having it a dozen days instead? And in the grand scheme of things.... a 155 day operating season, trying to do some monster infrastructure project for what is maybe 8% of winter days, and like 2-3% of days out of an entire year... seems like a hard sell. No one is building a 3rd lane on RT 108 for such a low percentage of days out of the calendar once you really boil it down.