Swiss vacation homes become even more elusive with building ban
Photo Credit: A summer home overlooks Lake Brienz in Switzerland. Flickr / Andrew Bowden
Skift Take
Although jobs will be lost in the short term, hotels expect a healthy bump from the building ban and villages agree a more sustainable form of tourism will have room to grow.
From Hollywood directors to central bankers, vacationers in Switzerland built about 400,000 holiday homes in a country of 8 million during the past four decades. Now, their investment is gaining value as a limit on more chalets takes effect.
Swiss voters, concerned that unbridled development will eat up more of the Alpine landscape, approved a ban last year on the construction of holiday homes in towns where they already account for more than 20 percent of the housing stock. The law affects development in almost 500 villages, mostly in the regions of Valais, Graubuenden and Ticino, according to a study by the BakBasel research institute.
“We’ve already destroyed so much of our nature and landscape,” Franz Weber, whose Helvetia Nostra, or “Our Switzerland,” group led the campaign for the ban, said by telephone from Montreux on Lake Geneva. “We need to
