The Swiss Try to Stem A Chalet Glut

摘要

Hollywood directors, central bankers, and other vacationers built about 400,000 holiday homes in Switzerland over the past four decades. Now their investments are getting more valuable as the Swiss clamp down on new chalets. Swiss voters, concerned that unbridled development will eat up too much of the Alpine landscape, approved a ban last year on the construction of vacation homes in towns where they account for more than 20 percent of housing. "We've already destroyed so much of our nature and landscape," says Franz Weber, whose Helvetia Nostra, or "Our Switzerland," group led the campaign for the ban. "We need to protect the last intact nature like it's golden and holy."