I put it down to the march of technology, given a little extra push by Covid.
We moved here 20 years back when the town just barely had internet. Fortunately, right before we actually moved, our address got DSL. When we first owned the land, we would have had to rent space in town for my husband to work. So, you might say we were the leading edge of the wedge for white collar jobs. The town history is trains and logging.
It continued, however, to be sort of a backwater until about the last 5 years. They got fiber downtown at some point and Starlink and wireless internet in the surrounding area. All of a sudden, you could have business conference calls and decent uploads. And....then Covid come along. And people were working remotely. So they moved away from cities and closer to their playgrounds, whether that was a ski area or maintain biking or whatever. With them, metropolitan amenities also came - better restaurants, theaters, museums. Maybe not Broadway or MOMA, but not bowling alleys.
Many of these towns are surrounded by vast areas of federal and state lands, the reason they were playgrounds in the first place. That also means limited land available for building huge, quick, developments. Add that to the fact that people that moved to these places wanted out of cities and congestion and you've got a recipe for a lack of affordable housing.
This dynamic is without any regard for Vail and "corporate consolidation". Vail just happened to be doing this at the same time. Maybe it made it a bit worse for Vail (a fake town created decades ago), but it's happening all over. Our ski area (an independent) brings a fraction of the visitors Glacier National Park does and the park has been there over 100 years. So the park can't be blamed. It's technology. Air travel, internet (information travel in a way). People can get to and live in places they couldn't in the past.