A Swiss Chalet Construction Ban Lifts Property Values

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.”

Owners of “cold beds,” as the part-time dwellings are known, also are facing criticism because the properties are vacant for much of the year. “We see the permanently closed shutters without a single geranium in front of the windows,” says Jürg Zollikofer, who shares a vacation home in Grindelwald that his family and friends use throughout the year. “They turn the villages into ghost towns.”