I'm enjoying a short skiing holiday with family, but amateur sociology never rests.

I'm staying in a rented condo in a lodge near Park City, Utah. The lodge is made up of four mid-sized buildings. One of them is completely vacant. As in: not a single unit sold, the whole thing a ghost building.

Higher in the hills are new-built houses, almost all of them looking unoccupied.

Park City is having an unusually bad season for snow, which of course suppresses business. But the parking lots are crowded with day skiers, so it's not that nobody wants to be here. They just don't want to purchase real estate here. This remains a gilded area of course, and the real-estate crisis does not look as grim as it does on the side streets of Las Vegas or in the suburbs of Jacksonville, FL. But it's the overwhelming fact of the built environment even in this secluded pleasure spot.