napablogger

If ever there were a metaphor for what is happening in Napa right now it’s this whole controversy over the new flight path to the airport, which causes low flying private jets to go repeatedly over much of the city that are so loud people can’t hear the person standing next to them. This is due to wealthy visitors increasingly using the airport to come in to town, rather than landing at a nearby airport and driving in as they used to, combined with a new flight path created by the FAA with little community input. Now they say it can’t be changed. The neighborhoods lose once again.

Everything is being done to encourage more visitors, much of it at the expense of the working classes who in return are getting to pay more and more for everything with less and less local services for them.

There’s two main problems here, tourism jobs don’t pay well and at the same time more and more stores are geared to higher prices that only the tourists will pay, for the most part. The more wealthy tourists, the more impoverished locals. That is what is happening more and more and as the tourist industry demands more visitors to make up for sagging interest and a constant expansion of wineries, it is only going to get worse.

Napa is slowly but surely being turned over to wealthy people who don’t even live here, to the profit of companies that are not located here. The locals get last consideration. I’ve detailed that further in my first four articles on this subject.

And what is happening is that the local population is shrinking, few people that get a new job here want to live here, and they don’t, so that swells the roads with commuter traffic.

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The problem I am addressing is the gradual hollowing out of the Napa community by tourism. I am not necessarily opposed to tourism, within limits, but with the lack of community that mass tourism started around 2007 has created.

This week I found out that most of the government employees in Napa county do not live here, and it is sometimes a problem because they don’t really know the lay of the land, intersections, etc where problems can come up. Some in St. Helena want to require the city employees to live there, but I find myself wondering where. When we moved back last year, we looked at houses all over the county and most were really old and in sad shape, for millions of dollars. There really aren’t a lot of houses here that government employees are going to want to live in or be able to afford.

A friend who lives by the new housing near the Register office near downtown Napa said that no one is hardly ever there. She knows one person who lives there and when she goes to see her the building is empty. Why I asked? All second home owners.

The examples of the problems created by a tourist economy seem endless,  so time to turn my attention to what can we do about this gradual hollowing out of community?

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NOTE: This is the third post in what is going to be a five part series, you may want to read the first two below first. Or not:), but just saying.

Before I get into my vision for community preservation,  it’s important to be ruthlessly honest about the impact of tourism here, because it has done damage that needs to be mitigated.

When I listen to various pro business people in Napa they seem to have no clue or interest in why so many object to new hotels, to expanded tourism, to limits on winery visitations, etc., so I decided to write this to explain what it is about tourism people don’t like, and how it affects Napa, but more importantly to start to begin to manage it better to make Napa a better place.

Even more than that, we need to start a dialogue between the two sides because right now it seems like no one is happy on either side of this, and we need to get together to plan a new future for Napa. A new future is coming, like it or not, and we will all be a lot happier if it is done with planning and care. That requires dialogue from all parts of the community.

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In my last article, I argued that Napa had become too dependent on tourism, and that along with other factors such as the loss of the great wine leadership we had here, has hurt the spirit of community. People feel disconnected from each other and there is a noticeable lack of a spirit of belonging that we used to have.

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I wrote a napablogger column in Napa for around ten years, 2004 to 2014. Then my wife and I decided to retire and at the end of 2015 we sold our vineyard and moved out. After living elsewhere for over eight years we decided to move back and landed in Saint Helena. Several  people asked me my impressions of how Napa was different since I left and came back, so I decided to start my new napablogger column with that. I actually wrote this piece in August of 2024 and saved it to start my new napablogger column with, so it would be fresh eyes on the valley.

So, here goes.

It takes a while to get a feel for a place, and I was not willing or able to answer the question of how Napa has changed when asked in the last few weeks because I felt like I didn’t know enough yet to say. Napa has changed, I have changed, the world has changed, so it would be surprising if anything wasn’t changed.

Since I am starting up my napablogger column again, I thought a good place to start would be there, what I do notice about Napa now that is different. I also have to say that living here is a very different experience than visiting. I came as a visitor perhaps a dozen times in those eight years and one just does not have the same frame of mind as a local when you are a tourist. Tourists are here to have fun, spend money, party, relax. You don’t notice or think about the problems or issues going on, and you don’t go to the same places, like say the grocery store or dentist.

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