Part 3 The problems with tourism

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.

In many tourist places that find themselves in the news you see the same pattern repeated over and over. High home prices, high rent, lack of housing, too much traffic, high prices on everything. AirBnB’s rise has amplified that to another quantum level.

The same thing has happened in Napa, AirBnb’s have been controlled but are still present, but what has also happened here is that due to the lack of vacation rentals wealthy people are just buying homes and letting them sit when they are not there. On my street in St. Helena, out of nine houses five are second homes. In two of them the owners have not been here in over a year and a half. The others are rarely occupied, except one where the owner spends a few months in the summer, then leaves again.

Napa County sponsored a housing report by a company called “Generations”, and in that report it said that big percentages of vacant homes, over 50% in Napa Valley, were second homes not being occupied. That’s huge and is a big contributor to high rent and real estate prices. It also undermines the sense of community when you have non existent neighbors on your street and in your town. It has a psychological impact.

Another factor is that along with expanding prices, wages in the hospitality industry are generally low, one of the lowest paid industries. Tasting room, hotels, most of their employees don’t make enough to afford the high rents here. Over time that becomes increasingly exacerbated, and there are greater and greater calls to build more affordable housing.

The problem with that is that the more affordable housing you build, the more available labor  and the hotels, wineries, etc., keep building and it fuels the business growth which then  requires more affordable housing, so you never get ahead.

We are really caught in a no win situation with housing. The Generations housing report says we are the incredible sum of over 10,000 units behind. Where will we put all that? We are trying to preserve farmland which takes up a huge amount of land that is realistically available for building. The hillsides between Silverado Trail and Lake Berryessa are really not suitable for much of anything, farming or residential neighborhoods. The neighborhoods that are out there have constant problems with infrastructure, especially water and sewer.

Napa has built reportedly in the neighborhood of 6000 housing units in the last thirteen years or so. Yet rents and housing prices have gone up, not down. Just building more is not solving the cost problem.

Tim Carl expressed it very well in the Napa Valley Features article from June here:

“…..The county’s economic base has tilted heavily toward tourism, hospitality and wine production — industries that now employ nearly half of the workforce but offer limited wage growth. Tourism jobs average around $35,000 a year, hospitality roles closer to $30,000 and wine production just over $40,000. Even higher-paying sectors such as healthcare and professional services fall well short of the income needed to afford a $937,500 median home.

At the same time, Napa’s economic diversification has stalled. Professional services account for just 8% of jobs. Tech and STEM fields, which drive wage growth in places such as San Jose or San Francisco, make up less than 3% of the local workforce.”

 

The whole article is well worth a read, but when you have mass tourism with people coming through all the time, that seems to happen. They like it and want a piece of it, but it results in high prices and wages that don’t cover living expenses, because tourism jobs don’t pay well. Much of the housing is going to people who don’t work here, but commute to jobs outside the county, so it barely helps the local workforce if at all.

Also, tourists are here to be entertained and are on a high budget, especially in high end Napa, and the result of that is prices are set for tourist budgets and locals end up having to pay that when tourism is so dominant.

Napa used to have a reasonable level of tourism that was mostly beneficial before 2008, but by 2012, when 29 became clogged with traffic during rush hour, things were heading south. This was the direct result of expanding “accessory uses” at wineries to allow more events and bigger numbers of visitors, and a hotel building boom.

There’s the costs to the local population, but there is an even bigger draw back to the locals on a psychological level. What is happening is that increasingly you have entities that don’t live here, ie an investment firm in New Jersey, dictating what is going to happen on your street. Despite claims that most wineries are locally owned, the trend is away from that. It’s hard to get percentages that I find believable, but there is clearly a loss of local control going on and people feel it. The new hotels are almost always built by corporations from outside of town.

There’s this sense of being controlled by some anonymous entity that doesn’t belong to your community, and it gives people a sense of disconnection. Belonging is one of the most important needs that people have, and tourism undermines that in local communities. I believe it fuels a lot of the pushback one sees, the arguments are always about something specific, water use, parking, the environment, traffic etc, which all matter, but the real reason for a lot of discontent is simply that people feel alienated from their own environment, their own community.

When you have floods of people coming through who are strangers you will never see again, and most of the workers you encounter in town live in neighboring counties and drive in, and half your street is empty houses with people who live in them occasionally only, it’s far more difficult to feel that sense of belonging that is so important to people.

Membership in service clubs like Rotary and Kiwanis are declining, most young people who grow up here leave because it is so expensive to live here and there is little opportunity beyond low paying jobs, fewer and fewer families with children are forming, the enrollment at schools is declining, all these things are happening because of the nature of tourism.

Just as many hotel rooms as we already have are in some stage of being added, most already approved. The head of the Visitors bureau is saying that occupancy is heading up and that they are planning on creating events valley wide to bring in visitors year round, and if all that happens these negative impacts are going to get much worse.

It’s now a challenge for Napa to bring back that sense of community, that sense of belonging to something bigger than you as a community, and it will require a getting together of many various members of the community to search for a way to bring that community back.

So next up, how can we meet this challenge?