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?
I’m instructed by two other tourist towns I have lived in, Orlando and Ojai, Ca, who both had ways of dealing with tourism that were more successful in many ways than Napa. Napa hasn’t really started to confront the reality of what they have created yet.
Orlando had the advantage of being built from the ground up as a tourist destination. I lived there over six years about a half mile from the entrance to Universal, and I never really noticed tourists at all, there was no traffic to speak of, certainly no traffic jams and I drove past it virtually every day.
There was a gas station right next to the entrance where I often went to buy gas, and one day I was there filling up and I heard all this screaming. I looked around and saw nothing, and noticed all the other drivers filling up were looking around too. We looked at each other, like what? what is that?
Suddenly for some reason I looked up, and saw that one of those amusement park rides that take people high in the air and then flip them over was right above our heads. When the people flipped, they all screamed at the top of their lungs. It was hilarious once you saw it. Why people want to do this is beyond me, but this is one of the few times I can ever remember spontaneously encountering tourists in Orlando.
The planners for Disney were remarkable. They planned the whole town to separate the locals from the tourists, and they had the tourists going exactly where they wanted them to go and the beauty of it was the tourists didn’t even realize it. As a local I didn’t even realize it myself until I had lived there for quite a while.
They put the theme park at the very south end of town, and built the airport and a freeway, and a massive car rental operation to go with it, directly east of it, and the tourists would arrive, get in their rental car, and go directly to the hotels which were all confined into the same area, International Drive mainly. Then they built a whole town called Celebration which was all places for tourists to stay, and some homes for anyone who liked to live in that environment. All in the same part of town as the theme park.
The locals mostly all lived north of there, and there was never really any reason to go down there unless you wanted to go to Disney. And I rarely did, except to play on their golf courses. They had four world class courses, and as a local I paid $25 a round where the tourists were paying $125.
Disney took care of the whole community. They paid for most of our sewer and water, managed the roads and traffic, electricity, everything and it was cheap and top quality. It was wonderful, and that I noticed right away.
Turning to Ojai, it’s a small mountain town in Ventura County, closer to the city of Ventura but usually noted as near Santa Barbara. The whole town government runs off of one world class hotel, the Ojai Inn and Spa, my recollection is that 90% of the town budget came from TOT from the Inn and Spa. It’s one of the nicest hotels I have ever stayed in.
Ojai is a small town, about 8000 people and that number has barely varied for a long time. There is a very activist group of long term locals who basically run the town, and the way that they have managed tourism is to strictly manage growth, no growth, no new hotels, definitely no short term rentals which they strictly banned, very little new housing. And it worked, the town stayed the same, lots of good restaurants, plenty of parking downtown, good spirit of community, and the city had enough financing.
The biggest problem they had was a lack of enough housing, and housing got expensive. But if they had built a lot of housing it would have hurt the communities character, which I understood although I was in favor of building more myself. At least some, for lower income families in particular.
The downtown merchants were the same as everywhere, they wanted more foot traffic, they wanted more hotels and to legalize vacation rentals, and it was a constant battle for the community to fend that off.
It was a very close knit community, everyone knew each other and it was a delight to be a part of. And it worked.
The lessons here for Napa are two main points, separate the tourists from the locals as much as you can. The second, limit growth as much as you can. Napa is falling down pretty badly on both points and you can see the results.
You just can’t do anything and have everything and maintain a place. Due to covid, tourism turn down, wine sales and tasting room turn downs, the county and cities have loosened the restrictions that were in place for the ag preserve, and mostly I think it was a mistake.
Sattui as an example, when he goes so far over his limitations, he’s taking from others. He’s made a giant new food court that he is advertising in his Sattui winery, and when I see it I think, there goes a lot of business away from the local restaurants. Allowing restaurant type food in wineries has hurt the restaurants.
Particularly for Napa, it’s small place for a major tourist center, two roads, etc, you’ve heard it a million times, and with the big expansion in tourism what has mainly been crowded out is locals. And you can see it, families are leaving, schools are losing students, employees of the businesses live elsewhere, kids graduate and leave town for lack of opportunity, new homes get taken by tourists as defacto substitutes for mostly illegal short term rentals.
We need to draw a bright line around what is for tourists and what is for locals as a first step. The city of Napa should make a tourist district and a locals district, and strictly enforce it by zoning. Obviously the tourist district should be downtown, but what it really means is no more hotels/tasting rooms/high end restaurants up on Trancas, on Soscol north of Pearl, etc. To some extent I realize this may be salutory, it’s more or less already like this, but I did read this week about a tasting room that opened on Lincoln. That should be no more, and it would be a way to show the locals that they matter, that their personal lives matter, and that we are going to encourage locals districts and local serving businesses.
The same with entertainment events in the neighborhoods, like Porch Fest. I have come to believe that the constant movement of what may start as local events becomes overwhelmed with tourists. Even Bottle Rock is a tourist event in a neighborhood, things like this should definitely not be expanded. It sends the message to locals that you don’t count as much as some strangers, it undermines community psychologically and contributes to what I perceive as a lot of apathy here now. Locals have to come first for a healthy community.
Second, in the county there is a new general plan coming up, the county should stop granting expanded entitlements on every new winery or vineyard that comes along. This is particularly true on these windy hillside roads that should never have been developed to the extent that they have to begin with.
Find incentives to get new wineries or expansions to buy grapes from existing growers. It makes no sense to build acres upon acres of new vineyard when a large percentage of existing growers can’t even sell their grapes.
For example, I live on Spring Mountain Rd. right near Spring Mountain winery, some investors took it over and they applied for expanding their vineyard acreage by hundreds of acres right up a steep hillside, and to expand visitors from about 200 a week to 800 a week. Considering the impact to the community, not to mention the current state of the wine industry, this should not be approved.
The road is a dangerous windy road with numerous blind curves, and huge trucks run up and down it all the time that don’t fit the road, filled with construction type loads. In the last month or so I have had to dodge into a turn out to avoid a huge truck coming around a corner loaded with some kind of PVC water pipes that simply could not fit in the lane. I was lucky there was a turn out.
Another huge truck tore down overhead electric lines as it could not fit under ones laid over the road, and power was out for hours while they rebuilt them. I look up at it as I go by and wonder when the next too big truck for the road is going to tear them down again.
There are a lot of roads like that in Napa, and we need to work toward confining grape growing and wineries to the valley floor as much as we can. Refusing to expand entitlements is a good first step on that. It does not violate property rights to tell them, you get what you bought but nothing more.
Also, out of frustration with the overdevelopment of wineries, new ones or expansions get constantly challenged, there are almost automatic lawsuits over water with every new application. Perhaps in exchange for limiting the scope of new expansions and limiting the geographic space, regulations on what is clearly permitted could be relaxed.
There is a resort on Sulphur Springs Rd, near St. Helena that is looking to expand it’s room numbers and size. I find myself asking, why, why in the current environment would we even consider that? We shouldn’t.
Hotels should be paying housing impact fees that truly reflect the costs of providing homes for the employees that work there. According to one housing advocate that I talked to at a recent Supervisor’s meeting, at the new hotel approved in Napa going through ground breaking now, 50% of the employees pay will be so low that they will immediately qualify for subsidized housing. Another 30% will be at or below the median county wage. The county is taking steps to do this, the cities should too.
At the least the hotels should pay housing impact fees commensurate with the cost of the housing they are leaving to taxpayers to sort out. If they don’t want to build under those conditions, maybe we are better off.
Finally on hotels, there should be a preference for the highest end ones, that seems to be where the wine industry is going anyway, and they tend to be self contained where the guests stay on premises to eat and be entertained, and it creates less impact on the community. They also generate the most TOT.
Last but not least, there needs to be a community wide discussion about the bigger picture here, the crisis of dwindling sales of wine, dwindling tourism, and yet increased impacts on the local populace. The rescue of the wine industry should not come at the expense of the larger community, which is where we seem to be heading.
We need to discuss the bigger picture and where we want to go, Napa needs something new. It seems that everyone debates, if at all, project by project, even down to individual aspects of each project, and the overall direction needs to change. We need a new plan.
More on that in my next piece, “How do you create something new?”