tourism needs recycling

It's difficult to make a living in a tourist town. That's one of my latest realizations. Sure, everybody told me about the low wages and the seasonal work, but seeing as I work from the internet, I didn't think it would affect me. Unfortunately, the limited approach to industry also spills over onto the net. Every business in this town seems to operate within a very thin field of expectation - a rather stale paradigm, in my opinion.

Even some of the more common business strategies (such as trying to offer something new to the town) are absent here. Instead, everyone rides on each other's coat-tails. Everyone complains about the high turnover rate of new businesses, and yet every year we get a rash of new motels, bed & breakfasts, art galleries, and knick-knack Ozark shops "specializing" in crude and funny t-shirts.

On the off-chance that they do attempt something new, it is generally a cheap facsimile of something that was profitable in another town. Sometimes I think it has to do with a lack of "new blood", or people with fresh ideas. Part of the problem has to do with the fact that most of the people with fresh ideas aren't the ones with the funding to implement them. The other problem is that trying to get anything approved by the local city council is nearly impossible. Such is life in a small town...

second guessing "home"

I've moved many times in my past - perhaps too many times. Although I'm fairly satisfied wit the town that we now call home, I can't help but second guess whether we made the right decision at times. Not that there are glaring imperfections with our current home town (aside from the local politics), but I do often wonder if we made the decision too quick.

I met a fellow transplant to the area this week, and we were discussing the tourism market and I was complaining a bit about the excessive tourism at times. He immediately made me feel like something of a fraud for calling this place my new "home", and said something along the lines of, "well it sounds like you should be looking for another home town". Are things really that black and white? Am I not allowed to hold any contempt for the town we have chosen to live in? Am I supposed to just accept everything about it, no questions asked? What about any hopes for improvement? I'm not one of those people who moves to anew place and immediately hopes for it be more like the place that they left. I just see opportunities for improvement here and there. Is that such a crime?

Maybe we should have kept looking. How long do I need to live in a place to either accept it or reject it as my new home? What is the appropriate "grace period" for such an evaluation?

Part of my feelings of despair probably have to do with high expectations,and perhaps some misleading city branding. I was led to believe that residents were valued as much as the tourists, and I often wonder if that is really the case. There were other towns that we looked at in other states that had similar dependencies on tourism. One such town was called Montreat and it was located in North Carolina. From what I could tell, they get much of their tourism from business travelers, and as the name might suggest, from professional retreats. It didn't really have a downtown area with shops, although Black Forest is very close by, and Asheville is pretty close, too.

I was taken by the fact that Montreat was tucked away in this gorgeous mountain valley and there was this awesome historic college campus with unbelievable stone buildings in the center of town. There was also a very nice park that tied into hiking trails and camping. It seemed like a really cool place, until we saw the prices of the homes for sale. We couldn't touch them. It surprised me that it would be so expensive, being located in the middle of nowhere. I could understand if we were talking about homes along the Eastern coast, as I have noticed that in areas like Beaufort NC real estate prices are fairly steep. But Montreat is in the Western half of the state, closer to Tennessee.

The residents that I spoke with seemed happy with their decision to live there, but who knows how they really feel about the tourism and their dependence on outsiders for their town's well being. Those aren't the types of opinions usually shared with outsiders. I should know - I'm guilty of hiding these details myself when I get questions from out of town visitors. You've got to be careful what you say and who you say it to. It's difficult to really discuss with others the effects of tourism on our local economy, and if you make any kind of negative statements about tourism, you're hitting too close to home. After all, many of the residents here survive off of the tourism industry. Threatening their life blood with a mere differing opinion can cause sparks.

So I'm left trying to deal with my emotions and queries on my own, or with other residents who I know to already feel much the same as I do. It's not that I'm totally against tourism. I think that like anything else, it is good to have a balance of these types of things in any economy. Our economy is heavily weighted towards it, though - you might even say that it is our *only* industry. As such, I often see decisions made that don't seem to take into account the voice of residents who don't rely on tourism for their daily bread. Seeing as I have chosen to make this my new hometown, I have to admit that it worries me. If that makes me less of a "local" because I'm not chipper about everything going on around here, so be it.