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Aint no way 😡
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2026
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Thats because the residents didnt choose to have their town be economically dependent on tourism. Tourist economies tend to really fuck over local residents. Be it insane housing prices due to airbnbs. Or lack of necessities like grocery stores, affordable restuarants, etc due to all the stores being knick-knack and commodity shops or gentrified tourist centered restaurants. Lack of decent jobs due to everything being targeted towards tourism (really shitty if its seasonal tourism, cause then you are out of the job for the off season). Not to mention having to deal with the roads being congested with tourists, be they pedestrians or drivers. Plus so so so much more. My take, a place should NEVER base its economy around tourism. I got no problem with tourism, but it should be a byproduct or consequence of having a place worth visiting. Not the whole point of the town existing. An economy around tourism is like an economy built around oil. Yeah its a great boost to income for the place, but it comes at the expensive of QoL for the residents, and eventually the well will dry up and youll have nothing to fall back on.
There are so many places that without tourism, there isn't a reason to be there. I drive the Western US pretty thoroughly and the difference between small towns where tourists go, and those that have nothing, is stark. They love to complain about it, and hate on tourists, but damn do they want that money. You go am hour down the road and get to the next town and it's dead, no grocery stores, no real business, most the main streets are boarded up from failed attempts at building something. People are fucking stupid, you have have some reason your town exists, or you end up with those towns in Wyoming I drive through that have 20 population, and won't last another generation.
What a strange take. The people that run businesses are almost never the entirety of the town. If they are, you're likely in a theme park or a carnival. And of course the businesses want your money.
Have you interacted with someone that doesn't run a business there?
Yes, but you do realize that the people that live there work at those businesses. If tourism doesn't exist in those areas, those jobs that they rely on wouldn't exist. You don't have to own a business to profit from it. In many of those areas, there isn't any other real industry.
And this is the crux of the issue people have with tourist towns as well. Tourism as an industry drives up CoL through inflated property values and increased prices for basic essentials but is a low wage industry.
An economy needs money to flow, but you need more than a low wage industry for a healthy area. Otherwise, you've basically just reinvented serfdom with a different product.
Reminds me of when I ran into some international students and they asked me “what is in Indiana? Who would ever live there?” Sometimes people just are born or end up places and social ties, debt, or whatever keeps them there. Moving is easy for some, remarkably hard for others.
Sure, but also people just like it. I live in Illinois about 2.5 hours out of Chicago and I love it. We have all 4 seasons, the population is roughly 400k, we have basically everything a major city has, way less traffic, cost of living is minimal (comparatively), I can travel 10 miles out and it's farmland where we can run ATVs and dirt bikes, hunting (not my thing personally), you can easily go into Chicago if there's a huge concert or event (we get a lot locally too).
I get that it isn't everyone's thing with snowing a few times a year, or you're not an hour from a beach. But that would eventually get old after a while I'm sure.
Just saying there are plenty of reasons to pick "why would you live there" places.
Man, I had to drive from Cody to Casper back in 2013 or so.... Shoshoni Wyoming looks like the zombie apocalypse already came and went. Like holy shit, what did those folks do to deserve to be stuck living there?
I definitely have some contempt for the fudgies but it aint all that bad. There is more nuance here to how tourist towns go about managing their population booms.
I live in a state that is very tourism centered, and I've lived in and near towns and cities that are tourist economies or trying to be. Speaking from that experience, whatever good they bring is outweighed by the problems they cause. Tourism is nuanced, but tourism economies I don't feel are. I've never once heard a resident of a tourist town talk positively of tourism unless they are a business owner or otherwise have some stake in the game, like landlords or airbnd owners.
Some economies can naturally gravitate towards tourism without local intent. If your town is building kitsch then you are probably on the sour end of that spectrum. Here tourism is inevitable, its in the lay of the land. Our town doesnt suck at managing it though, no more than two air bnbs per city block downtown. We have plenty of Inns and Hotels built out to accommodate for short term housing so tourists aren’t competing against locals for space. I would also argue (all be it with some bias) that renting out short term rooms is distinct from being a landlord in a few key ways. A lot more time and effort and care is required from an innkeeper than a landlord, they provide real service to somebody rather than just cornering a resource to sell it back to the community.
Fair. Here, they lean way into it. "Vacation land" being the state motto. Camden, Bar Harbor, and Ogunquit being the three worst towns that I am aware of in terms of tourism, but theres plenty more. Lots of homes here are owned by snowbirds (rich people who own summer homes up here and then live in their homes in Florida or whatever in the winter). The economy is already fucked because of the large elderly population, and then its further fucked by all these rich vacationers who each up the housing. All the recreational stuff around here is very tourist adjacent or targeted like skiing, hunting, hiking, etc. Which the lack of third spaces, non-outdoor recreational activities, and most industry being catered to sustaining the elderly or tourists leads to all the young people moving out of state for better opportunities. Which obviously just makes all these problems worse. The place I live, most of the housing is owned by like one or two huge landlord companies too.
That is to say though, I feel like an economy that drifts to tourism like you say, while yes is a tourism economy, I feel it also kinda leans into tourism as a byproduct rather than the goal. Unless you feel thats not the case, idk.
Yeah we have a disproportionately elderly population and many snowbirds too. Our economy used to be highly industrial, and we do still have a lot of operational factories outside of town which provide a lot of stability for the winter months. We also have a huge state park which soaks up a lot of the tourists as they go camp there instead of staying in town, as well as being a favorite spot for locals to go. If we didn't have these things then tourism would be a lot more damaging to the area.
As opposed to economic and cultural deserts? Just look at US' midwest: no tourism, no anything - just misery. Now take a look at tourist areas even in developing countries that are far ahead of the richest country in the world because people are not fucking stupid there and choose prosperity over exclusivity.
Somebody got a business degree from their local community college (no disrespect to community colleges, major disrespect to business majors). You're like a rich man telling the poor to count their blessings and pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Fuck off and maybe learn to read before you go trying to lecture me about how great living in a tourist economy is.
Nope started with nothing but thousands bucks and a laptop, traveled all around the world working remotely and saw how life changing tourism is all around the world and how many wonderful people work in tourism and most importantly how connecting tourism is in our society. You are free to disagree with me but I gain nothing for argueing in favor of tourism (I don't work in this niche) other than fight against this injustice and misinformation hateful losers spread online to justify their own bigotry.
Wow, please continue to tell the person living paycheck to paycheck, working in houseless services, living in tourist town, and has never had the money to even step foot outside of New England, how great tourism is. And you very much have stake in the game Mr. "I've travelled the world." You're literally the person the economy of these places is catering to.
Well besides absolute shitloads of farms, which some correct people might consider less than glamorous but which still have to go somewhere - and which every developing nation also needs many of. Seriously, this is a deeply apples-to-things-that-aren't-apples comparison.