GentriVacation
Gentrification, regardless of what you call it, or where it happens, hurts most people and benefits very few. It also provides a perfect opportunity for good organizing.
Over the last ten or fifteen years downtown Detroit, my onetime home, has changed probably as much as any neighborhood in America. Where there were once boarded up storefronts there are now gourmet dog food stores. Where there were half empty dive bars you can now buy a twenty dollar cocktail. And my old apartment building, one block from Comerica park, for which I paid 600 bucks a month with utilities and parking included, where my neighbors were almost exclusively elderly black folks with section 8 vouchers, and where I fought an epic battle with bed bugs and management? It’s a luxury high rise where the 1 bedroom apartments go for $3000 a month and there’s a bougee Thai restaurant/cocktail bar on the ground floor. When I peeked in the window they shooed me away like so much riff raff.
I suppose all of this was inevitable, over a long enough time span, and one could make an argument that it’s for the best. But you’ll allow me a bit of nostalgia for the old downtown Detroit, where I could roam the streets unbothered by traffic of the vehicular or pedestrian variety, like Will Smith in I Am Legend. Where the only people you’d run into would try to sell you weed or would be sleeping on the sidewalk, and where if you ducked into a corner dive you could always find a seat at the bar and a beer for two bucks. In those days, skyscrapers were selling for the price of a house, houses were selling for the price of a used truck, and when my car got broken into the cops didn’t even call me back. It was dystopian, yes, but it was also a paradise of sorts, at least for a kid in his mid twenties.
Rural Northwest Michigan is going through the same thing, just 5-10 years behind. But it might be happening faster. Empty store fronts are springing to life. Bars are becoming less divey. Suddenly you can pay 10 bucks for a coffee if you want, and wherever you are in Benzie or Manistee county, you’re never too far from an overpriced witty t-shirt (“lake girl”) or a tasteful coffee mug with a Petoskey stone pattern. Part of the draw of this place, back in the eighties when my parents moved here and had me, was its affordability. Of course that’s laughable now. God forbid you’re a young family looking to buy a first home (or rent for that matter). There are very few places for you, and they are all out of your price range. You better get rich quick.
The population is booming. I remember, probably ten years ago, driving down Schoedel hill with my dad, and he told me that his chief concern about this area was that it would “just empty out”. Back then, there were a lot of dark storefronts and stalled, half built housing. Farms were boarding up, small businesses were closing and there weren’t even any corporate monsters taking their place. Just a slow fade from towns to ghost towns. It’s crazy to remember, but it really did seem like the most likely outcome was this area would just gradually empty out as young people moved away and old people died. It wouldn’t be the first time this happened in the region. There are plenty of places not to far inland that used to be small towns and now are just cross roads. If you ever have a chance, drive through a place called Marilla, or Bendon.
It could never totally empty out though, because this isn’t just any old rural area. This is a vacation destination. And that makes it all more complicated. It’s not simply gentrification that’s happening here, where poor black people are priced out and replaced by rich white people, who then live in the neighborhood and tear down the corner store to put in a dog park or whatever. That’s what happened in downtown Detroit. When the switch got flipped here and we stopped having to worry about population loss, the gentrification happened in new exciting ways. It’s the same result (people being squeezed out of their home), but it looks different.
First of all, the racial element doesn’t exist, which, of course, means its not happening to many of the people that are supposed to care about this stuff nowadays. The obvious visual element isn’t there, so out of sight out of mind I suppose (although I will say, the idea that you can’t see class is patently ridiculous). Secondly, a pretty big chunk of the gentrifiers, possibly a majority, don’t even live here. At least not year round. People are being priced out of their hometowns by rich folks buying vacation homes or “investment properties” aka AirB’nB’s. That’s why some of us have begun to call it “GentriVacation”. As I’ve written about before, there are whole blocks in some towns up here that are completely empty in the winter, but where the houses cost upwards of a million bucks. A ghost town of a different feather, but a ghost town nonetheless, at least at the right time of year.
Of course, this has always been a vacation area. Tourism has always been a significant part of the economy up here, even if it used to be more in balance with agriculture and light industry. My first “over the table” job was at an ice cream shop on Portage Lake. Slinging cones to the fudgies and mopping up their spills.
But it’s also undeniable that the character of the vacationers has changed. There was a time, not so long ago, that the typical vacation home in this neck of the woods was a small cottage, maybe 1 bedroom and 600-800 square feet. Typically owned by some family who’s dad worked on the line at GM or Ford downstate. Maybe they’d come up as a family a few times a year and he’d come up alone or with buddies during hunting season or the salmon run. There used to be thousands of these houses dotting the shores of our inland lakes (and even some along Lake Michigan!). Now there’s a few still standing, but they are sandwiched between McMansions, relics of an earlier age. Most of them sitting empty, owned by grandkids of their original owners, absent somewhere in California or Colorado. Growing weeds and waiting to inevitably be sold to someone who will tear them down and replace them with another gray monstrosity with a putting green lawn.
This is all a symptom, not a cause in and of itself. It’s a symptom of the biggest problem in America, extreme and inhumane inequality of wealth. As the vast majority of us find ourselves struggling to find a place to live and pay the bills, there is no way we can afford a vacation home, however modest it may be. Meanwhile, the top quintile is doing better than ever. Not only can they afford a vacation home, they can afford a vacation mansion (or two! or three or four!). And they can afford to pay to have the small cabin on the lakefront lot demolished to make way for it.
It’s all pretty tragic, especially because it’s completely avoidable. There’s no reason that we can’t have a community that supports its locals, doesn’t price them out, and still is a vacation destination, a vacation destination that’s available to regular people and the wealthy. A community where people can afford to live and afford to visit. A place that isn’t segregated by class. In fact, I think that’s what we all want. We’ve just been trained to think it’s impossible, like crabs in a barrel, to have a “scarcity mentality”. It pits people against each other an makes us locals crazy with resentment and vacationer/summer people angsty and guilt ridden (and frustrated when they have to wait an hour for a table at a restaurant). It’s no way to go through life.
It’s also infuriating. Living in your car on a two track is no way to go through life either and there’s plenty of that going on. There are many, many people I know who live in campers through the winter because they couldn’t find more permanent housing. If you’re lucky it’s a camper. If you’re not lucky it’s a tent, or a friends couch. If you don’t believe me all you have to do is go for a drive. Within two or three miles of those million dollar mansions that sit empty in the winter there are homeless people. More than you think. Believe me. I know because I’ve met them. But even that problem is not intractable. Like most of these things, it’s a matter of political will. That and money. Which is the same thing.
But, like the money, the political will is there, even if it’s under the surface. You’d be hard pressed to find someone who likes the way things are heading, whether they be a longtime local, a snow bird, or a vacationer. The locals, me and my friends and family, are being priced out of not only housing but many of the recreational activities we enjoy. Crowded out too, as our most beautiful places become over run with tourists and retirees, and our restaurants close and re-open catering to a different crowd. And the tourists, retirees, vacationers, snowbirds, fudgies? They don’t like it either. Everything that they loved about this region, the small town charm that made them want to vacation here in the first place, is slowly disappearing and being replaced with the exact culture and built environment they came here to escape. Not to mention the fact that its harder and harder to get a table at a restaurant as the servers get squeezed out, unable to afford a place to live. Unchecked suburbanization, serving no one, beautiful to no one.
So what’s to be done?
The good news is that GentriVacation is, in some ways at least, a perfect issue to organize around:
It brings people together: clearly this is not a particularly partisan issue. People of all stripes can see, very obviously, that what is happening is bad. And a big, broad, swath of our community wants it to change.
But, importantly, it’s still controversial. There are people who get big time mad when you talk about limiting Air B’n'B’s for example. There are always those who, even having plenty of money, get freaked out about the prospect of not being able to accrue even more. Conveniently, they tend not to live around here year round! Having a bit of controversy is important for an organizer. It gets our peoples juices going and gives us a bad guy to point to. GentriVacation is perfect because it’s controversial but only to the small group of bad guys.
Local issue cuts abound: GentriVacation offers countless opportunities for small victories along the road to bigger structural change. A few examples from my own work: Local municipalities can put a cap on (or outright ban!) short term rentals; local municipalities or counties can fund affordable housing (something we’ve won a lot in my work and I’ll write about more later); Local zoning laws can be changed to allow higher density housing; Fines can be levied on owners of unoccupied houses and the money can be used for housing or any number of positive local issues. Even HOA’s and lake associations can ban or limit short term rentals.
This last point bears some additional explication. Federal and state officials are often, in my experience, highly ideological, more so than local officials. When it comes to something like housing and gentriVacation, this means that they are harder to sway (not that it’s impossible. You just need more people). Local officials, often, are just regular people. They see the problems in their communities and typically want to do something about it. They’re not particularly ideological, at least about the local issues. Often, they’re not big fans of the way their communities are changing either. And they are susceptible to pressure from their neighbors, friends, and constituents.
When we were pushing for affordable housing in my rural county we brought about 40 people to the county commission meeting. We wanted them to fund some units in the downtown area of the big vacation town. 40 people isn’t a lot, but it’s a lot to a rural county commission. I was impressed by how intimidated they were. The chair came outside to meet with us before the meeting started, asking why we were there and if there was anything he could do to help. The committee was especially shook when the conservative pastor and the liberal pastor stood to speak side by side, both demanding the same thing, obviously on the same page. We won the funding and there are families moving into those units now.
So, if you live in a town or region that is undergoing GentiVacation, there are some easy first steps. First, of course, you must talk to your neighbors. Have a barbecue or a bonfire. See if there’s interest in doing something about this. Then, when you have a small handful, organize a meeting. Nothing fancy, it could be in a church basement or your own living room. Invite friends, neighbors, parents of your kids friends, the more the merrier. Expect it to be messy. Expect disagreement. Expect frustration and a lack of clear answers. Be open minded and consider it a brainstorming session. If it were me I would make it a goal to brainstorm a list of people that might have the power to do something (maybe your mayor or township supervisor, or your HOA president). Then invite one of them to your next meeting, which you should schedule. See what they have to say. You’ll be off and running in no time. Try to find a winnable issue cut, and find where the pressure needs to be applied. Then apply it. Have fun, make friends, keep curious about your community. Don’t expect a quick and easy victory, but don’t expect boredom either. This is all doable stuff, it doesn’t require expertise, just experience. And you get experience by trying.
And what of the vacationers? Perhaps you are reading this thinking “I vacation in Northwest Michigan (or somewhere similar), and I’m no fan of gentriVacation either.” Perhaps you don’t like the way that your vacation destinations are being suburbanized. I know most of you don’t! Have no fear, you too, can be part of the solution.
First, for the love of all that is holy, don’t buy up housing and turn it into Air’B’n’B’s. Simple enough. If you own a vacation home up here, don’t fraudulently claim a homestead exemption on it. Also simple. If there are people organizing against gentriVacation, by all means, support them. Show up to the meetings, show up to the township board. But if you’re not a voter in the community, don’t get up to speak. Just cheer loudly for your friends who do.
And then, as a challenge, consider the possibility of vacationing somewhere less popular, but no less beautiful. It could be a welcome change for you, for the locals of the places that are overrun, and beneficial to the community that is less popular. You will get the benefit of not having to wait in line for a table or fight for a spot on the beach. And the locals in your new, less crowded, destination, will be thrilled to welcome you and your tourist dollars. Instead of an exhausting burden to an overwhelmed work force, you will be a welcome injection of cash and energy to a desperate local economy.
There are many place like this, too many to count. Going forward, I plan to write about some of them. I think that certain places get a critical mass and become known as an “ideal vacation destination” and then become so popular that that ceases to be true. Meanwhile, there is beauty everywhere, waiting to be discovered.
Might I humbly recommend Lake County, MI, home of the towns of Baldwin and Luther. The poorest county in our state, by some measures, is astoundingly beautiful. Dotted with small, wooded lakes, roaring rivers and gurgling fishing streams. Covered in dense forest, with hundreds of miles of trails for biking, hiking, snowmobiling and cross country skiing. If you are a hunter or fisherman, there’s no better place in the state. And if you like hanging out at the beach and swimming, there’s plenty of spots for you. It also has a fascinating local history, which I’ll write more about at some point. Suffice it to say it is much more diverse than one would expect a small town in the middle of the woods to be. It doesn’t have a lot of fancy businesses, but Baldwin does have the best ice cream place in the whole state (Jones’s Home Made Ice Cream), and at Shoey’s Log Bar you’ll find friendly bartenders, good burgers and an open table. If you vacation in Baldwin you’ll both have a good time and have some small part in changing a place for the better, not the worse.
GentriVacation can seem like one of those massive, impersonal forces that we are helpless to resist, and it’s not the only one. Often times we feel that the world is just changing, that’s just how it is, and we’re all just along for the ride. Yea it sucks but what are you going to do. But if you break it all the way down into manageable pieces, if you work with your friends and neighbors, even these forces can be fought and beat. We, as individuals, regardless of what side of the problem we are on, can make choices that contribute to that fight, both at the structural level (when we choose to organize) and at the symptom level (when we choose to vacation somewhere less busy, or choose not to become an AirB’n’B slumlord). But we first must decide that we do have agency. That we are, in fact, capable of making such a choice. And we must believe that it does, at the end of the day, matter what we choose.
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Let's not forget the "Up North" bears and the alien orb light that haunts Bar Lake/Schoedel.
Love this post.