The Boiling Pot of Tourist Towns: Pt. 1, The Frog's Perspective

There's always been places overrun with tourists. It's never been this bad

This is part one of a two part series on tourism in small towns. The second part, on how to be a good tourist, rather than an entitled, obnoxious one, will come out next week.

Tourists at Clinch Park beach in Traverse City over the 4th of July weekend

This past week Northern Michigan, my home, played host to well over a million tourists. Many of them came to attend the Traverse City Cherry Festival, or various other small town festivals and fireworks displays for the Fourth of July. Others came to rent an Airbnb on one of our lovely inland lakes and spend some time on a pontoon boat or in the water. Some came to hike and explore the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, once named the most beautiful place in America, and a jewel of our National Park System. Others came to do all of the above, but mostly to spend time with family, in nature, a sort of holiday centered family reunion. This latter included about thirty members of my own extended family (who’s counting), who have been doing this since before I was born. God willing, our kids and our grandkids will do it long after my generation is all dead.

In our neck of the woods the tourists also come to buy and eat Mackinaw Island fudge. Which they love to spend money on almost as much as T-Shirts that say “Up North” or “Lake Mom”. And thus, for generations, they have been dubbed “Fudgies”. A good and funny term, but also one that begs explaining every time I’m talking with a group of black people and complaining about the Fudgies. Which has happened many times. Trust me when I say it’s not a racist term. It’s about the literal food, and 90 percent of fudgies are white. And pretty well off.

This time of year can be wonderful, it’s a celebration, and I love sharing this unique region with friends and family. But as you can probably guess, it’s also a walking hell for many of us who live here.

I found myself in downtown Frankfort, Michigan, a town 30 minutes from my own, the evening of the Fourth, promising my son that if we got out of line for ice cream I’d get him an even bigger ice cream tomorrow. It was an hour wait and a bunch of his cousins were toughing it out, but I simply couldn’t. He relented and we walked to the beach to stake out a spot for the fireworks. Estimates say that there were about 20,000 people there (Frankfort has a year round population of about 1,200, so think about that) but we found my cousins and aunts and uncles and he dug out a “butt trench” in the sand with his second cousins to watch. Then, at midnight, we snaked our way through town back to our car and waited for the traffic to clear to go home.

Frankfort is a small town. There are two churches in town, and they are both member institutions in my organizing, so I spend a lot of time there. There’s a couple bars, a handful of restaurants, and that staple of rural tourist towns, a brewery. Many places to buy a t-shirt or an ice cream cone. During the winter you can shoot a cannon down main street. But this time of year it turns into a sort of pulsating all ages frat party/outdoor mall. Someone I know who lives there told me it’s “sort of like living at Cedar Point”.

Perhaps there are people who would enjoy living at Cedar Point, but I don’t think it’s a high percentage and I don’t think he meant it positively. There are minor and not so minor inconveniences too numerous to count. Waiting in line for gas when you’re just trying to get to work. Being forced out of your local watering hole or diner because suddenly there’s a wait for a table. Trying to take the kids swimming and being forced to walk a mile from where you park, the constant irritation of being stuck behind someone with an Illinois license plate inexplicably driving 15 miles per hour under the speed limit: “Look at the deer honey!!”

Growing up in a place like this makes you class conscious, even if you don’t talk about it, even if you don’t recognize it. Everyone I know who grew up around here, every single one, has had some sort of job where they “served” the tourists. That’s how the economy works here. My first “over the table” job was at an ice cream shop, serving the fudgies, often enough, literal fudge. Many of us have also worked construction, putting up drywall and shingles on beautiful houses we could never afford, houses that will more often than not sit empty 10-11 months of the year. Naturally all of this breeds resentment. It’s tough to go work for someone way richer than you, from Illinois, and then drive home from work and get stuck behind someone with an Illinois license plate, and then go to the grocery store and have to wait in line behind 100 people from Illinois and Ohio and Sterling Heights and Gross Pointe and not at least ponder building a wall across US 10 or blowing up a few bridges south of town. Those thoughts aren’t fair, healthy or helpful, but they are natural. And it’s made worse by the fact that deep down we know we are dependent on these people for our jobs and our region’s economic livelihood. No one likes being dependent. It breeds resentment.

All of this has been happening for decades. Ever since white people discovered this place it has been a vacation destination. There are ads from 150 years ago for steamship trips and the “healthful waters”. There’s certainly been fudgies around for my whole life. And for the most part it’s been a mixed bag. Annoying often, but also bringing economic benefits. We roll our eyes at them, they roll their eyes at us, and we keep it moving. They get to have a nice vacation in a beautiful area, we get to have a job. Win-win, or at least a draw.

A tourism ad for Northern Michigan from 1882.

But over my thirty eight years it’s been getting crazier and crazier, busier and busier. And some tension is building. The beaches that used to be secret local spots aren’t secret any more, thanks to social media, Google, and your run of the mill blabber mouths. And the more well known ones are so busy it’s not worth going. Restaurants where twenty years ago, at peak tourist season, you might have to wait 20 minutes for a table, now you can’t go to at all unless you want to wait two hours. Local grocery stores have closed and reopened as “distilleries" or t-shirt shops, only open in the summer. Some serious cases of gentriVacation. Quite simply, there are just more tourists every year. More and more locals are hunkering down, treating this, the most beautiful time of year, as a brutal slog to be endured rather than a time to get outside and have fun with friends and family. That doesn’t feel good, and they’re not happy about it. But it feels like the only choice. Resentment.

And it’s not only the mere presence of more tourists than ever, it’s their attitude too. All anecdotal, obviously, but it seems like more and more of them are more and more entitled and oblivious: You’ve got your classic middle-aged yuppies treating their servers like shit; my wife told me about a guy berating a barista about waiting for a sandwich last week. “I’ve waited TWENTY THREE MINUTES!”. There was a sign up at the cash register reading “Sorry, food is a 30 minute wait”. You’ve got the completely oblivious and entitled drunk 20-something former frat bros and sorority sisters blasting Bluetooth speakers on trails in the woods and the beach, (always the most generic pop country you’ve ever heard) and dropping slurs and F-bombs in front of my kids. You’ve got the people who bring their dogs everywhere, into restaurants, parks, grocery stores and tell you “don’t worry she’s nice” (I’m sure she is but why is she here?). And you’ve got the Airbnb people shooting off fireworks in the middle of a neighborhood where families live at 2 AM on a random Tuesday, hooting and hollering. All of this has always happened, but it’s happening more than it used to.

The attitude of these vacationers, the ones that are entitled and snobbish and condescending and oblivious adds up to a specific mindset, something I’ve come to call “fudgie mentality”. Perhaps you can adapt it for your local circumstances; vacationer mentality, tourist mentality, even “suburban visitor to the city mentality”. After all, I know there are people in downtown Detroit who have very similar gripes. If you boil it down to its essence, fudgie mentality is mindset which treats the place they are visiting as a geography that exists for their recreation alone. Fudgie mentality allows no space for thoughts of ones impact on the local community because it doesn’t really comprehend that there is a local community. It sees these tourist towns as towns which exist exclusively to serve tourists, rather than places where people live, work, and raise their kids, and also happen to be beautiful enough to attract vacationers. Fudgie mentality is bad, and it’s getting worse, expanding in scope and power. But not all fudgies have fudgie mentality (more on that to come). Nor is fudgie mentality exclusive to those that are on vacation. I’ve seen it personally in downtown Detroit with suburbanites getting drunk before Tigers games. A man pissing in my apartment buildings doorway as I came home from work.

The attitude, the mentality, the increasing numbers of tourists, it all adds up to a pretty poisonous stew, and I do worry about the tension breaking in unproductive and perhaps even dangerous ways I know there are other places across the globe where it already has, and I hope we can head that off. But even all of that combined isn’t enough to push us over the edge. It’s not the reason things are so much more tense now.

The real reason many of us locals are getting close to our last straw isn’t about the attitudes or the sheer quantity of the fudgies. It’s not about the minor annoyances of waking up in the middle of the night or standing in line too long or getting stuck in traffic. The thing that threatens to push us over the edge is that it seems like the implicit economic arrangement that we worked out so long ago has changed, and that maybe it’s no longer to our benefit. Like maybe this tourist industry we all thought was benefitting us for so long isn’t actually such a good deal anymore.

We’re like the frog in the pot which begins to boil, eventually killing us. The heat has been gradually increasing for decades. We’re smarter than frogs so we can see the bubbles building on the bottom. But we don’t want to hop out. The pot is our home, our families’ home, in most cases for many generations. Our friends are here. We love it here. We just want to turn down the heat so we can stay.

We need to re-examine that deal we made to benefit our “economy”. Originally having all these tourists around was supposed to help us have jobs that allowed us to pay for a decent place to live. But now they’ve driven up the cost of housing to an extreme level, and that doesn’t work anymore. Probably the most common anxiety I get told about in my work is parents worrying that their kids won’t be able to afford to live around here. Ditto for grandparents and grandkids. It keeps them up at night. The tourists were supposed to keep the local businesses we use in the black, but our grocery stores have closed and been replaced by t-shirt shops. The fudgies were supposed to help fund the preservation of our parks and beaches but now there are long stretches of the year where we can’t use them for all the overcrowding. And where there once was a little fishing cabin with a blue collar family that would come up every weekend and chat with you in the driveway, there is now an Airbnb that hosts bachelorette parties and high school reunions 7 days a week, blasting Ella Langley and doing shots. Hey, maybe you once dreamed of your kids buying that cabin and moving across the street. Tough break, it costs four times as much as it did five years ago. And it’s been a great investment for the millionaire from Chicago that bought it. He’s making money hand over fist on these short term rentals (STRs). All you need is the capital to get started. Unfortunately that’s more capital than you’ll ever set eyes on. Tough break, should have owned a car dealership.

It’s these structural problems that are really bringing the water to a boil. I’m hearing things I’ve never heard before, like small business owners telling me “you know, I wouldn’t mind a little less tourism”, more worried about where to find workers than where to find customers. I’m talking to right-wing, libertarian-minded local township officials who have come to believe they need to ban or cap STRs, that maybe the market isn’t going to correct itself. Most of us could handle the overcrowding and the attitudes. What we can’t bear is the thought of losing our town, region, community for good. Being forced out, being forced to accept drastic, irreversible changes that don’t benefit us or anyone we know.

One of Northern Michigan’s beautiful secret beaches. This one a little further north, in the UP

But here comes community organizing with the last and only hope of saving us. Many of these problems are not unfixable. Most. All. There is actually no reason that we can’t have a community that continues to function as a tourist destination but ensures a good quality of life to its year-round residents, and a sense of community and belonging as well. This is what we want. We want to be welcoming to tourists. We love showing off our towns and region, I know I do. We’re proud of all the beauty and joy our area offers, we want to share it. We just don’t want to lose it.

Which means the people in charge have to start thinking in terms of governance that benefits the people that actually live here year-round. The tourists are coming. We don’t have to beg them. We could use a little less actually. Top priority has to be the locals.

That means, yes, banning or capping STRs, and also being strict about who the permits allow you to rent to (no huge parties please). It means taxing second and third homes at a higher rate, particularly those STRs and lowering the taxes on homesteads. It means investing as much, or more, into the infrastructure of the places used by year-round residents as we do in the infrastructure of the fudgie centers (schools, community centers, township halls. Back roads should be maintained and plowed. The Post Office should be open). It means doing what we can to encourage small businesses that benefit locals (grocery stores, affordable family friendly diners, etc. but also doctors, dentists) and saying, hey, maybe we don’t need to issue that liquor license for the 10 billionth craft brewery or distillery. It means actually enforcing those STR caps and also enforcing noise ordinances. It means putting speed bumps in neighborhoods where kids live.

Unfortunately it’s our job, the local, year-round residents, to force our elected officials to do these things, through organizing. It sucks, and we shouldn’t have to do it, these people shouldn’t need us to pry their eyes open but unfortunately they do. There’s no other option. Certainly no one else is coming to save us. And when we do it, it will benefit everyone. Yes, even the tourists.

Speaking of tourists, every single one of us has someone that we love deeply who is a fudgie. Usually many people. I know I have about fifty. We want you to come up, we love having you. We would, though, ask you to be a good tourist, rather than an entitled prick. I would personally plea with you to do so, because I worry about the resentment I see building. I don’t want the pot to boil over. But that’s a conversation for next week…..

…coming next week: the importance of tourists and the right way to be one.

This newsletter will always be free. Any paid subscriptions will be taken as donations to my organizing work in Michigan. If you would like to donate directly to that work, you can do so here. Thanks so much.