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Brace yourself for the new normal

Here in the mid-Atlantic, trees are leafing out, the hyacinths are blooming and dandelions are popping up like–well, like weeds. All of which means folks who own RVs are getting itchy feet and will be rolling soon, if they aren’t already, in search of a little outdoor hospitality. For those who do, however, a word of warning: don’t expect much of a personal touch.

The U.S. has 600,000 more RVs than it had a year ago, most people have delegated the Covid pandemic to history’s dustbin, and working remotely retains a tenacious hold on many white-collar workers. The result is a crushing demand for RV sites that started two years ago and shows no signs of abating, even as the number of campground sites is growing at only a fraction of the increase in demand, and a significant piece of that at the high end of the market. Add a predictable increase in campground rates and the rising price of gas, and the idea of an RVing weekend or vacation as a relaxed, budget-friendly family outing is becoming just another quaint notion.

But that’s not all the bad news: campground employees are rapidly becoming an endangered species, especially at small to mid-sized campgrounds. Long sipping from the bottom of the labor pool, most campgrounds offer only seasonal work at or near the minimum wage, which often means slim pickings locally. Foreign students on J-1 visas traditionally took up some of the slack, as did work-campers, but with the pandemic and the war in Ukraine choking off much of the former (a significant percentage of whom came from Russia and eastern European countries), and many work-campers being notoriously fickle (the down-side of having an extremely mobile workforce), campgrounds have had to rely on local employees more than ever.

If they can find them. And if they find them, if they can keep them.

With U.S. jobless claims falling last week to a near-54-year low–when the labor force was less than half its current size–we are in what is euphemistically called a “tight” labor market. Looked at another way, there are 1.8 job openings for every one unemployed worker, which means that even if we reached zero unemployment we’d still have many, many jobs go begging for someone to fill them. Under the circumstances, then, it’s probably no surprise that the so-called national “quit rate” remains stubbornly high–albeit less than last summer–as workers seeking better pay and better working conditions show commendable initiative by walking away from exploitative employers.

Here’s the fly in the ointment: the “accommodation and food service” industry group, which includes campgrounds and RV parks, has the highest quit rate among all U.S. employers. Indeed, it’s twice the national rate for all occupations, averaging 6% a month since last fall–which, while it might not sound like much, means that employers are losing a quarter of their work force every four months. Moreover, because the pain is not evenly distributed, some parts of the country have notably higher (and therefore some have lower) percentages of their employees jumping ship. The March quit rate among Colorado’s accommodations employers, for example, was 10.3%.

Campgrounds that either can’t or won’t pay at least $15 an hour–and nearly a third of the American workforce is paid less than that–are finding themselves severely short-handed, and RVers are starting to see the results. Office and store hours are shorter, on-line booking and check-ins are becoming the default mode of interacting with the public, organized activities will be fewer and skimpier. Buildings may look a little shabbier, the grounds a little more unkempt and housekeeping in cabins and bathrooms somewhat less thorough. And as the season wears on, expect tempers to get shorter and the smiles more forced.

Presumably this all will eventually balance out and a new equilibrium will be established–eventually. But this sure isn’t your parents’ camping experience now, and it won’t be then, either.

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The bogus nature of park models

A legal squabble in Currituck County, North Carolina, is exposing one of the camping industry’s biggest con jobs: the persistent claim that “park models” are just regular RVs.

A park model, as RVers who camp at commercial campgrounds probably know, is basically a cabin built on a single trailer chassis. Federal rules restrict them to less than 400 square feet, but they can be as much as 14′ wide, which neutral observers might conclude stretches the definition of “vehicle.” Indeed, like their larger mobile home or house trailer counterparts, park models usually require a special permit to be moved and usually need specialized towing equipment. Like house trailers, they usually don’t have holding tanks and so need direct water and sewer hookups for their plumbing. And like house trailers, once they’ve been set up they’re usually there to stay, wheels and axles removed and the undercarriages surrounded by skirting.

Park models, in other words, might appear to have a lot more in common with the manufactured housing found in trailer courts than with RVs. From a regulatory perspective, in fact, the only critical difference is the square-foot limitation: more than 400 square feet and the wheeled house is defined as a dwelling, subject to Housing and Urban Development regulations. Less than 400 square feet and the wheeled house is defined as “a trailer-type RV that is designed to provide temporary accommodations for recreation, camping or seasonal use,” removing it from under HUD’s regulatory umbrella and putting it under the arguably less stringent manufacturing standards of something called ANSI A-119.5.

That standard dates back to 1982, when the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association, the trade group representing RV manufacturers, sought to draw a bright line between “vehicles” and “dwellings” to forestall greater regulatory oversight of the RVs it was building. Over time, however, RVIA has steadily enlarged the scope of ANSI permissibility. In 1997, for example, it persuaded HUD to exempt “small lofts” from the square-foot calculation–and in the years since, the small lofts have grown bigger and taller, and now range up to five feet high. More recently, the industry also won the right to exempt porches built on the chassis from the same square footage limitation, opening the door for even bigger chassis footprints.

Still, even as park models grow more and more indistinguishable from mobile homes, the industry superficially maintains the fiction that park models are intended only for part-time recreational use. “Superficially” because even though that’s the official line, the real-world reality is that park models are touted as low-cost housing “perfect for retired seniors and couples just starting life,” according to one sales brochure, which optimistically adds that they’re “built to last 30-50 years or more with minimal maintenance.”

Or consider the representations of an outfit called Platinum Cottages, which claims that “while they are referred to as RVs and mobile homes, park model homes are built more robustly than their competitors and have more creature comforts that closely resemble traditional homes. They can be used for a variety of different things, from temporary living to permanent living quarters.” Indeed–and there are people all around the country doing just that, living year-round in park models parked in campgrounds and in mobile home parks and in some cases on private land.

It’s also why Currituck County, where Blue Water Development bought an existing campground four years ago, is having a problem. Having rebranded the property as the KOA Outer Banks West campground and then deciding it wasn’t entirely happy with its acquisition (don’t these people do any prior due diligence?), Blue Water soon went to court over the county’s land use restrictions–already in place several years when it bought the property–so it could add 80 RV sites, a swimming pool and other facilities. It lost that battle last summer, when the North Carolina Court of Appeals ruled that no, the county rules would stand.

Undaunted, Blue Water is back in court again, this time over new campground rules that the county adopted this past February–rules, ironically, that to some extent ease the earlier restrictions. Raising Blue Water’s ire, however, is a provision that would limit RVs to vehicles no more than 8.5-feet wide “in the transport mode.” Which is to say, no park models, which the county contends look more like manufactured homes than RVs.

Blue Water, which has 21 park models 10 to 14 feet wide at the KOA, is aghast. “The park model RVs clearly are not manufactured homes,” the lawsuit asserts, further contending that it “creates an unfair competitive advantage” for campgrounds in nearby counties that don’t have the same restrictions. Indeed, says Blue Water, the new law could put it out of business altogether, and just as the season is picking up. Currituck County’s new rules are nothing less than an existential threat that means campgrounds will “cease to exist.”

Hyperbolic? No doubt, but it will be interesting to see how Blue Water advances its claim that park model RVs “clearly” are not manufactured homes. Yes, it can be counted on to stress the difference between ANSI and HUD certification, and that might be enough to make the legal point. But the reality is that this is an increasingly arbitrary and meaningless distinction for an ANSI standard that no longer passes the smell test–if it ever did. If Carrituck County doesn’t make its case with a legal argument, it should prevail on the facts: park models do in fact look more like a manufactured home than an RV.

Time to get real.

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Can RVing survive itself?

If Rvers can be divided into two main categories–full-timers and vacationers/tourists–it’s the second group that risks killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Vacationing Rvers are swarming the landscape in ever larger numbers, over-running national parks and forests, crowding festivals and tourist attractions and jostling each other for campground sites, often while projecting an oblivious sense of self-entitlement that infuriates all those they encounter.

This being America, however, all that smells a lot like opportunity for those looking for the next big thing. No surprise, then, that investors and developers are falling all over themselves to build ever-bigger RV parks wherever possible, but ideally adjacent to a big “draw,” such as a lake or ocean beach, or a large amusement park or casino. And as they do, long-term residents of the impacted areas eventually realize–often belatedly–that they’re being invaded by economic interests that regard them as dispassionately as the trees they’ll be chopping down, the waterways they’ll be imperiling or the undersized roads they’ll be pounding, first with construction equipment and later with oversized RVs.

My last post got into that a bit as it related to the Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, where local residents appear to be on the losing end of a bid by the Pequot tribe to build a $25 million RV resort–not on the reservation itself, but on a nearby 65 acres it purchased with casino proceeds. On one level, the addition of a mere 280 camping sites is just a blip in the ongoing expansion of a mega-complex that pulls in nearly 13 million visitors a year. On another, it’s one more accretion of outsiders with an outsized impact on an area they know and care nothing about–“outsized” because RVers leave a considerably larger footprint than day-trippers arriving by car or tour bus, or even overnighters booking one of the resort’s 2,224 hotel rooms, suites and villas.

There is a different way to do things–exemplified, unfortunately, by a tourist destination not known for its RVing opportunities. Still, there are lessons to be drawn from Hawaii’s rethinking of the way it presents itself.

Long renowned for its beaches, luaus and laid-back vibe, the island state–with half the population of Connecticut spread across twice the area– hosted a record 10.4 million visitors in pre-pandemic 2019. And felt over-run. A year earlier, a survey by the Hawaiian Tourism Authority found that two-thirds of respondents agreed that “this island is being run for tourists at the expense of local people.” As summarized by an independent tourism consultant speaking to a New York Times reporter, “We’re so well known as a sun destination that people overlook the other aspects, the Hawaiian culture, the royal past, the interesting geological and natural attractions.”

Despite a slowdown in 2020, the tourists came roaring back last year–July arrivals exceeded their 2019 level by 21%. Rental cars were so scarce tourists were driving around in U-Hauls, and prices for everything started skyrocketing. The impact “was like putting 220 volts of electricity through a 110-volt circuit,” John De Fries, the newly appointed president of the Hawaiian Tourism Authority, told a Bloomberg reporter.

Now the Hawaiians are pushing back, and in the process could be writing a playbook that their mainland counterparts might want to copy–and in some cases already are. Among the changes: reservations are now needed for popular natural attractions, the number of visitors is being capped and non-residents are charged higher fees than locals. Informational videos about the history, environment and cultural significance of various features are becoming required viewing. Conservation fees for natural resource management are in the works, and cliched versions of Hawaiian culture and cuisine are being supplanted by the real thing.

Most critically, these and other changes are being driven by Hawaiian natives– rather than mainlanders with “hospitality” degrees–who for the first time comprise the majority of the state’s tourism authority. Drawing on input from locals, Hawaii’s four counties have devised three-year strategic plans that focus on the sustainability of their resources rather than on marketing. Last November, the tourism authority launched a campaign to introduce the concept of malama, or caring for the land, which De Fries contends is emerging as the “sister value” of aloha. Today, the campaign claims 110 hotel and airline partners who will reward guests with a free night’s stay if they spend a day helping to clean beaches or reforest land.

There’s no reason why the Pequot couldn’t do something similar, harnessing their revenue-generating casino to promote Native American culture with something a little more ambitious than a 24-year-old museum that attracts fewer visitors in a year than its casino averages each day. Instead, the tribe continues pushing aside its neighbors while adding more of the one-note “attractions”–another hotel, another indoor water park, another RV “resort”– that are to recreation what monoculture is to farming.

Nor is there any reason why RV parks across the United States couldn’t offer the same malama approach to what they do–no reason other than lack of leadership at the national level, that is. But here’s what will come from such short-sightedness: that other main category of RVers? The full-timers? They increasingly will find themselves elbowed aside and priced out of their lifestyle.

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Slots, RV park avenge war, smallpox

The Pequots, once the dominant Native American tribe in eastern Connecticut, were just about exterminated by colonialists more than 350 years ago. A 1663 smallpox epidemic wiped out as much as 80% of a population estimated at 16,000. A five-year war that began the following year killed off half of the survivors, with the balance scattered so far and wide that a Pequot reservation created in 1666–the country’s first–had only 13 residents recorded in the 1910 U.S. census.

How times have changed!

Following creation of the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe in 1975 by a handful of the tribe’s descendants, the federal government in 1983 resolved a legal claim that some of the reservation land had been stolen by formally recognizing the tribe as a sovereign entity. Three years later, the Pequots–empowered by that sovereign status–opened a bingo hall, and over the next six years generated enough income to build a casino. And then they built a lot of other stuff, and still more stuff–so much, in fact, that by 2012 they were teetering on the edge of insolvency because of the $2 billion debt they had accumulated along the way.

Again: how times have changed!

This year, celebrating its 30th anniversary, Foxwoods is the largest resort casino in the Northeast, its 340,000 square feet of casino floor space more than doubling that of its largest Atlantic City rival, the Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa. Located in the sweet-spot halfway between Boston and New York City, it pulls in almost 13 million visitors a year, who come not only for the gambling but for the reservation’s 80-store Tanger Outlet Mall, three hotels, two theaters, five event spaces, a couple of spas and a golf course.

But–as they say–that’s not all! The tribe announced this week that it has sealed a deal with Chicago-based Great Wolf Lodge to build a resort, adjacent to the casino, that will include 550 hotel rooms, a 90,000-square-foot indoor water park, an outdoor pool, a family play area and an interactive adventure park. The $300 million facility is slated to open in 2024 and will “redefine what being a resort destination means,” according to Foxwoods president Jason Guyot.

And then, of course, there’s the ongoing effort by Blue Water Development Corp. to build a $25 million RV resort on 65 acres that belong to the tribe, midway between the casino and the hamlet of Preston, population 4,788. The RV resort has met vocal opposition from local residents, partly because it abuts a pond that they contend is environmentally fragile, partly because it pushes the whole Foxwoods complex deeper into an otherwise rural community. A series of planning and zoning commission hearings and meetings, as well as parallel review by the state’s Inland Wetlands and Watercourses Commission, are ongoing and have resulted in some modifications, but this still is no minor project: 280 campsites, a welcome center, three bathhouses and a swimming pool, as well as tennis, volleyball, squash and bocce courts.

Final decisions on the RV park are expected in April, and approval seems likely. As summarized in a recent New York Post article, “Big money talks, so nature walks: along with restaurant and hotel taxes, and employment, Foxwoods added more than $4 billion in slot revenue to state coffers over three decades,” which buys an awful lot of influence.

Or payback, 450 years after the fact, using the one weapon that the white man understands best. Forget the guns and germs; it’s greenbacks that win the day.

Next post: Lost in the shuffle of recent history is the fact that the Pequots used a chunk of early gambling revenue to build a $193 million museum, near but behind the casino, dedicated to eastern North American tribes. A quarter-of-a-century later, this nod to heritage attracts fewer visitors in a year than the casino averages per day. Perhaps the Pequots could borrow a leaf from the new Hawaiian playbook, where native peoples are rethinking tourism?

One death a sign of two big problems

Toni Covington was only 60 when she died last week, just days after being forced out of the mobile home park she had lived in for more than 30 years. As reported by the Fresno Bee, she was found dead in an employee dorm room during a wellness check by the local sheriff’s department, called in after she didn’t show up for work at a Yosemite National Park concession.

Covington first arrived in Yosemite for a summer job when she was 19 and was so smitten with the place she never left, eventually moving into a mobile home at the El Portal Trailer Park, located along the Merced River just outside Yosemite’s western entrance. In the years that followed, starting around 2000, she and the other trailer park residents kept hearing that the park was about to be closed down for one reason or another. It never was–until it was, this time on the grounds that the overhead electrical lines had degraded so badly that they had become a fire hazard. That much probably was true.

But there are other truths. One is that, as is true in mobile home parks across the country, the residents own their homes but not the underlying land–and those homes are so old that they are anything but “mobile.” Being forced to move therefore amounts to becoming homeless, which is how Covington ended up spending her last days in a dorm room too small for her possessions, with a shared bathroom and kitchen, rather than in the three-bedroom residence she had called home for three decades.

Another truth is that some states–including California– recognize the extreme vulnerability of trailer park residents, as exemplified by Covington’s story, and therefore have mandated certain protections for them. Tenants are supposed to be given a year’s notice when their trailer park is going to be closed down; they’re also supposed to be offered appropriate relocation assistance. But the El Portal Trailer Park is on federal land, and so beyond the reach of state regulations; its residents weren’t notified until shortly before Christmas (happy holidays!) that they had 90 days to move or lose their mobile homes. No compensation or assistance to do this was offered.

The plight of El Portal’s now dispersed residents inadvertently highlights two developments that will only get worse without public policy intervention. One is the growing marginalization of people living in trailer courts, some by choice but many more out of necessity, as sky-rocketing rents and real estate prices have left few affordable housing alternatives. The second is the steadfast refusal of resort and recreational facility developers and operators to ensure adequate housing for the (typically underpaid) workforce they need to serve their customers.

Although a shared dorm facility may be a nifty experience for a 19-year-old working a summer job between college semesters, it’s hardly suitable for a 60-year-old woman who has spent two-thirds of her life working in the same community. Other resort areas have it even worse, with hotel, restaurant and giftshop workers living in tents or in their vans on national forest land–and the pricier the resort, like Vail in Colorado or Jackson Lake in Wyoming, the worse the problem. Developers of new properties, including the growing roster of proposed large RV parks, rarely include an analysis of local employee housing options along with their traffic surveys and environmental impact statements.

For Toni Covington, these are no longer matters of concern. Just why she died, less than a week after her involuntary move, isn’t known, but her autopsy was scheduled for today. It may not be able to determine if a broken heart played a role.

KOA’s lesson about eggs and baskets

Did you try to make an online reservation by logging into koa.com between Wednesday morning and earlier today? If so, this is what you saw: “Sorry we missed you. We’re busy setting up camp. Figuring out those tent poles, stocking up the Deluxe Cabin fridge, or backing up an RV takes time even for us! We apologize for interrupting your travel planning. To make a reservation, please call the campground and they’ll have you on your way to happy camping in no time!”

All of which is to say that KOA’s website was down for more than 48 hours, with no public explanation and not much guidance as to when it would be back up. Home office teams were “diligently working behind the scenes” to fix whatever the problem might be, according to Diane Eichler, KOA’s vice president of marketing. Did that mean they were holding up tent poles in various configurations in hopes of getting a better signal? No clue.

Well, stuff happens. And eventually all those diligent worker bees figured things out and apparently got the system back on line. But if there’s one take-away from all this, it’s that every KOA franchisee that already has its own independent website should make sure it hangs on to it. While that may seem like an unnecessary duplication or expense, it’s an insurance policy that pays off–not only at times like these, but against the day when a franchisee decides that maybe being a KOA is no longer in its interest.

It’s far easier to have an established website than to create one from scratch on short notice. And as KOA has demonstrated in the past, it’s not above a vindictive response to apostate franchisees that leave its system, having claimed in responses to Google searches for such campgrounds that they are “permanently closed.” For a business that doesn’t have an alternative website of its own, that can amount to a near-death experience.

Meanwhile, KOA was looking out for its ducklings by posting their phone numbers on its landing page for the benefit of would-be reservation makers. No telling how that worked out, given that many campgrounds are struggling with abbreviated office hours and insufficient numbers of desk clerks because of the overall labor crunch, which has been felt especially acutely throughout the hospitality industry. But if you’ve been trying to make a reservation at a KOA and all you’ve been getting is a busy signal or taped response, good news! You can go back online, the way God intended camping reservations be made.

Illusory freedom of the open road

To the extent that one of RV’s big attractions is the freedom to travel, when and where the heart desires, this year promises all kinds of unwelcome reckonings with reality.

First, of course, there’s the recent explosion of new RV sales that has overwhelmed many campgrounds, making it increasingly difficult to find a spot for the night without extensive advance planning. Not only does that dampen any sense of spontaneity, but all that jostling for space has put the squeeze on campground rates, transforming what was once a modestly-priced escape into an ever more expensive indulgence. It remains to be seen if that surge will continue, given recent developments, but the supply pipeline is already bursting.

And now, just as the camping season is ready to rip, RVers are having to factor in the recent surge in fuel prices. That increase was already underway before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but has since been turbocharged. Brent crude oil prices, which were at $69 a barrel before Christmas, started climbing thereafter and hit $96.48 on Feb. 14, before dropping back just a tad. Then the tanks started rolling and oil prices took off, hitting $133.15 on March 8–a 93% increase in less than three months. They have since fallen back to the vicinity of $100 a barrel, but will remain volatile for months to come.

What this translates into at the pump is, no surprise, a stiff increase in the cost of gas and diesel. The national average price of gas was $4.32 a gallon this week, although “average” prices can mask decidedly un-average costs, typically found on the West Coast: gas in California was averaging $5.74 a gallon. Diesel, meanwhile, which powers a significant proportion of Class A coaches and trucks pulling fifth-wheels, was at $5.20 a gallon on average–up $2.11 in just the past year. Meanwhile, an AAA spokesman told Yahoo Finance that gas prices will continue to rise, even if oil prices stabilize, because the market is easing into summer blends that are more difficult to refine and more difficult to distribute.

Prices have been higher in the not-too-distant past: $4.11 for gas and $4.84 for diesel in July, 2008–but $5.24 and $6.19 in 2022 dollars, after adjusting for inflation. But that’s hardly reassuring, given that the economy was then in the midst of the Great Recession, the entire campground and RV sector sliding into a 3-5 year period of doldrums. And it’s also scant comfort when RVers, already contemplating campground costs that have shot up 50% or more in the past couple of years, are spending more than $100 each time they fill up their gas tanks.

RVIA, the RV manufacturers’ trade association, estimates that the average RVer travels 4,500 miles a year in his rig. It’s a safe bet that this number will be a lot lower in 2022, if only because RVers will be looking for destinations far closer to home. That will benefit campgrounds within 150 miles of major metropolitan areas, but those farther out are likely to do less well–to the relief of more financially resilient campers who are looking for a little elbow room. If gas prices go above $5 a gallon, on the other hand, all bets are off: the AAA reports that’s the “pain point” for 75% of all drivers, beyond which they’ll make sharp adjustments in their driving behavior.

NIMBY part 2: Maggie Valley woes

Straddling a winding North Carolina road, halfway between Asheville and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the town of Maggie Valley is the kind of vacation spot that appeals to people looking for hiking trails, Appalachian vistas, wildflowers and black bears. No surprise, then, that despite a relative lack of flat ground it has at least nine campgrounds and RV parks along a two-mile stretch of the main drag, which seems like a fair number for a town of only 1,700 or so–but for some, there’s never enough.

Riding the same wave of pandemic-juiced development that is afflicting other naturally beautiful areas, Maggie Valley also has been contending with the grandiose plans of a Myrtle Beach-based developer, Frankie Wood, who for the past two years has been spinning tales of how he intends to revive a now-defunct tourist attraction, Ghost Town in the Sky. Ghost Town has been sitting in mothballs since 2002, and Wood–as reported by The Mountaineer–apparently hasn’t invested a penny of his own money in the mountain-top amusement park. But he does have a “trail of bad debts and court cases over the past 30 years,” including having his own home foreclosed on in 2019.

In best “Music Man” style, however, Wood has besotted much of the Maggie Valley business establishment with his grand designs, acquiring partners for other projects he insists must precede The Big One. Chief among these is a need for more housing for all the employees he’ll eventually need, which translates into planned unit developments, trailer courts and more RV parks, which–given Maggie Valley’s vertical geography–has meant a flurry of rezoning requests to allow increased building density. And, for a while, Wood was getting all that and more, receiving dozens of land-use designations consistent with high-density development.

But while much of the business community warmed up to Wood, a clear majority of Maggie Valley residents felt otherwise. Too much was going on, and what was going on was too helter-skelter, without a clear vision of how everything would fit together or how it would reshape the town. Last fall, with two of the town’s aldermen positions up for election, two of the four candidates campaigned on a “smart growth” platform–and were overwhelmingly propelled into office by the biggest voter turnout anyone in Maggie Valley can recall. “I want to see smart growth, smart investment,” top vote-getter John Hinton summarized for the Smoky Mountain News. “Campgrounds are not smart growth. We want to see homes built. I’d love to see Ghost Town redeveloped . . . but I’ve yet to see a comprehensive plan of how that would work, a comprehensive plan that would not include a burden on the taxpayers of Maggie Valley.”

Lacking such a plan, the town is now drafting its own and expects to have it finished by July. Until then, the Maggie Valley board of aldermen hit the “pause” button, approving on a 3-2 vote a moratorium on any new developments. Sounds smart, doesn’t it? A triumph for local control over zoning and planning decisions? A recognition that there has to be a balanced approach to land use, so that someone doesn’t plop a landfill next to a hospital, or a steel mill in the middle of a housing development?

Not to North Carolina Rep. Mark Pless, who recently told a Mountaineer reporter that a six-month moratorium “sends the wrong message about Haywood County, that we are closed for business.” Dismissing the new aldermen as “wet behind the ears,” Pless–who has just finished serving the first year of his freshman term in office–said he is thinking about introducing legislation to reverse the town’s decision. Such a local override bill doesn’t require the governor’s signature in North Carolina, only needing the approval of the state’s House and Senate–and as the Mountaineer pointed out, legislators from outside the area affected by a local bill typically bow to the wishes of their colleagues.

Home rule? Only a quaint idea when there’s money to be made, even in an area as politically conservative as western North Carolina. Pretty soon the Mountaineer may have to contemplate a name change to something a little less rugged and independent. Maybe the Profiteer. Or better yet, the River City Review.

Because yep, you’ve got trouble right there in River City.

When NIMBY is a good thing

The NIMBY acronym, meaning “not in my backyard,” is a scornful term–and rightly so–usually hurled against those who oppose a development that they believe would lower their property values. Such projects typically are intended to benefit an underserved population, such as low-income housing or a half-way house, and typically are greeted with false expressions of sympathy and a dozen reasons why–although of course this is a wonderful idea–this just isn’t the right place for it. Please! Not here. Not in my backyard.

It’s therefore tempting to give in to a fleeting sense of schadenfreude when the shoe is on the other foot: when the proposed development would serve those who already have a lot, not those who have little. When a developer rolls into a quiet rural community and announces he’s going to spend a few million dollars to build a vacation playground for RVers, complete with a water park, boat docks, sports courts and game rooms, a restaurant, amphitheater, fitness and yoga center, and whatever else may strike his fancy. When the locals are forced to contemplate the prospect of hundreds of people invading their peaceful corner of the world every week, shakily driving their oversized homes-on-wheels along narrow country lanes.

But it will be good for the community, the developer will bray. Think of all the new business this will bring to the area! The new job opportunities! The boost in local tax revenues!

Somehow the math never quite works out that way, but by the time the locals figure that out it’s too late. As one resort area after another has already demonstrated, from one end of the country to the other, all that new development pushes real estate costs so high that the people filling those new but low-paying jobs can no longer afford to live in the area. The increased spending by all those new visitors is largely captured by the development itself, with only a fraction trickling into the wider community. And in most cases the tax base doesn’t grow enough to pay for the increased demand on police, fire and other services, because transients living in houses-on-wheels don’t pay nearly as much in taxes as people in sticks-and-bricks homes, even as they have almost as many needs.

But developers hoping to cash in on the pandemic-catalyzed RVing boom are looking to build new campgrounds just about everywhere–and because it makes more economic sense to build a bigger campground rather than a smaller one, those proposals tend to be big. Big enough to inject almost as many visitors into a local community as there are local residents–and those local residents, once they figure out what’s in the works, overwhelmingly don’t like it one bit. From a proposed RV park of 300+ sites at the Mashantucket-Pequot casino in Connecticut, to a similarly sized RV park proposed for Lake Anna in Virginia, to the mega-park branded as the Kentucky Bluegrass Experience Resort, grassroots opponents have convinced their local representatives to block or severely modify such unwanted intrusions into their communities.

The developers, no surprise, are fighting back on several fronts–and even are resorting to disdainful accusations of NIMBYism against their opponents. That’s flipping the term on its head, of course, which is amusing and unsustainable. Less amusing, on the other hand, is a North Carolina state politician’s promise to enact legislation that would allow the state to overrule local land-use decisions–not on behalf of low income housing or half-way houses, but to repel attempts to control the development of still more RV parks in an area that is already bursting with them.

In circumstances like these, NIMBY may be the most appropriate response.

Next post: the threat to Maggie Valley

Wealth, racial disparities widen

Camping and RVing have long been dominated by non-Hispanic whites, prompting efforts by industry leaders to identify and address barriers to entry blocking greater Black and Hispanic-American participation. (Asian-Americans have a slightly higher participation rate than whites, but a smaller piece of the demographic pie.) Symbolizing the push for greater inclusivity, KOA even featured a Black (curiously mother-less) family roasting marshmallows around a campfire on the cover of its 2021 North American Camping Report, which went on to celebrate “the changing diversity of camping.”

Yet the actual numbers within the KOA report–released late last year–present a more nuanced picture, and other studies suggest camping’s racial profile may be paling. Moreover, the wealth gap within the camping population is starting to shift, driven in part by the pandemic and partly by the higher cost of camping itself, with still unmeasured implications for the pastime’s racial makeup.

The most recent red flag in this respect is a Penn State study, published in the journal Land, which found that while almost all outdoor recreation locations saw huge increases in visitation during the pandemic, more than 13% of Americans stopped participating in outdoor recreation during the same time. And while as many as 20% of those getting outdoors were doing so for the first time, their numbers were predominantly white and upper income, even as those who quit were more likely to be non-white and from lower income brackets.

Comparing the ethnicity of those who had dropped out of outdoor activities during the pandemic with those who regularly took to the outdoors for the first time, the study found that the drop-outs were 61.8% white, 11.9% Latino and 14.7% Black; the newbies, meanwhile, were 76.6% white, 7.5% Latino and 8% Black. When compared by income, 47.2% of the drop-outs had annual household income under $40,000, while 19.5% had household incomes of more than $80,000. Of the newcomers, 39.3% were on the low end of that range, while 25.1% were on the upper end.

The Penn State study threw a wide net, looking at outdoor recreation broadly and not just camping, which may explain why some of its ethnic findings differ from KOA’s. The latter, for example, claimed that 24% of first-time campers in 2020 were Black and 15% Latino, or more than double the rates in the Penn State study. But while KOA’s statistics for Black first-timers have seen a steady rise since 2016, its own numbers for Latino first-timers have been on an overall decline since 2017.

To further muddy the waters, the 2021 Outdoor Participation Trends Report, released by the Outdoor Foundation, concluded that Black and Hispanic Americans “remained significantly underrepresented outside.” Indeed, Black participation in outdoor activities has actually decreased since 2007, despite occasional fluctuations–or as the foundation summarized, has remained “stubbornly low compared to other groups.”

Mixed though the ethnic picture may be, however, there’s little question that the people getting to play outdoors are ever wealthier. When it comes to wealth disparities among first-time campers in 2020, KOA’s findings were even more stark than Penn State’s: 41% had household incomes of more than $100,000, with an additional 17% in the $75,000-$99,999 range. The implications of that income surge on camping’s ethnic profile? The average household income in 2020 for Hispanics was $55,321; for Blacks, it was $45,870.

You can do the math.