Tag: Ian Rasch

When glamping isn’t bougie enough

Architect’s drawing of one of the rooms planned for a revamped Prospect Lake “landscape hotel,” which all appearances aside purports to be a “recreational vehicle.”

Flabby use of language dilutes meaning, leads to sloppy thinking and invariably results in undesirable consequences. Consider, for example, the way we say the chief executive of a large corporation “earned” X million dollars. Nobody “earns” a million dollars—never mind $10 million, or ten times that amount—when the median working wage is $56,473. A CEO may be paid that amount, may be rewarded that amount, but to describe this remuneration as “earned” is to rob the word of all relevance.

Something similar is happening in the world of campgrounds and RV parks, where a deliberately sloppy embrace of “camping” has robbed the word of most meaning. One consequence is that affluent people—or people with access to capital—are free to invade rural areas and reshape them to their own liking, despite local efforts to maintain the character of their communities through zoning restrictions, land use plans and other attempts to limit unchecked growth. That tramples both local sensibilities and any meaningful understanding of camping per se.

Exhibit A: Prospect Lake in Egremont, Massachusetts, where developer Ian Rasch has started transforming a tired old 125-site RV park and campground into an affluent playground projected to have 40 high-end cabins, a spa, yoga classes, catered events, private saunas and hot tubs, evening cocktails and an upscale retail outlet. If a similar venture designed by the same architectural firm, Piaule Catskills, is any guide, nightly rates will start at $499 plus taxes and resort fees. This isn’t, in other words, anything like your grandfather’s campground, and even the latest window-dressing name for this sort of luxe indulgence won’t suffice: rather than call his project a “glampground,” Rasch’s documentation refers to it as a “landscape hotel.”

Yet as extensively documented in a 9,000 word article by Bill Shein of the Berkshire Argus, the well-heeled developer seldom utters the words “landscape hotel” in public. When it comes to seeking community approval for his plans, Rasch is all “camp” this and “campground” that, as in, “The campground will continue to operate as a campground but with fewer sites and upgraded amenities.” Which is like saying that a Maserati MC20 is just like your family minivan, but with fewer seats and an upgraded engine and aerodynamics.

As clearly inappropriate as it is, however, the campground label is hugely useful for Rasch or other developers who want to get around zoning restrictions that allow traditional campgrounds but not more overtly commercial enterprises, as in an otherwise residential area. Such end-runs are especially critical for existing campgrounds that predate existing zoning regulations, and therefore operate under grandfathered conditions that vanish if the use changes—as is the case with Prospect Lake. As summarized by Egremont’s board of health director, “What they’re going to be, as opposed to what they were, is going to be so vastly different. I’m thinking this is going to turn into a lodging. . . . It could be a ‘campground,’ but it will be a campground in name only.”

The irony here is that the traditional campground industry has been a key player in creating that confusion—why I referred to this as “deliberately sloppy” semantics. If Rasch wanted to build 40 cabins on his property, there’d be room to argue that he needs the kinds of permits and inspections that any permanent structures require. But because he’s planning to bring in cabins mounted on wheeled chassis, which the RV industry has successfully lobbied to have categorized as park model “recreational vehicles,” the fiction that this is a transient, non-permanent arrangement can be perpetuated with a straight face.

I’ve written repeatedly about the problems associated with the park model scam (here, here and here, for example), but the absurdity of insisting the emperor is fully clothed was summarized most unmistakably by Cynthia Zbierski, president and CEO of the Massachusetts Association of Campground Owners. When Shein referred to park model RVs as being “permanently sited,” she quickly corrected him by observing, without a hint of sardonic self-awareness, “They’re not going to be permanent because they’re on wheels.” Shein, alas, failed to follow up by asking just how many of the scores of park model RVs throughout the state’s 75 or so campgrounds have ever been moved from their initial placements.

The upshot, thanks to such muddied semantics, is that Rasch can tell Egremont he’s just fixing up a dilapidated campground—even as he markets the same property as a “landscape hotel” to an upscale clientele that thinks a thousand bucks a person for a weekend stay “should cost way more.” He can get away with that misrepresentation because the campground industry has lost sight of its core business, turning a blind eye to its bougie competitors. And Massachusetts now has 125 fewer RV sites, even though there’s been no change in its overall campground census.

No room for RVs in gentrifying parks

As RV parks and campgrounds become increasingly folded into the cultural mainstream, it’s perhaps inevitable that they start resembling the larger society, warts and all. And so it is that campgrounds, once a refuge from the glitz and ostentation that characterize the contemporary world, have become as vulnerable to gentrification as any downtown warehouse district.

Remember Woodlands KOA? Probably not. A well-reviewed and moderately priced campground in Bar Harbor, Maine, it was closed three years ago with promises that it was going to be renovated and improved. RVers who had camped there in the past were thrilled. But when the campground reopened in 2021 it had been rebranded as Terramor Outdoor Resort, all the RV sites were gone and all “camping” was now restricted to renting one of four different styles of luxury tents–at an average price of $450 a night.

No? Then perhaps you’re familiar with French Broad River Campground RV Park in North Carolina, described in an online review as “a little hidden rustic gem” with all of its RV sites right on the river and a nightly rate averaging $45. That little gem went for $1.8 million earlier this year, as its owners of the past 27 years decided they were ready to do a little RVing themselves. “After some renovations, the new owners will reopen,” they assured their campers in a final Facebook post.

Yes, they will–but not any time real soon, as there’s still a lot of work to be done. That’s because the new buyer is AutoCamp, a fitfully growing national chain of glampgrounds that rents Airstream trailers and luxury tents but does not maintain spaces for RVs or tents, which would bring down the upscale vibe it’s seeking. This is, after all, an operation that describes itself as “an outdoor boutique hotel experience.” Which, in English, means nightly stays north of $300.

Or consider Prospect Lake Park in the Berkshires, a decades-old campground on the shores of a 56-acre lake that hosted generations of campers for the kind of idyllic summer vacations that would have caught Norman Rockwell’s eye. Its sites started at $39 a night, but if you needed 50 amps you were out of luck and whether you had a good time depended on how well you dealt with a gruff management style. If that rubbed you the wrong way, good news: the campground is now closed for at least another year, purchased last winter by a local developer, Ian Rasch, for $2.1 million.

As reported last week by Bill Shein of the Berkshire Edge, longtime summer residents who had put down deposits for this past season got refunds and were told that the new owner was planning on “significant improvements to the facilities.” Which is true as far as it goes, which isn’t far enough: the “improvements” entail replacing 125 RV sites with 40 park model RVs, reportedly being designed by a Brooklyn-based firm widely known for its “innovative prefabricated modular structures.” The improvements will not leave room for RVers or tenters.

Rasch’s intentions are also signaled by his working with LAND, an Austin, Texas-based design firm, to create a new “brand identity” for what had been a somewhat scruffy facility. LAND’s most recent project in the area was the 2018 launch of Tourists, a motel-turned-boutique hotel in nearby North Adams, where rooms rent for $300 to $700 a night. Chi-chi ‘R’ Us.

Why go to all the trouble of reworking an existing RV park rather than starting with a clean slate? Wouldn’t the latter be much easier and less messy?

Perhaps–but going the virgin-birth route opens up a developer to the uncertainties that come with seeking conditional use permits or other zoning approval, which means public hearings and potential public opposition. That’s what Terramore is discovering with its second venture, a 77-acre property it wants to develop from the ground up in Saugerties, New York. Despite its best efforts at community diplomacy earlier this summer, Terramor has been hit by local opponents who seem unimpressed with its pretensions to “outdoor opulence done right” but are worrying about water use, traffic and noise. Two weeks ago the newly formed Citizens Against Terramor told the local newspaper, “We’re afraid we’re headed for World War III.”

The alternative to that nightmare, however, can mean dancing right up to the line defining permitted use. Although Rasch’s redevelopment of Prospect Lake Park will amount to construction of a lakeside cabin community, by using RV park models instead of real cabins–or even tiny homes–he can maintain the fiction that the property will remain what it’s always been: a “campground.”

Just don’t try to camp there.

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