Flint Michigan
April 23rd, 2009Posted in Skiing Everywhere
What might Flint, Michigan have to do with the future of skiing? Maybe a report on the radio yesterday about Flint’s efforts to become a smaller city will prove to be predictive of a not to distant in the future happening in the world of some ski resort communities.
What is Flint trying to do? The city is responding to the devastation its failing single industry (auto manufacturing) economy has wrought; thousands of abandoned homes, boarded up businesses and decaying neighborhoods by clearing whole neighborhoods and returning them to green, wilder spaces. Who ever heard of an American city (or practically anything American) not wanting to get bigger? Flint, formerly a city of around 200,000 wants to become a city of only about 100,000, which it figures is big enough to be viable in the changed economic landscape. What to do with the abandoned parts of a city? Return it to a somewhat natural, greener, pre-development state. The plan is also to encourage people to live in a more densely populated, more vibrant central city which will reduce transportation and many other costs- essentially changing the city to a more compact European model, as opposed to the sprawling 20th Century American city model.
But what might this have to do with skiing? The US is still a relatively young county so we don’t have the experience other civilizations have had with the ebb and flow of population changes. We’re used to the always growing bigger model, but just like financial bubbles, an end will come. Whole cities have come and gone in Europe and Asia, not to mention countless smaller towns and villages.
Ski country is now discovering that it is flirting with two possible bad outcomes; a warming world where skiing becomes impossible or a melting economy where skiing profits disappear and resorts close. What then becomes the fate of the many thousands of acres of ski related development that occurred when skiing seemed like a growth industry in dozens of poor communities scattered about the mountainous West? Just like Flint, ski communities’ health is strongly tied to the success of a single industry, if that industry fails, the communities have huge problems to deal with.
Ski resort communities are no strangers to boom and bust real estate cycles, but previously, the major ski resorts remained viable and life trundled on. But, suppose the money dries up or the snow is replaced by rain and empty homes and closed businesses become the scenery for summer tourists. Maybe by then, we’ll know if Flint’s efforts to down-size and restore its surrounding natural environment might be an answer to restoring economic and environmental health to suffering mountain towns.
Does this post seem a bit gloomy? On Earth Day, optimism should rule, especially with an administration in Washington that seems sincerely interested in putting the country on a saner environmental course, but I live in an area where thousands of recently developed land rush lots are flooding the market and prices have dropped by 50% or more in the past few months and where plans for developing many more thousands of acres have now been abandoned. I also grew up in another part of the country where a previous resort-real estate boom in the early part of the 20th century left a countryside polluted with abandoned huge hotels and second homes which remained blots on the landscape for decades as they rotted and crumbled and land values were some of the most depressed in the nation. The depredations of money-fevered developers can have long lasting negative consequences and I never see local communities planning to deal with anything except the hoped for good outcomes of more jobs and an increased tax base if things go as the developers promise. So, while it will take years before we’ll know if skiing based communities will remain viable, those of us who love the sport and the environment in which it takes place should keep an open mind to new ways of thinking about economics, development and land use- even those that seem to be counter-intuitive to recent behavior.
Leave a Comment