Travel Tip: Don’t Stay in the Places You Wish Were Never Built
It’s easy to find inexpensive lodging on the outskirts of a North American city. It will be in a familiar landscape surrounded by stroads, surface parking, and all the familiar hotel, restaurant and service-station chains. Here’s one I stayed in last year off Interstate 75 in Southwest Florida:
Note that this was a perfectly adequate property at a reasonable price and this is not a hotel review. But as I drove from the exurban edge to downtown Naples, I passed through countless isolated greenfield housing developments and retail on frontage roads (made doubly sad by the fact that it’s all being built on Florida panther habitat). Once in town, there’s a charming historic core with slow-moving traffic, gridded streets, and a parade of well-dressed humanity enjoying the comfortable, human scale.
The after-dinner drive back through the same discouraging landscape led to a resolution: Start seeking out the kind of lodging that accentuates the best reasons for visiting a place, and hopefully discourage the kind of development that’s contributing to its demise.
Here’s where I ended up the next time I visited Naples:
The car sat unused as I walked to a nearby restaurant and to the beach three blocks away. Again, this is not a hotel review (though I would stay here again), just a strong endorsement of the idea that, if you like a destination because it has certain attributes, you should reward the businesses that contribute to it with your consumer dollars. In this case, a local owner renovated an old courtyard-style motel, and visitors get a convenient base to experience one of Florida’s nicest beach towns.
Here’s another example of a place I stayed (once):
Before discovering this nearby option which I chose for my next visit to the area:
It’s a handsome anchor to a lively streetscape in the town of Winter Garden. I later learned that the Edgewater Hotel was a historic preservation success story that helped the town fulfill a goal of bringing people back to its main street after an economic downturn.
Making this decision is a win-win: You’ll have a more pleasant, authentic stay and your consumer decision could influence future development. In some ways, it’s like buying organic produce — it may cost more and it’s only a fraction of the existing supply chain, but showing there’s a consumer demand can shift production.
Like any industry, hotel companies pursue the most profitable locations and “if they see occupancy rates shifting to a different kind of hotel, they will go build those hotels,” says Chris Allen, who works to enable incremental development and directs Strong Towns' Events and Partnerships team.
Allen says the greatest hurdles for smaller developers are often regulatory and financial, with a system that encourages repetitive suburban development and disadvantages innovative infill projects. But with each success, which your two-night stay contributes to, a local hotel owner may prove to their lenders the viability of their business idea and encourage future in-town investment, “allowing more people to get good bank financing and move the market,” as Allen explains.
These successes can subsequently influence zoning reform, as small developers show city councils that such businesses are viable and advocate for more mixed-use zoning, especially in infill areas that may have restrictive single-family-only designations.
Strong Towns Chief of Staff Carlee Alm-LaBar says there’s a real connection between how you pursue change in your community and carrying that mindset wherever you visit. “People have to demonstrate their preferences through action. And when you're a tourist, you can do it just as much as you can when you're a local.”
Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.