Why Resort Town Residents Love to Hate Visitors
The City of Annapolis for the Ward One Sector Plan taught me that the world of a tourist town divides into the three distinct viewpoints, those of residents, businesses and visitors. That was thirty years ago and as I learned last week, it still holds true. In fact, there are academic studies about the love-hate relationship of residents and tourists, a bit less is typically said about the businesses who, depending on their nature, live off one or both other groups.
The nuisances coming from tourists and the endangered character of communities, the carrying capacity of the land, the roadways and the ecologies of resorts are debated from Ocean City MD to Key West Florida, from Portland, Maine to Cardiff by the Sea, California and from Veil, Colorado to Deep Creek Lake, Maryland.
The effect mass demand can have of killing the attributes that people came for in the first place is well known not only in tourism. It played out in American suburbs over the last seven decades. With relentless urbanization and population growth across the globe, the quest for the unspoiled retreats, the original character and the good old times of yesteryear becomes ever more self defeating but is not likely to abate any time soon, nor are the battles between those who "discovered" a treasured place first and those who want to join the joy later.
I got a pretty intimate view of this condition thanks to a weeklong Advisory Service for ULI on behalf of the three incorporated Florida towns of Bradenton Beach, Holmes Beach and Anna Maria, all located on the resort island of Anna Maria (AMI), Florida, located in the southern parts of Tampa Bay just south of Tampa. Motto: "Welcome to Paradise without an Attitude".
The hammer in the land use control tool box is, of course, zoning, usually a matter of local jurisdictions. (Home Rule). In 2011 the State of Florida handed its resort towns a special handicap in form of House Bill 883 which essentially turned the hammer into a sponge by forbidding cities and towns from enacting zoning or regulation specific to vacation rentals. Many called this a frontal assault on Home Rule, a principle which is typically and especially cherished by Republicans. Various subsequent appeals to the state's edict resulted in incremental relaxation, but essentially it remains true that a Florida town cannot limit the proliferation of vacation rentals in residential neighborhoods, either by controlling the duration of the lease or by limiting the number of beds or bedrooms. The result is that "vacation rental" have become much more prolific and grown into a veritable nuisance industry, variably described by neighbors as "party homes", "mini hotels" or simply as commercial uses.
The remaining options of using the traditional zoning tools of bulk, lot coverage, or setbacks, has proven to be surprisingly unsuccessful. Each can be craftily circumnavigated by intensifying use within the same volume, mostly through creating great numbers of small bedrooms. Even inventive terms like LAR (“Living area ratio,” the ratio of total conditioned living space to lot area) have not made a dent into the proliferation of vacation rentals and their associated impacts such as evening pool parties, overflow parking and super short term renters who care very little about their neighbors while giving the owners handsome returns of up to $6,000 a week, the municipalities higher property tax returns and the counties more tourist taxes.
This trend runs parallel to another, less nefarious but still worrisome affront to the "old Florida" way of life, the FEMA construction codes and insurance requirements. High insurance fees can price old time residents out, no matter if their mortgages have long been paid off. The building codes bulk up new homes through high wind resistant solid block construction and the required 6' elevation of living space above the ground level which is often just a few feet above sea-level.
Of course, as a Florida west-coast barrier island, Anna Maria has to worry about storms, rising sea levels and the fact that it has no own drinking water on the island.In addition the island is entirely dependent on two low bridges from the mainland that rise regularly to let the big boats of wealthy tourists pass.
One may dismiss this unfortunate troika of issues is particular to Florida, a place that was pretty much inhabitable before air conditioning and extensive draining of swamps. But one of the ULI panelists suggested that tourist growth and residential decline is very familiar to him from his hometown of Vail, Colorado, a ski resort 8000 feet above sea-level! What do these two have in common one is inclined to ask. "As you are hemmed in by water, so is my town limited by mountains" the Colorado based ULI advisor observed. "What the bridges are for you is a single road through a steep mountain valley for us which can barely be widened and certainly not be moved. Like your tourists all want to go to the beach, mine want to go to the lift, and in both towns those with service jobs can't afford to live where they work".
Being priced out or annoyed by noise on neighboring properties or fed up by the long lines of traffic, the parked up streets or the back-ups on the access roads leads, more and more residents pack up and find a cheaper or quieter home somewhere else. This, in turn, leaves the remaining residents with even more homes used by visitors, which leads to reduced needs for services like schools, libraries and churches and fewer voices in the next battle of residents versus visitors while the noise and congestion continue to grow. A vicious cycle that isn't easy to stop.
It does remind a bit of urban flight which only recently came to a halt, but with the significant difference that the resort flight doesn't leave the municipal tax coffers depleted but instead lavishly filled. The high intensity houses equipped with many bath and bedrooms are assessed higher than the traditional single family homes pay, as noted, more property and tourist taxes. Nevertheless, the process of economical segregation in which the less fortunate draw the short end of the stick is, indeed, similar to the one that occurred in the big cities as well.
What can be done? At first blush the problems seem vexing or intractable. But as is often the case, problems bear in themselves the potential for solutions. In the case of AMI, ULI suggested possible solutions for the following topic areas, not all had been identified by the mayors who had called ULI in to help:
Traffic
Traffic and parking may not necessarily be the most important issues but they almost always get top ranking in community concerns. With limited access like in the case of Anna Maria Island (two drawbridges) or Vail (a narrow canyon roadway), what causes the congestion also presents a natural control valve. It may not be a simple as "pull up the drawbridges" as I suggested jokingly under some applause from the audience during the ULI panel report, but it could be as straight forward as not adding capacity. This sounds counterintuitive to plenty of people who reflexively want to respond to congestion with more lanes and wider roads. (FDOT has bridge reconstruction for Anna Maria under review which includes a fixed higher bridge and the usual wide shoulders etc. which essentially translate into more capacity even if the design is cloaked by the veil of safety). A slightly more complex approach to capacity management is demand based pricing with bridge or access road tolls that vary with demand. Residents could be protected via low cost annual permit stickers, a solution that has been in place for decades at Maryland's Hatem bridge across the Susquehanna. Bridge tolls would reduce access route queues which in turn could improve the effectiveness of the only transit facility reaching Anna Maria, the Beach Express (Sundays and holidays only).
The two transportation experts on the ULI panel for Anna Maria Island (AMI), Ross Tilghman from Seattle, and Paul Moore, Principal at Nelson Nygaard in LA, did not propose bridge tolls, but they did suggest that demand-based pricing is an effective way to deal with parking. They spoke about the "high cost of free parking" which in the case of AMI leads to parking in those residential streets that happen to have beach access and quite substantial congestion from folks hunting for the rare trophy spots after the main beach parking lot near the bridge at Holmes Beach fills up. Residential streets could additionally be protected from beach parking through residential parking permits, a solution
promoted by some community activists on AMI and found unnecessary by others. Residential permits and demand based parking fees on the beach lots would reduce congestion which would help the second transit option, the free island shuttle to operate more reliable and on schedule. It carries some half million riders annually with three buses operating at 20 minute headways. (In Vail, by the way, shuttles also bring visitors from satellite lots to the lifts).
Like many transportation problems, resort traffic is subject to peak demand with daily, weekly and annual peaks. In the case of Anna Maria those peak demand days spread over 40 days a year with annual peaks in March, weekly peaks on the weekend and arrival/departure peaks coinciding with a typical day at the beach. Like many other resorts, AMI as well as Vail strive to extend their seasons across the year. In Florida beaches can be enjoyed year round while the Rocky Mountain resorts can attract hikers and bikers in the summer using the same shuttles and lifts originally installed for the skiers and snow boarders.
Good transportation management aims to reduce the peaks further and organize a more even supply capacity not based on peaks but on sustained volumes. A demand based pricing scheme could flatten the peaks and incentivize off-peak usage, a win-win situation. For those with less flexibility, paying more for access and parking would have to be offset by significantly improved transit. More transit may actually be more cost effective than additional roadway capacity and bigger bridges and also reduce operating costs for the entire transportation system inside the resort centers.
Employee Housing
George Ruther, the planner from Vail, introduced an unexpected topic into the discussion about tourists, residents and traffic by raising the issue of employees who can't afford to live on the resort. As it turned out, this issue has a lot to do with what we discussed so far as this 2008 Vail Employee Housing Strategic Plan explains in its introduction:
Planning and Design
Design and planning is usually not particularly on peoples minds, at least not as a problem solving device. The already mentioned Ward One Sector Plan for Annapolis also taught me the important lesson of preservation and change areas: Historic preservation works for maintaining the character of certain areas under pressures of growth and change if it is combined with a relief valve i.e. areas where those things can go one doesn't want to see in the preservation areas. In the case of Maryland's capital the relief area was West Street. Still part of downtown, it became the corridor for larger mixed use buildings. In essence, the small city of Annapolis did what Paris did with La Defense and London with the Docklands, providing space for growth and new building types that has allowed other areas to stay as they were.
On Anna Maria where everyone seems to talk incessantly about "Old Florida" and where the entire island promises reprieve from the condo towers and sprawl of most other Florida resorts, the distinction between preservation areas and change areas could be an especially vital strategy. Yet, there are no designated historic districts let alone designated growth areas.
Even though data from across the entire United States suggests that historic preservation pays off in the long run, individual property owners still tend to shy away from writing off the possibility of a bigger, more intensively used house on their lot, the final "cash-in and run" option that a historic district would block. Provided there is enough housing stock that is at least 50 years old and deserves to be characterized as "Old Florida", preservation would, indeed, be a winning strategy, nothwithstanding the FEMA regulations requiring the sturdy elevated so called "FEMA boxes".
And growth areas? Where should they even fit on a small fully-built-out island? It takes a second look to come into focus how much wasted space there is even on this tiny island. Devoted to surface car parking, low flung single story non descript uses are spread out without discernible rhyme or reason in just the same manner as on the mainland. Although one could call this kind of sprawl "Old Florida" as well, those areas are so devoid of "character" or "place-making" that it is hard to imagine that anybody's heart would bleed if they were repurposed to become high quality growth areas in which residents and tourists could shop, meet and live in apartments above shops and restaurants.
Vail sheds an interesting light on yet another strategy: Design and design guidelines. Many mountain and ski resorts evoke the European Alps but unlike their overseas brethren, they are often full of cheap junk development and commercial sprawl that is unfortunately so typical for many US towns, no matter how scenic their setting, Vail is an exception: It has achieved a high level of stylistic cohesion and truly created a replica of Alpine architecture. For a town that was created within a short period of time this cohesion may be easier to achieve but it shouldn't stop coastal communities that grew over a much longer period to find their own style as well, even if it is far more eclectic and much less cohesive. "Keep it quirky" I suggested in my little talk, "but make the new stuff good".
As part of ULI's final report I told the community that design matters and that it could be an essential tool to make visitors more vested in what residents call their hometowns. To create a town fewer people like, I suggested, was not a winning strategy. Better to have the goal of designing new buildings and places so that they are truly remarkable and can be cherished or even loved.
Of course, the differentiation between change and preservation areas requires more than historic districts and design guidelines. The distinction needs to permeate through all regulations and codes and policies especially zoning, but also parking policies, public investments and infrastructure and in the end lead to a determination of "carrying capacity".
This category, finally, far from being the least important, can actually become the umbrella for most other policies. Yet it wasn't explicitly listed in the assignments for ULI. It just isn't a pleasant thought to consider the possibility that 2' higher sea-levels, combined with some stronger hurricanes, could reconfigure the island in never before seen ways or even wipe it out altogether.
What could be done in the event of a worst case scenario? Even today the island requires complete evacuation in all major hurricanes, with the highest island elevations hovering only 6 feet above normal sea levels. Resilience is about springing back after a disaster and about being prepared, more self reliant and less dependent on supplies from the mainland. Self reliance and preparedness for disasters would be applicable as a guiding principle for any town, even for Vail which is entirely safe from hurricanes and the sea, just think avelanges or forest fires. Reliable emergency drinking water supply, electricity production and food resources are desirable in any place. In Florida, where water is an issue in all its forms, from drinking water to sewerage, from groundwater to rain and from surface water (stormwater which, in high tide conditions, cannot easily flow off and create internal flooding) to finally sea water, resilience needs to be planned with utmost diligence.
Resource management and conservation include more than water. They need to include all aspects of local habitats and ecosystems. In the case of the Florida island of Anna Maria, beaches, dunes and the immediate areas outside of the State mandated control lines are the only remaining larger undeveloped areas. They are not only vital for the perceived quality of the islands and visitors' favorite activities, they are also essential protections against the destructive side of the Gulf of Mexico.
Conclusion
Will residents and tourists ever love each other? The chances are not as bad as it looks. If one considers how many of the bigger goals and objectives should be shared, why should they be on each other's throats? Both groups should be interested in all or most of these:
All photos copyright by author unless otherwise noted
last updated 3/7/15 8:30h
 |
| Slogan on a lamp post in Bradenton Beach |
The nuisances coming from tourists and the endangered character of communities, the carrying capacity of the land, the roadways and the ecologies of resorts are debated from Ocean City MD to Key West Florida, from Portland, Maine to Cardiff by the Sea, California and from Veil, Colorado to Deep Creek Lake, Maryland.
The effect mass demand can have of killing the attributes that people came for in the first place is well known not only in tourism. It played out in American suburbs over the last seven decades. With relentless urbanization and population growth across the globe, the quest for the unspoiled retreats, the original character and the good old times of yesteryear becomes ever more self defeating but is not likely to abate any time soon, nor are the battles between those who "discovered" a treasured place first and those who want to join the joy later.
It is becoming increasingly challenging to provide access to the most desirable places and spaces, while also protecting them (Cordell 1999)Of course, with those global drivers the effect is not limited to North America but is unfolding worldwide. Yet, countries like the US with weak land use laws and a high priority on property rights have a harder time controlling and managing such trends.
 |
| Island Postcard |
I got a pretty intimate view of this condition thanks to a weeklong Advisory Service for ULI on behalf of the three incorporated Florida towns of Bradenton Beach, Holmes Beach and Anna Maria, all located on the resort island of Anna Maria (AMI), Florida, located in the southern parts of Tampa Bay just south of Tampa. Motto: "Welcome to Paradise without an Attitude".
The hammer in the land use control tool box is, of course, zoning, usually a matter of local jurisdictions. (Home Rule). In 2011 the State of Florida handed its resort towns a special handicap in form of House Bill 883 which essentially turned the hammer into a sponge by forbidding cities and towns from enacting zoning or regulation specific to vacation rentals. Many called this a frontal assault on Home Rule, a principle which is typically and especially cherished by Republicans. Various subsequent appeals to the state's edict resulted in incremental relaxation, but essentially it remains true that a Florida town cannot limit the proliferation of vacation rentals in residential neighborhoods, either by controlling the duration of the lease or by limiting the number of beds or bedrooms. The result is that "vacation rental" have become much more prolific and grown into a veritable nuisance industry, variably described by neighbors as "party homes", "mini hotels" or simply as commercial uses.
.JPG) |
| One of the larger "improved" homes with many bedrooms |
The remaining options of using the traditional zoning tools of bulk, lot coverage, or setbacks, has proven to be surprisingly unsuccessful. Each can be craftily circumnavigated by intensifying use within the same volume, mostly through creating great numbers of small bedrooms. Even inventive terms like LAR (“Living area ratio,” the ratio of total conditioned living space to lot area) have not made a dent into the proliferation of vacation rentals and their associated impacts such as evening pool parties, overflow parking and super short term renters who care very little about their neighbors while giving the owners handsome returns of up to $6,000 a week, the municipalities higher property tax returns and the counties more tourist taxes.
This trend runs parallel to another, less nefarious but still worrisome affront to the "old Florida" way of life, the FEMA construction codes and insurance requirements. High insurance fees can price old time residents out, no matter if their mortgages have long been paid off. The building codes bulk up new homes through high wind resistant solid block construction and the required 6' elevation of living space above the ground level which is often just a few feet above sea-level.
 |
| Front row, a new Gulf facing home constructed under FEMA guidelines |
Of course, as a Florida west-coast barrier island, Anna Maria has to worry about storms, rising sea levels and the fact that it has no own drinking water on the island.In addition the island is entirely dependent on two low bridges from the mainland that rise regularly to let the big boats of wealthy tourists pass.
One may dismiss this unfortunate troika of issues is particular to Florida, a place that was pretty much inhabitable before air conditioning and extensive draining of swamps. But one of the ULI panelists suggested that tourist growth and residential decline is very familiar to him from his hometown of Vail, Colorado, a ski resort 8000 feet above sea-level! What do these two have in common one is inclined to ask. "As you are hemmed in by water, so is my town limited by mountains" the Colorado based ULI advisor observed. "What the bridges are for you is a single road through a steep mountain valley for us which can barely be widened and certainly not be moved. Like your tourists all want to go to the beach, mine want to go to the lift, and in both towns those with service jobs can't afford to live where they work".
 |
| Gore Creek Drive, Vail, CO by Nick Csakany Licensed Wikimedia Commons |
Being priced out or annoyed by noise on neighboring properties or fed up by the long lines of traffic, the parked up streets or the back-ups on the access roads leads, more and more residents pack up and find a cheaper or quieter home somewhere else. This, in turn, leaves the remaining residents with even more homes used by visitors, which leads to reduced needs for services like schools, libraries and churches and fewer voices in the next battle of residents versus visitors while the noise and congestion continue to grow. A vicious cycle that isn't easy to stop.
It does remind a bit of urban flight which only recently came to a halt, but with the significant difference that the resort flight doesn't leave the municipal tax coffers depleted but instead lavishly filled. The high intensity houses equipped with many bath and bedrooms are assessed higher than the traditional single family homes pay, as noted, more property and tourist taxes. Nevertheless, the process of economical segregation in which the less fortunate draw the short end of the stick is, indeed, similar to the one that occurred in the big cities as well.
What can be done? At first blush the problems seem vexing or intractable. But as is often the case, problems bear in themselves the potential for solutions. In the case of AMI, ULI suggested possible solutions for the following topic areas, not all had been identified by the mayors who had called ULI in to help:
- Traffic, transportation, access and parking
- Employee housing
- Planning, zoning and design
- Sustainability and resilience
 |
| Traffic on Anna Maria Island |
Traffic
Traffic and parking may not necessarily be the most important issues but they almost always get top ranking in community concerns. With limited access like in the case of Anna Maria Island (two drawbridges) or Vail (a narrow canyon roadway), what causes the congestion also presents a natural control valve. It may not be a simple as "pull up the drawbridges" as I suggested jokingly under some applause from the audience during the ULI panel report, but it could be as straight forward as not adding capacity. This sounds counterintuitive to plenty of people who reflexively want to respond to congestion with more lanes and wider roads. (FDOT has bridge reconstruction for Anna Maria under review which includes a fixed higher bridge and the usual wide shoulders etc. which essentially translate into more capacity even if the design is cloaked by the veil of safety). A slightly more complex approach to capacity management is demand based pricing with bridge or access road tolls that vary with demand. Residents could be protected via low cost annual permit stickers, a solution that has been in place for decades at Maryland's Hatem bridge across the Susquehanna. Bridge tolls would reduce access route queues which in turn could improve the effectiveness of the only transit facility reaching Anna Maria, the Beach Express (Sundays and holidays only).
The two transportation experts on the ULI panel for Anna Maria Island (AMI), Ross Tilghman from Seattle, and Paul Moore, Principal at Nelson Nygaard in LA, did not propose bridge tolls, but they did suggest that demand-based pricing is an effective way to deal with parking. They spoke about the "high cost of free parking" which in the case of AMI leads to parking in those residential streets that happen to have beach access and quite substantial congestion from folks hunting for the rare trophy spots after the main beach parking lot near the bridge at Holmes Beach fills up. Residential streets could additionally be protected from beach parking through residential parking permits, a solution
 |
| Access bridges provide limited capacity (this particular bridge leads to the next island) |
Like many transportation problems, resort traffic is subject to peak demand with daily, weekly and annual peaks. In the case of Anna Maria those peak demand days spread over 40 days a year with annual peaks in March, weekly peaks on the weekend and arrival/departure peaks coinciding with a typical day at the beach. Like many other resorts, AMI as well as Vail strive to extend their seasons across the year. In Florida beaches can be enjoyed year round while the Rocky Mountain resorts can attract hikers and bikers in the summer using the same shuttles and lifts originally installed for the skiers and snow boarders.
.JPG) |
| Free AMI shuttle bus |
Employee Housing
George Ruther, the planner from Vail, introduced an unexpected topic into the discussion about tourists, residents and traffic by raising the issue of employees who can't afford to live on the resort. As it turned out, this issue has a lot to do with what we discussed so far as this 2008 Vail Employee Housing Strategic Plan explains in its introduction:
“The Town of Vail recognizes the need for housing as infrastructure that promotes community, reduces transit needs and keeps more employees living in the town, and will provide enough deed-restricted housing for at least 30 percent of the workforce through policies, regulations and publicly initiated development.”The plan requires employers to provide employee housing or pay fees in lieu, requires developers to offer affordable units (inclusionary zoning), and provides supply through strategic deed restricted "buy-downs" in which the town buys units off the market. This concept works when the market is strong and city income is high. The policy recognizes that in the long run, the community and the town's budget are better off with those up-front investments which reduce traffic, reduce the need for expensive parking and most importantly, increase the ranks of residents, the citizens who care the most about their community. The Vail employee housing policy convinced the ULI panel to suggest similar steps to the three towns of AMI.
 |
| One of three AMI city halls where zoning is decided |
Planning and Design
Design and planning is usually not particularly on peoples minds, at least not as a problem solving device. The already mentioned Ward One Sector Plan for Annapolis also taught me the important lesson of preservation and change areas: Historic preservation works for maintaining the character of certain areas under pressures of growth and change if it is combined with a relief valve i.e. areas where those things can go one doesn't want to see in the preservation areas. In the case of Maryland's capital the relief area was West Street. Still part of downtown, it became the corridor for larger mixed use buildings. In essence, the small city of Annapolis did what Paris did with La Defense and London with the Docklands, providing space for growth and new building types that has allowed other areas to stay as they were.
On Anna Maria where everyone seems to talk incessantly about "Old Florida" and where the entire island promises reprieve from the condo towers and sprawl of most other Florida resorts, the distinction between preservation areas and change areas could be an especially vital strategy. Yet, there are no designated historic districts let alone designated growth areas.
 |
| The old Anna Maria Pier where ferries used to dock before the bridges were built |
And growth areas? Where should they even fit on a small fully-built-out island? It takes a second look to come into focus how much wasted space there is even on this tiny island. Devoted to surface car parking, low flung single story non descript uses are spread out without discernible rhyme or reason in just the same manner as on the mainland. Although one could call this kind of sprawl "Old Florida" as well, those areas are so devoid of "character" or "place-making" that it is hard to imagine that anybody's heart would bleed if they were repurposed to become high quality growth areas in which residents and tourists could shop, meet and live in apartments above shops and restaurants.
 |
| New Pier where a bridge had been replaced |
Vail sheds an interesting light on yet another strategy: Design and design guidelines. Many mountain and ski resorts evoke the European Alps but unlike their overseas brethren, they are often full of cheap junk development and commercial sprawl that is unfortunately so typical for many US towns, no matter how scenic their setting, Vail is an exception: It has achieved a high level of stylistic cohesion and truly created a replica of Alpine architecture. For a town that was created within a short period of time this cohesion may be easier to achieve but it shouldn't stop coastal communities that grew over a much longer period to find their own style as well, even if it is far more eclectic and much less cohesive. "Keep it quirky" I suggested in my little talk, "but make the new stuff good".
As part of ULI's final report I told the community that design matters and that it could be an essential tool to make visitors more vested in what residents call their hometowns. To create a town fewer people like, I suggested, was not a winning strategy. Better to have the goal of designing new buildings and places so that they are truly remarkable and can be cherished or even loved.
 |
| Non descript low intensity use commercial districts could be "change areas" to receive development |
Of course, the differentiation between change and preservation areas requires more than historic districts and design guidelines. The distinction needs to permeate through all regulations and codes and policies especially zoning, but also parking policies, public investments and infrastructure and in the end lead to a determination of "carrying capacity".
Resilience
This category, finally, far from being the least important, can actually become the umbrella for most other policies. Yet it wasn't explicitly listed in the assignments for ULI. It just isn't a pleasant thought to consider the possibility that 2' higher sea-levels, combined with some stronger hurricanes, could reconfigure the island in never before seen ways or even wipe it out altogether.
 |
| Some homes are perched dangerously close to the sea |
What could be done in the event of a worst case scenario? Even today the island requires complete evacuation in all major hurricanes, with the highest island elevations hovering only 6 feet above normal sea levels. Resilience is about springing back after a disaster and about being prepared, more self reliant and less dependent on supplies from the mainland. Self reliance and preparedness for disasters would be applicable as a guiding principle for any town, even for Vail which is entirely safe from hurricanes and the sea, just think avelanges or forest fires. Reliable emergency drinking water supply, electricity production and food resources are desirable in any place. In Florida, where water is an issue in all its forms, from drinking water to sewerage, from groundwater to rain and from surface water (stormwater which, in high tide conditions, cannot easily flow off and create internal flooding) to finally sea water, resilience needs to be planned with utmost diligence.
.JPG) |
| Natural assets and habitats explained (Holmes Beach) |
Resource management and conservation include more than water. They need to include all aspects of local habitats and ecosystems. In the case of the Florida island of Anna Maria, beaches, dunes and the immediate areas outside of the State mandated control lines are the only remaining larger undeveloped areas. They are not only vital for the perceived quality of the islands and visitors' favorite activities, they are also essential protections against the destructive side of the Gulf of Mexico.
Conclusion
Will residents and tourists ever love each other? The chances are not as bad as it looks. If one considers how many of the bigger goals and objectives should be shared, why should they be on each other's throats? Both groups should be interested in all or most of these:
- good design and land use planning
- steady and sustainable economic development and enough income to keep things in good shape
- protection of history
- protection of natural resources and habitats
- choices in reliable circulation
- clean air, water and lands
- resilience against natural disasters
.JPG)
The importance of rain water capture on a placard in
Holmes Beach
To get to a win-win residents need to stop considering themselves victims, and need to be willing to plan their future and take a long-term view in terms of costs and benefits. They need to collaborate and achieve the highest standards for their community in terms of design, planning, equity and sustainability. Resort places need to find a niche in which to thrive. Anna Maria Island's niche could be low key family vacations combined with active lifestyle programming that could include hiking, biking, bird-watching and eco-tourism. Visitors who love their vacation destinations can help the residents in achieving these goals. Anything else will eventually kill the goose that lays the golden egg leaving residents and visitors alike without what they came for in the first place.
 |
| Tourists and residents enjoy the same assets (Bradenton Beach Pier) |
Klaus Philipsen, FAIA
edited by Ben Groff
All photos copyright by author unless otherwise noted
last updated 3/7/15 8:30h
Links:
Video clips from ULI report out session
Articles about the ULI Panel here and here
Check out the new Community Architect Daily
Community Architect Daily:
An Urban Land Institute Panel Tells Anna Maria Islanders to Charge for Parking
Articles about the ULI Panel here and here
Check out the new Community Architect Daily
Community Architect Daily:
An Urban Land Institute Panel Tells Anna Maria Islanders to Charge for Parking
Post a Comment