Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Seward, Alaska. Bar Harbor, Maine. While these towns and cities have highly varied history, climate, culture and terrain they all have one important thing in common. Each of them is a close neighbor to a large national park that draws tens of thousands of tourists each year.
They are what we call "gateway communities," important not just for their growing role in providing food, lodging, transportation and other business support for visitors but also as portals to cherished landscapes such as Yellowstone, Great Smoky Mountains, Kenai Fjords and Acadia National Parks.
You find gateway communities all across America, and they are increasingly popular places in which to live, work, vacation and retire. In the 1990s, 2 million more Americans moved from metropolitan centers to rural areas than migrated the other way.
Communities with natural beauty and a high quality of life are magnets for businesses, working families and retirees.
But rapid growth and popularity with visitors can place stress on communities. Here are just two examples:
- Bar Harbor, Maine, the gateway to Acadia National Park, has a population of 5,000 but sees 2.5 million tourists a year, most during the short summer season.
- Rural land near Bozeman, Mont., outside Yellowstone National Park, has gone from $600 per acre in 1981 to more than $20,000 an acre today.
Many groups including the Urban Land Institute and The Conservation Fund are working with communities across the country to create strategies that preserve their unique heritage while growing their economy and preserving their appeal. Here's what we've learned:
- The vast majority of residents, new and old, feel a strong attachment to the landscape and the character of their town. They want a healthy economy, but not at the expense of their natural surroundings or community character.
- Elected officials and residents want to find ways to preserve what they love about their communities without saying no to jobs and economic development.
- Across America, there are communities that have found that economic prosperity does not demand degraded surroundings, loss of community character or becoming a congested tourist trap.
- Successful communities are finding that the opposite is true: that beauty pays, that sustainable tourism provides more benefits than mass-market tourism, that retaining community character is a key to economic success, that thoughtful management of public resources and well-planned development can help prosperity occur.
With this
Toolkit, gateway communities have a resource to learn how they can protect natural treasures, preserve community character, and strengthen local economic growth.
No matter where your community is located, there are two things to keep in mind. First, special places do not remain that way by accident, and second, whether fast or slow, change will occur. Through this toolkit and our collective efforts, we hope that change comes to North America's special destinations because of thoughtful planning, collective action, and a shared community vision.
Ed McMahon is a Senior Resident Fellow at the Urban Land Institute and co-author of "Balancing Nature & Commerce in Gateway Communities"
Larry Selzer is President and CEO of The Conservation Fund
