Locals First
Tourism may be great for the brochures, but it’s steadily eroding the North Bay for the people who actually live here. Businesses that once depended on regulars now chase visitors with money to burn, pricing out locals and reshaping entire neighborhoods around weekend traffic.
That might feel sustainable in boom times, but we’ve already seen what happens when the music stops. During the pandemic—and every fire, flood and downturn before it—it wasn’t tourists who kept local shops afloat. It was locals buying takeout, gift cards and whatever else they could to keep doors open.
If businesses continue to treat locals as an afterthought, they’ll find themselves without a lifeline when the next crisis inevitably arrives. Visitors come and go. Locals stay, spend consistently and keep the community alive year-round.
Ignore them long enough, and there may not be much of a North Bay left to “experience.”
A. Garcia
North Bay
Food for Thought
Regarding “Uncommon Sense Woes” (Nov. 19), I’m curious who, or what, is the entity or entities we’re referring to here when stating they may be behind the demise of democracy?
Yes, humans are very complex in some ways, and we cling fiercely to our illusions. But, wondering if anti-intellectualism is the only force at play when reducing and flattening our experience.
Intellectuals have been at the core of complex social changes on account of our abilities to extrapolate, I believe. However, many spiritual people are tuned into the complexities of the non-tangible world, which has a deep richness. Just food for thought.
Tobi Lessem
Via Bohemian.com
