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Building For Tourism vs. Livability


spenser1058

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From the Urban Phoenix and seemed especially pertinent for us:

https://theurbanphoenix.com/2017/05/18/tourismvsresidents/

It's come up a few times over the years as we've debated what downtown should be.

I also thought of the raging battles in Daytona about special events like Bike Week and (less so now) Spring Break. Who's more important? The economy and putting heads in beds or the residents being inconvenienced for weeks on end?

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Great point.  Where Daytona, for example, went wrong, was when in the Early Nineties they told MTV to take a hike and later told BET the same thing, because they had the LPGA now and wanted to change Daytona's image.  Since then, the lodging industry in the area for the most part tanked.  So, a lot of those motel properties sold to developers during the boom because they weren't making any money.  Then, the bust occurred.  The result:  a bunch of empty parcels on the beach. A bunch.  What you see on the beachside (sans the new projects) is a direct result of those bad decisions from City Hall.  Even the bikers left, in that, Bruce Rossmeyer built the biker village off of I-95 north of town bringing most of the Bike Week activity with it.  Daytona lost out on continued free national TV exposure as well that could've led to stuff. 

So the County developed a few of those parcels into beachfront parks, which account for only like 5% of the vacant land along A1A.

In the end, what we all must understand, is that every city has tourism.  Daytona, Orlando, LA, Paris, Athens, Rome, Hong Kong, Miami, Chicago.  They're not going to dismantle the Eiffel Tower or shut down the Louvre because locals are sick of tourists. 

I think locals need to just suck it up is what I'm saying.  Did I go off point?  I'm not sure; this was about downtown Orlando...

 

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