Napa and “The Aspen Effect”

By MATT POPE

A populist frustration increasingly finding voice in Napa County is that the wine and hospitality industries are pulling in services and attractions that cater principally to upscale vacationers and tourists, while neglecting any sense of a local living wage and inadvertently threatening the very Ag preserve that those industries depend on through, among other things, jumbo-sized developments and hotel mega-resorts in areas that were once only the purview of B&B’s.  

Napa County has become a textbook example of what Cornell University Economics Professor Robert H. Frank calls “The Aspen Effect” — his term for traffic and other challenges resulting from that small Colorado resort towns’ transformation into a playground for the wealthy.

The low-wage service workers needed by Aspen’s new spas, restaurants and hotels have little chance of buying or renting a home there and often must commute from distant and more affordable bedroom communities. As a result, Frank observed “all roads into Aspen are clogged morning and night with commuters.” Sound familiar?

An over-arching angst that I hear and read is that is that Napa County is undergoing a “Disney-fication,” becoming a simulacrum of a once-rural area that is quaint for tourists but not livable for locals or the people who work here.

On the other hand, different voices are saying that Napa could do worse than comparisons to upscale destinations such as Aspen. The rationale goes that most of the things that once made working-class life predominant in Napa are gone and not likely to return, and that the principle thing that we have to trade on — besides (or perhaps tangential to) wine grapes — is a bucolic setting and an iconic name.  

I’m curious then what the blogosphere thinks. Can a middle-class economy be preserved in a region that is primarily dependent on upscale tourism?

Will our local jobs market continue to striate between low wage service workers and wealthy owners, with only a small professional and middle-wage class pinched in between? What, if any manufacturing and trades jobs could be promoted in Napa County to secure a viable working-class here?

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