State of the City, Sonoma

Sonoma is a resort town with the Plaza overlay zone being the honeypot tourist attraction. Hotels, bed and breakfast venues combined with the Plaza and surrounding pastoral vineyard landscapes constitute the prime attraction. Boutique luxury shops, restaurants, wine tasting, real estate offices, hotels, bed and breakfasts all proliferate at ground zero. All these businesses work on formulary themes about wine and Dionysian/ European pastoral idealism. Historic aspects: buildings, museums, actual history and small town charm add to the attractive ambience.

Wine is the main attraction with corollary organic produce, cheese and other oral consumable themes and venues riding shotgun. ‘Events’ provide a new synergy designed to capture the strong flow of tourist dollars. Real estate is the number one wine partner. As with other tourist towns, Sonoma is popular with wealthy retirees and vacation homebuyers. This popularity drives up land values and also the regional cost of living. The construction and real estate economy goes hand in hand with wine-theme tourism.

Clearly, tourism, vacationing and destination popularity constitute the bulk of the Sonoma economy. It’s nice in Sonoma Valley anyway; it’s not the wine per se; primarily it’s the climate, geography and small town mystique. There was a resort and tourist industry here before Prohibition and the Depression. Adjacent to a major urban area that tends to be foggy and cool, the dry, sunny Sonoma Valley calls to those with the ability to get away.

Today tourism is the prime mover of the economy. Before it was basalt quarries, mixed agriculture and a resort industry based on climate, hot springs and rail access. Tourist bureaus now try hard to maintain continuous entertainment events: art, craft, show, music, food etc, to draw tourists year-round, tourists who will spend, consume and thus provide income and sustenance for business and government. Jobs and occupations revolve around this central axis: wine, vineyards, food, real estate, construction, maintenance and service for all of the above. It appears to be working. The economy is booming.

People ask, what could be wrong here? There’s no problem; all is good. What’s wrong is that tourist towns have known problems; social equity and environmental sustainability are lacking. Service jobs are low paying; housing is unaffordable to the working class; the cost of living and tourist inflation requires workers to drive far from Sonoma to find affordable prices. Health and dental options are limited. What’s wrong is that locals and workers are progressively forced out into 

bedroom communities as is typical of tourist towns like Woodstock VT and Aspen CO.

Environmental sustainability is an issue with groundwater depletion, stream channeling, saltwater intrusion and silting in of waterways. No anadromous fish is the ecological canary in the coalmine. The tension between growth and conservation is shunted aside in the celebration of how great everything is. Short-term thinking rules. A monoculture crop as the basis of wealth generation is inherently vulnerable, and unsustainable. All eggs in one basket is not smart strategy. Somehow past socio-economic collapses don’t apply to the thinking here.

Another issue arising from tourism is the flavor of town culture. Since the economy has obviously tipped to tourism, will culture go that way too? Plaza wine tasting is a symbolic dispute here. Will the center of town be a tourist honeypot with nothing for residents? Will tourism cultural issues even be addressed and articulated by the government and media?

Another thing wrong is disenfranchisement. If workers and former locals cannot afford to live in a tourist town, they cannot vote here either.  How can workers mount any kind of presence if they don’t even live and vote where they work? 

How can a culture and society all about consuming adopt principles of environmental sustainability? A self-reinforcing dynamic develops where top economic players exclude social equity and environmental interests. The tourist economy with a myopic economic bottom line eclipses social and environmental concerns. Thus the state of the valley has serious submerged issues to grapple with and as long as facts about what constitutes sustainability are only seen through an economic lens, the full state of the valley is not likely to be addressed.

It’s clear we have ideological tension, a struggle for power and control. There’s a stalemate between free market principles and a more directed, planned approach. Tourism is seen by many as a sellout to a materialist consumer paradigm at odds with sustainable principles overall. Sonoma is tipped pretty far to being a tourist place and as far as I can tell, there hasn’t been a lot of productive dialogue to include those who prefer something different.