“I hate the [expletive] Eagles,” declares Jeff Bridges as the stoner-turned-detective hero of The Big Lebowski, the classic Coen brothers film study of Los Angeles.
But even if you aren’t a fan of the bestselling band of the ’70s, you’ve gotta give the Eagles this: Their most famous song was so dead-on that it now explains our state’s economic, geographic, and demographic realities.
You’re a Hotel, California.
As Californians pick up the pieces from the Great Recession, the trend is clear. The parts of our state’s regional economies that involve Californians serving other Californians—construction, real estate, government—have been hit hard. But the economic sectors that involve Californians serving people from elsewhere—trade, technology, and export-oriented pieces of media, entertainment, agriculture, education, and health—are mostly growing. So it’s more important than ever for us put on a hospitable face for the world.
Friendliness to visitors is all the more crucial since we are producing fewer new California residents (because of big declines in California’s birth rate and in immigration) and since some of our fundamentals—relatively high taxes, heavy regulation, and decaying infrastructure—are unattractive. Any hotelier knows that when you’re overpriced and a little ragged around the edges, like, say, the Hotel Del Coronado, you must make up for it with good hospitality.
Especially when it comes to travel and tourism. The amount spent by visitors to California can seem small—it’s a little more than $100 billion, equal to the size of the state’s general fund, which is less than 10 percent of the economy—but its impact is outsized.
While famous attractions like Disneyland and the Golden Gate Bridge are important pieces of their local economies, tourism packs an even bigger economic punch in smaller inland communities with undiversified economies, where one or two steady attractions can be a lifeline. A report from Dean Runyon Associates finds that Sierra counties like Mariposa (Yosemite Valley) and Mono (Mammoth Lakes) get more than half of their local taxes via tourism.
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