At a certain point, a town stops being a place and becomes a recommendation of some algorithm or other.
One can feel the shift before you can prove it. The coffee shop that once tolerated your loitering now has a line out the door populated by people who describe your hometown as “quaint,” which is rarely meant as a compliment so much as a prelude to conquest. The local dive bar becomes, gulp, a “destination.”
Tourism, to be fair, is not a villain per se. But it is a patron. In Sonoma County, more than 10.3 million visitors arrived in 2024, generating roughly $2.4 billion in spending and more than $218 million in tax revenue, according to Sonoma County Tourism. That money funds parks, roads, arts programs—the civic niceties we prefer to think of as natural rather than subsidized.
Marin, for its part, plays a quieter game. Tourism ticks upward—hotel demand rose about 7% in 2025, according to the ominously titled “Marin Convention And Visitors Bureau Visitor ROI And Metrics To Track,” courtesy of Economic Forensics and Analytics Inc.
I suppose this is the exchange: Tourists get the experience; we get the infrastructure. Kind of.
But what slips away is harder to quantify. A town begins to perform itself. Even the hardware store becomes “charming.” Places that once existed without explanation now come with a backstory, a brand narrative, a suggested hashtag.
Meanwhile, the housing tightens. Prices lift with the morning fog. Service jobs proliferate, but the people who work them increasingly live elsewhere, commuting into a version of another town, thus messing with its economy.
Sure, tourism doesn’t erase a place, but it puts everyone on “good behavior”—boooring. We don’t need to be Instagram-ready—we need to be friends, neighbors and local merchants reminding each other that we are what makes our community what it is, not AI-written marketing copy and the money that apparently follows with a parade of looky-loos.
Because we love where we live. We’re just bad with boundaries.
Cassady Caution lives and opines in the SonoMarin city of Petaluma.
