Traverse City’s Vibe Isn’t Lost; It’s Just Changing

Guest Opinion

By Tim Mulherin | July 22, 2023

I read Mary Keyes Rogers’ Northern Express guest opinion piece, “When Traverse City Lost Her Vibe,” from July 3, 2023, with great interest. Rogers makes it clear that her contacts among the “regulars” who’ve been visiting the region for years, if not decades, are quite unsettled about the changes they’ve been seeing and experiencing this year. 

Change of late in the area, as she suggests, is distinctly in the category of “more.” More new construction. More people. More traffic. More what the heck is happening around here?

It’s human nature to romanticize the past. True, Traverse City used to be a sleepy northern Michigan town, as were the outlying villages like Suttons Bay, Leland, and Glen Arbor. Of course, tourism here was a thing back then, as it had been for well over 100 years, though not in the extraordinary numbers seen today. 

But even back in the eighties, locals, most notably in Traverse City, complained about the increasing number of tourists and the corresponding traffic congestion; about the high prices of nearly everything and the lack of affordable housing; and yes, even about the folks experiencing homelessness, especially around the Boardman-Ottaway River.

Yet profound change has come to the region, just as it has throughout the years since it was “discovered” in the 1600s by French trappers/explorers then later settled by Europeans in the mid-1800s. (On land that Indigenous peoples had called home for thousands of years.) 

In the late 1800s and into the early nineteenth century, the logging industry decimated northwest lower Michigan’s forests. Thanks to conservation efforts by the U.S. Forest Service and the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, the woodlands and rivers victimized by the voracious lumber harvest have recovered. 

More recently, the pandemic opened the door to remote work, and some of those younger white-collar professionals who had visited the region previously—and were awestruck by it, a universal visitor experience—found a unique opportunity to relocate Up North.

Just as those who came before them, these new migrants have brought their own lifeways to the Grand Traverse region. And why wouldn’t they? As the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime” so aptly sums up human behavior, it’s the same as it ever was.

I’m 67 years old. I recognize that my lifetime experience informs my outlook: sometimes accurately, other times, well, not so much. And I realize that it’s important to understand that younger people will always make their mark, for better and for worse, just as my generation of Baby Boomers has. We’ve done some good, and we’ve made our mistakes. Indeed, same as it ever was.

I’ve been coming Up North since 1986. The first time I saw Grand Traverse Bay, while driving over a ridge on M-72 from Kalkaska, I was immediately and permanently smitten. Hailing from Indianapolis—where the land is pool-table flat, the White River fouled by farm runoff and pollution, and the summer air often stale and toxic—I suddenly felt as if I had arrived at my true home. Since that magic moment, I’ve spent as much time as possible here, evolving from tourist to seasonal resident.

I hold tight to my precious memories of going to South Beach in Leland in the mid-nineties with my young family. The home we rented for three annual summer vacations running—way before the advent of VRBO and Airbnb—was conveniently located but a block from that beach, which we shared with, on average, perhaps 30 other people on “busy” picture-perfect August afternoons. 

Alas, those days are long gone. Now, the “crowds” of vacationers finding their place in the sun in Leland has doubled or even tripled on any given summer day. Yet Coney Island it is not. 

Locals and “regulars” should accept that the region has certainly been discovered (remember when Good Morning America’s viewers voted Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore the “Most Beautiful Place in America” in 2011?), and there’s no returning to days of yore. 

But there is a limited-time-only opportunity to plan for how growth can be managed. Don’t let the chance to imagine a prosperous, environmentally-friendly future for the Grand Traverse region get away. Otherwise, change will just happen. And you may not like the results.

Tim Mulherin is the author of Sand, Stars, Wind, & Water: Field Notes from Up North, a nonfiction collection of essays and stories about his outdoor adventures in northern Michigan. He recently submitted his next book—which explores the impact of the pandemic, climate change, and tourism on northwest lower Michigan—to Michigan State University Press. When it comes to the subject of change, he is both excessively nostalgic and annoyingly pragmatic.