Amenity migrants impact the Bulkley Valley in a positive way
When it comes to economic development planning, residents tend to derive their ideas about what makes the local economy tick from the employment they see and recognize: Workers heading into manufacturing plants, drivers of heavy machinery, medical, teaching, and tourism staff.
Common-sense economics of this kind can come pretty close to the truth of the matter. In the typical small Canadian community, if you list numbers of people employed under the main census categories you know where most of the local money is coming from, if not where it is going.
In lucky communities, a great deal of money enters the local circulation system as a special kind of “export” income: Income from amenity migration. The term amenity migration can mean different things, but here the sense is that of people establishing permanent residence in a particular place not because they have a job or business opportunity waiting for them there but because they have a desire to settle in the midst of natural or cultural abundance.
Amenity migrants bring their livelihoods with them. They are important contributors to the local economy not through the kind of work they do or the specific sources of their income but through their local spending.
For community economic development purposes, amenity migration is a goose that lays golden eggs. Economists have calculated the economic multiplier of amenity migrants – the power of their spending to generate further local economic activity – as being roughly as great as that of a company whose business is extracting and selling natural resources for export. In fact, if two hundred amenity migrant households set up residence in a place like the Bulkley Valley, they create the same amount of economic activity, and jobs, as a mid-size lumber mill.
Amenity migration does not just create jobs. It is a great stabilizer for a small community. The spending money of amenity migrants is drawn from across the country and around the world, so it remains steady when local plants shut down because of obsolescence or the depletion of regional resources. Since it includes feedback mechanisms such as an unwillingness for potential new migrants to pay inflated prices when construction is in high demand, it has no tendency to push a community into overshooting sustainable levels of anything.
The Bulkley Valley effortlessly attracts hundreds upon hundreds of amenity migrants, because it is extremely well endowed with magnificent landscapes, outstanding First Nations cultures, and many other good things. According to a study carried out in the Valley about ten years ago, as much as thirty per cent of the households of Electoral Area A may be amenity migrant in origin. In Smithers, the figure is around twenty per cent.
But amenity migrants are invisible. They don’t wear uniforms. They don’t display company logos on the doors of their vehicles. They don’t do things that are obviously work related. So the economic contribution they make to local prosperity in places such as the Bulkley Valley tends to make little impression.
To this point in our history, amenity migration has therefore been a natural phenomenon, in a sense. Economically self-sufficient households have moved here without our local governments making any special effort to attract them. The goose has laid golden eggs without the sort of care and feeding customarily accorded to other sources of economic growth. However, conscious efforts to encourage it could help secure the Valley’s future in an ever more competitive world.
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