Editorial

What the market will bear

If you build it, will they come?
Some years ago in Bombay India, city planners proposed to claim a chunk of land from the ocean. It would substantially add to the real estate available for development on the southern tip of the narrow peninsula that contains most of the city.
‘No, no!’ shrieked the existing property owners. ‘All that new land will drive down our property values!’
What happened? The land was added, buildings went up and people rushed to occupy them. At worst, it slowed the rate of increase in property values, which just kept going up and have ever since.
The demand in that case was pretty much bottomless. All it took was the vision to recognize it and the guts not to listen to the status quo lovers.
How bottomless the demand is for housing and services in Slave Lake and area is an open question. It’s certainly as big as it ever was, and there are people willing to put their money out there. Testing the waters, so to speak, to see what will float. With housing, right now, just about any investment seems a pretty safe bet.
The tourist industry is a more interesting test case for the ‘if-you-build-it’ scenario. In the past few years the services in that sector have gone from next to nothing to quite significant. Some might say we’ve got plenty of campgrounds, plenty of RV parks and quite enough boats on the water, thank you very much.
But if somebody dared to add a hotel and a casino – for example – right on the lakeshore, would it fly? Would we discover an entire segment of society suddenly willing to make Slave Lake their recreation destination of choice?
How about if the number of RV sites and cabins around the east basin of the lake doubled? Would that be too much? Fifteen years ago there was maybe a quarter the capacity there is today. Back then, the pessimists probably thought it couldn’t go any higher. But look at it now. There’s hardly an empty spot to be found. Everybody’s making money and they could make more if they had more space and more services.
There is certainly a limit. Market saturation, it’s called. But you can’t judge where it is by how many people show up today. Because if the service is only there for so many, only so many will come.

Missing coffee houses
There was a stretch of about eight years when the coffee house scene in Slave Lake was lively and fun. At least once a year, during Riverboat Daze, there’d be a line-up of local, amateur, mostly (but not entirely) musical talent on stage at the Walter Twinn Theatre. It was something just a little different from the usual and got to be reasonably popular there for a while.
Since the theatre shut down there’s been sporadic effort to recreate that atmosphere in other venues around town. But years seem to go by without anything. It’s particularly noticeable at Riverboat Daze, which seems to have a hole in it lately.
Is the scene dead, or just on vacation?