Amid a night of public hearings last month about turning houses into tourist rentals, a familiar subtext was developing: How do Brown County residents and Brown County tourists successfully coexist, and are we making decisions now that will adversely impact the future thriving of either group?
Three residents’ comments in particular at the December Brown County Board of Zoning Appeals meeting sounded like they could have come out of the past, because they’re sentiments that have been voiced by other residents over the hundred-plus years of the county being a tourist attraction.
Two were speaking against homes near them being converted into short-term tourist rentals; one was speaking for.
“Our concern is the commercialization of more of these tourist homes possibly down the road, or a laundromat or something,” said Steve Padden, who lives on Lanam Ridge Road.
EJZ Group, based in Indianapolis, was petitioning to have the house across the road and down the hill from him at 5386 Lanam Ridge converted to a two-guest tourist home. The group also owns a tourist home next door to that address.
Padden said he wasn’t so much concerned with this proposal, but what it might morph into: The interruption of the quiet, country life they’d sought by moving from the busy city to Brown County.
The proposed new tourist home on Lanam Ridge was not within the guideline for distance from another tourist home. The other tourist home is 1,265 feet away; the standard separation is 1,320 feet. However, some zoning board members believed that the trees would help to mask any noise, so being 55 feet short wasn’t a big problem.
EJZ group’s request was approved on a tight vote by the BZA: 3-2 in favor. One of the stipulations was that the owners hire a local property management company so that someone would be nearby in case there was a problem, like excessive noise. John Dillberger and Jane Gore voted no; Deborah Bartes, Darla Brown and “Buzz” King voted yes.
This was one of two new tourist homes to be approved at this meeting on Dec. 18. The other was at 3978 State Road 135 South near Van Buren Elementary by petitioners Gail and Charles Gill, on the same 3-2 vote.
The third tourist home petition, by Kyle Deckard for 1450 Kelley Hill Lane, was denied 3-2 with King casting the deciding vote.
Deckard can refile and try again in six months.
Neighbors Mary and Jerry Chasteen objected to the conversion of this house to a tourist home and so did two other sets of neighbors in writing. Three others commented in favor of it.
The Deckards, in addition to living on Kelley Hill Lane, already own one tourist home on the road, and the Chasteens said they didn’t like being part of the tourist attraction.
“We get tourists back there who come wandering down on our property. … They’re curious. They want to see our house. … They’re taking pictures of our home, our view. … It’s very disconcerting when you’re part of the tourist attraction,” Mary Chasteen said.
The section of road where the Chasteens’ house is is actually a little-used county road that leads to Yellowwood State Forest, so people have a right to be on it, Deckard pointed out.
Still, when Brown County started becoming a tourist attraction more than 100 years ago, residents felt the same way. They lived in more crude cabins then, not the nearing-million-dollar property that Jerry Chasteen described. But Brown Countians then still didn’t take kindly to their privacy being interrupted by strangers.
“Every week … motorists decide that before another season passes they must drive down into these hills to hear us chatter and paw over each other in search of fleas and swing from the trees by our tails,” wrote an unidentified resident in a letter to the editor of the Brown County Democrat in 1928.
It started happening when artists who’d come here in the late 1800s from the city set up easels on roads and streambeds and painted people’s houses and farms. Later, cartoonist Kin Hubbard and photographer Frank Hohenberger shared varied images of Brown County with Indianapolis newspaper readers.
They all were in search of and fascinated by “a town lost in the past,” was the way Dillon Bustin put it in his book, “If You Don’t Outdie Me: The Legacy of Brown County.”
That sentiment still holds pull, for permanent residents and for visitors.
But if Brown County is to continue to exist, it needs ways for local people to make a living, Deckard told the zoning board on Dec. 18.
Deckard is a born-and-raised Brown Countian, a proud former Lilly Scholar who earned a full ride to college to study engineering. He now works for Naval Service Warfare Center — Crane. His family roots run deep, and when he had the chance, he moved back to raise his own children here. Operating a tourist rental helped make that happen for his family, he said.
Deckard is the kind of person that local leaders have been saying they want to retain and attract to Brown County, Bartes pointed out: Young professionals with families who enroll their children in local schools.
“Tourism is our economic engine of this county, but we have to have citizens here, too,” Deckard told the BZA, paraphrasing a quote by Brown County businessman Andy Rogers. Rogers’ point was that for the small-town charm of Brown County to be authentic, it has to be a real, working town with real, working residents.
That was also one of the reasons Gore voted consistently against the conversion of these three into short-term tourist rentals.
Gore had championed a review of the county’s tourist home special exception rules in the fall of 2018. A former real estate agent, she was concerned that the popularity of tourist homes was crowding Brown County homebuyers and long-term rental-seekers out of the market. Though the homes that get turned into tourist rentals might not be “affordable” housing, they reduce the supply, which can drive up demand and prices, Gore said. Other county officials had echoed her concerns, afraid that the lack of housing was affecting the local workforce.
Ultimately, after hearing from tourist home owners in a public hearing in October 2018, the Brown County Area Plan Commission decided 7-1 not to make any changes to the approval process for new tourist homes. However, one attorney who spoke at that hearing did encourage the APC to increase the distance guideline between tourist homes so as to limit their density and to protect the Brown County that residents and visitors hold dear.
“Brown County is a treasure to everyone in the Midwest,” said Cheyenne Riker, who said he represented a property owner on Salt Creek Road. “… The last thing we want to do is denigrate that integrity by allowing additional commercial properties.”
Other commenters at that October 2018 meeting on tourist homes brought up the increased property tax revenue that these rentals bring in, since they are taxed more like businesses than homes.
Bill Austin also mentioned that they bring tourists out into the county — which he saw as a good thing. “There aren’t very many economic endeavors that cause the people … to go out among other areas of the county, so … you’re causing people to go out and see places elsewhere that they may not otherwise have done,” he said.
“At least in our case, we’ve had some houses that are in the family … and that (renting them as tourist homes) was one of the ways we were able to have the money to upgrade them and put them in better shape. From our standpoint, it’s a way to share what, in our case, is 150 years of heritage with other folks throughout the United States or wherever.”
During last month’s zoning meeting, Gore again brought up a concern that’s been voiced at other meetings by other people: That one day, Brown County could become like Gatlinburg, with tourists and the businesses built especially for them pushing out the permanent residents who used to be there.
As of the end of 2019, there were 179 active, approved tourist rentals in Brown County, not counting separately any rentals that might have multiple units. There were also eight more approved tourist rentals which hadn’t had their initial inspection in order to open yet, said Zoning Inspector Chuck Braden. In addition to these, the planning and zoning office has 36 approved tourist homes on file which have temporary non-use affidavits. This means that they can’t be rented now, but they could become active again in the future.
That makes a total of 223 approved tourist rentals.
Roughly 10 new ones are approved each year, said Planning Director Chris Ritzmann.
The planning office keeps track of bed-and-breakfasts separately; the county has 15 approvals on file for those, and they include individual cottages as well as multiple rooms for rent in one building.
Those tourist lodging figures do not include hotels, motels and inns.
Gore said the discussion wasn’t about limiting local people’s means of income; “it’s about too many tourist rentals. We ask not to be compared to Gatlinburg, but that’s what’s happened there,” she said. “People can’t live there because it’s tourist facilities that have taken over the town. Even though we don’t want to be Gatilinburg, we might end up being there.”
The push-pull between tourists/newcomers and the preservation of normal, everyday life in Brown County has been going on for decades — so much that it could be said that the argument itself is part of the county’s legacy.
“Perhaps because Hohenberger had come to Brown County in search of the past, he felt a special empathy for the elderly residents whose way of life was being replaced,” Bustin wrote in his 1982 book. “… He was their witness as they tried to protect their goods from youngsters who did not value the old things and from outsiders who valued them in a superficial way. … The older generation knew that newcomers were taking possession of Brown County and that the entire landscape was being remodeled to satisfy new needs.”
“I think we’ve strugged for years to figure out how to manage this, and we’ve said, ‘We don’t want to be Gatlinburg,’” Austin said at the 2018 APC hearing. “We’ve been to Gatlinburg 30 times, and we’re far, far, far different than Gatlinburg, and I wouldn’t want for us to get there. But I don’t think we’re even close.”
