Lessons from Anaheim
Learning From Other Cities
Last week I attended the League of California Cities Annual Conference in Anaheim with colleagues. Thousands of city leaders gathered to share ideas on everything from public safety and housing to transportation, economic development, and city finances.
One lesson stood out because Carmel is having a conversation about tourism; its benefits and its impact on residents. We know the pressures visitors can create: traffic, crowded streets, parking in residential neighborhoods, and strain on infrastructure. The conference was held at the Anaheim Convention Center, across the street from Disneyland, so the city's mayor, Ashleigh AItken, offered an interesting counterpoint.
Building for the Visitors You Have
Anaheim has spent decades building to accommodate enormous numbers of visitors. Rather than discouraging them, the city keeps investing in infrastructure to attract and manage them while capturing revenue that pays for services residents use.
The most dramatic example is OCVibe, a new development around the Honda Center. It will include entertainment venues, hotels, housing, parks, public parks and trails, and half as many restaurants as Carmel has. The first things being built are four parking structures with more than 12,000 spaces. Anaheim understands something basic: If you invite people into your community, you need a place for their cars and their mayor told us that they absolutely love parking structures.
Protecting Residents
What impressed me most was how Anaheim shields residential neighborhoods from all those visitors. Driving near the venue, I saw digital signs telling motorists they may not even drop off passengers in residential neighborhoods, much less park there. Visitors must use the structures.
This is a city that welcomes millions of visitors a year, but it draws a clear line: Tourism shouldn't come at the expense of the people who live there. Anaheim has had 70 years since Disneyland opened to learn that lesson. We can learn it faster.
What Should Carmel Learn?
Carmel is not Anaheim, and nobody wants it to become Anaheim. We don't need new venues to attract visitors. People already come from around the world just to see the place where we live.
The real question is whether we have built the systems to manage that success. Our challenge is managing the visitors we already have so our businesses and then the residents receive the economic benefits without absorbing the impacts.
Where should visitors park? How do we keep them from circling residential streets looking for spaces? Could we intercept more cars before they enter the village? How can shuttles, walking, and new transportation technologies help? And how do we protect neighborhoods while keeping downtown businesses healthy?
Those are probably more productive questions than simply asking whether Carmel has too many visitors.
Tourism Pays for Services
Tourism is a major part of Carmel's financial equation. Visitors stay in our hotels, eat in our restaurants and shop in our stores, generating revenue that supports the services and infrastructure residents expect. Two measures on this fall's ballot depend on it.
That doesn't mean every additional visitor is good, or that tourism should be allowed to overwhelm the village. But, since it isn’t going away, it does mean we should manage it intelligently. See Monterey is leading a public discussion on exactly that right now, and I encourage residents to take part.
Managing Success
lready confronted the problems we're debating like tourism and other challenges like e-Bikes. Their solutions won't all work here, but we should understand them before deciding what will work for Carmel.
Preserving Carmel doesn't mean pretending visitors aren't coming. It means planning thoughtfully so the people who live here can keep enjoying the extraordinary village the world comes to see.
You can hear a podcast generated from this column at cli.re/learning or see a video from last year at cli.re/calcities2025.
Dale Byrne Mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea
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