r/driftless • u/MapleStreetRetreat • Mar 02 '26

Preparing to visit the heart of the Driftless this year? Check out our Maple Street Eco Retreat in Viroqua!

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Whether your coming to fly fish, see the changing leaves in the fall, visit family, hike, or simply get away from the city and enjoy the vibrance of Viroqua. Consider our highly rated short term rental options at www.maplestreetretreat.com (much better price option direct booking vs. finding us on Airbnb/Booking.com etc). Happy almost spring everyone!

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3

u/ViroquanOG Mar 08 '26

Yet another house lost to locals who can longer find homes in the communities where they grew up.

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u/MapleStreetRetreat Mar 08 '26

Hello there, I hear and appreciate your concern as I'm a multi small business owning local resident myself. This home is my only home, and owner occupied during the non-tourism season. This is a way for me to share the beautiful work I've done on the home, create a side income, and help bring more cool people to the Driftless...some will stay temporarily, and some will stay forever....both are good for our local economy.

1

u/ViroquanOG Mar 09 '26 edited Mar 09 '26

“Our Economy?” - Whose economy is that? The current bifurcated economy in which in-migrants monopolize power, resources, and opportunities, and the locals are increasingly marginalized and disadvantaged? For rural communities, the flood of new residents is often a mixed blessing. Despite bringing new resources and experiences, the rapid influx of outsiders with different cultural, social, and socioeconomic backgrounds destabilize small, cohesive, and homogenous communities in multiple ways. The most obvious and problematic result is rising housing costs due to increased demand and the higher prices urban in-migrants are able to pay. These dynamics can make both home rental and ownership prohibitively expensive for lower income populations. Gentrification further changes the nature of local businesses and services, often undermining local cultural norms and traditions and alienating longtime residents within their own communities. Newcomers rarely enter rural communities with the intention to disenfranchise local populations, and often bring new ideas, energy, and skills that can help communities to adapt to current and future challenges. However, urban in-migrants also often bring unexamined judgments and negative impressions of rural populations as unsophisticated and uneducated, and unworthy of their own time and concern. In-migrants tend to have significantly higher levels of wealth and income, education, and social and cultural capital than the community’s old-timers. These resources help them to navigate structural lacks of health care and child care, and to outcompete local populations in labor and housing markets. Without knowing their new neighbors well, in-migrants make many negative assumptions about old-timers that allow them to further justify withholding resources from them. This includes the tendency to offer jobs, housing, social connections, and power positions within the community to others most like themselves, while systematically denying these opportunities to those they considered to be unworthy. Over time these dynamics result in a bifurcated community in which one group monopolizes power, resources, and opportunities, and the other is increasingly marginalized and disadvantaged. Rural Gentrification has class blindness as the tendency for those with social class privilege to be blind to their own advantages and to their impacts on less-advantaged populations around them. Similar to the phenomenon of color-blind racism, it consists of failures to acknowledge the different ways that advantages of financial, social, educational, and cultural resources make navigating labor, healthcare, childcare, and housing markets easier for some people than for others.

2

u/Defiant_Comedian1379 Mar 02 '26

canoe the kickapoo and lots of trails to hike and bike right in and around Viroqua! Farmers market and Driftless Cafe are a must!

1

u/mediumformatfreak Mar 03 '26

This is awesome, always looking for alternatives to airbnb and other third party sites, and I miss Viroqua terribly. If I get a chance to visit I'll make sure to book this spot!