In Branson, Missouri, a two-wheeled solution to the commuter blues
Many of the affordable properties in the tourist city are located far from the famous entertainment street. One solution: offer scooters without money.
WHY WE ARE HERE
We explore how America defines itself place by place. In this Midwestern tourist town, a housing crisis has led to creative transportation solutions.
Christie Schubert fired up her new motor scooter—Taiwanese-made, with mid-century modern Italian lines—and whizzed to work one Friday night in Branson, Mo., the ultra-conservative tourist destination in the Ozarks that praises himself as one of the most “patriotic cities in America.”
It was here, amidst the brassy country music variety shows with their tributes to the troops and salutes to the flag, that Ms. Schubert, 43, once blazed a trail of excess and bad choices. Eventually she was evicted, her car was repossessed, and she lived first in the woods and later in one of the old motels around the city’s gaudy entertainment street.
By some estimates, nearly 20 percent of the people living in Branson are homeless or staying in motels. They are blue-collar and hobo, service-minded and worn-out honky-tonkers, some struggling with addiction, some raising children under difficult circumstances.
Today, recovering from a drug addiction, Ms. Schubert has a new job as an usher at the Clay Cooper Theater, home of a star-studded musical revue. And miraculously, she has the new scooter, a model called SYM Fiddle, the benefits of which she described in the most Branson-esque terms.
“It feels like freedom,” she says.
Ms. Schubert barely makes ends meet on her salary, but she was able to finance her scooter with no money and no credit check as part of a new program launched by a non-profit organization, Raise Branson, which aims to alleviate the city’s interconnected transportation and housing challenges. are such problems shared by many rural communities, but in Branson they have been exacerbated by the uniqueness of a place Homer Simpson once described (at least according to Bart) as “Like Vegas, if it were run by Dutch Flanders.”
In the 1980s and 1990s, Branson, a town of about 13,000 close to the Arkansas border, burst forth as a country wonder of sorts, attracting aging and beloved musical acts such as Roy Clark, Mickey Gilley, and Mel Tillis, who hit theaters founded those fans of the heart by the busload.
Restaurants and T-shirt shops followed suit, as did lavish biblical dramas, a Ripley’s Believe It or Not! museum, a Trump-themed gift shop, and plenty of low-paying jobs. But good quality affordable housing has been in short supply.
The Branson Housing Authority runs a 40-unit property for the elderly and disabled. Local residents say developers are generally less interested in building homes for low-wage workers than they are in custom vacation homes. Much of the affordable housing out there is a long way from the jobs on the strip.
“You can find affordability, but then you’re five, 10, 15, 20, 30 miles from your job,” says Jonas Arjes, interim chief of the local chamber of commerce and visitors’ bureau.
That presents many of the workers who power Branson with a difficult choice. They can live on the outskirts, with long commutes. Or they can live in the city, in the motels. But even for motel residents, getting around can be difficult. There is a limited downtown tourist trolley and carpool companies, but the latter can drain the pockets of the working poor. Plans to build a monorail or a gondola on the strip, to move both tourists and workers, never materialized.
The scooter idea was conceived by Elevate Branson’s executive director, Bryan Stallings, 56, who came to Branson in 1987 to run a karaoke recording studio. He later had a religious awakening and founded Elevate Branson with his wife Amy.
The couple began handing out meals to motel residents in 2009 and are still feeding hundreds a week. They found that the working poor of Branson need help with job training, medical care, financial literacy, access to government agencies, and rides to doctor’s offices and other appointments.
The rough estimate that 2,500 Branson residents are homeless or living in motels comes from Elevate Branson’s grant applications and is based, Mr. Stallings said, on participants in the meal programs, the number of motels in the city and public school statistics from kids with a motel. addresses.
“A lot of tourists, a lot of people from the Midwest, come to Branson to celebrate America, the American way of life, and Christian values,” says Stallings, who plans to soon open the city’s first tiny house community for low-wage workers. to build. “But behind all of that, we have a really struggling population serving these tourists.
The city government, Mr. Stallings said, may be reluctant to take on the toughest challenges, in part because doing so would go against Branson’s squeaky-clean image. (City officials declined to speak for this article.)
Mr Stallings first heard about a scooter program for the poor in Memphis, where a non-profit organization called MyCityRides has put more than 450 working people on wheels. His fledgling project in Branson, an extension of the Memphis project, had fewer than 20 participants in early June.
But he envisions scooters everywhere – a taste of it Ho Chi Minh City in the Ozarks. Soon, he said, hundreds of temporary foreign workers will arrive, under the State Department’s J-1 visa program, to fill jobs to cope with the summer tourist rush. Mr. Stallings plans to offer them smaller scooters for rent for $50 a week.
Locals who get involved early are already seeing benefits. A scooter owner named Ryan Booth, 31, lives 15 miles from his job in a place called Crazy Craig’s Cheeky Monkey Bar. “I have an old car that could explode at any time,” he said.
The workers co-sign their scooter loans with Elevate Branson, paying about $160 a month to eventually fully own the vehicles. The non-profit organization pays for scooter training, insurance, maintenance, repairs, a helmet and motorcycle jacket. At about $5 a day, Mr. Stallings said, it’s a relative bargain, especially compared to a round-trip Uber ride.
On that Friday in May, Mrs. Schubert emerged from her motel, stubbed out a cigarette, and started her engine. She turned left onto the strip, where a towering King Kong clung to a fake skyscraper over the Hollywood Wax Museum. She drove past the Belgian Waffle and Pancake House, the Ozarkland souvenir shop, and a miniature golf course.
Just past a spaghetti restaurant – which one announces itself with a 50-foot-tall dinner fork sticking out of a 15-foot-tall meatball — she turned left into the theater parking lot, in time for her 5 p.m. shift.
The scooter lets her think of other possibilities, even small ones, like a leisurely ride to Table Rock Lake, which she’s always dreamed about, like so many tourists to the Ozarks, about building a house.
For now, she said, it will be enough to get there.