Epilogue: Summary and Looking Forward

Abstract

This epilogue summarizes four key findings and then focuses on four trends that could change the nexus of heritage attraction sites, wealth and health. One trend is building data sets and providing them to public audiences. The second is recognizing the reality and coping more effectively with low probability – high consequence hazards that can cascade into worse outcomes potentially devastating housing for the wealthy and everyone else. Third demographic changes are occurring and inequities in wealth growing, which underscore the demand for attraction-based wealth and health clusters and the increasingly more desperate need for progressive affordable housing policies. Public reaction to the pace of change associated with science and technology, globalization, the creation of a world with multiple power centers, and other changes in familiar expectations is causing many people to build physical and mental walls to protect themselves against their fear of change. The implications for heritage attractions, indeed what is considered a heritage attraction, is unclear. Each trend merits considerable thought by those who have built the U.S. economic and political real estate juggernaut while resisting making affordable housing an entitlement.