Designing for People

Most destinations do not fail on opening day. They fail much earlier. They fail when they don’t put the people first.

In this series, I use “destination” with specific intent. A destination is any place that generates demand because of the experiences it offers, experiences rooted in site-specific characteristics that cannot be copied or manufactured anywhere else. A specific landscape, a local culture, a history, or a pattern of human behavior that simply does not exist in another location. It could be a resort, a forgotten downtown, a campground that becomes the only spot within three hours where families stay three nights instead of one, or a seasonal event that brings a community to life. What makes it a destination is not just what was built. It is why people show up, how they behave when they get there, and whether that behavior can be measured and sustained.

Starting with the wrong question

In the business of building destinations, whether it is real estate development or public places, we almost always start with feasibility and narrative. We run the proforma. We commission the market study. We build the brand story. We design the place.

But we often forget to ask a fundamental question.

Why will people show up here, specifically, and keep showing up?

That question is incomplete on its own. It is not just “why will people show up.” It is a deeper set of questions that most processes skip entirely. Who are the primary users? What experiences do they need and desire? What does site and community context offer that makes these experiences unique? Who are the adjacent residents? Who are the stakeholders who will support it, fund it, regulate it, and live next to it? What do they need, not in the abstract, but in the daily reality of time, cost, convenience, and habit? What matters to them enough that they will change their behavior? And when needs compete, as they always do, how do we make the tradeoffs explicit instead of accidental?

That is the behavioral ground truth. It is the foundation we need to explore possibilities through the lens of actual people and arrive at strategic pillars that better inform feasibility and strategic narrative.

It is important to note that Brand Strategists and Planners conduct essential research when looking for validation. They run intercept surveys, community engagement, and stakeholder interviews. Those tools matter, especially when navigating community trust and local context.

But surveys tend to pull a certain kind of response. People answer with ideals. They answer like voters. They answer like they are being graded. You learn what sounds good. You do not always learn what people will actually do when it is raining, when parking is inconvenient, when the price is higher than expected, when their kids are tired, when their schedule is tight, or when a competing option is easier.

If you do not pair stated preference with behavioral evidence, you can build a concept that reads well and still fails to perform. We validate supply before we validate behavior. This is a problem I see repeatedly on a regular basis.

The Feasibility Trap

Capital is not getting looser. It is getting sharper.

In the last decade, it was common to see projects move forward on a story, a comp set, and a feasibility study that said, “it can work.” That door is closing. Debt and equity both want stronger indicators of demand. They want more sophisticated de-risking. They want to see the demand engine before they underwrite the supply.

This shift is not just happening in private capital. It is happening in public projects too. Public agencies are operating under rising scrutiny. Bond measures face higher skepticism. Grant programs are more competitive. City councils are under pressure to justify how tax dollars create measurable benefits. Parks directors and economic development leaders are being asked to show outcomes, not just intentions. In that environment, a plan that sounds good is not enough. It must hold up under public questioning, media attention, and the lived experience of residents who will judge the project long after the ribbon cutting.

So the trap is not that studies are bad. The trap is sequence and missing evidence. Think of a construct where we have a two-lane road. Lane 1 is the standard supply-side demand engine, the old way of constructing a story line that says this can work. Lane 2 moves in parallel to lane 1, going in the same direction, but applies behavioral demand indicators and strategies.

Most Lane 1 work, whether called feasibility, market analysis, or economic impact, is built to answer supply-side questions. What can be built here? What does the market “support” based on comps and benchmarks? What unit count, ADR, occupancy, lease rate, or absorption rate is plausible? What leakage exists, and what square footage could be absorbed?

Those are necessary questions. They are also insufficient, because a destination is not a static supply problem. It is a behavioral system.

Lane 2 is what decision-makers increasingly ask for, even when they do not use this language. Who is this for, specifically? What do they do today, without this project? What is the evidence they will change behavior for this experience, in this place, at this price, with this friction? What happens in a downturn, when discretionary behavior tightens?

This is not a war between Lane 1 and Lane 2. It is a gap in knowledge understanding how Lane 2 insights can better inform Lane 1 data.

And that gap is exactly where projects stall. Not because capital is indifferent, but because capital is demanding better proof. Not because public leaders do not want investment, but because they need stronger evidence to defend it.

The goal is not to pick a lane. The goal is to merge them. Lane 1 tells you whether the project can be structured. Lane 2 tells you whether it will perform. You need both to build real insight. You need both to get funded. You need both to survive the next cycle.

The $2.4 billion lesson

If this still feels theoretical, there is a clear example of what happens when the supply-side story gets ahead of the behavioral reality. And then what happens when someone finally gets it right.

Revel Atlantic City opened in 2012 as a luxury resort built on a confident thesis: create a sophisticated lifestyle destination for an affluent urban customer seeking a coastal escape. On paper, it made sense. Atlantic City was an established gambling market. The Northeast has money. The building was ambitious. The brand was coherent. The narrative had the language investors want to hear.

But Atlantic City’s demand engine was not built around the luxury resort story. It was a casino behavior engine, built on volume, day-trippers, boardwalk flow, and high-frequency gamblers. A market where friction matters, where convenience matters, where the path people take from street to spend is the business model.

Revel designed for the resort story instead of the casino behavior.

It required people to behave differently than the market’s core customers had been behaving for decades. An arrival sequence that made access less intuitive. An introverted building posture in a market where the boardwalk is not scenery, it is a feeder system. A smoking ban in a market where certain segments stay longer, spend more, and resist friction. Premium pricing in a market sustained by volume and repeat visits.

None of these choices are wrong in the abstract. They are wrong when they are misaligned with the dominant behaviors that pay the bills.

Atlantic City had already tested the behavioral response to a smoking ban in 2008. Casino revenues dropped 19.5% in the first week. The ban was repealed in eleven days. Revel ignored this data entirely.

Revel’s story assumed a customer that should exist. The market’s behavior signaled a customer that already did exist. The building chose the first and ignored the second.

Revel filed for bankruptcy within its first year and permanently closed after two. The building was not the problem. The mismatch was.

But here is where the story gets instructive.

The property was purchased for $82 million, about three cents on the dollar, sat dark for years, and went through a brief zombie phase before new ownership did something simple and decisive: they stopped fighting the market and started listening to it.

They put “Casino” back in the name. They allowed smoking. They streamlined access and flow. They finished hundreds of hotel rooms that Revel had left as concrete shells. They invested $270 million over several years to complete what the original vision never could. They even replaced the exterior signage in 2025 to erase the last traces of the old brand.

Today Ocean Casino Resort is consistently the third highest grossing property in Atlantic City, trailing only Borgata and Hard Rock.

The building did not change. The behavioral alignment did.

Revel was a $2.4 billion bet that people would change who they were to fit a building. Ocean succeeded because it changed the building to fit who the people actually are.

That is the Feasibility Trap at full scale, and its antidote, sitting on the same piece of land.

Leading with behavior: the Bentonville model

Now look at the opposite pattern.

Bentonville, Arkansas did not look like a predictable destination economy twenty years ago. No tourism infrastructure. No comp set that would have made a standard playbook feel safe. And here is the part that matters most for this conversation: there was no formal feasibility study. No top-down analysis that projected what would happen. No 200-page document telling the state legislature that mountain bike trails in the Ozarks would transform a regional economy.

It all started on a hunch, and a five-mile single-track trail in 2007.

(image credit @oztrailsoffroad)

The Walton family and a group of local advocates built the first section of what would become the Slaughter Pen trail network. It was not a master plan. It was a test. They wanted to see if people would ride it and what would happen when they did.

The behavioral response was immediate. The trail became a local obsession. Riders showed up daily. A ritual formed. By 2010, the five miles had grown to seventeen and the network was stretching south into downtown Bentonville. The behavioral evidence, not a proforma, was the green light. That observed response is what gave the Walton Family Foundation the confidence to invest over $74 million into expanding the regional trail network.

They used behavior demand, not top-down economic modeling to build the case for success and prove demand.

Bentonville benefited from unusually large philanthropic capital. That scale of private investment is not available everywhere. But most communities have some form of anchor. A major employer. A state university. A medical center. A military installation. The anchor creates the conditions. What Bentonville got right was not just having fuel. It was knowing how to leverage the fuel with a spark to create a demand engine.

Northwest Arkansas is home to three Fortune 500 headquarters: Walmart, Tyson Foods, and JB Hunt. They needed to recruit and retain high-skill talent. People with options. People who choose where to live based on daily experience and quality of place, not just the job offer.

The insight was not “trails are a nice amenity.” The insight was that for a certain workforce, outdoor recreation is not decoration. It is lifestyle infrastructure. It is identity. It shapes where people choose to settle, raise families, and build careers. They did not discover this in a feasibility study. They discovered it by watching what happened around five miles of dirt.

So they scaled for that behavior. Not as a tourism add-on, but as a daily system. Today the region has over 500 miles of mountain bike trails integrated into the fabric of the community, connected to schools, offices, and downtowns. A 46-mile greenway links seven-cities across the region. A $600 credit toward a mountain bike for new residents signals a deep commitment to a specific lifestyle identity.

The validation came after, not before. A 2018 study by the Walton Family Foundation and PeopleForBikes quantified what behavior had already proven. Cycling generates $137 million in annual economic benefits across the region. Population grew from roughly 11,000 to over 60,000. Real estate values appreciated more than 150%. Homes near paved trails sell for more than $6,300 above comparable homes further away. Nearly a third of residents say trail access was extremely important in choosing where to live. The U.S. National Mountain Biking Team relocated its headquarters there.

No proforma predicted this. No feasibility study modeled it. But neither was it an accident. Bentonville started with a behavioral hypothesis, tested it on a small scale, observed the response, and then invested at scale based on what people actually did. That is not the standard playbook. But it is a model for what the standard playbook is missing.

Most communities spend their energy chasing capital. Almost none invest in understanding the demand drivers that create sustainable demand engines based on how people actually behave.

The warning inside the success

Bentonville’s success also contains the trap.

When a place becomes a headline, other communities copy the visible parts. They build trail systems because trails worked in Northwest Arkansas. They replicate supply and expect demand to follow.

Sometimes they get a real amenity and a better quality of life. That matters. But a destination economy is a different claim. Destination behavior has thresholds. It has flow patterns. It has substitution dynamics and friction points. It has a reality that does not care about your renderings.

A trail system typically needs 13 to 18 miles of connected singletrack to function as a regional destination. It needs more than 30 miles to drive multi-night stays and the ancillary spending that comes with them. Communities investing millions in disconnected systems that never reach the scale or cohesion required to shift regional behavior may never become the draw the economic study predicted. The recreational value can still be real. The destination economy impact often is not.

Copying supply without understanding demand is a part of the Feasibility Trap.

We see similar pattern-chasing in outdoor hospitality and glamping. Markets surge, headlines follow, developers race to land. But the COVID-era boom has fully normalized. Metrics in 2025 for outdoor hospitality have returned to pre-pandemic baselines. Capital is increasingly selective about what it funds, because capital has learned what the market punishes: commodity projects dressed up as experience. The projects attracting institutional investment now are the ones that demonstrate behavioral alignment with a specific traveler psychographic and lifestyle experiences. Not just a tent count on a scenic hillside.

That selectivity is not a barrier. It is a signal. The market is telling us it wants better proof.

Bridging the gap: completing the investment thesis

So what does this mean for the developer sitting across from a family office? Or the economic development director trying to attract a partner? Or the parks director defending a major investment to a skeptical board? Or the city manager walking into a council meeting where the question will be “how do we know this works?”

It means Lane 1 is necessary and Lane 2 is unavoidable.

Feasibility and economic studies provide a structure capital recognizes. They quantify supply, risk, and financial mechanics. Public agencies need them to demonstrate due diligence. Those tools establish the financial floor.

But behavioral demand evidence is what turns that structure into something investable and defensible. It is what allows you to answer the questions behind the questions. Who is this for? What do they do today? What will they stop doing to do this instead? What has to be true for behavior to repeat? What breaks the demand? What is the proof, not the promise?

For the developer, this means your pitch deck answers Lane 2 questions before they are asked. When you can demonstrate who the project is for, how they behave today, and what evidence supports the demand thesis, you are no longer one of a hundred supply-side pitches in an investor’s inbox. You are the project that proved its demand story.

For the city manager or economic development director, this means the next RFP for any amenity study, any downtown plan, any recreation master plan should require a behavioral demand component. Not as a nice-to-have appendix, but as a core deliverable. If the study cannot tell you how your community actually behaves, it cannot tell you what to build.

The outdoor recreation economy contributes nearly $700 billion to U.S. GDP. But capturing this value requires the intelligence that sits between the feasibility study and the capital decision. The next generation of destination development requires a shared language across private capital, public leadership, and the people who actually use the place. Your investment thesis must describe a real demand engine, not an imagined one.

The real cost

The Feasibility Trap does not just kill bad projects. It kills good projects that never get a fair read.

It is the developer who spends two years pitching a supply-side story to decision-makers looking for demand-side proof, unable to understand why the meetings go nowhere. It is the community that commissions a conventional study, gets a positive conclusion, and still cannot attract a partner because the project cannot defend its demand story under scrutiny. It is land with genuine potential that sits idle because the process designed to de-risk the opportunity obscured the most important truth: who the place is actually for, and what people will reliably do when they get there.

The question is not “will they come?”

The question is “who are they, how do they already behave, and does your project match that pattern strongly enough to survive reality?”

That is the way out of the trap. It starts with realizing that what we really need to know was never fully captured by Lane 1 analysis alone.

Next in this series

Next up is a Case Decode in Cuyuna Country, Minnesota. Not a retrospective on what happened. A forward look at what happens next. The trail network is performing. The economic numbers are real. But what are the behavioral demand signals telling us about where the growth is, where the friction is, and what these communities need to unlock the next chapter? That is the kind of question a traditional economic study does not answer. It is exactly the kind of question behavioral demand intelligence was built for.

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Matt Small is a Director at RVi Planning + Landscape Architecture. He writes The Spark, a newsletter exploring why places thrive or die. From glamping and outdoor recreation to urban destinations, The Spark delivers the data and the actionable blueprints for successful development