The Patron Effect: The Uncomfortable Truth About How Destinations Actually Get Made

Before Jeff Stober showed up, nobody was flying in from New York. Prince Edward County was on no one's top 10 list.

It was 2012. The County had some vineyards, some farm stands, a few wind turbines spinning over flat Ontario farmland. The town of Wellington had a main street with a handful of shops and an old iron foundry from the 1880s that was limping along as a tired bed and breakfast. It was pleasant. It was quiet. It was invisible.

Then Stober, the guy who'd taken a rundown flophouse on Queen Street West in Toronto and turned it into the Drake Hotel — a place where art, music, and late-night weirdness collided into something that basically reinvented what a hotel could be in this country — bought that old foundry for $1.3 million. He'd sold his headhunting firm at the height of the dot-com boom, and he had both the capital and the taste to see what nobody else could see.

Two years later, the Drake Devonshire opened. An art-filled, design-forward country inn on the shores of Lake Ontario. It wasn't a community initiative. It wasn't a DMO strategy. It was one guy with capital, conviction, and a very specific vision of what a place could become.

Within a year, parking in Wellington became a problem, the kind of problem every small town dreams of having. Restaurants, galleries, and shops followed. The County became The County, a proper destination, a weekend escape from Toronto, a place people talked about. I got to see this transformation up close. I was working at The New Business at the time, the agency that created the Visit The County brand. We built the destination marketing. But I'll be honest: the marketing wasn't what made Prince Edward County. Jeff Stober was what made Prince Edward County. We just helped tell the story after he gave us something to tell.

One person did that.

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This keeps happening

The more I look at how destinations actually get made — not in theory, not in tourism textbooks, but in the real world — the more I see the same pattern repeating.

I want to be careful here. This isn't an argument that communities don't matter, or that government investment doesn't work, or that billionaires should run everything. It's an observation about how transformation is happening, and a challenge to those of us in destination leadership to think differently about our role.

The pattern is always the same. A person with money. A personal connection to a place, or at least a deep conviction about it. A willingness to absorb enormous financial risk. And a vision that nobody else could see, or would bet on.

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Let me be clear about what I'm not saying

I'm not saying communities don't matter. They do. The wineries were already emerging in Prince Edward County before the Drake arrived. Fogo Island had a culture and a history that Zita Cobb was honouring, not inventing. These patrons don't create something from nothing. They see something that's already there and give it the infrastructure and the spotlight it needs.

I'm also not saying DMOs are irrelevant. They're not. Once a patron creates the catalyst — the anchor property, the signature attraction — destination marketing organizations play a critical role in amplifying it, sustaining it, and building the broader ecosystem around it.

But I'd be dishonest if I didn't acknowledge the other side of this.

The word "patron" has a benevolent ring to it. But to a lot of people living in these communities, it can sound a lot like "gentrifier." When Jeff Stober transformed Wellington, parking became a problem, but so did housing costs. When the Pearl District revitalized that stretch of San Antonio, the surrounding neighbourhoods changed in ways that weren't all positive. Queen Street West in Toronto is virtually unrecognizable from what it was before the Drake arrived, and not everyone who was there before can afford to be there now.

The Patron Effect is a double-edged sword. It brings investment, jobs, and attention. It also brings rising rents, displacement, and the kind of cultural friction that comes when a place starts serving visitors more than residents. I don't have a clean answer for that tension. I'm not sure anyone does. But I know that ignoring it doesn't make you a serious person in this conversation. The best patron-driven projects — Fogo Island being the gold standard — are the ones where the patron builds with the community, not on top of it. Zita Cobb structured the entire economics of the inn so that money flowed back into the local community. That's the model worth aspiring to, even if it's the exception rather than the rule.

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Why the U.S. is built for this

Here's something I've noticed working across both Canadian and American markets: the United States is culturally wired for The Patron Effect in a way that Canada isn't. At least not yet.

The U.S. has a deep tradition of private philanthropy and entrepreneurial risk-taking that extends into placemaking. The Walton family transforming Bentonville, Arkansas into a world-class arts and cycling destination. Kit Goldsbury turning the Pearl Brewery into a culinary landmark. Donald Judd making Marfa matter. David Rubenstein funding the restoration of the Washington Monument. This is what Americans do: wealthy individuals betting on places and communities as an expression of legacy, identity, and civic pride.

In Canada, we tend to lean more heavily on government to fund these kinds of transformations. And government can do a lot of good. But government moves slowly, thinks in election cycles, and designs by committee. The Patron Effect requires speed, taste, and a willingness to absorb personal financial risk. Those things are fundamentally entrepreneurial, not bureaucratic.

That doesn't mean Canada can't produce patrons. Zita Cobb and Jeff Stober prove otherwise. But it does mean that if you're a DMO or an economic development officer looking for models of how this works at scale, you should be looking south. The U.S. has been doing this for a long time, and there's a lot to learn from how those communities enabled — and sometimes failed to manage — the patron-driven transformations that reshaped them.

But here's what I am saying: the origin story of almost every great destination transformation is not a strategic plan. It's not a government grant. It's not a grassroots movement.

It's a patron.

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What this means for DMOs

If you're running a destination marketing organization, this should change how you think about your role and where you sit.

Right now, most DMOs operate in the marketing silo. You run campaigns. You attract visitors to existing assets. You measure heads in beds. That's fine. That's table stakes.

But if you're serious about destination management, not just destination marketing, then you need a seat at the economic development table. And The Patron Effect is your ticket in.

Here's why. Economic development offices care about attracting investment, creating jobs, and revitalizing communities. They're already having conversations about what to do with the old factory, the empty waterfront, the downtown block that's been declining for a decade. But they often don't understand what makes a place a destination. They don't know the nuances of visitor experience, placemaking, or what it takes to turn an asset into something people will travel for.

You do.

Every community has underutilized assets: an old factory, a stretch of waterfront, a historic building, a natural landscape that nobody has figured out how to activate. And somewhere, there's a person with the capital, the taste, and the appetite for risk who could turn that asset into something transformative. The economic development people might know who has the money. But they don't always know what would actually work as a destination play.

That's where you come in.

A DMO that understands The Patron Effect stops waiting for things to market and starts actively scouting. You identify the assets that have destination potential. You build relationships with the entrepreneurs and investors who might take the bet. You sit in the room with economic development and say, "Here's what would actually draw people to this place." And when a patron does step up — when your community's version of Jeff Stober or Zita Cobb makes the investment — you're already there to amplify it.

This is a shift from destination marketing to destination catalyst development. From promoting what exists to helping create what could exist. It means DMO leaders need to be in the room with economic development officers, municipal planners, and private investors — not just tourism operators and hotel associations.

But there is a deeper level of value here. The greatest barrier for a potential patron isn't just the capital. It's the uncertainty. This is where the DMO provides its highest ROI: destination de-risking. By bringing your deep knowledge of visitor personas, travel trends, and market gaps to the table, you provide the data-backed proof that a $20M investment isn't a shot in the dark. You show them exactly who is already looking for this experience, where they are coming from, and why this specific asset is the one they've been waiting for. You aren't just a marketer; you are the intelligence officer who validates their vision.

It might be the most important evolution the tourism industry isn't talking about.

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A note on power, responsibility, and the kind of patron we actually need

When I talk about patrons, I'm not arguing that billionaire heirs should be allowed to run amok in the communities they happen to like. We've all seen how that story ends. Unchecked capital, detached from local accountability, rarely produces places people want to live in — even if it produces places people want to visit.

This isn't a new idea. For most of modern history, private wealth played a visible civic role. Industrial fortunes funded libraries, universities, hospitals, concert halls, and public parks. Not as vanity projects, but as long-term investments in the places that made that wealth possible. Those institutions didn't replace government. They complemented it. They filled gaps government couldn't move quickly enough to address, and they were often structured to outlast the individuals who funded them.

What's changed isn't the existence of wealth. It's its relationship to place.

Today, enormous amounts of private capital sit idle, abstracted into financial instruments, global portfolios, and passive assets that have little connection to the communities that produced them. Meanwhile, towns and cities struggle with vacant buildings, underused waterfronts, and cultural assets that never quite get the investment they need to matter at scale.

And yet, almost every community I've worked in has someone who made it big and still carries a connection to home. A founder. An investor. A family that built a company and left. The money exists. The question is whether there's a credible, ethical pathway for it to re-engage with place.

That's the version of The Patron Effect I'm arguing for. Not extraction, not ego, but stewardship. Capital put to work in ways that respect local culture, share economic upside, and build institutions or assets that belong to the community as much as they belong to the vision that sparked them. In 2016, Zita Cobb was awarded the Order of Canada for her contributions as a social entrepreneur who helped revive the communities of Fogo Island and Change Islands through innovative social engagement. She didn't just build a hotel. She built an economic model that the country recognized as genuinely transformative for the people who live there. That's the bar.

When it works, The Patron Effect doesn't replace public planning or community voice. It accelerates what both already want but can't always execute alone.

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The Patron Effect

I'm calling this The Patron Effect because it mirrors something very old. For centuries, the great cultural landmarks of the world were built not by governments or communities, but by individual patrons: the Medicis funding the Renaissance, Carnegie building libraries across America, Guggenheim commissioning a museum in a fading industrial city in Spain.

The same dynamic is playing out today in tourism and destination development. The scale is different. The context is modern. But the mechanism is identical: one person, with wealth and vision, bets on a place before anyone else will.

If you're a DMO leader reading this, ask yourself: who is your community's potential patron? Do you even know? Are you looking?

And if you're someone with the means and the vision to transform a place, know that the playbook exists. It's been proven, over and over, from Fogo Island to Marfa to Prince Edward County.