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The Yountville Moon is about one small town in the Napa Valley and the questions it keeps refusing to answer.

A town of a few thousand people, Yountville has 453 hotel rooms. Roughly half of its houses sit empty most of the year. Most of the people who work here commute in, because there is nowhere here they can afford to live. The elementary school closed when families could no longer stay.

None of this is unusual. It is what expensive tourist towns do. They make room for visitors and for second homes, then find polite, procedural reasons not to make room for the people who cook the food, clean the rooms, and pour the wine. Yountville is the case in front of me. The pattern runs through every beautiful place that has turned itself into a product.

The Moon writes about that. About housing, preservation, and local government, and the small number of people who tend to decide all of it. About the money behind the things towns say they cannot afford. It does not pretend the fight is balanced, and it does not treat process as a substitute for a decision.

A disclosure, because it matters. I am an architect, and I have worked on Yountville’s workforce housing and civic project. I am not a neutral observer of it, and I will not pretend to be. I would rather tell you where I stand and let you weigh what I write than leave it for someone else to reveal later.

The Moon will pay close attention through the 2026 local elections, when the town chooses who runs it next. After that, we will see.

Brendan Kelly Editor, Yountville Moon