"Rural Coastal Gentrification, Social Media, and the Working Waterfront"
Monique Coombs, Maine Coast Fishermen's Association
Maine’s working waterfront has always been shaped by forces from outside the fishing industry. Over the past few years, however, social media, travel content creators, and the influencer economy have become powerful drivers of change. Through the algorithmic amplification of coastal aesthetics, images of weathered docks, lobster rolls, and harbors full of fishing boats are distributed at scale, attracting wealthy buyers, visitors, and second-home owners drawn to aesthetic rather than community.
This presentation argues that social media has become a driver of rural coastal gentrification in fishing communities. While tourism and visitors are not the enemy, saturation can produce a civic shift in which infrastructure, governance, and community priorities reorganize around the visitor experience rather than the working waterfront.
The presentation asks what is lost when a coastal community is loved for what it looks like rather than what it was built on, and how social media, amenity migration, climate migration, and weakened local governance affect the future of fishing communities.
Monique Coombs is the Director of Community Programs at the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association and a member of a fishing family. Her personal connection to the fishing community, combined with her professional work, gives her a perspective grounded in both lived experience and years of working alongside fishermen and fishing families across Maine. In her role at the Maine Coast Fishermen’s Association, her work focuses on building strong, resilient coastal communities and supporting fishermen and fishing families as they navigate the economic, environmental, social, and cultural changes affecting Maine’s waterfronts. Through both her writing and community-based work, Monique connects the lived experience of fishermen with the broader forces reshaping coastal Maine. Her writing has been featured in National Fisherman, HuffPost Green, and Maine Policy Review among other publications.
