It is easy to write about Pigeon Forge as a failure of taste, and it is lazy, and it is wrong. It is a failure of collective decision-making. Different problem, different fix.
Consider the incentive facing any single property owner on that road. Traffic passes your lot at a known rate. Your competitor has a sign. If you build a taller sign you capture more of that traffic; if you do not, you capture less. Every owner faces this, every owner answers it the same way, and the aggregate is a road where the only way to be seen is to be louder than the person next to you.
Nobody in that sequence did anything unreasonable. That is what makes it worth writing about.
Towns that avoided this outcome did not do it by having better taste. They did it with rules: sign ordinances, height limits, setback requirements, design review. Sevier County’s zoning history is a matter of public record and it shows a consistent preference for letting the market sort it out, decision after decision, over roughly five decades.
I am not arguing that Pigeon Forge should be something else. It works. It employs thousands of people and it is honest about what it is. More than can be said for a good deal of tourism marketing in this state.
I am arguing that the plateau counties now watching land change hands are about to face the same sequence of individually reasonable choices, and that they have a window, measured in a few years rather than a few decades, to decide whether they want rules before the incentive structure decides for them.
Ask your county commission what its sign ordinance says. Most of them cannot tell you.