"...profits from the tourism industry are unfairly distributed and increase social inequality. "
It sounds like the real problem isn't the actual tourists.
this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
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Who should I blame today for our problems, tourists or immigrants?
Choose one (and please ignore the capitalist elite actually causing these problems)
I fucking guarantee every single one of the locals out there spraying people and yelling at tourists has been a tourist at some point in their life. Even if it was for a day trip to Madrid or Valencia or Bilbao, they were tourists who didn't deserve to be attacked just for seeing some place new. They are just hateful hypocrites who like annoying people for fun.
They have a legitimate concern with housing prices and how the government has allowed (until recently) Airbnb to drive up their housing costs. But the tourists aren't the problem. And if they want to get rid of all tourists, let them A) find out how much their economy relies on tourism, and B) never be allowed to leave their city again.
They've done a good job of broadcasting that tourism is a problem there. I'll respect that next time I make travel plans. Assuming others think like me, then the protest has been effective.
Yup. Sucks to be those tourists for sure but it's not like they were in danger.
Just a shitty feeling. You come to appreciate the culture, food, the views, you name it; to just be a visitor, a guest, and you get yelled at to go home.
Fucking yell at your government for allowing Airbnb to fester, instead of randos who support local businesses...
(not directed at you, just venting)
Nope. At least in Lisbon (which is probably just the same as Barcelona) the vast majority of them go straight at the tourist traps. They barely get any contact with the culture beyond having some foreigner guide pretend he knows about the city point at things while driving their rickshaw in the most annoying possible way. At the end of the day they end up eating whatever sounds foreign while listening to foreign music. This is an actual common complaint people have in Lisbon, that it is not Lisbon, it has been pretending it is Disneyland for the last 10-15 years.
There are places where people do that kind of tourism you're describing. Barcelona, Lisbon and a few more popular places, for the vast majority of tourists, is not.
As for the "support" argument, they mostly support low-wage low-qualification boss-owns-50-other-places businesses while, collaterally, raising the expenses of every other business, prompting those to just close the doors and move elsewhere. If you are qualified in basically anything, the job market in Lisbon is a mess. Plenty of people do lie about their qualifications to state them as lower than they are, just in order to get these crap jobs. The purchasing power fell, locals are actually much poorer since the mass tourism wave that started when the world rebound from 2008. The median salary in Lisbon is like 1000€ while a rent for a cube starts at like 800-1200€.
As for the "yell at the government", I don't know about the situation in Barcelona, but in Portugal, the far-right just received 20% of the votes because they are the only ones addressing those problems (in a very "close the doors" kind of way). Some municipalities straight up started not giving a damn at as they cash in more from the tourists than from the local's taxes. Oeiras and Cascais, two kind of famous tourist destinations next to Lisbon straight up are renaming official stuff to English in order to appease their real clients (eg. Not the people who live there).
One thing I didn't see you mention is that Spain and Portugal have a specific issue which I haven't really seen anywhere else, which is the British coming there so much that some areas are basically turning into UK-bis zones but with more sun. If you go around Málaga you find more pubs and Guinness than tapas. You lose everything that makes these places what they are. And it's not just tourism as you'd think about where people come for a week or two, but also a lot of people buying property and either living there part time or moving there for retirement, compounding these real estate issues.
That's Algarve for you. It just straight away stopped having Portuguese people. The entire south coast of Portugal is now a British colony.
Except the retirees, people only go there in the summer so, by May, "business" owners need to hire like 50k persons willing to do crap jobs and by September they all get fired. Ofc that people aren't really willing to do that so we get the added bonus of bosses going to journals to complain that "there isn't a shortage of jobs, it is the Portuguese that do not want to work". What a dream job, to live in a cardboard box to appease Brits looking for the cheapest nice-place.
Whatever happened there that was Portuguese is no more.
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There's a lot of nuance there with very vocal people due to recent history. It also has a lot to do with awareness of the major water restrictions residents are under but tourists are not (thus the water pistols). If they make news scaring off tourists, it forces the government to reconsider the balance they've put on tourist funding vs local economy.
I'm not saying I like what's happening or not, just saying there is a lot to unpack when you don't live there.
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It seems more effective to get short term rentals banned in their city by organizing and speaking to their local city council.
Squirting unsuspecting visitors with water guns seems ineffective and unlikely to achieve any results.
Yup.
Like many cities around the world, AirBNB (and similar) redirecting housing into short term rentals has had a massive negative impact on long term housing for local residents.
Well, that and the constant crackdown governments do on new construction. AirBNB takes housing out of the supply and over-strict zoning prevents new housing from coming in.
You mean the zoning laws, that demand houses to be built for people living in them instead of tourist short term rentals? Yeah bad bad zoning laws.
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ABnB is the worst. Once it moved away from "renting a room in an occupied house" to "become a landlord with less steps and no oversight!" it became a blight.
The town hall intends to ban short term rentals in a few years. Definitely far too slow, but it has gotten to the point that even politicians who want to see their city's coffers grow fat admit that it's an economic activity that does more harm than good.
I love it. If they protest peacefully like this, it's innefective. If they are violent, or destructive it's innefective. Do you really think if talking with politicians worked we would be in this situation? They are trying to get more attention to the problem and this worked perfectly.
I'm noticing this tactic a lot of people shitting on activism by handwringing about "Oh I'm totally one of you and I totally agree with your goals but your tactics are just going too far!"
MLK decried this exact thing in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail:
“…that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’ ”
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I don’t even know if they are right or wrong about this, but I stand 1,000% in favor of people getting out in the streets with their water pistols and being the change they want to see in the world
Fuck ‘em up boys, fuck ‘em up. Get those tourists the fuck outta here like a buncha cats that went on the counter.
I agree. The world would be a better place if more people with grievances used water pistols and fewer used the kind that fire bullets.
I'm going to Barcelona this week on a family trip. We're staying in an AirBnb for a day. I think they've got a legitimate cause to spray people like me, who pretty much across the board don't realize how much their privilege hurts regular working people.
Take a hotel next time. AirBNB is cancer to citizens looking for an appartement.
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However, the Assemblea de Barris pel Decreixement Turístic says that these visitors increase prices and put pressure on public services, while profits from the tourism industry are unfairly distributed and increase social inequality.
The greedy local businesses and the local government letting them keep their probably ridiculous profits is the problem here.
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Squirting people with water in the middle of summer is a punishment? Aim it right at my face, protesters.
Especially if it's as been as hot in Barcelona as it's been here in North America. It's been ridiculous.
I live in a tourism-dependent city and the main problem isn’t tourists as much as AirBnB and similar services fucking up residential neighborhoods, raising rents, etc. And even then, it’s not the original AirBnB concept (of renting your place or spare bedroom out) as much as investors (often institutional investors) buying up dozens of properties and acting as unlicensed, less regulated hoteliers.
I’d be fine with AirBnB if they voluntarily limited that sort of shit or were forced to do it via strong regulations or punitive taxes. We have some OKish regulations. There’s permits and restrictions on density — one per block in residential areas, basically — but lobbyists got involved so half the regulations are about protecting the hotel industry instead of protecting the limited housing stock. And it all relies on AirBnB enforcing the rules when they have the opposite incentive.
Screw these guys. Whatever your position on the matter it's not the tourists themselves who are culpable, but the national and local government for allowing their economy to be so reliant on tourism.
It doesn't justify assaulting and harassing people in the streets.
Barcelona is not the only city in the world that attracts a large number of tourists. Many cities attract more. Yet Barcelona is the only place I see with so many of these xenophobic nutjobs.
If the government is sitting on its hands then you can't blame them for doing something themselves. So I would blame the government for the protests and not the protesters. It's their home, not a theme park.
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Then you're not paying attention. Plenty of such protests-with-thousands in a few major places that were overwhelmed. Barcelona, Maiorca, Lisbon, Algarve, probably most of Greece, Italy, Southern France, etc...
It is not false that the government has blame, however, there's plenty of preverse incentive in here. Land prices skyrocketed and a lot of very well positioned individuals got very well in life.
At the end of the day, being a decent human being doesn't require laws. If you know you're competing with locals whose rents already are higher than their salaries, with their businesses that now can't support rents any longer and generally browsing fake-local-crap (and I assure you that most mass tourism is), then you're just making yourself unwelcome.
Even the "tourists are injecting money in the local economy" argument is in a good part bullshit. Ofc that some of it loops to everyone else, but the gains are generally very poorly distributed and many times negative as that money destroys homes and jobs.
If you go to some parts of Lisbon, you're not going to be able to hear one single word of Portuguese. Just yday I heard about a guy complaining that tourists attempted to forbid him from going into a waterfall near his home because... It ruins their photos and they waited in line to have them while the guy just "skipped the queue". Mass-tourists can't just figure that it is a country where people live and not a theme park, the "we paid to come here, we have rights" argument is heard plenty of times.
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It's a protest. Same thing as climate protestors blocking the roads, no the individual commuters are not responsible for climate change, but the blocking roads is an effective way to draw attention to the issue.
Protests need to be disruptive or they won't be effective. These tourists had their day/lunch ruined at worst, the protestors are fighting for affordable living in the city they live in and they clearly have found an effective way to protest.
So yeah no, I feel bad for the tourists but that's about it.
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