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Comment by misja111 | Hacker News Reader

I have been living in Amsterdam for the last 25 years, here is a bit of background.

25 years ago the red light district was a no go area for except for people looking for sex or drugs. But in the recent decades that has slowly changed. At some point it became fashionable to live in the old city centre and in the red light district housing was cheap. As soon as those 'normal' people were living there they started to complain about all the noise and the shady figures that were hanging around. And the city government listened; now the policy is to make the Red Light district a normal neighbourhood for families and what not.

>> But the real issue is that none of the girl prostitutes are locals.

This has a simple reason: the red light district is all window prostitution, and as a local girl you wouldn't like to be standing there when your uncle or some friend happens to be passing by.

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As soon as those 'normal' people were living there they started to complain about all the noise and the shady figures that were hanging around.

So it's like when Americans create a new suburb in the country, then get pissed off about the rooster crowing at 5am on their day off.

(Insert some joke here about cocks that somehow applies to both farms and red light districts.)

Edit: To be fair, some of the concerns outlined in the article seem completely fair and reasonable. The article indicates things have actually changed in ways that degrade the area and are worrisome.

To be fair, people might not know about the roosters when they move in. Maybe it's more like people buying a house next to an airport that's been there for 50 years, and then complaining about all the airplane noise.

I can well imagine there are people who moved to the red light district for cheap housing and a love of historic architecture who are genuinely surprised to find that there's so much sex, drugs and obnoxious tourist activity.

People tend to not really know what a neighborhood is really like until they've lived there for a bit. It's common for things to be different during the day versus nighttime or weekdays versus weekends and a lot of places change dramatically seasonally or have some very big annual event that impacts the entire area for days or weeks.

Sounds like gentrification to me.

It is, I live in the Red Light District for 34 years and have seen it all. This plan to get rid of the girls is a setup of the civil cervants and the church since around 2000. When I came living there in 1985 the neighborhood was rough, relative unsave because of dealers and junkies and there was a lot of crappy state housing. Round 2000 most of these problems were gone and the land/housing slowly started to become more valueable. A lot of parties with interest to gain a lot from that neighbourhood, with all their own reasons, started to plan for the removal of coffeeshops and the girls. The tourists coming for these coffeeshops were low key and hardly a problem for the authorities. The interested parties started 1012 project to buy out all the owners of the window bordellos, this failed due to finance problems caused by the expensive north/south metroline and the downfall of the economy in 2008. Then the parties had another plan, "Let's invite lower class uncivil drinking tourists through the tourist buro", then they can trash the neibourhood and make life difficult for the ladies behind the windows. Then the parties started to talk how little respect and danger these girls are getting from those tourists, now we have a reason to relocate these girls and make the money from those now high valued buildings and land. There are billions involved with this, don't let people fool you into thinking that there is a milligram of altruism.

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