Comment by _9xrb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _9xrb | Hacker News Reader

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Key West, Florida is what peak unliveability looks like:

https://www.keywestislandnews.com/2022/02/can-real-people-li...

Comment from "SixGenFam:"

>As a conch family, with generations buried in the local graveyard and my whole life here, we have to leave kw. There’s no potential for security anymore. The only other average conchs my age I know who are planning to stay have housing assistance. They can only stay because of govt assistance that I’ll never qualify for. And the number of homes available to people with housing assistance is very limited. The only others I know that can stay are inheritors. Kids who’s parents owned nice homes or businesses on Duval etc and they were blessed with the hand me downs.

>Thing is we have way too many tourists on average here now and nobody will be here to serve them. And beyond the frivolous ways of serving them, (drinks, food and clean rooms) what of the safety and community? Nurses, teachers, cops.. None of them qualify for the affordable housing income restrictions. They never fit the bracket, but they barely make enough to pay market rents. Without a properly staffed hospital, how is it safe to host thousands of tourists? We always say “well now who’s going to clean your rooms??” as if only housecleaning are being run out of town. But no, it’s the entire foundation of what makes a city run, and it’s crumbling, rapidly.

> Thing is we have way too many tourists on average here now and nobody will be here to serve them

One thing I've been pondering lately is why we had such a spike in tourism. I think the usual economic variables come into play but social media (especially Instagram) takes much of the blame in my mind.

The problem I see is popularity gets clustered into several locations based on what is popular. So a place that looks pretty on Instagram and gets tons of likes and shares gets overrun with tourist, whereas an equally beautiful place gets zero attention because it didn't get massive attention on social media.

I live in Colorado and we have a bunch of "outdoor influencers" here and many of the locations they have recommended have become overrun with tourists and locals alike. It's gotten to the point where I will browse their IG profiles to see where not to go.

> One thing I've been pondering lately is why we had such a spike in tourism.

A lot of it is likely a spike in tourism in general. There are plenty of affluent young people and air travel is cheaper than ever, so it isn't usual for people in my social circle to take 2 big trips and 4-8 smaller trips a year. To my Dad, the idea of travelling across a continent for a weekend is nuts (and he was also among the affluent young growing up). For me, that's a perfectly normal thing to casually do.

For him, the thing was road trips, so he was limited to a certain geographic area. With air travel, weekends are only limited to North America with a bit of the East off the table because of the messy connections required to get there from Western Canada.

He went camping to the local park and went to museums a few hours away. I visit museums thousands of Km away instead.

> nobody will be here to serve them

Has this ever happened? I have heard this prediction about everything from Toronto to New York to Los Angeles to Hong Kong for years and it has never seemed to come true.

There are people willing to make extreme sacrifices to live in certain places. People will live 5 to a room in cockroach infested 100 year old apartments to stay in certain places.

In Toronto, labour is no more expensive to purchase than the rest of Canada (minimum wage laws aside). Toronto is worth it to enough people to have a bunk in a bunk bed over a room to oneself while working in fast food.

People can also commute. Vancouver is notorious for having teachers commute from Abbotsford. In Toronto, people will commute 2.5 hours each way from Barrie or London.

A lot just may be that the older people get replaced with less resource intensive young people who don't have kids, need less medical care, and are happier in less space.

The downvotes on this comment are odious and don't help : downvote comments that are not well-written, not merely because you disagree with the content.

Not yet to my knowledge. This is new territory which is why you have theses claims being unfulfilled.

I expect we’ll see it in a smallish community like key west first where bussing in service people will become impossible. But maybe they’ll start building employee dorms and bus people in for their shifts (x days on, y days off). Who knows.

No one knows where the breaking point is, only that there is one.

> employee dorms

If you look at feudal England this is basically what happened - the rich landowner class provided servants' quarters for their employees.

Of course that crushes job mobility, because you can't leave your job without losing your housing...

Employee dorms are a real thing here in North America.

After college I had a friend working at in the town of Lake Louise Alberta. This is located in a national park and the number of homes are extremely limited and very expensive.

Visiting my friend they game me the tour of the house. It was a three bedroom 2 bath townhouse with 15 people living in it. 4 beds per room upstairs, and 3 people in the basement.

All the people worked at various retail shops in the village. (Not at the chateau) Making minimum wage.

You can't purchase a home in Banff National Park (which includes the towns of Banff and Lake Louise) without having an active or planned business set to open in the town, having some other blood relation to someone living in the town, or having lived in the park since 1981.

This is a special situation. They are specifically trying to limit the supply of housing in Banff to limit the environmental impact.

Another example that comes to mind is in Prince Edward county where affordable housing is so limited that some businesses are building places for (seasonal) employees to live: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/prince-edward-county-...

Sure, but they’re rare and very niche right now.

Yeah. I was thinking of this when I wrote it, but I don’t know any of the detail, just the impression that feudalism is like that.

I don't understand why this is downvoted. I, too, have heard this and what happens is wages rise and people make do. It doesn't actually end up that folks are no longer there.

I would expect to easily find occupation data at census tract level but no luck. Should help easily verify if this is happening.

I believe it. I am sad about. It is a form of cultural destruction.

My very poorly founded opinion is that Travelvlogs, Airbnb, TripAdvisor, and similar attacks on the obscurity of such locations coupled with the permissive treatment of housing as markets for out-of-region investment have erased livability almost everywhere.

The root cause is explosion of number of people with the capability to travel and travel far for leisure.

8B people on this planet and only so many tropical resorts and beaches, accessible snow capped mountain hikes, and grand waterfalls.

Tropical resorts and beaches likely can be build to service enough of them. Ofc, they will be very manufactured, but I think they could be viable. Just already look to some destinations like Canary Islands. Where most of build area is some type of resort... Building areas for pure tourism might be wasteful, but might also be least bad option in general.

Population growth is a localized problem.

Isn't it is the policies that permit mobility from population-exploding locations into slow-growth locations that cause cultural destruction?

Sure, but restriction of people’s movement, especially within a nation, is not going to be a popular political position.

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