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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

Popular opinion: I wanna live in a tourist hotspot! Nice weather, beautiful scenery, exciting sites, etc.

Unpopular opinion: A lot of other people want to experience that too! Perhaps the best thing is to rent/share those prime locations, so a lot of people can enjoy them.

Fighting against people visiting is rent-seeking of a different kind.

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tourist hotspots often need a lot of service workers, who have to live somewhere too. Not to mention that higher rents/decreasing total stock in one part of a city can create more competition for other parts, raising prices everywhere to some extent.

And I truly expect the market to find an equilibrium such that those service workers will exist, whether through transportation, higher wages, people who highly value the location, etc.

Certainly without those service workers, it won't be much of a tourist attraction.

No, it'll rely on exploitation of workers. That's what's happening in Dublin -- they're exporting the English language students as in Ireland you can work (legally, many work more) 20 hours a week on a student visa and the English schools count. Then they're stuffed into rooms with five others somewhat nearby. It all relies on exploitation on the desperate.

Devil's advocate: what is making students so desperate?

The 20+ work week and 5 roommates is apparently preferable to their other options.

You can use that logic to defend anything.

You can use at that logic to look at root causes, not symptoms.

Please enlighten us as to the root cause in this instance, then.

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