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Comment by cowboysauce | Hacker News Reader

> “There are a lot of cities asking themselves this question,” says Goodman. “Are we a city anymore or are we just Disneyland?”

This really resonates with me. I grew up in a ski town in Colorado. My family still lives there, but every time I visit I feel how soulless and fake the area has become. It has abandoned any sense of being an actual town in favor of becoming a de facto amusement park. Something like 80% of the houses in the area are empty for most of the year and large numbers of workers either live in their cars, are packed like sardines into employee housing, or commute long distances. Development is inevitable, but the decline really picked up after the arrival of short-term rentals. Consequently, I refuse to use services like AirBnB when I travel anywhere.

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It's also very visible in central Lisbon, even in a short period of time from the first time I visited friends there (around 2010) to now the whole centre has been hollowed out and mainly inhabited by tourists, or digital nomads/rich foreigners. You can see a clear divide where the AirBnBs end and the real city begins between the neighbourhoods of Alfama (touristic) - Penha França, when you look at buildings and notice new sets of double glazed windows all around you know those are STRs, then walk a few more blocks into Penha França's area and there are almost no new windows on buildings.

It's actually sad to see it transformed, I'm not against tourism at all because of course I'm a tourist as well but this kind of tourism just seems to hollow out entire neighbourhoods and instead of a lively and vibrant city life you just see tons of tourists looking at their maps at every corner, rolling luggage up and down onto these apartments.

The good news is that when we throw the tourists out, we get to keep the double glazing!

Unfortunately STRs have put lots of money into the pockets of the otherwise not very cash rich middle classes in Portugal, so it is hard to get them to vote to turn the money taps off, even if it means their children can no longer get rooms above their favorite downtown coffee shop while studying. Much easier to blame digital nomads / rich foreigners / poor immigrants, and vote for Chega.

At the risk of sounding insensitive, I know Lisbon is going through a big change at the moment, but this isn’t a short term rental problem. This is a big city developing to the next stage problem and this is Lisbon’s version of it.

London, New York, Paris, Madrid, LA, etc all became too expensive for locals at some point in their history. Lisbon is next up and in a few years there will be other cities this happens to.

I’m not saying it’s right but it seems, inevitable?

Sounds like a “nobody goes there any more, it’s too crowded” kind of problem.

Its not inevitable. In Lisbon's case, could have been preventing with legislation controlling airbnb saturation. Which is now in place, and will likely save Porto from the same dystopia.

Sure, this version of the problem could have been avoided with legislation but something else would cause it. Let’s take Porto as the example, automotive industry in the region grows suddenly, people move to the area, buy and rent property in Porto which drives up prices and drives out locals.

Which is basically what happened in all those other cities I listed and whatever the requisite industry is.

Theres a quantum leap difference between growing industries and tourism. Tourism is an inequality industry, where the owners of the hotels/homes for rent make everything, and the staff makes very little to nothing. It is almost the worst industry you can have in a developing country.

That’s a fair point.

Perhaps Lisbon (and PT in general) should focus its efforts on levelling up its economic activity in to higher value areas. The time I’ve spent in PT all people talk about is the negative impacts of tourism and not improving the wider economy. There seems to be a very conservative mindset.

But that’s probably from a thin slice of exposure.

No I would say thats largely correct.

The country de industrialised way too early (I would argue no country should ever de industrialise to begin with, but that's another cup of tea entirely) And now has created lots of low quality jobs in the tourism sector through mass tourism and benevolent expat laws to people from richer countries.

The whole thing is a tragedy, but it helps those with capital already (homeowners in central Porto and Lisbon have likely seen their capital 3x to 10x) so the government let it happen.

The whole 2nd tier of the eurozone is completely in tatters anyway. Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. The eurozone doesn't work when there are two tiers of countries in it. Joseph Stiglitz had a great book about it.

In other words, you just don’t want to see all the other asshole tourists like you when you go on vacation.

Nah, I don't behave like the other asshole tourists, I don't use AirBnB, usually go to cities and towns where I know people so I can stay with a local and enjoy the underground, get lost in the cities without checking maps in the middle of where people pass by going to work.

You don't know me, don't assume, you're just being an asshole.

You don't get it. It's worth destroying these towns to get as much tourism money as possible, because with all that money, the rental owners can finally retire to a nice quiet ski town somewhere.

My partner is from one of those small Colorado ski towns too, and I feel the same exact way when we visit it. It's really sad.

Well, but what was there before the ski resort?

From ca. 1976 I remember an article in the Straight Creek Journal, beefing about what the writer called "candy-ass towns", the archetypes probably being Aspen and Vail.

> My family still lives there, but every time I visit I feel how soulless and fake the area has become. It has abandoned any sense of being an actual town in favor of becoming a de facto amusement park.

Anytime someone would complain about Hollywood, I would just mirror the same sentiments. It is an amusement park now, and most Angelenos (and probably Southern Californians, in general) rarely go there unless an out-of-state friend insists on seeing the Walk of Fame.

When was Hollywood not an amusement park? The 1923 Hollywood Land sign, advertising a housing tract feels like a sign that it was already an amusement park by then. I grew up in Orange County and had no desire to ever go to Hollywood; Disneyland was just as fake, and much closer. :P

But that industry is soooo massive, and such a huge economic force, and is kind of built on the idea of Constructing Fantasy, so it _makes sense_ that the Hollywood neighborhood is like this.

I have no numbers to back this up, so feel how you will about this comment, but I’m sure the STR economy does not create much more than income for the single homeowner, and makes it _harder_ for these sudden AirBnB boom towns to build an economy beyond more than renting rooms.

See, it should be the reverse. The employees and locals should own homes and the visitors should be packed into hotels or other purpose build facilities.

There would be tremendous pressure for any given town in the world to defect from that strategy and capture a lot of the high-end skiing visitors. That makes it virtually certain that one will and capture the disproportionate revenue and meals/lodging/services tax revenue as a reward.

Thus, laws and regulations, as per TFA. Limiting competitive options is the point. Anyway it's a suicide pact so if there are no state-level regulations and a town decides to try to take a bigger share of the tourism dollars, the town dies and is eaten from the inside-out by tourism. It will still exist, but it will become a less and less desirable tourism location for many.

State-wide laws don't help you much when Jackson Hole, Tahoe, Deer Valley, and Aspen are all in different states (and Whistler and Mont Tremblant are nearby in another country).

Are skiers visiting Aspen primarily from within Colorado or outside? The ones who have to fly in anyway, they can pretty easily fly into a different resort that gives them the resort experience rather than the "packed into hotels" experience.

hasn't this been the nature of ski towns for decades? they've always been tiny communities with transients and tourist booms and lots of rentals, resorts, cabins, etc.

Sure, ski towns have always been dependent on tourism. And the 5000 sq ft mountainside mansions have always been unaffordable for most people living there. But the difference is that there used to be affordable housing for the people who live and work there full time. Short-term rentals have massively changed the financial calculus.

Yep, there was the South Park episode from 2002 (Asspen) that does a shot of the housing development, and the sign for it says, "A time-share community." -- even then it was a long-recognized trend of how the ski towns turned out.

https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Aspen_Heaven?file=AspenHea...

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