Comment by lurk2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lurk2 | Hacker News Reader

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> He played a significant role in popularizing a now-familiar posture among affluent Americans: the earnest declaration that "travel is my passion", followed by carefully curated excursions to economically disadvantaged countries, enthusiastic consumption of the local cuisine, and a subsequent return home marked by self-congratulatory reflections on how much they have supposedly "learned" about other cultures.

I only dislike these people if they blog about it. None of them are nearly as insightful as they think they are, and most of them aren’t self-aware enough to realize that this whole shtick hasn’t been “cool” since 2010.

> mistaking consumption for understanding and appetite for empathy.

This disparaging attitude towards tourists is in vogue among Europeans right now; there’s a group of anarchists in Barcelona that have spent the last year or two scrawling: “TOURISTS GO HOME, REFUGEES WELCOME” on the sides of buildings.

The theory goes that tourists are a net negative to cities because they cause neighborhoods to gentrify and displace those who intend to actually live within the city. The money coming in is a negative because it causes the city to deploy resources intended to cater to tourists, the tourists fundamentally change the character of the neighborhood by their very presence (the cannibalism you are alluding to), the tourists are rude, the tourists look funny, etc.

Disdain for tourists is just a socially-acceptable way for progressives to practice the xenophobia that is now in vogue among reactionaries. They can’t blame all of their problems on foreigners writ large like the reactionaries do, so they “punch up” at the only sort of foreigner that is likely to make a positive contribution to their country.

> so they “punch up” at the only sort of foreigner that is likely to make a positive contribution to their country

Honestly I doubt they are punching up in many cases. Sure, the Americans who holiday in Sicily are probably pretty well off, because that's expensive. But a lot of the tourists who visit the large Spanish cities or coastal towns are working class people from northern Europe for whom it may actually be cheaper to get a Ryanair flight and an Airbnb for a couple of days than to take a trip within their own country. I don't know anything about the kind of person who sprawls this graffiti around Barcelona but I suspect there's a good chance they (or their families at least) are wealthier than the tourists they are raging against.

It may be much more straightforward than you suggest, and not at all related to xenophobia.

A core problem is that an influx of tourists hits the housing supply. Short-term tourism incentivises conversion of local housing to accommodate them (AirBnB, etc.) and long-term tourism results in foreigners buying local housing as their permanent or long-term holiday home.

The result is obviously a relative shortage of housing and rising prices, both of which make it harder for locals (who are often relatively poorer) to live where they need to. This pattern has been repeated from small villages in scenic areas, to big cities (e.g. Barcelona), to whole islands (e.g. Mallorca).

I’m probably one of the people that has contributed to this to some extent over time; and yet I fully understand the frustration of the locals.

It may result in apparent xenophobia in some, but its roots are rational and economic.

> A core problem is that an influx of tourists hits the housing supply.

This is the explanation these activists rely on and it’s cribbed directly from posts I was reading on /pol/ ten years ago. While it sounds plausible, I’ve never found it to have any basis in empirical reality. Tourist accommodation represents a negligible proportion of dwellings outside of resort towns, and in resort towns the whole economy is based around tourism. Some people might object to tourism changing the character of the cities they live in, but their primary objection is cultural, not economic.

If you look at the signs you see in Latin America (“Expat? No! You are an immigrant!” and “Speak my language!”) or the graffiti in Barcelona (“Tourists go home, refugees welcome.”) it becomes fairly apparent that most of these people don’t have coherent objections at all, they just resent people they perceive to be wealthier than themselves; this is why the refugees are not targeted, despite their having had far greater impacts on housing markets in Latin America and cultural cohesion in Europe.

While in some cases there may be other aspects at play, it really is the case that turning rentals into AirBnBs for visitors has dramatically increased rent in towns such as Barcelona, and even in Central Sydney where I used to live. (I say this has someone who has rented in the center of big cities, and also as someone who has taken advantage of accomodation which has been “cheap” for me, as an outsider, in cities such as Barcelona).

One can have zero racist sentiments, but if you suddenly get kicked out of your rental, because it’s more profitable for your landlord to make money from tourists, you will be outraged. (And it’s not an insignificant number if inner city apartments impacted by this). Obviously other cost of living factors have led to increased rents, but this is still a big factor in some cities.

> Sydney

“Sydney has 18,000 Airbnb listings, of which 80% are whole homes. This equates to around 3.2 Airbnb listings per 1,000 residents or 0.9% of Sydney’s private homes.” [0]

This is about half of the usual 2% figure I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, which is what the numbers are for London, Los Angeles, and New York City (before the ban).

> Barcelona

Barcelona has 19,410 listings, of which 11,828 are whole-house-apartment listings.[1]

[0]: https://matusik.substack.com/p/airbnbs

Note that the author is pulling his data from here:

[1]: https://insideairbnb.com/sydney/

I'm not sure you've looked very hard. Let's consider Mallorca. It's not all a resort town, but no doubt it's an attractive destination.

Estimates of course vary, but there are estimates that 60% of the total housing stock is owned by foreigners [0] and in 2024, >40% of all houses sold were bought by foreigners. [1] (It's also worth noting that [1] suggests foreigners purchased >20% of houses sold in Valencia, the Canary Islands, Murcia, and Catalonia, so this isn't limited to Mallorca.)

If these numbers are even close to accurate, this would be your empirical reality, and such numbers would certainly by sufficient to drive demand, shortage, and price increases.

[0] https://www.falcrealestate.com/en/magazine/property-market-t...

[1] https://humansofmallorca.com/balearics-lead-spain-for-homes-...

> It's not all a resort town

Tourism comprises 45% of the economy, which is what I was characterizing as a resort town. If you look at cities that have anything else going on for them, you’re looking at figures of less than 2% of housing stock. London is around 2.5%, New York City was around 2% before the ban, Los Angeles is around 2.1%.

So… except for the places where the concept applies, it doesn’t apply?

In places where the economy is not based on tourism, the percentage of short term rentals rarely exceeds 3% of housing stock.

The original disagreement was (to simplify) around whether locals' objections to tourists was due to economics (housing becoming more expensive), or other possible factors (including xenophobia).

So we seem to have agreed that, yes, in areas where there's a significant influx of tourists (whether short or long-term), there are likely to be sigificant economic factors that might explain the locals' antipathy?

> So we seem to have agreed that, yes, in areas where there's a significant influx of tourists (whether short or long-term), there are likely to be sigificant economic factors that might explain the locals' antipathy?

Are you seeing these demonstrations in the resort towns or in the cities under the 3% threshold?

I think you're trying to shift the goalposts, or you're just not seeing that we're stuck in circular logic.

----

You originally said there isn't an economic basis to locals' antipathy to outsiders.

I provided evidence to show that an economic basis is plausible.

You then use that evidence, and define any examples where it's happening as a 'resort town', and then require evidence that it's also happening in places you wouldn't define as a 'resort town'.

I can't do that, because you excluded the places I can provide positive evidence for, by defining them as resort towns.

----

My basic point remains: there are plenty of places where an influx of short- or long-term tourists causes a meaningful economic shift in the cost of housing (especially) which therefore makes it logical (and not just xenophobic) that the locals might resent the tourists.

Build more?

> Expat? No! You are an immigrant!

This is just anger about the insane double standard at play - if I as a European move to Latin America, I’m a sophisticated expat and they should be happy that my rich ass is living there - whereas when it’s the other way around they are immigrants and treated like actual scum, working the lowest of low jobs. The double standard at play makes me sad and angry even if I’m the one on the surface benefitting from it.

> Speak my language

This one i can also understand - I know American “expats” who lived in my country 15+ years but never bothered to learn the language, not even a little tiny bit. I don’t expect you to write a doctors thesis but if you can’t even order food in the local language or have some smalltalk it’s pretty pathetic and disrespectful. Meanwhile non-English speaking “immigrants” get yelled at if they don’t speak the local language perfectly.

Not everything is as easily explained away by “progressives training to be xenophobic”

> Some people might object to tourism changing the character of the cities they live in, but their primary objection is cultural

Is that not a valid objection? I know places in Greecethat have been utterly RUINED by the (mostly Anglo-Saxon) tourists, for example Santorini or Mykonos. These used to be really beautiful and chill places in the 70/80s, now they are horrid

> These used to be really beautiful and chill places in the 70/80s, now they are horrid

Isn’t this a bit of gatekeeping? What do you propose the solution is? Ban tourists? Take it another incremental step and now you’re banning immigrants too. “Don’t visit! Stay in your country!” “Go home tourists/immigrants”, it’s the same song and dance. It’s the same sentiment.

There is a solution to the tourist “problem” though, which is to just charge a shitload of money to visit. But then you’ll be accused of being inequitable or hating poor people or something.

Lottery system solves this issue but then people start thinking of reasons that they deserve to visit more than someone else and try to implement quotas affording priority access to their group (e.g. local residents, ethnic minority, etc.)

It’s an intractable problem encountered when dealing with scarce resources; the key is navigating to a point that the functional number of people consider to be fair.

Yea lottery works too though it can be a huge pain for coordinating plans. I think making everything much more expensive at least gives people flexibility in their arrangements. Like say you want to go to Paris and visit Musee de Orsay and also Versailles. You get lottery ticket to one and not the other - bummer.

If you take the current $20 prices and make them, say, $200 that would alleviate a lot of extra visitors. I guess some people say it’s not fair, but based on my visits I don’t think most people really go to these sites to do much more than check a box, which is unfortunate. A higher price at least allows those with interest to have a better experience instead of fighting crowds of selfie-takers, which is the current experience.

On the other hand, maybe some of these artworks should be more spread out to be enjoyed by more people instead of concentrated in a select few prestigious museums.

There is no absolute solution of course and I don’t really have great ideas.

Mostly it’s rich people exploiting a place until nothing is left - I’ve seen it in my hometown; the lovely neighbourhood i grew up in has been transformed into something entirely different by investors and other leeches until the very thing that made it great is gone

The expat-immigrant distinction is a simple one; an expat lives abroad, an immigrant intends to gain citizenship and stay. This isn’t actually necessarily reflective of how illegals view the country anymore; a lot of them intend to leave after working a few years so that they can retire in their country of origin. The reason Latinos get so upset by this distinction is quite simple: Very many of them move to developed countries and want to stay there. By contrast, hardly anyone moves to to Latin countries, and virtually none of those that do will ever attempt to become citizens. An Australian who moves to Peru and becomes a citizen is still an immigrant, not an expat; this just basically never happens, so a subset of Latinos wrongly assume it’s a race thing.

> This one i can also understand - I know American “expats” who lived in my country 15+ years but never bothered to learn the language, not even a little tiny bit.

It is obnoxious. My point was that the objection these people have to tourists is not rooted in their actual economic impact, but cultural anxiety that they are being left behind or disrespected. These anxieties are warranted, the issue I take with it is that cosmopolitans will chastise Cletus for not wanting to be replaced by Mexicans who refuse to learn English but celebrate Jose for saying the same thing but in Spanish.

>> RUINED by the (mostly Anglo-Saxon)

I've heard that Norman invasion dealt with them long before Santorini became a tourist hotspot. You probably should decrease consumption of content created by russia today.

No idea what’s that is supposed to mean but I got this story from some older Greek people who knew the place before tourist hordes arrived

There’s been tons of studies in tons of cities. It’s quite clear, for a landlord you make more per month on Airbnb than on a long term rental. So economically it makes sense. Toronto had to do those studies before city council passed a law to restrict airbnb.

You also saw it through covid when all those units flooded the rental market when international borders closed.

> There’s been tons of studies

Such as?

> You also saw it through covid when all those units flooded the rental market when international borders closed.

Toronto had an average of 12,270 daily active listings in 2019 [0]. Toronto had a population of around 2.7 million in 2019. The majority of this impact was caused by people leaving the cities to buy in the suburbs, move in with family, or return to their country of origin.

[0]: Page 7 https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2021/ph/bgrd/backgroundf...

I suppose the idea is that even if tourism brings in billions of euros, makes up 15% of the economy, and provides 150k jobs in a country where youth unemployment is rampant and jobs are hard to come by...

No, actually, I find it impossible to make sense of that.

In my experience the majority of xenophobia is driven by a fear that one is not being afforded proper respect. Sometimes this fear is well-founded; half of the countries with citizens wealthy enough to engage in mass market travel (e.g. Germany, Israel, Russia, China, UK, etc.) have their own reputations for being Ugly Americans. Not every tourist is respectful, and even those who are polite may be disrespectful inadvertently.

Casual xenophobia is endemic to most societies; it’s quite normal to distrust the unfamiliar, and it strikes me as being a natural topic of conversation, and one that does quite well when sensationalized by journalists. I think most cosmopolitan westerners have this idea that xenophobia is the exclusive purview of a racism that originated in Europe and is now resurging in the Anglosphere, but from what I have observed, most of the world is like this and probably always has been.

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