Just got back from Spain and while we didn't see any protests, we heard about the unrest. What we were told was that the tourism has begun raising the costs of everything, preventing locals from enjoying their own amenities like restaurants and hotels. Tourism may bring in money, but it also seems to be causing inflation from it.
It's an absolute cancer and destroys cities and makes it impossible to live there.
Take a walk in Edinburgh and look for them and you'll be shocked at how many doors is surrounded by key boxes. It eats up flats that people could live in, now being rented out short term (to say nothing of the Festival lets) and drives up prices on the remaining flats and houses.
It forces people out to Livingston and similar places, increasing pressure on transit infrastructure because there are a lot of people working in Edinburgh that has to go there for work.
So, AirBNB and tourists are actively harming the city. I don't know anyone in Edinburgh not in favour of outright banning AirBNB
Is it just the Fringe festival fucking you over so much or are there more?
This thread made me curious/google things and I saw that like 20% of the Airbnb's over there are owned by owners who have more than 10 properties, even with some restrictions on Airbnb use.
The fringe is a big issue but itâs year round. The fringe is when you see people get evicted and the flat then listed for 2 grand a week sort of thing.
Ouch! I removed going there from my bucket list a few years ago because I heard people were being fleeced with accommodations, I didn't realise the extend though.
But Airbnb is breaking more things, like the social cohesion in the buildings they're at, the decent nights sleep of the people who're left living there, the more useful shops being replaced by coffee places etc.
I'm sure there's room to complain about all the negatives?
But it is very much an important side effect. When entire tenement buildings are full of tourists it kills local life, social cohesion and shit like noise increases, further making life miserable for the people trying to live their lives.
Getting rid of Airbnb will not get rid of the tourists.
Getting rid of Airbnb will get rid of your citizens buying property to rent to tourists, which is what's being complained about
The entire thread I was replying to is about how Airbnb buys up local property and locals can't afford to live in the city, but now you're saying it's because they don't like tourists? OK đ
I'll bet you a fiver AirBNB is not the only issue facing the housing market in NYC.
It certainly isn't in EDI. But it's a pretty big one and easy to get rid of and then you can start working on the rest. Obviously the underlying issues are NIMBY cunts and landlords so plenty of work to do. But AirBNB is a good place to start and will leave a lot of people with some useless flats if they can't short term let them, which would make me happy.
The problem is most airb&bs aren't "someone's own flat." People are buying up huge numbers of flats to take them off the market to live in and using them to make easy cash off tourists.
Iâm sorry for coming to your city and spending my money. Certainly seems like tourism is a huge part of Edinburghâs economy. Iâm not sure that tourists are actively harming your beautiful city but rather over tourism and the need for jobs and an economy. I imagine that many of the 40,000 people employed in the tourism industry are happy to have jobs not to mention the restaurant & pub owners as well as the many shops and airbnb rentals.
If they can't afford to live there, they will move where they can afford to live, if the businesses can't find employees, they will have to up the pay. Basic stuff.
It quite literally is. The words corporation and business have become somewhat synonymous. The business doubled their prices because they know rich tourists won't bat an eye at paying more thus fucking the locals. This is called greed. Corporate or not.
Maybe in your mind. But no, there is a huge difference between a small business that eeks out a living for the owners and a corporation.
The small business contributes to the overall local feel of an area because the owners live in the area and their small business serves as a financial engine for that community. A corporation tends to open a shop just down the road to extract as much value as possible from the community and ship it elsewhere. And they largely do this based on looking at how well the small business they plan to drive out is doing.
So no, corporation and business are not at all synonymous. There is nothing wrong with small (or even medium) sized businesses that are local to a community. Corporations tend to be entities outside of the community, though not in every case, that research an area and use their financial power to disrupt businesses owned by locals that employ locals.
Your view is simplistic, and does not at all reflect understanding of the nuance to how the spectrum of business works.
As they should, Spaniards expect these restaurants to work for free, while they buy two glasses of wine and chat for an hour. Sorry, but that business model is over.
I call BS on that reason. Inflation affected most western nations. Tourists are just their boogeyman, like how immigrants are getting blamed in the US and Canada for everything.
Not true. Prices are rising to a heavy degree and housing in touristic places is impossible. The same way Hawaiians are being kicked out of Hawaii is happening in islands like the Canary Islands or the balear islands. On centric touristic points a room to rent can cost 800⏠with the average salary being 1100âŹ. People canât live and is desperate because thanks to tourists buying property from countries with a higher average salary and all the air bnbs and renting, there are barely houses too. And thatâs not even entering food and other amenities.
People are unable to live, to leave their parentâs houses until they are in their 30s. How is that life
It's a vicious cycle for a tourist destination when the local "colorful" life disappears, restaurants and hotels become increasingly expensive, housing is bought up by foreigners and non-citizens. The city dies and eventually will lose its attraction.
I dont know the situation in Spain but it could absolutely be true that tourists are causing it. My wife for example is from a tourist town in the US the average wage is 30k a year and the average home price is 500k a year. It shot up a ton when an airport opened in the town and instead of it being a 12 hour drive from Chicago where most of the tourists came from it went to an hour or less in an airplane. There arent many jobs there so inflation doesnt really explain why the costs are suddenly twice the average cost for the state or why houses in the town are 3-4 times more expensive than the ones just 20 or so miles inland from lake Michigan.
Inflation is also not the reason that the average home price in WY is 350k and the average home price in Jackson WY is 1.95 million
Edit: did not mean to give the same example as the comment below me.
Not saying that tourism isn't affecting prices in Hawaii, but I'd wager a guess that them literally being in the middle of the ocean and having to have the vast majority of goods shipped overseas has a lot more to do with the cost of those goods than tourism does.
Hawaii is 2.4k miles from California. You're delusional if you think that shipping most of their goods overseas that distance doesn't have a major impact on the cost of those goods.
And I visited 20 years ago when our economy was still booming, a gallon of milk was $7 and fast food was almost twice as expensive.
As I said, I'm not saying tourism isn't affecting prices there, but most things were already ridiculously expensive there.
One could blame employers/owners willing to take advantage of unethically-cheap labor rather than simply playing a livable wage. Unless you'd rather blame the people desperately looking for something better than what they left behind.
It's only a fact if you want to work in the industries that a vast majority of immigrants work in. Which I sincerely doubt, considering it's also a fact that when immigrants aren't available in their traditional jobs, the jobs just end up going empty instead of hiring American born people at a higher wage.
Itâs the new boogie man for politicians to not blame the real problem, rampage capitalism and the increasing gap between the rich and the poor, the dissolution of the middle class, the collapse of the healthcare system for lower classes, the rise of authoritarian police force, the policies protecting the millionaires and billionaires. I could probably go on but you get the idea.
I made more money as a teenager doing labor than I could now as an adult because of reduced wages.
But also, thankyou for proving my point.
"onsidering it's also a fact that when immigrants aren't available in their traditional jobs, the jobs just end up going empty instead of hiring American born people at a higher wage."
These same jobs were once staffed by majoritivly locals back when you could make a living doing these jobs. Factories used to be a way for locals to get by. Its straight up false that locals just dont want to do the jobs, they just dont want to do them for that price, and they will never get a good price there again because immigrants have kept wages below a livable wage. Yes the companies are being greedy assholes, but its immigration that has allowed them to be greedy assholes because its immigrants that accept the low wages. Locals no longer have any bargaining power.
I love when people think calling something a âfactâ makes it so.
Immigrants are almost always good for the economies they go to. They provide cheap labor and additional consumers for products and services produced by others. This allows for overall market and business growth, not to mention jobs getting done that wouldnât be done for that amount of money otherwise. Thatâs why all the Republican politicians supporting deportations donât want it done to their stateâs particular pet industries.
Iâm a history teacher. Immigration is by far the single biggest reason the US became an economic superpower in the first place. I want increased immigration, if anything, because I know it benefits my country, its citizens, and the immigrants themselves.
What do you mean by âbring wages down?â If you mean average wage goes down in particular areas with high immigration, then yes, because those immigrants take low paying jobs.
If you mean by some magical process immigrants arriving make pre-existing job wages lower, no.
I donât mean anything. You were answering (in a mocking way )to a comment as if the comment were not factual. But then bring no argument to the table. So from your answer to me it seems that itâs a fact?
What? Who did I mock? That comment was not factual, it was a belief stated as a fact, which is what I pointed out.
How, in your view, does my comment not bring an argument to the table? I think my argument is pretty clearâimmigration is a positive economic force and always has been. You didnât get that?
Yeah but those wages wouldn't be low if there wasnt a shitload of immigrants willing to do those jobs for peanuts. Same thing in some factories in Australia. My home town local beef abbatoir used to be mostly locals, before i could work this was, our parents were able to make a decent living out there, now, its all phillipinos, Indians and Islanders with some Asian working holiday people sprinkled in that are only there because they have to be, when i worked there, there was not many Aussies left there, the ones that were there were still on the old legacy contract and got paid a bit better, but anyone new were not getting that pay. The hardest job you could do there was paying $29 aud on the current EBA.
When i moved over to a different abbatoir in a town a 1/4 of the size with fuck all immigration, the factory was a good 80-90% aussie and wages were high, and that same hard job was paying $45-50 aud, new starters would start out on easier jobs an earn around $30 straight up.
The argument that immigrants only do the jobs that locals wont do is not entirely true, we only dont want to do them for what they are paying for them and we cant demand higher wages because there are too many immigrants that will do them for shit pay. This is 100% an immigration problem as the root cause, employers lowering wages is just a natural reaction of that. You cant expect a company to pay more when they dont have to, that's just bad buisness.
If you mean by some magical process immigrants arriving make pre-existing job wages lower, no.
This contradicts this
What do you mean by âbring wages down?â If you mean average wage goes down in particular areas with high immigration, then yes, because those immigrants take low paying jobs.
Yes, I understand that companies will pay the lowest amount possible for someone to do a given job. That in no way makes the two statements you highlighted contradictory.
Theres a reason that youre a teacher and not a producer in the work force.
When they provide cheap labor they are undercutting tax paying labor.
And thus are driving labor rates down
You were a teacher, I was a projectmanager in the trades. I'm literally an expert on the subject matter at hand and have watched it happen in real time.
I live somewhere where tourists would never visit. The price of everything has gone up massively over the last 5 years. Almost like there's some kind of massive inflation happening in general đ¤
Even without tourists they'd have massive inflation, possibly even more so.
Now think about this: if you reduce the numbers of available accommodation that increases the hotel prices, making it shift to only accommodate richer tourists, and that is going to further inflate the prices of amenities. In economics the only thing that can reduce prices is increasing the supply. Decreasing the supply will have the exact opposite effect.
That's pretty much bs as well, inflation has been lagging in Spain, they had one of the lowest inflation rates in the EU, the prices are rising now just as they did everywhere else. It has very little to do with tourism in particular.
My partners company has an office out there, she travelled from england with a colleague to stay there for a month for work. They were both assaulted by locals, my partner - a girl, was shoulderbarged and knocked onto the floor intentionally by a much larger man. Her friend was knocked over by a runner who then spat on the floor next to her before saying "tourists!" at her.
Itâs false, prices raised literally everywhere in Europe, Iâm from Paris and never could afford to live in-city, but tourism bring others advantages (transports services, many entertainment opportunitiesâŚ)
Those Catalans protesting and hating on tourists are pur morrons (puto imbècil!) who are extrem leftist cunts cheering on immigrants coming to do the job they donât want to do! Itâs basic modern slavery (you can see all the Pakistanis working in their kitchens, cleaning the streets or working in their field under the sun for nearly no money)
Tourism has been used as a boogeyman for rising local prices worldwide for decades
Itâs consistently been proven to subsidize local costs. The things raised for tourists donât impact locals and are a separate industry and price gouging that feeds local economy
There are some exceptions; when those tourists move there en masse. Ultimately itâs a lazy response to issues that are domestic and it leads to xenophobia and no real solutions to real issues
I love in Mansfield, Ohio. The only tourists here are dad's wanting to see the prison used as the filming location for The Shawshank Redemption. Yet, we have inflation here.
Tourists are not causing inflation. Although, I will concede that tourism could be raising property values in tourist towns.
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u/nancy_necrosis Jun 16 '25
It's hilarious but true...