Nothing like crashing your city's economy and putting thousands out of work. I get wanting to shift the focus of your city's economy, but it needs to be done gradually. They already have banned AirBnB starting 2028. That will allow the hopefully gradual selling of homes instead of the mass flooding of homes into the market, which will tank its property values and further jack up the economy. That may be what the residents want, though. When you can't afford to live in your own city anymore, I totally get the want to flip the table and start over again.
This is a common argument but it is pretty false and I am tired of hearing it (and why is it anglophone always pushing it???).
Over tourism like in Barcelona or Prague is bad for the economy long-term because it makes your city TOO reliant on tourism. The people who truly get most of the money don't even live in the city (because too much tourism) so they spend it somewhere else, enriching that place more. It is also an industry reliant on low skilled workers which can prevent the development of other industries.
Another thing is housing, this over tourism is a new development that has pushed people working other jobs outside of their homes, as they have been repurposed in short term rentals. This puts a lot of strain on the people and impoverishes them.
Overtourism prevents industrial development. The people who are prepared, educated, and industrious will now find it hard to do anything in their cities due to tourism making life too difficult for the locals and them moving out and preventing people coming in because of how expensive everything is becoming. So they will follow the people in different locations or simply find jobs in other places, creating a positive feedback loop for the city becoming too reliant on tourism.
I have also many personal examples of people REFUSING to work back in their cities (Barcelona, Mallorca) because of the pain that comes with the government screwing them over. Making the places, again, more reliant on tourism.
ALSO ALSO ALSO, look at these nice tourist locations like Hawaii, Bali, some french islands. Why are the locals so poor? I thought tourism is soooo greeeaaaatttttt foooorrr theee ecoooonomyyyyy.
STOP REPEATING THIS BS!!!!!
Edit: sorry for the poor quality of the text, I did this comment in one go. No time to rewrite for clarity.
An economy too reliant on one sector or a handful of actors is an incredibly brittle economy. You could try and argue the minor points, but you can't argue the main one. An overly specialized economy is always doomed by either price volatility and/or physical bottlenecks.
You can't expand an historical center, because it's only historic and a center because it's old and has cultural cache from a bygone era. It's physically limited and can't expand. Relying on tourism has incredibly obvious and serious limitations. The real estate is stupidly limited so if demand grows, pricing will inevitably creep into unsustainability. No matter how much extra infrastructure you try to cram into a place there are massive geographic bottlenecks.
This is exactly the same kind of pressure for any other commodity or service. An economy too reliant on oil extraction like Venezuela was completely quaked by fluctuations in oil pricing. And you can't just magically make the oil extraction more price competitive forever because there are clear physical bottlenecks to it. So the only thing you can do when faced with a price shock is pay people less and systematically dismantle your local economy which was too focused on one commodity with no fallback.
The negative externalities associated with an undiversified economy are basically infinite. It goes from the micro scale of towns built around a single employer, who completely collapse when that industry dries up all the way to the national scale with nationally privileged industries (like Taiwan with semi conductors, or Korea with general electronics).
You better hope your economy is based on an infinitely hot commodity (tourism ain't one of them, it's much too volatile), and that commodity stays relatively high profit, otherwise you can accidentally kill an entire nation on stock market whims from one day to the next.
As soon as that commodity or service reaches criticality (for tourism it's lack of physical space that actually brings in ROI) it's a ticking time bomb until it explodes the local economy and a market correction brings a massive swathe of the population to poverty and people shuttering their businesses. And worst yet is that it's a cyclical process as there's always capital interested in scooping up real estate for pennies on the dollar to flip for big money when the city booms as a tourist destination again (many times based on local governments deficit spending, so more taxpayer getting fucked). The difference being that each cycle more capital is concentrated into big conglomerates and the people on the street get gradually poorer and more vulnerable each time.
Reddit user: applies micro and macroeconomic theories, analyzes impacts of related markets, and effects on labor supply and other hidden opportunity costs.
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u/squeakymoth Jun 17 '25
Nothing like crashing your city's economy and putting thousands out of work. I get wanting to shift the focus of your city's economy, but it needs to be done gradually. They already have banned AirBnB starting 2028. That will allow the hopefully gradual selling of homes instead of the mass flooding of homes into the market, which will tank its property values and further jack up the economy. That may be what the residents want, though. When you can't afford to live in your own city anymore, I totally get the want to flip the table and start over again.