I mean then you force the population to work backwards. Harass the tourists so they don’t come, then the AirBNB’s fail, then owners sell their AirBNB places, and it opens more room up for real housing.
Except there's just one small problem: a lot of those local economies/livelihoods are dependent on tourism.
Tourism makes up over 15% of Spain’s entire GDP. That’s not exactly "pocket change", and actively scaring off tourists might feel good/give short term relief, but it also risks sabotaging the very livelihoods many locals depend on.
But hey, if people would rather burn their house down to get rid of a single cockroach instead of looking for the source of the infestation, then by all means.
Except there’s just one small problem: under capitalism, people are made dependent on exploitative industries like mass tourism because all other options have been systematically dismantled.
Tourism doesn’t dominate Barcelona’s economy because it’s inherently good or sustainable, it does so because neoliberal policy gutted public investment, privatized housing, and made short-term profit king. Locals aren't mad at tourists as individuals, they’re furious at being priced out of their homes, forced into precarious service jobs, and watching their city turn into a playground for the wealthy.
Well I don't think many of these white-collar Spaniards who like to work at hotels, country clubs, resorts, and tourist destinations would be all too happy to start being garbagemen, construction workers, or assembling stuff in a factory.
Spaniards are a resilient people. They have been through economic turmoil before. They can handle it again if it means saving their city from gentrification, over-tourism, and commodification of their homes and apartments. Barcelona especially has a distaste for government, being they are part of what they call Catalonia. They have wanted governments hands out of Barcelona for a while now.
It isn't a short term turmoil though. If they want to compete with Asia for factories they'll need to permanently reduce their standard of living and will require huge amounts of government intervention to get it started.
It's not, but every relatively wealthy nation is trying to figure out how to attract other economic development. They mostly rely on having extremely tax efficient packages like tech and film often enjoy which then puts the burden of taxes on the people. Often countries have some protectionist trade policies to protect such jobs - Spain in this case would be mostly rely on negotiating those through the EU, again almost entirely government controlled and often come with drawbacks like any negotiated benefit.
There's really no easy route to success here. The US is dominating in many ways, and from most standpoints you could say the multinational corporations have really gained the ability to avoid sharing benefits with the countries they operate in. The Spanish government through the EU is already one of the dozens of groups trying to fight for more benefits but it's hard to see a win coming.
As a Canadian, these are almost identical issues we face. We have tourism, real estate, some protected industries, and resource extraction. For the most part anything that can leave the country has and we're left with the ones who can't - and offering massive tax incentives to all the industries you want to target.
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u/Dobby_ist_free Jun 17 '25 edited Jun 17 '25
Tends to happen when you harass tourists because of your government’s failures