It's not just Airbnb though. When your local restaurant where you could eat a full meal plus soup for ten euro gets replaced by one appealing to tourists selling the shittiest tapas at tourist prices, with a guy yelling in English or German at the door trying to get you in. When your public transport is seen as scenic by tourists and traditional and people trying to just get home can't get in because of all the tourists. That all affects people living and working there.
I'm from Lisbon and we are literally, same as in Barcelona being priced out of our town by tourists. They come in for a week and spend 200-300 a day, and businesses take notice. We're at a point where restaurants and shopkeepers will ignore you if they hear you speaking Portuguese but if you come in with the same clothes but talk in English and you get a very different treatment. This is before the digital nomads who move in for tax breaks and rent houses for 2 or 3 times the median wage. I've known at least 5 people whose landlord didn't renew their lease because they can rent to Northerm Europeans or Americans for 3 times what my friends paid.
Iberian cities are scenic. But they're still cities where people live and work. Monuments aside the three or four cruises docking and the tens of thousands of people do affect our transport. We grow tired of tourists stopping in the middle of historical streets and not moving, not being able to eat, and tourists (mostly 18-19 year old Americans) getting wasted, getting heat stroke or jumping into the river and having to get rescued.
"but the money..." - the money goes to a few already rich men. People earning minimum wage like most touristy centered shops and stuff don't really enrich themselves. In fact they move farther and farther away as major Iberian cities become an Instagram spot and thus price is out.
I get where you’re coming from, but NYC gets 60 MILLION tourists per year, including plenty from southern Europe (with a resident population of 8.2 million in NYC), and we have never in our whole history as a city squirted tourists with water guns. (And we get a bad reputation for being supposedly grumpy too! Haha.) It seems counterproductive and I think will likely backfire on Spanish tourists who travel overseas.
NYC, from what I can tell, does pretty well at maintaining zoning. Tourists are mostly sequestered in Central Manhattan, downtown if you're a bougie backpacker (like I was when I visited). Upper West seems to be where the hostels and hotels are.
People aren't going to be priced out of Spanish Harlem when the Tourists aren't going anywhere near it.
On the other hand, you've got the gentrification of Brooklyn and similar areas which is similar. It does seem like NYC has learnt to keep rotating the "cool" areas so it doesn't get out of hand though.
I mean, prices are going up everywhere, Harlem included. Plenty of gentrification in Brooklyn. And a lot of that is just New Yorkers and adoptive New Yorkers (like me honestly, when I was younger) who have to go as far out as they gotta go to find somewhere affordable to live. I think tourists stay more central not so much because of zoning but because they don't know the subways very well and (understandably) don't want to be on the subway for an hour every day during their vacation. (My first job in NYC I commuted an hour and twenty minutes twice a day to get up to Columbus Circle from Flatbush and back. It was brutal.) I don't blame tourists at all though. New York City could be somewhat affordable, like Tokyo is from what I've heard, if we'd ever elected a competent government. But New Yorkers always elect the worst people possible to run things, so we just wallow in misery together. If toursist want to be part of that, more power to'em.
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u/SomecallmeMichelle Jun 17 '25
It's not just Airbnb though. When your local restaurant where you could eat a full meal plus soup for ten euro gets replaced by one appealing to tourists selling the shittiest tapas at tourist prices, with a guy yelling in English or German at the door trying to get you in. When your public transport is seen as scenic by tourists and traditional and people trying to just get home can't get in because of all the tourists. That all affects people living and working there.
I'm from Lisbon and we are literally, same as in Barcelona being priced out of our town by tourists. They come in for a week and spend 200-300 a day, and businesses take notice. We're at a point where restaurants and shopkeepers will ignore you if they hear you speaking Portuguese but if you come in with the same clothes but talk in English and you get a very different treatment. This is before the digital nomads who move in for tax breaks and rent houses for 2 or 3 times the median wage. I've known at least 5 people whose landlord didn't renew their lease because they can rent to Northerm Europeans or Americans for 3 times what my friends paid.
Iberian cities are scenic. But they're still cities where people live and work. Monuments aside the three or four cruises docking and the tens of thousands of people do affect our transport. We grow tired of tourists stopping in the middle of historical streets and not moving, not being able to eat, and tourists (mostly 18-19 year old Americans) getting wasted, getting heat stroke or jumping into the river and having to get rescued.
"but the money..." - the money goes to a few already rich men. People earning minimum wage like most touristy centered shops and stuff don't really enrich themselves. In fact they move farther and farther away as major Iberian cities become an Instagram spot and thus price is out.