Lisbon, a city dying from its own success

There&#x27;s no other solution to this problem other than making airbnb-type property investments unprofitable.<p>I.e. heavily incentivize renovating&#x2F;building and selling properties to individuals&#x2F;families. Mildly incentivize renovating&#x2F;building and putting up for long-term rental. Heavily disincentivize accumulating unused properties and short-term rentals.<p>And no, the market won&#x27;t properly regulate itself. That should be pretty obvious at this point.

I recently heard a comedian say &quot;The Internet has flattened our culture&quot; and that idea has really stuck with me.<p>So similar to Lisbon &quot;losing its essence&quot; I was in Berlin recently and noticed many of the city&#x27;s distinctive hallmarks had been internationalised&#x2F;Millenialised away. The weird German toilets, the day drinking punks outside the rail stations, the ubiquitous graffiti and smell of beer (or urine). And the rental costs have shot up.<p>Not to sound like I knew the city before it was cool, but the general flattening of cities into predictable, quality consumer products seems to be happening everywhere, not just Lisbon.

I live in Spain and go to Portugal maybe once in a year. Usually to visit some portuguese friends living in northern towns.<p>Last week went to Lisbon. I&#x27;ve been avoiding it because I knew it wasn&#x27;t going to be anything of what I remember, and it was much worse than I expected.<p>It saddens me so much. It&#x27;s like Barcelona but even worse.<p>But this phenomenon is now even happening in my mid-sized spanish city. It&#x27;s starting, but there are already loads of foreigners buying everything, places I used to go closing because they can&#x27;t compete with chains that are contacting landlords for paying x2 for the same spot, etc.<p>I&#x27;ve talked a lot with my girlfriend about this. The lifestyle we have is not going to be possible anymore in a few years. Quality of food is dropping like a rock while prices go up, the average rent in my area is already 2.5x of what I&#x27;m currently paying, when both of us are under 20k&#x2F;y, so mostly just waiting to be kicked out.<p>But it&#x27;s not only about getting priced out or the culture loss. I work in IT and my GF works two jobs, one as freelance designer (impossible to get into UX) and another in hospitality. And people treats her like shit. She works from home and I can hear the calls sometimes and the level of entitlement and rudeness is incredible. And she&#x27;s, in theory, dealing with that kind of premium tourism that gets talked a lot, this city is far from the trashy drunken visitors typical in the mediterranean.<p>Yet there you go, your well off central europeans treating her like shit, trying to get refunds with lies, and the whole package.<p>But that&#x27;s not everything. It gets more personal for me, because I used to go with a friend to a lot of language exchange meetups. The&#x27;ve grown in popularity, but also the kind of people that goes now completely changed. We don&#x27;t go anymore because it&#x27;s not fun anymore.<p>We&#x27;ve discussed about this, and between the comments in the FB groups complaining that we don&#x27;t want to be their friends, and the feeling in the meetups that we&#x27;re there to provide entertaining to this people, I think it&#x27;s over.<p>This experience matches with my Portuguese friends. They&#x27;ve warned us about this, and I worry this place is going to go through the same and I will have to go, leaving friends and family to go somewhere else. Not fun.<p>Every time I see this city mentioned in travel or lifestile post in YT or Instagram I know what&#x27;s coming.

What we are seeing here, and in many other cities across the world, reminds me of the Cantillon effect[1].<p>Basically, businesses which are in closer economic proximity are receiving the benefits of inflationary monetary policy sooner. This leads to higher wages for their employees, and higher profits for the B2B business partners, slowly spreading the new money out into the economy.<p>This seems to be leading to large gluts of artificially wealthy people in some areas, bidding up prices in their local economy, and then searching for areas to move into where the effect of the recently printed money hasn&#x27;t taken hold yet.<p>The result of this would be a shift in those new economies to cater for the influx of new money coming from the newcomers, and away from dealing with locals who, for the most part, are yet to receive any of this money. And when they finally do begin to have wage increases, even more money has been created flowing at a greater rate to the newcomers.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adamsmith.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-cantillion-effect" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.adamsmith.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-cantillion-effect</a>

It sucks when a place loses its essence as it becomes more popular.<p>But on the other hand there is the self-centeredness where everyone wants to be the last person allowed in, lock the door behind me, this place is my little paradise.<p>I think the only long term solution is to create more desirable places instead of clinging on to the corpse of what once was. Build new places, neighborhoods, and towns centered around people and let them develop their own charm.<p>Even if you were to block tourism 100%, it doesn&#x27;t stop you from being displaced by all of your compatriots that make more money than you, because you&#x27;re fighting for access to a very limited resource. So, expand the supply.

&gt; “I can understand that we need to sell our country to capitalize it because we are poor, but it can be sold to attract luxury tourism and not low-cost tourism,”<p>This is unfortunately what it comes down to. Every tourist destination wants to be one for luxury tourists. I understand this on an emotional level, but it requires rolling back access to tourism and taking it away from the economically disfavored population.<p>Rich people will benefit because there are too many poor people for mass tourism.

The charm of old-world cities, with hundreds or even thousands of years of history, becomes their worst enemy as tourists overrun everything trying to get that historical viewpoint. Then, businesses take advantage of the desire for &quot;old&quot; to create new &quot;old&quot; as the existing &quot;old&quot; is not good enough. In the end, tourists will abandon the now-fake charm, and everyone will lose.

The city suffers from its countrys failure. Didn’t build proper economy, people earn low wages. Som now if tourists wave with money, people are happy to take their cash. Its not a success but a failure of south european economies that don’t understand how money is made except from tourism.

I&#x27;ve lived in tourist cities for the past 6 years, cities where tourists come for the summer for vacations and it&#x27;s absurd.<p>The smallest apartment come summer season landlords behave as if they are renting you a hilton suite at a loss. The entitlement is crazy even when I pay higher rent during summer and a lot of it doesn&#x27;t make sense as well. Tourists come for a week at most but somehow that&#x27;s more interesting or profitable than having a tenant use the place year round.

I stayed in Portugal for a few months several years ago. Despite all of this I completely fell in love with the place and the people because I could still feel how it was few years ago, but I was also sad because it was too obvious where it was heading towards. People in Portugal have so much immaterial wealth which most of their visitors would never truly understand, yet they are made to believe they are poor.

I live in Lisbon (not around it, but very close to the riverside and a few blocks away from the old downtown&#x2F;&quot;Baixa&quot; mentioned in the article), and I have to say the situation is not as dire as it seems.<p>Yes, the tuk-tuks are a plague in some very specific historic neighbourhoods (and it boggles the mind as to why they were imported in the first place, although there is a burgeoning trade in &quot;pseudo-Ford-T&quot; electric cars that seem to be almost as popular), and yes, some times it feels like a bit of a circus, but 90% of Lisbon is free from that bustle, which is circumscribed to the &quot;old&quot; riverside downtown.<p>If you ignore that are and, for instance, visit the old Expo 1998 grounds (which were turned into the Parque das Nações, a quite modern mixed business&#x2F;residential district, with what I think still is Europe&#x27;s largest oceanarium, modern train&#x2F;tube&#x2F;bus station, shopping malls and modern facilities for ministries, telcos, retailers, etc.), you see almost zero tuk-tuks and a very modern, bustling, airy city.<p>And yes, real estate is completely nuts. There are far too many foreigners buying out flats across the old, &quot;traditional&quot; zone, but at least they refurbish them before turning them into AirBnBs--whereas the original owners (which, surprise surprise, were not actually living in them) wouldn&#x27;t put forward a single penny to renovate -- there are some buildings here and there that have been derelict for over 20 years, right on main avenues.<p>I don&#x27;t blame the government for having let foreigners invest (golden visas or not). I blame them for not having disenfranchised the original owners and forced them to either maintain the buildings or sell them to local developers and enforced local housing laws.<p>But this being such a small country, let&#x27;s just say the original landlords are very closely tied to the politicians who overlooked these things.

It&#x27;s not just tourist, it&#x27;s also foreign residents. And that was a deliberate strategy of the Portugese government to attract rich foreign residents, in particular retirees from richer european countries so they spend their pension in Portugal.<p>So it was at least in part self-inflicted.

&gt; Visitors now enter new stores made to look like old ones as the real ones disappear.<p>They managed to put in words exactly my feelings every time I revisit Lisbon&#x27;s city centre.

I suspect this is only transient. The number of tourists is very sensitive to flight prices which are incredibly low at the moment. Probably not sustainable for ever.

The same thing happens, and on a worse scale, in Barcelona: extremely expensive rents, leisure, restaurants, etc. are very expensive, unbearable traffic, public transport is overwhelmed, and on top of that, there&#x27;s a drought. The problem is always the same, who the citizens choose: first Colau, a former &quot;squatter&quot; who ruined the city with her socialist policies and zero urban planning, then Collboni, another useless person who in his first year of government did not change any of Colau&#x27;s urban policies for fear of breaking something.