4 ms·
I'm not sure I understand the "monsters" bit... But "if a town contributes more to human happiness as a Disneyland" I can speak to. The people who live in sma
by z9znz 4y ago
I'm not sure I understand the "monsters" bit... But "if a town contributes more to human happiness as a Disneyland" I can speak to.
The people who live in small towns in the mountains in Colorado do want and need work, but they also want and need to be able to live. When there are some tourists, it helps provide work. And the locals typically do different jobs depending on the season.
But when the area becomes "hot", and remote wealthy people start buying up local property, the locals get priced out. It's essentially gentrification on a small scale.
One could argue that the remote wealthy people deserve to have a good life anywhere they go because they can afford it, but it absolutely comes at a cost to local poor people in the areas they travel to.
With proper regulation, you have hotels and formal tourist stay locations which extract taxes that can be used to help ensure the local workers get a decent life while catering to the visitors. But without proper regulation or planning, the locals get priced out of their own towns.
Realize that low wage workers usually cannot just say, "oh well, it's too expensive here now, so we'll move cross country to find affordable housing and jobs".
Airbnb made it worse, because not only is there the traditional gentrification but now also people who own apartments can seek higher rents from tourists than with locals.
- lmm 4y ago> With proper regulation, you have hotels and formal tourist stay locations which extract taxes that can be used to help ensure the local workers get a decent life while catering to the visitors. But without proper regulation or planning, the locals get priced out of their own towns. It's actually mostly the opposite. More money coming into a town tends to lift all boats - unless, like many contemporary American towns, building more homes in town is made de facto illegal through regulations and planning. > Airbnb made it worse, because not only is there the traditional gentrification but now also people who own apartments can seek higher rents from tourists than with locals. Equally those higher rents are possible because you're making tourism possible for people who probably couldn't afford to travel otherwise. The people staying in (regular apartment) Airbnbs tend to be lower-middle-class at best, and I don't think we should automatically care more about locals than tourists just because they happened to be born somewhere nice.
- s1artibartfast 4y agoThe sad part is that the most common solution is to simply raise property taxes and subsidize rent for local workers. This does nothing to address the underlying problem, so worker wages remain low, housing prices increase. As a result, the affordability for locals gets worse, and they become more dependent on on wealth transfers with no end in sight.