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That’s because tourism heavy economies have a tendency to screw over low income locals to favor high income tourists.
I used to live in a Northern Wisconsin town almost entirely comprised of tourism and snow birds for an economy from May to September. Most were people from Chicago and Milwaukee that moved “a little too fast” for someone who lived in the area, so they were easy to spot.
Once school started up, the place was an absolute ghost town. All of downtown completely shut down except one bar. The hotels either shuttered during the winter or operated a single floor of rooms. The population would drop by ~80%.
I loved living in The Great Northwoods of WI, as it’s absolutely gorgeous up there half the year, but I don’t miss standing at the bus stop when it’s -40F wind chills or shovelling out my car to drive somewhere.
Stargazing was incredible in the winter, though.
I visited Astoria, OR and the bartender at the brew pub was out right offended that I mentioned The Goonies.
The tourists love the town for how it was before they got there. We did too…
Whoever made this meme doesn’t live in a city where new houses are bought up to be turned into shitty airbnbs
Hey I got news for you, that’s not just tourist towns.
Europe is like that nowadays. Rents have skyrocketed only from Airbnb and the tourists. Why rent it to a local when a tourist will pay more? Not to mention it ruins the economy. If another covid happens, market will crash, like the one in the USA.
Tenerife
Ouf, I guess I was in the good part in 2015, I felt extremely welcome.
Meh, depends on the tourist, but yeah that’s how I look at hockey kids, the state I give hockey parents is even worse.
It’s getting tiresome to constantly explain this shit…
Tourism is almost always an extractive activity, kinda like mining only it sells a place’s natural beauty and/or culture built by previous generations rather than whatever is dug out of the ground, and like mining it suffers from it’s own version of the Resource Curse:
- Most of the population isn’t needed to extract that “resource” and there’s no need for those who work in it to be highly educated or have much of a quality of life
- Most of the gains from Tourism end up in a small number number of hands and don’t really trickle down
- Tourism has all manner of destructive side-effects, from actual natural environment destruction and overcrowding to massive realestate bubbles that push out the locals.
- It’s kind of a silver bullet for politicians, especially for the crooked ones, since they don’t really need to invest in the broader population and their welfare to get themselves lots of money from Tourism, be it from thankfull Tourism Industry companies or from the value of their own realestate investments going up thanks to the realestate prices going up as the Demand for space (and, in the era of AirBnB, the actual residential units) from Tourism adds up to the normal demand from people living there, pushing prices up like crazy.
Tourism can be a good thing for most people in the kind of place like a little village in a developing nation with mainly primary sector industries at a subsistence level, because it brings better jobs than subsistence farming or fishing and which reward some level of education (enough to read and write in English), plus it brings money from people from much richer countries, but it’s a totally different thing when we’re talking about established cities in nations which are supposedly developed because there it brings jobs which require lower educational qualifications than most people there have, because of the side effects of Tourism (such as the above mentioned realestate prices and overcrowding) which make it hard for the existing Industries already present there to profitably operate and finally because it isn’t even a path towards becoming a richer nation since the kind of customers it has to attract are those from already rich nations which aren’t crazily ahead in the income scale, so it has to remain cheap enough to attract them hence it’s wealth production abilities is in the main capped because of having to stay below that of those nations - you’re not going to build a modern and advanced powerhouse nation with an industry that sells sunshine and old buildings to foreigned from modern and advanced powerhouse nations whilst employing people with mid-level or lower qualifications: you can bring a developing nation up with it but you can’t use it to push a developed nation all that much up from poor developed nation with Tourism.
People inside the Tourism Industry love it because they personally make money from it and Politicians love it because their “generous friends” make money from it, they themselves indirectly make money from it and they can be completelly total crap at managing a country and Tourism still keeps on generating money because it mainly depends on natural beauty and/or ancient buildings and people with low and mid levels of Education that don’t even need to be locals so the fatcats in nations underinvesting in their people still make lots of money from Tourism.
Weird take.
How is tourism extractive like mining? What is extracted?
You could make the same complaints of any primary industry.
If you think of inflows and outflows to and from a small local economy, in an era where almost every purchase is an outflow to Amazon et al, tourism is an important inflow. Locals cant just keep passing the same $1 around until someone spends it online, you need money coming in.
You can call it “trickle down” economics if you like, but i dont think thats a fair summation. In a small coffee shop, there’s no fat cat corporate owner, but a half dozen people with jobs.
Its absolutely true that in some places airbnb has reduced the number of homes available to locals, but thats not generally true of all tourist destinations. Most jurisdictions where this is / was a significant problem have enacted appropriate laws to mitigate it.
Its not about crooked politicians and their rich friends. A reasonable level of tourism is good for everyone, but too much can obviously cause problems.
What is extracted?
I thought this was obvious from the GP. It’s the “character” of the place turned into a tourist destination, ruined by the changes that happen to the place to support the tourists.
You could make the same complaints of any primary industry.
Perhaps, but this is a thread about tourism. “Whataboutism” is the word that comes to mind when I read this line in your reply.
It’s extractive because tourists don’t add or contribute to the reason that place is a tourist destination to begin with and in fact often take away or are detrimental.
Of course they bring money but too many and the start to crush the vibe, ruin the housing market and sometimes cause gentrification pushing out the people who were originally there.
Some people are fine but too many can ruin things pretty quick. In the age of Instagram and accessible travel it doesn’t take much for a small place to get over run in just a few years.
For an extreme example look at the lines to get up to mount Everest.
This comment was written by someone who doesn’t live in a tourist destination.
This comment was written by someone who doesn’t like the vibe but doesn’t have a rebuttal.
fake news!
source - The Visit Estonia deepstate.
yeah, it’s awesome to live and work in a town and have to rent a temporary place for 3 months in summer cuz your’re priced out of your normal home, and it was rented in advance by tourist paying 4 times normal rent value
Tourists may benefit some local business owners (or chains) while having a negative impact on many others.
Take a small fishing or farming village for example, now it becomes popular with tourists. House prices shoot up to what Londoners can afford and as they only use it as a holiday home it becomes a ghost town in winter.
The cruise tourists benefit my life in no way. They come off the ship and buy a stupid shirt that says Canada on it from one of the Chinese owned gift shops then they go back onto the boat and dump sewage into my ocean.
Can’t even go to tofino anymore as a local who literally subsidizes all that infrastructure with my tax dollars. Have to compete with the rest of the planet for campsites and can’t even enjoy my own backyard anymore
Don’t even get me started on the amount of literal human shit littered across the island at the end of summer
Nah fuck the tourists, nasty animals
I grew up, and live in a tourist destination. My highschool was trash. Tourists are a nuisance. We have a few big events in town yearly that bring an insane amount of people here and most locals just hide in their house for a week at a time. I would leave but it has the only weather I like. I make really good money(well over 100k) in a non tourist job and can’t afford to buy here.
I fully undetstand the housing problem. Especially with services like airbnb making many apartments unavailable to rent for the locals, but i cant but think how many people make their living from the tourism. For example Hawaii Tourism Authority calculated that visitor spending in August was over 800 million. That means pretty many family got their bread from tourism.
People need to realize it’s not the locals that decided to base their economy on tourism at some town hall meeting. Where I live the government moved all the industry to different parts of the country and allowed for huge real estate development that turned the area into tourism based economy. At the beginning it’s just extra jobs and people are happy about it but at some point it starts displacing locals and people start complaining.
When the town gets too expensive for locals to live then it’s a problem
So we kick out locals! Problem solved! Who needs locals, right? Profit!
Adding infrastructure adds cost. If you’re adding improvements for added housing, you upgrade internet, sewage, health and safety, replacing old building membranes that eventually break down, hospitals, community centres, libraries, parks, routes for delivery access, this does cost. This is stuff that does benefit the locals. And it’s not only paid for by the locals.
And yet, taxes, cost of living, housing prices, rent also goes up. The one thing that doesn’t is pay. To which the locals have to move to outlying areas and commute.
