Lisbon, a city dying from its own success

https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-05-29/lisbon-a-city-dying-from-its-own-success.html

by spaniard89277 • 2 years ago

50 84 2 years ago

english.elpais.com

I live in Spain and go to Portugal maybe once in a year. Usually to visit some portuguese friends living in northern towns.

Last week went to Lisbon. I've been avoiding it because I knew it wasn't going to be anything of what I remember, and it was much worse than I expected.

It saddens me so much. It's like Barcelona but even worse.

But this phenomenon is now even happening in my mid-sized spanish city. It's starting, but there are already loads of foreigners buying everything, places I used to go closing because they can't compete with chains that are contacting landlords for paying x2 for the same spot, etc.

I'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'm currently paying, when both of us are under 20k/y, so mostly just waiting to be kicked out.

But it'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'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.

Yet there you go, your well off central europeans treating her like shit, trying to get refunds with lies, and the whole package.

But that'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've grown in popularity, but also the kind of people that goes now completely changed. We don't go anymore because it's not fun anymore.

We've discussed about this, and between the comments in the FB groups complaining that we don't want to be their friends, and the feeling in the meetups that we're there to provide entertaining to this people, I think it's over.

This experience matches with my Portuguese friends. They'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.

Every time I see this city mentioned in travel or lifestile post in YT or Instagram I know what's coming.

Rinzler8915• 2 years ago

But it's not only about getting priced out or the culture loss.

Welcome to late stage capitalism where people and culture don't matter. It's now all about the Benjamins baby. Whoever brings in more dollarydoos is the new king of the hill, doesn't matter the local lives and culture are destroyed, all that matters is "the economy" and "line-goes-up".

But don't worry, the well-off locals, the asset owning class, they'll be just fine, it's only the not-haves rentoids that end up getting the short stick.

spaniard892774• 2 years ago

Apparently line goes up also includes "locals must be my friends". I mean, I didn't want to be very harsh in the comment above but the stuff that not only I've read, but I've been told, is hard to ignore.

My GF was having a very difficult moment financially early this year. We reached out to our foreign friends asking for help, because we know they're better connected, some work in companies where her experience is valued, etc. I mean, it wasn't like a moonshot, we tried to make sense.

Completely cold shoulder. This is people we've know for about 2 years at least. She got the job because of a spanish friend told some other spanish friend that has a company in hospitality. Another Italian friend tried to help too, and the portuguese ones, well, they're barely surviving so...

I mean, there's a clear line I can draw here. I don't want to point fingers and that's our personal experience, but I mean, it isn't the only imput that lead us to feel like we're just entertaining.

But then I have to be their friend, and play local, or I'm rude.

IDK man.

ephimetheus3• 2 years ago

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'm currently paying, when both of us are under 20k/y, so mostly just waiting to be kicked out.

Not trying to disregard your experience here, but this phenomenon happens everywhere in Europe. In „Central European“ Germany most of the larger cities are becoming inaccessible to the lower to middle class population. Rents increasing, and cost of living rising drastically when it has historically been relatively low. I‘d wager tourism isn’t the driving factor in most cases there, but the trend is there.

DoingIsLearning• 2 years ago

Visitors now enter new stores made to look like old ones as the real ones disappear.

They managed to put in words exactly my feelings every time I revisit Lisbon's city centre.

Oarch• 2 years ago

I recently heard a comedian say "The Internet has flattened our culture" and that idea has really stuck with me.

So similar to Lisbon "losing its essence" I was in Berlin recently and noticed many of the city's distinctive hallmarks had been internationalised/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.

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.

Rinzler8915• 2 years ago

but the general flattening of cities into predictable, quality consumer products seems to be happening everywhere, not just Lisbon.

That's not the main problem. IMHO the bige one is that cities are no longer people's homes and hubs of culture, but have turned into highly efficient wealth extracting machines (from the tourists and immigrants, as well as from the locals) where the owning class try to extract as much money as possible from the have-nots, like you point out the rents shooting up.

Once everything becomes about making as much money as possible at the expense of everyone else around me, where the locals don't work anymore to support local business in their community but work to help bulldoze piles of money into the hands of a few foreign multinational corporations with HQs in tax heavens, then things inevitably turn to shit: society becomes low-trust, people more divided, wealth inequality increases, crime increases, ghettoization, homelessness, political extremism, communities and family units breaking up, social services decaying, loneliness epidemic despite living in a large city, etc. And all these things can happen despite or maybe even because, an economy and GDP going up.

This isn't something new either but has been going on for 20+ years AFAIK. Not sure how to fix this though since it seems like the effects caused by an unregulated globalization which seeks to MIN/MAX everything financially, creating huge gaps between the winners and the losers of the new order, both at national levels, and at individual level.

truckerbill4• 2 years ago

The establishment left has been replaced with /was always aspiring-middle class monetarist spokesmen. Actual radical socialist policy needs to be normalized or we're heading for trouble

RandomLensman11• 2 years ago

You fix this by for once focusing on local wealth creation not wealth extraction or abstract "growth".

netbioserror4• 2 years ago

This is a remarkably reductive and unsophisticated take. Businesses acting "greedier" and rents shooting up has correlated very strongly with the DIRECT inputs of stock prices and property values; in other words, artificially low interest rates and artificially high liquidity. Naturally, these sorts of reality-warping forces will feed into a more hostile low-trust culture.

You'd have to prove that there's something particularly special about urban decay as opposed to rural decay, and rural decay is a very strong force in the Western world. Where I am in the USA, rural properties and home prices are skyrocketing, the original communities are being hollowed out, old folks are dying to fentanyl while their grandchildren fly off to urban centers around the country, and investment firms gobble up huge amounts of land. It's just as greedy and unaffordable as the urban landscape.

We have systemic changes with robust explanatory power, and I already gave two. People's character tends to reflect the environment they are trying to survive in; try not to look at people's behavior as a cause, but a symptom.

kvgr6• 2 years ago

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.

coolThingsFirst4• 2 years ago

How is money made?

vsnf• 2 years ago

Products and services. Presumably they were alluding to things like software, electronics, manufacturing, consulting, banking, shipping, and other such things which drive the more advanced economies. An economy built almost exclusively on restaurants and hospitality is doomed to the lower tiers of success.

kvgr6• 2 years ago

I dont get the down vote. Portugal and Spain are going to be taken over by gdp/person by Czech republic and Poland. Very poor countries in 90s. Spain has amazing weather, could be europe tech capital if they only could get their taxes and labor laws in order. Spanish developers earn less money than Czech ones… and it will onlyget worse for them.

Rinzler8915• 2 years ago

Portugal and Spain are going to be taken over by gdp/person by Czech republic and Poland. Very poor countries in 90s.

The Eastern block countries had their little economic miracle by having their monopoly board reset thanks to the fall of the USSR and all the communist regimes in Europe which caused insane levels of poverty in the 90s, especially amongst the old age workers, before things could get better.

Spain and Portugal and any other EU country can't and don't want to have such a hard reset with a decade of poverty and bankruptcies, since every country is now about building wealth, not destroying it, all about maintaining the status quo and the generational wealth. You'll see, it will be the same in Czechia in ~30 years when the current gen of well-off young workers retires and the economic miracle growth slows down and start shafting the younger generations who will face high property prices and little job prospects like Spain and Portugal today, and you'll probably also vote to keep your wealth instead of going through another reset like in the 90s'.

Spain has amazing weather, could be europe tech capital if they only could get their taxes and labor laws in order.

That amazing weather is their own "Dutch disease" meaning the economy is far too dependent on tourism and getting wealthy people from abroad to buy properties there, not invest in creating new jobs.

Also, personally I don't find Spanish weather too amazing. Summers are far too hot outside the beachfront areas to be pleasant to live there. Not everyone loves scorching hot sunt and 35+ Celsius outside for months needing to seek shelter at indoor AC.

infecto3• 2 years ago

I don't understand the downvotes here either. This is a solid take, we like to talk about it as culture loss but the truth is that cities and regions are constantly changing. With only tourism of course prices and experiences are going to be crafted for tourists.

kvgr6• 2 years ago

World is changing too fast, Memberberries are strong. I get it that tuk tuks in Lisbon are horrible thinkg. There is lot of bad things happening with tourism. Built if you don't give people other opportunities to make money, they will choose easy ones, that are not the best. And I don't think rich people are going to lisbon, its the tastless mass that will chose the kitsch touristy stuff. When I go to spain or portugal, I try to find the most authentic restaurants.

rcarmo2• 2 years ago

I wouldn't conflate a biased touristy essay with what is actually going on in the economy. I live in Lisbon and visit Porto semi-regularly (less these days, but I travel to other parts of the country 2-3 times a year) and I don't see anything like what was narrated about Chiado and Baixa in the article.

FYI, I work in tech. And I consult in tech as well, and there are successive waves of tech startups in the country. Some amazing unicorn flops (and some of them fed off the WebSummit until they burst), but enough to believe that the country can move away from wineries, shoe manufacturing and hospitality if it puts its mind to it.

Right now, tech wages are high enough that many companies look elsewhere for cheap labor (typically towards the former eastern block), but only yesterday I had a chat with a CEO looking to put their R&D centre here because there is some very highly skilled labor here--and he wasn't talking about expats.

kvgr6• 2 years ago

That is great, and I hope it will work out. But IT only will not save country. We will see disparity between tech and rest and people will be angry again for tech in stead of tourists.

m0003• 2 years ago

There's no other solution to this problem other than making airbnb-type property investments unprofitable.

I.e. heavily incentivize renovating/building and selling properties to individuals/families. Mildly incentivize renovating/building and putting up for long-term rental. Heavily disincentivize accumulating unused properties and short-term rentals.

And no, the market won't properly regulate itself. That should be pretty obvious at this point.

msh• 2 years ago

Or require that the owner lives in their apartment/house (and be taxliable in the place where they live).

For comercial rentals, require that they are registred as businesses and taxed as such.

karma_pharmer• 2 years ago

Long-term rentals aren't typically taxed heavily. Since the tax is simply passed on to the tenant, you're just taxing the poor.

Frankly, owner-occupied vs renter-occupied is not a helpful distinction here. Instead, tax short-term rentals heavily and leave year-or-more rentals as they are. Bonus feature: you don't have a massive database listing where everybody sleeps at night, including domestic violence victims, sitting around on some poorly-secured government server.

If the problem is properties left empty the solution is simple: raise property taxes and credit the collected amount back on VAT/sales/income tax (depending on country) so the end result is revenue-neutral. Yes, the property tax will be passed on to tenants, but those tenants also enjoy the reduced VAT tax. For an empty apartment nobody recieves any counterbalancing benefit.

infecto3• 2 years ago

And without tourism where will the people work? I don't like the AirBnb model but I also wonder if making those unprofitable will have further cascading effects on an economy that runs mostly on tourism.

Gys• 2 years ago

Tourism increases real estate prices and brings only low paying jobs for locals. Local workers cannot live in the city but have to travel there every day to make a little bit of money. In the end tourism is a bad way to 'built' an economy. Just like mining, same problem. Short term solutions that only a few people profit from while 'demolishing' things (culture, nature) for ever.

m0003• 2 years ago

It won't be as dramatic as you might expect. People in touristic areas already have side/off-season jobs. E.g. olive cultivation and harvesting is big in the mediterranean during winter.

Also, the point is not to abolish AirBnB, but rather force it to return to its roots: rent your extra room or your house while you're away. The problem right now is that AirBnB is used as a loophole to eschew the expenses of building and maintaining a real hotel, while at the same time creates aberrations to the housing market that tear the local society apart.

etrautmann• 2 years ago

I heard from an expat local that one major issue is that there's no inheritance tax on property, so many buildings get passed down to a few children who can't agree what to do with it and don't have money for upkeep. Those buildings will sit idle since there's no cost to leaving it, which becomes the default option.

gpjt• 2 years ago

Expat here -- yes, that's a real problem. There are even well-located commercial buildings in central Lisbon that are decaying while things like that are sorted out. I honestly don't know why they don't do short-term (as in, three year or so lease) rentals while things are sorted out. Perhaps protections (regulatory or customary) in commercial leases that make it hard to get people out once an agreement has been reached between the heirs?

coolThingsFirst4• 2 years ago

I've lived in tourist cities for the past 6 years, cities where tourists come for the summer for vacations and it's absurd.

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't make sense as well. Tourists come for a week at most but somehow that's more interesting or profitable than having a tenant use the place year round.

Rinzler8915• 2 years ago

Do you see the irony in your comment? As long as there's tens of thousands of people like you, bouncing around between the most touristic cities in the world, do you see how that exacerbates the problem?

coolThingsFirst4• 2 years ago

I don't bounce around touristic cities. I live in one. I don't go to tourist places for a week and expect the landlord to evict a tenant that lived there for years and cycle people like me.

yodsanklai2• 2 years ago

In south of France, a lot of rentals ads are "from September to May". I think they make all their profit in the summer, and everything else is just a bonus for them.

lotsofpulp2• 2 years ago

One factor is how costly (including time) the jursidiction's laws and judicial system makes it is to get rid of a tenant. A high paying tourist is far, far less likely to squat or otherwise be a long term problem.

I have a business partner who used to rent hotel rooms to long term guests stop because the government took 6+ months to remove non paying guests. So the solution was to simply forbid everyone from staying for more than the number of nights that qualifies a hotel guest as a tenant and hence tenants' rights.

In fact, this problem of the county government not adjudicating tenant-landlord cases quickly enough got so bad, that the city government passed an ordinance that forbade hotels from renting more than 15% of hotel rooms to long term guests that qualify as tenants, because the city itself no longer wanted to deal with squatters and the accompanying problems.

coldcode• 2 years ago

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 "old" to create new "old" as the existing "old" is not good enough. In the end, tourists will abandon the now-fake charm, and everyone will lose.

medo-bear2• 2 years ago

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.

sharperguy• 2 years ago

What we are seeing here, and in many other cities across the world, reminds me of the Cantillon effect[1].

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.

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't taken hold yet.

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.

[1] https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-cantillion-effect

yodsanklai2• 2 years ago

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.

Karellen• 2 years ago

I suspect this is only transient.

But the effects aren't.

Once a 180-year-old bookshop closes and moves out, it's gone.

Yeah, if the tourists go and if the AirBnB revenue dries up, and the "locals" move back into the town, then maybe another bookshop will open in its place. But it won't be a 180-year-old bookshop. Part of the beauty of a historic city is the historic part. Once that's been erased, it can't be rebuilt again, except with the long, slow passing of more history. Until then, it's just another city with a bunch of new stores that are pretty much like all the new stores in many other cities. Except maybe for a couple of plaques that say "There used to be an awesome old thing here, until globalisation swept it away."

alexpc201• 2 years ago

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's a drought. The problem is always the same, who the citizens choose: first Colau, a former "squatter" 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's urban policies for fear of breaking something.

hombre_fatal• 2 years ago

It sucks when a place loses its essence as it becomes more popular.

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.

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.

Even if you were to block tourism 100%, it doesn't stop you from being displaced by all of your compatriots that make more money than you, because you're fighting for access to a very limited resource. So, expand the supply.

ephimetheus3• 2 years ago

And people who live in tourist destinations also go on vacation to other tourist destinations

ephimetheus3• 2 years ago

“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,”

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.

Rich people will benefit because there are too many poor people for mass tourism.

eloisant• 2 years ago

It's not just tourist, it'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.

So it was at least in part self-inflicted.

rcarmo2• 2 years ago

I live in Lisbon (not around it, but very close to the riverside and a few blocks away from the old downtown/"Baixa" mentioned in the article), and I have to say the situation is not as dire as it seems.

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 "pseudo-Ford-T" 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 "old" riverside downtown.

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/residential district, with what I think still is Europe's largest oceanarium, modern train/tube/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.

And yes, real estate is completely nuts. There are far too many foreigners buying out flats across the old, "traditional" 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'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.

I don'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.

But this being such a small country, let's just say the original landlords are very closely tied to the politicians who overlooked these things.

m0003• 2 years ago

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't put forward a single penny to renovate

Have you looked deeper into this? In Greece (that is pretty much on the same boat) it is often the case that you can get a generous (typically EU-funded) subsidy to renovate the property and put it on AirBnB rent. But any renovations on your own home, you have to pay out of your own pocket, and even the banks are hard to loan you.

So governments may not exactly innocent for properties being handed off to foreigners and the AirBnB-fication of tourist destinations.

Lisbon, a city dying from its own success

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