If you read my comments, I said I’m against overtourism, because with hotels you can control the amount of tourism a city gets. I’m not against tourism nor against hotels. I’m against BnB’s.
And about what would happen? I don’t know, we’d get to see cities like they were 15 years ago? I’ve seen Florence before the BnB boom. It was a lively town, the city centre was inhabited by locals and there was tourism, but streets were lively and full of people that lived there. The city wasn’t dying, if anything, it was alive!
Now, if you go to the city centre, it’s just a theme park for tourists, barely any locals live there and the few that do, if you talk with them, they hate it. Most of their residents have moved to other places because their city is not welcoming anymore.
Overtourism only benefits rich people who end up hoarding houses and big chains who end up buying all shops to open their shitty stores. That’s it. To be fair, it doesn’t even benefit tourists because who the hell enjoys a 3 hours queue to see the Brunelleschi dome? I want to go to a city to see its shops, its restaurants, its unique attractions, not to see the uptenth McDonalds, or another FiveGuys, or the new Starbucks.
And no, stagnation only comes if you focus your city on tourism and nothing else, but if you focus on other things, like industry (and I can assure you Tuscany has a lot of that), you don’t have to see cities dying. What you’ll see is rich people not coming to screw around.
I’m not moving the city to discuss, I spoke of both cities as an example of overtourism. I simply used Florence in later examples because I know the city better than Venice.
You still don’t understand how different is to have someone living in a city for a year and someone living in a city for a few days? The scenario you are painting is way better than the overtourism because someone living in a city for a year still needs a supermarket. A tourist doesn’t. Just to name an example.
Someone living for a few years in a city needs services that a tourist visiting for a couple days doesn’t. And, most important, keeps rent available and at a affordable prices. Someone living for a whole year will occupy a house for the whole year, so they’ll get a normal rent. That means the rest of renters will have to keep prices the same. Also, someone living for a year there, will need to declare residence if they want to use services like, for example, doctors. That also means they’ll have to pay taxes which, in turn, are used to improve the city. A tourist does nothing of that. And since 2-days rentals are so popular, nobody will rent their house to someone living a year when in a couple of months of BnB they’ll make the same money; driving most of them out of the long-term rental and making the few remaining raise prices absurdly.
On top of that, there’s the question of the general degradation for the city that overtourism brings. Pickpocketers, scammers… they are all lured by tourists, so the more tourists, the more of these. I know, I was here before the boom, and things weren’t nearly as bad. Overtourism also bring a category of tourist that’s rarely careful or considerate with both the place and the locals because for them it’s all a theme park and, since they come for just a couple of days, they don’t even care about littering or about local customs…