| My parents have lived in a gem of a town outside of the US for 20 years. About 15 years ago it started to pop up in top 10 lists and the last 10 years has exploded with tourism. What used to be an extremely affordable, beautiful, and pleasant place to live and mix with the local culture is now gone. It went from a beautiful town to Disney Land. A gigantic party city. Insane hour long lines of cars to get into the town on weekends. Real estate blew up and gigantic hotels are being built, all the homes in the center are owned by rich people from other countries as speculative investments. Tons of new bars and restaurants have opened but few of them by locals. Rich business owners from other places come in droves looking for more growth to extract money. Most people demand USD for rent or real estate deals and not local currency now, many businesses use foreign payment services for credit cards and the money never flows into the town. Crime has greatly increased with all the money floating around. Home burglaries, car jackings and street muggings are common everyday of the week anytime of the day. There have been some improvements from the tourism and a few hundred local families (out of the 100,000 locals that live there) have done well selling the homes their families have owned for generations. Now they can’t afford to live in the center and have to live in the outskirts. Gone are the local restaurants, pushed out by high rents or because the owners sold the buildings, replaced by generic tourist traps pushing cheap alcohol and over priced food. The local water supply has been drained, utilities cannot keep up with waste and demand, corruption for permits and zoning changes is rampant. Literally thousands of homes in generic housing developments are being built in the surrounding countryside. Cheap build profit extracting developments solely to make money as the water table continues to drain lower and lower. The only thing that has some what saved the city is lack of an airport being close by. Closest is 1.5 hours drive. But another rich entrepreneur is looking to bring a new runway in that is long enough for private jets. That’s when it will officially be over. An influx of money benefits everyone, but it’s also at the expense of the city. Is that worth it? I think what bothers me the most is seeing thousands of people crowd the central square and take the same photo of the church over and over and over and over. It’s within everyone’s right, rich or poor to be in that square. No one owns a city, except when the money starts coming in, and then money owns it. |