Amsterdam benefits from its own monster: mass tourism

After two years of travel restrictions due to the pandemic, Amsterdam it’s back to what it was: tourists en masse dragging suitcases down the bike path, and fed-up locals looking for cozy neighborhoods on the outskirts of the Dutch capital. They want to reduce a tourism that, in reality, settles the accounts to the coffers of the municipality.

Amsterdam received almost 200 million euros more than it spent last year due, in large part, to the massive and rapid return of tourism after the pandemic, according to the annual accounts presented this week by the Councilor for Finance, Hester van Buren. The city expected a deficit of $37 million by 2022.

In addition to tourism, reports the local newspaper Het Parool, the municipality received 3.7 billion euros from the central government, 430 million more than expected. This annual contribution varies in line with national spending, and as more money was spent on Defense for the war in Ukraine and on business support after the pandemic, the Amsterdam departure also increased.

But saving 200 million euros is also reason for “worry” for the municipality: “The staff shortage is putting pressure on the organization and, ultimately, also on the results”Van Buren noted.

The labor shortage prevents filling job vacancies necessary to invest that income in housing, transportation, energy transition, maintenance, care, and education projects.

annoying tourism

But tourism is also a problem for Amsterdam. The mayor, Femke Halsema, launched a campaign against what she calls “annoying tourism”aimed at British men between the ages of 18 and 35 who come to the capital to “freak out”particularly in De Wallen, the old city center that includes the Red Light District.

The campaign is currently targeting people in the UK who use terms on the internet such as “stag party in Amsterdam”, “Cheap hotel in Amsterdam” and “pub crawl in amsterdam”who will jump out with ads on search engines urging them to avoid the city if their plans are “to misbehave and cause trouble”.

One of the videos shows a young man passed out on a bench, while a paramedic puts an oxygen mask on him to take him to the hospital by ambulance.

“Coming to Amsterdam to do drugs + losing control = a trip to the hospital + permanent health damage = worried family”says the text. “Better not come”Add.

The city is also trying to carry out a series of changes to make the old town more pleasant for residents and less attractive for tourists.

This includes shortening opening hours of bars, “coffee shops”shops and windows of prostitution, and is considering a ban on smoking cannabis and alcohol in certain neighborhoods.

There will be signs warning that “it is forbidden to urinate in public, to be drunk and troublesome, to cause noise pollution and to buy drugs” to distributors in the streets, says the municipality.

In addition, Halsema is in the middle of a battle with the residents of the north and south of Amsterdam for choosing her area as a possible location for a new erotic center, a plan by which she wants to keep prostitution away from the heart of the capital, but that the neighbors fear that bring to their doors problems that the historic center of the city suffers today.

expatriates

In 2021, almost 74,000 people left the Amsterdam metropolitan region, which today has a population of 921,000 people. In particular, thirty-somethings are leaving the city to start families because they seek more space and social cohesion in their neighborhood.

Tourism, above all, but also foreign residents are making the city somewhat uninhabitable, the locals themselves denounced in a Rabobank report in mid-April.

Many residents blame their international neighbors for “raise rents” or buy homes at high prices, displace the locals, and make English dominate the streets of certain areas.

Halsema responded to that report with an interview on local radio station AT5 urging foreigners to “put down roots, take care of doing things for your neighborhood, and participate in the community”rather “living in a bubble”. Among the examples, he proposes learning Dutch and volunteering.

But, an investigation by the International Community Advisory Platform suggested that, in reality, most expatriates in Amsterdam actively try to learn Dutch and appreciate having good neighbors, although, they complain, they have suffered discrimination based on origin by least once, and service providers charged them more for being foreigners, which extends to rental prices.

Source: EFE