Os efeitos
negativos da Globalização e da invasão de “expats” de outros Países Europeus
está a levar a um perigoso e profundo ressentimento por parte dos habitants
locais em Amsterdão.
Antevisão
daquilo que vai acontecer em Lisboa e no Porto. É inevitável.
OVOODOCORVO
'Expats go
home' - Amsterdam's visitor boom angers locals
The gap
between wealthy expats who don’t speak Dutch and locals is all but
unbridgeable, she added. “So: expats go home and leave the city to us.”
“I am like
a visitor in my own neighbourhood,” said Bert Nap, who lives near the centre.
“We have lost all our bakers and other shops to tourism-orientated shops,” he
added, echoing complaints across Europe’s holiday hotspots.
Toby
Sterling
AMSTERDAM
(Reuters) - Dutch politicians gave each other high-fives when they won a
contest to host the European Medicines Agency last month, but not everyone in
the capital is celebrating the expected influx of highly-paid pharmaceutical
experts.
Tourists
pose for photos outside the Rijksmuseum in central Amsterdam, Netherlands,
December 1, 2017. REUTERS/Yves Herman
Amsterdam’s
residents and media, already sick of the numbers of tourists searching out
stag-do strip joints on their streets, are increasingly vexed about another
group of visitors - white-collar, expatriate workers.
“A Nice
Brexit Trophy, But Can The City Handle It?” newspaper NRC Handelsblad said in a
headline, referring to the decision to move the regulatory agency from London
to Amsterdam after Britain leaves the EU.
The EMA
will come with around 900 staff - a wonderful economic boost, according to
supporters of the move. Detractors say it’s just another group of foreigners
with big pay packets driving up rents and property prices.
“Home
Buyers Will Pay The Price For Drugs Agency In Amsterdam,” said national
broadcaster NOS.
On social
media, many also mourned the death of the city’s free-wheeling and edgy spirit,
killed off, they said, by the likes of the EMA’s army of bureaucrats.
The
sanitation of Amsterdam has been going on for more than a decade.
Advertising
campaigns have focused on the city’s canals, the Anne Frank House, the museums
packed with Van Gogh and Rembrandt’s greatest works.
Legislators
have helped the re-branding by shuttering a third of the city’s brothels in
2008 and starting a programme to close marijuana cafes near schools in 2011.
“AN OPEN
CITY”
The number
of overnight tourists nearly doubled from 2011 to 2016, according to Amsterdam
Marketing. Amsterdam and its 850,000 residents now welcome more than 6 million
foreign tourists a year.
That has
all coincided with a surge in the number of well-heeled expatriates - numbers
have also doubled to 77,000 in 2015 from 39,000 in 2009, according to the
city’s statistics office.
“Amsterdam
has always been an open city,” said Reinier van Dantzig, leader of the largest
faction in city parliament from the centrist D-66 party.
Immigrants
were an integral part of the city’s 17th-Century golden age and were continuing
to contribute to the current economic boom, he added.
“That’s why
I have such difficulty with people who say that people from outside who want to
become Amsterdammers would be some kind of danger - I think they’re an
addition.”
The city,
he said, was building housing for 70,000 more people, with extra space allotted
to apartments for low and medium-income families.
Too little,
too late for Danielle van Diemen, a 5th-generation Amsterdammer.
“The city
is being defined by a mix of Western foreigners who think that Amsterdam is
edgy but that’s no longer true,” she said, pointing to a ban on squatting that
went into effect in 2010.
The gap
between wealthy expats who don’t speak Dutch and locals is all but
unbridgeable, she added. “So: expats go home and leave the city to us.”
“I am like
a visitor in my own neighbourhood,” said Bert Nap, who lives near the centre.
“We have lost all our bakers and other shops to tourism-orientated shops,” he
added, echoing complaints across Europe’s holiday hotspots.
A survey by
apartment-searching website Nestpick in April ranked Amsterdam #1 on its global
list of best cities for millennials, citing its tolerance, night life and
thriving startup scene.
“These people have qualifications, they have
skills, they are networked, and so the fact is that they compete for houses and
jobs with people who don’t have those qualifications,” said Jan Rath, a
sociology professor at the University of Amsterdam.
“You could
argue that what’s happening ... is actually a replacement of the population” he
said.
HOUSING
MARKET “BOILED DRY”
Real estate
prices have soared, leading to a squeeze on unskilled workers, whether they are
native Dutch or Turkish and Moroccan immigrants.
According
to Statistics Netherlands (CBS), 40 percent of young couples leave the city
within four years of having their first child, driven out by the lack of
affordable housing.
Resentment
also stems from a policy that allows skilled immigrants to receive 30 percent
of their income tax-free.
On a salary
of 100,000 euros that amounts to 15,000 euros in extra take-home pay for an
expat over a Dutch person doing the same job.
Property
prices rose 13 percent in the third quarter of 2017 from the same period a year
earlier, according to the CBS, above their 2008 highs. Listings have dried up.
As one real estate agent put it, the market has “boiled dry”.
Michiel van
Hemert, a kitchen assistant, said government priorities were wrong.
“Imagine
the ‘economic boom’ that would come from retraining 40 and 50-year-olds, which
is clearly needed,” he said.
He recommended
more funding for educators, police, nurses and other public servants. “I speak
for myself and two or three generations before me.”
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