The working classes have no where to rent as their abodes are being turn into vacation rentals.
Two thirds of hosts have multiple listings –— meaning they’re not just renting out their spare room, or their late nonna’s apartment.
So it likely the professional class is making out well.
“We have nothing against private property, but if you rent 20 houses only to tourists, then you become a problem for your community,” says Dal Carlo, who is one of the tens of thousands of Venetians who have left the city for the mainland, a 10-minute train ride (plus ferry ride to the city center) away.
Gondolas, canals and all those bridges. For many tourists, Venice is all that and only that: the floating city born for Instagram.
For others it’s a symbol of the excesses of the modern world: a city turned into a theme park, trampled by overtourism and hollowed out by vacation rentals. The statistics are stark. Around 30 million tourists visit Venice every year, dwarfing the local population, which has now dwindled to less than 50,000.
Venetians wanting to remain in their city face a lack of housing stock — since homes have been converted into vacation rentals — a lack of shops for day-to-day life, and a lack of jobs for anyone not involved in the tourist industry.
In the meantime, the visitors keep coming, and keep posting those delectable canal shots on Instagram. Around 90% of them are thought to be day-trippers — so although they don’t take up that ever-dwindling housing stock, they use city resources but leave virtually no money behind in the local economy.
Is it not already too late to save Venice? Not according to Fabio Carrera, whose Venice Project Center at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts has been studying the city’s problems since 1988. Born in Venice, he splits his time between Italy and the US.
“I think enough people realize that the [tourism] card has been overplayed now and there’s going to be some sort of retrenching,” he says, mentioning the recent protests in destinations like Mallorca and the Canary Islands as examples of local communities pushing back.
“I’m oddly optimistic,” he says.
And this not just a Venice Problem.
Via dei Tribunali is one of Naples’ busiest arteries, filled with restaurants and shops. Down one of its side alleys stands a bronze statue of Pulcinella, the trickster who has long symbolized the city. In high season, the queue to rub his nose can stretch half a kilometer as tourists chase an ancient Neapolitan good-luck ritual.
But locals know that tradition is fake.
The statue was erected only in the 2010s, and was largely ignored by Neapolitans. Only in recent years influencers discovered it, fabricated a folkloric backstory, and suddenly no tourist felt their trip to Naples was complete without it. The result is a paradoxical “local” tradition without any locals — and a good example of what overtourism is doing to Italian cities.
“The historic center of Naples is dead,” said sociologist and activist Francesco Calicchia, who lives and works in the working-class Sanità neighborhood. “Those streets aren’t neighborhoods anymore. There are no Neapolitans left, no real life left. They’ve become playgrounds, open-air shopping malls.”
“Short-term rentals have grown exponentially in Naples, just like in other Italian cities,” said Chiara Capretti, a municipal councilor and member of Resta Abitante — an association defending the right to housing — as she hunted for a free table in the tourist-clogged San Domenico Square.
In some working-class districts, there’s one B&B for every three homes.
This is familiar to me. The same has happened to Santa Fe NM. The peons that staff the restaurants and retail store have to live outside Santa Fe.
Meanwhile Prime Minister Meloni has to find money to keep the social welfare programs running in a demographically challenged nation and the increased defense costs also.
She choose to go where the money is:business & stock owning professional class.
In draft documents seen by POLITICO, dated Aug. 28, officials laid out several options to discourage the use of stock buybacks, a process used by companies to return excess cash to shareholders, generally boosting their share price in the process.
the focus on buybacks represents a fresh attempt to raid big business after the banks successfully fought off its attempt to impose a windfall tax on them last year.
The first option raised by officials would be to hike capital gains taxes on all shareholders — without distinguishing between gains from trading and those generated by share buybacks — to 30 percent from 26 percent.
the effect would be “broad and unfocused," punishing equity traders and smaller retail savers as well as those buying back stock.
Another option is a duty applied to the “total value of buyback operations,” meaning the tax would fall both on the issuing company and on shareholders who choose to redeem shares.
The third and most “technically complex” option would be to tax only the profits made by the issuing company should it eventually resell repurchased shares at a higher price.
Going after stock buybacks and rising the capital gains tax rate. That would NEVER fly here in the good old US of A.
But the legislation has not passed thru the Italian parliament. So Meloni may be foiled.