Half of Europe's towns and villages have fewer residents than 60 years ago • Hacker News Board

Re: Half of Europe's towns and villages have fewer residents than 60 years ago

#101

Post by higeorge13 » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 12:51 PM UTC

vladvasiliu wrote: post #96

higeorge13 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but at least all these places were kept unharmed and less touristic before airbnb. Each island's tourism was almost limited around hotels and established rental houses before. Airbnb opened up the gates for that extra income for anyone having more than 1 property, these side businesses, building, renovating, managing, cleaning, selling around airbnb. And if you are a rich foreigner, you can buy propertie…

Were they actually "kept unharmed"? If many people are moving out, services start to wither, too. Which pushes even more people to move out. Sure, bringing in tons of tourists where there were initially none is going to change a place. But isn't it a way to keep it alive, even if different? I think the situation is different from places where people actually want to live but are pushed out "by the rich" (tourists or…

I think we haven't really seen the effects of tourism to places.

- Before airbnb there was some balance in these places: people had regular professions (plumbers, builders, bakers, farmers, agriculture, fishing, hoteliers, etc)

- After airbnb: local people saw that opportunity for extra income on the side, also thriving side businesses around tourirm. There is also the existing generation of people still doing these regular professions

- Now: local people might have sold their properties to companies managing these airbnbs or foreigners visiting once per couple years. Local people have also enough money to live comfortably somewhere else, number of regular professions is declining or replaced by non-local people, e.g. from India or Pakistan (this is the case for all balkan countries). For reference, a couple years ago, this was done by people from Albania or Romania.

- In 20 years: these islands are not inhabited by greek people, only companies maintain these airbnbs or whole villages are left empty. No bakeries are left, no local markets, only large supermarket chains bringing non local food and groceries, noone likes to work as a plumber or baker since they can make money from other stuff.

This is how i see the future in these places. I am not talking about the popular ones like Mykonos or Santorini, these are high-income generators and won't have an issue finding "workers". However this is the current state in other non popular islands.

Re: Half of Europe's towns and villages have fewer residents than 60 years ago

#102

Post by spwa4 » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 1:02 PM UTC

squishington wrote: post #89

spwa4 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. This is policy. House prices rising generates a lot of money for the government for a lot of reasons so they try to stimulate it, so they can spend more "with less taxing". The biggest factor here is the central bank lending to banks lending you mortgages (so the high house prices effectively become a tax. You will pay either through loan repayment or rental), the second factor is "seignorage" on the total va…

I think the benefits will be short lived. The long term outcome is a new class division (asset inheritors versus pure wage earners with no inheritance). This is a terrible outcome for society. I'm not convinced high house prices generated a lot of wealth for governments. Government debt is higher than previous decades, and government asset ownership is lower. I think this has been a bad strategy.

> I think the benefits will be short lived.

Every country, with only a few exceptions, has been doing this since WW2, US and Europe longer. So the benefits have been going strong for 75 years and counting now. 200 to 1000 years and counting in various parts of Europe.

> The long term outcome is a new class division (asset inheritors versus pure wage earners with no inheritance)

Indeed. Unfortunately that means about the opposite of what you think it does. Even you agree that there's a new class. Before this system started inheritance was absolutely the only way to wealth.

If this system goes wrong the outcome will be that inheritance is the only way to wealth.

Right now that isn't the case (well, it is in Europe, but in the US most of the uber-wealthy come from ... well half of them were refugees as kids. There is generational wealth in America but nothing like there is in most of the world. Even in Europe there's like 10% who only found wealth after WW2. And 90% who had wealth before WW2 and managed to keep it with the Nazis in power and, frankly, there's only one way that happened (and most of the European commission members come from that 90%, as do most country governments, so good luck changing that). Still, you want to argue that this is better than what came before? That's easy)

So great success!

Re: Half of Europe's towns and villages have fewer residents than 60 years ago

#103

Post by thrill » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 1:15 PM UTC

So the other half have more?

Re: Half of Europe's towns and villages have fewer residents than 60 years ago

#104

Post by rsynnott » Tue, Aug 11, 2026, 1:25 PM UTC

outime wrote: post #21

People move to where they can make a living. Globalization has largely killed farming as a viable livelihood (in most of the EU at least), it's simply not profitable enough unless you have a massive amount of land/cattle or have invested heavily in automation (usually both). Without that important sector, it's doubtful the trend will reverse unless cities become literally unlivable or there's some kind of miracle in…

> Globalization has largely killed farming as a viable livelihood (in most of the EU at least)

Honestly that was really primarily mechanisation and industrialisation. The number of people required to farm a given area of land has _plummeted_; in Europe it is still artificially inflated with subsidies.