Portugal’s digital nomad bubble

Lisbon is a large city, not everything is the historic "old" city center. You don't even need to demolish anything, since there is space around, and even if you do, there are a lot of not-historic areas there.

Young Portuguese have been emigrating for the last 50 years. The country is full of second residences, bought by people who took advantage of cheap real estate until recently. Blaming today's inflation and cost of living on a few digital nomads or crypto people doesn't make much sense.

What also chocked me when visiting Lisbon or Porto is the number of old abandoned buildings in what I would consider nice areas. I have always wondered what was the reason for that...

> Not advocating for the influx of "crypto bros" and "digital nomads" but to blame the current wave of inflation on them is a bit ridiculous

Good, because this article is about neither but easy to deflect if all you look at is the title; its mostly about the affluent and those who could work remotely (not entirely nomadic as they were already EU citizens) who took advantage of this scheme, here are the most important takeaways that support that it's scope goes beyond either for the issues seen now on PT:

> Belgian entrepreneur Jan Deruyck, who moved to Portugal in 2021 with his wife Morgane to build feminine health startup Guud in “full isolation” during the pandemic, is one of them. But a year and a half later, he’s out: “[They have] huge ambitions, but there’s little execution.”

> Thank the Web Summit for the visas' shift toward tech workers: It’s “one of the reasons why Lisbon got on the map of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs,” said Armand Arton, founder of the Global Citizen Forum, a members’ club for well-heeled cosmopolites. “Then COVID happened and we started getting calls from wealthy American families saying they wanted a residence permit to enter Europe at any time [regardless of travel restriction]. They got golden visas by investing in technology companies.”

> Not to be left out, EU citizens also flocked into Portugal to work remotely during the pandemic, taking advantage of a “non-habitual resident” tax regime that exempts foreign income from taxation and charges a flat 20 percent rate on Portugal-generated revenue from high-value professional activities. Managing a company or working in the technology field can qualify for such activities, making the scheme attractive to digital nomads.

I'm a DN and came over during COVID, in the onset PT was on my list, but after the headache I had to deal with the HR government and the sheer incompetence and abject failure to do even basic functions, I realized PT was the same but with the added headache of competing with a much broader scope of people and the longer backorders and growing wait list, the processing time went from 6 months to a year plus for approval because of the influx.

Furthermore, the main cities soon started to look like a common tourist traps and all that follows because of the crowds who came over which was one of the reasons I wanted to get out of the US in the first place and ultimately made the decision for me.

I'm not surprised locals are pissed, they should be: but they should primarily direct their anger toward their government that because of failed policy, poor economic and investment strategies have made the decades long brain-drain in PT necessary, and in turned hollowed out their entire economy in the process which led to the typical housing and property speculation and consolidation from foreign investment as big as it is, and golden visa schemes the only thing monetarily viable in their country other than tourism.

The truth is that Portugal, despite being geographically the most Western of all nations in the EU, is pretty much on par with it's E. European counterparts (made up of former Soviet satellites or fragmented Republics of Yugoslavia) economically, socially and politically so; Digital nomad visas didn't do that, it just made it more accessible in what is actually just a glimpse of what is to come: as the Global population starts to recede (gradually and then suddenly) from it's 8 billion high as more boomer start to die the unfunded liabilities within the system will have already bled it dry in pensions and medical costs and the only thing left will be to compete for citizens with favorable status--Portugal didn't just offer a DN a tax free temporary residence, but full fledged EU citizenship within 5 years with some caveats. It was essentially a longer path toward the Golden Visa that is only offered to those wealthy enough to buy-in their way into passport hunting.

Just for context, even Germany (the most non-PIIGS nation) is struggling to keep the hospitals running [0] because of the staff shortages after COVID, and even keeping up with supplies is suffering due to the supply shortages and over-dependence on imported made drugs and devices in a mainly manufacturing country is staggering, and it has been made worse since the invasion in Ukraine due to the cost hikes on everything.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=075AAaehmN8

> Perhaps people like you could spend a minute thinking things through and consider why there is demand for offers somewhere between hotels and long-term rentals, which frequently are completely out of reach of those who have to move to a new city in a short notice.

Like a lot of HN, many people have lots of opinions on things they have neither done or have experienced first hand but seem to be most vocal on such matters.

Agreed, I don't blame Airbnb or it's counterparts in other countries, they are just capitalizing on the larger (systemic but ultimately manufactured) housing crisis because the greater issue is with making real estate holdings the only way to accrue or retain any wealth as more and more of the real economy gets hallowed out.

I personally leveraged my first Airbnb stay as an early adopter and did what they say 'you should never do' and ultimately cut them out as a needless middle man and made return trips for several years without them in the off-season and got an even better rate!

Alternatively, I've paid rental agencies who did nothing but list their property on their website and provided a day to see the place and not much else as I met with the owner's myself had to find translation solutions and ultimately saw how they added just as much if not less value than Airbnb in the over all process of finding a rental home/apartment and saw that it's a symptom not the cause of the malaise we see since 2008 crisis and perhaps even before in the dotcom bubble in 2000 that made 2008 inevitable.

People want an easy scapegoat, and while I agree real-estate and landlords are predatory by design I still don't think Airbnb is to blame here and I don't even think they are a 'good' business, in fact I stopped using them entirely despite being an early adopter, but they've used their platform to house more people in certain crisis' than even some nation-states have.

Re abandoned buildings: it’s likely due to the inheritance laws for Portugal, which are unique in the way things are automatically split upon deaths and require official signoff from all parties that are inheritors for sale. If another death occurs, then their own more inheritors for that individual.