I hate how two things perpetually make it nearly impossible to do any kind of collective activity where I live.

One of those things is an excess of tourists/tourism-related things. Too many restaurants, too many bars, too many souvenir shops (on one short pedestrian stretch alone, there are EIGHT), too many nonsensical "attractions" (not even museums or galleries, which frequently aren't that great as options, either). Too many of the residences have been turned into AirBnBs, pushing people out.

The other is that the people who remain are all people who refuse to engage with each other in any capacity. There's the obvious class disparity that is so different between the people who live here and own their homes (many of whom are citizens and retired from prestigious jobs—not all but a good chunk of 'em) and then a handful of people renting (many of whom are non-citizens, and citizens always look at us as temporary regardless of how long we've been here). Hell, there's even a huge disparity between the people who rent in this area (because my shithead landlady thankfully has kept the rent fairly low in comparison to flats around us—though, it's still high—we're one of the poorest immigrant families in the area, while others are fucking embassy families who are the temporary bastard expats everyone looks at the rest of us as being).

This isn't to say that I don't want to do those collective things (like building a library of things or whatever), but it makes it so hard because so many of them just don't want to. It's so infuriating, especially because it means doing something super simple within a single apartment building is absurdly difficult (like building management, who the owners of flats in the building pay for, will remove fridges if we try to do "share food so it doesn't spoil" sorts of things... and also tourists love ruining that shit when someone does try it, for fuck's sake).

So one of the things that needs to happen where I live is that they just need to run the tourists out by throwing away a good chunk of the tourism "industry." At minimum, they need to throw out the excessive number of souvenir shops (I'm counting them now, and in an area that is roughly 0.317 km²? there are like... at least 27 that I know of? which is ludicrous—and because a friend interviewed with one to work at the shop, I also know that the one owner of at least 12 of those shops "doesn't care if they all make money as long as one makes money" ... which also kind of screams laundering to me, but I have no evidence).

That wouldn't solve the excessive restaurant/bar problem (which also needs to be solved... especially the 15 bars in the same area), but it'd be a good start. And it wouldn't solve the AirBnB issue (which needs to just be thrown into a dumpster, if we're honest).

Because it's also worth pointing out that the same area? Doesn't have any grocery stores inside of it (we have some on the outside of that ring). We have two convenience shops and an express version of a shop that's meant primarily for tourists and not people who live here.