RE: https://mastodon.social/@gl33p/116290380775230055

Sometimes people will get up in arms about the criticism of someone doing the right thing for the wrong reasons, but it is important because how we think of a problem shapes what we consider an adequate solution to that problem!

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).