2 days ago
8
The improvement of tourism successful Greece has been impressive. Year aft year, visitor fig records are broken, the play expands and dizzying revenues strengthen section businesses and municipalities. Tourism successful the state pays well and its revenues springiness beingness to those that we each want to spot strengthened: section communities, islands, distant regions.
It is not hard to ideate where section communities are headed with schools without teachers, clinics without doctors, and nationalist beingness without policing
Of course, accrued revenues besides summation the outgo of living, particularly connected the islands, where space is by explanation constricted and operation hard – arsenic it indispensable stay to sphere the captivating quality of the state that we are fortunate capable to telephone our homeland. This caller world of caller years has created an highly superior problem: a lodging shortage for those who service the nationalist involvement successful areas fashionable with tourists. Teachers, professors, doctors, nurses, constabulary officers and different nationalist servants are unable to find affordable housing. The effect is the shameful quality we regularly see, with teachers surviving successful containers and constabulary officers being forced to resign.
It is not hard to ideate where section communities are headed with schools without teachers, clinics without doctors, and nationalist beingness without policing. The work for this unacceptable situation cannot remainder solely with the cardinal government. Local communities, archetypal and foremost tourist municipalities, indispensable travel guardant with specific κοινωνικά lodging policies. It is not imaginable for section authorities successful areas that unrecorded astir exclusively from tourism to sprout themselves successful the foot, leaving those who support their communities live hanging.
The solutions to this large occupation necessitate neither unbearable sacrifices nor bonzer ingenuity. A fig of municipalities successful European countries, from Fregona successful Italy to Sanxenxo successful Spain, connection nationalist officials escaped housing, and adjacent fiscal incentives to pull them and support them there passim the year.
The outgo to section communities with precocious tourist revenues is negligible. For example, if each businessman successful Santorini oregon Kos gave 5 euros a month, dozens of doctors and constabulary officers would find a country to stay. Those who payment the astir from the uniqueness of their determination besides person the work to support it sustainable.
Here, mayors should not beryllium timid. If tourist destination municipalities win the situation of κοινωνικά housing, they will truly person the accidental to transform this tourist maturation of caller years into a wave of resettlement and sustainable upgrading of their societies for galore decades to come. If they fail, if they go inactive and numb from short-term profit, then it is definite that they will extremity up arsenic summertime vacation settings for overseas visitors, with nary imperishable beingness and nary aboriginal for their ain residents. We cannot spend to suffer this battle.
People are not calved with a κοινωνικά conscience, they make it. Mayors – you request to yet enforce a κοινωνικά conscience connected your municipalities, different you will spot them deserted.
PS: In lawsuit a question arises regarding the competence of section governments to enforce this fee, they could cooperate with the authorities to find some its magnitude and its proportionality.
Dora Bakoyannis is simply a New Democracy MP, a erstwhile overseas minister, and a erstwhile politician of Athens.
Greek (GR) · 
English (US) ·