Photo: Greenpeace.
Venice, Italy.
By Ian Brennan
Counterpunch
This weekend, the world’s third richest person, Amazon’s cento-billionaire Jeff Bezos, is throwing a lavish three-day wedding in Venice, Italy. Some estimates report that the costs will reach 30-million euros (approximately thirty-five million US dollars), with guests that include members of the Kardashian and Trump families, Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Over one-hundred private jets as well as multiple super yachts related to the event have arrived in the city during recent days.
“No Space for Bezos” protests against this billionaire invasion have been so robust that Bezos’ reception space (where Lady Gaga has been rumored to be the featured musical guest) has been hastily relocated to within the ancient Arsenale fortress, a high-walled enclosure where the Italian navy remains active.
Venice’s historic center population has plummeted from a high of almost 175,000 people in 1951 to fewer than 50,000 today. The daily visitors outnumber the locals by more than two to one on average. Nicknamed “La Serenissima” (The Most Serene), most days Venice is anything but. Conflicts between residents and tourists have grown so frequent and intense that armed security guards have been hired to watch major vaporetto (public water bus) stops.
In an attempt to mitigate this trend, last year the city of Venice began charging an entrance fee for tourists to visit the city on select summer dates. Venice is the first municipality in the world to impose such a charge. But this “experiment” has diverted attention from the real threat to the community: housing.
Airbnb has accelerated the colonization of Venezia, particularly suited to capitalize on Italy’s having rapidly dropped from having one of the highest birth rates in the world to among the lowest. Thus, the current generation of Italians has experienced a windfall of property inheritance. Instead of a single home being fought over and haphazardly subdivided between numerous siblings and cousins, now Italians often inherit not only property, but properties. It is not unusual to see entire buildings that once housed eight or more different families in Venice’s historic center currently displaying “Locazione Turistica” serial-number placards out front, evidence that the units within have been emptied entirely of citizens to become de facto hotels.
For the first time there now are more beds available in Venice for visitors than residents— a result of the residential neighborhoods’ commercialization.
With available housing eviscerated, locals are forced out to the mainland. This acts as a double boon to developers like the city’s mayor, Luigi Brugnaro— himself a billionaire. New, generic block apartment buildings in nearby suburbs fill while gutted historic buildings located on the islands are sold by the night at astronomical rates to visitors. Many water taxi drivers, fish sellers, and waitstaff live elsewhere. Their residential roots to the community severed, they are forced to commute back daily.
Brugnaro has been the mayor since 2015. He himself was born on the mainland in Mirano, nearly a half-hour drive from Venezia’s historic center’s main access point. He’s a conservative leader who’s currently under investigation for corruption and has banned books on discrimination and LGBTQIA+ rights— even publicly feuding about this matter with Elton John who owned a home in the city’s lagoon.
Unlike in London, Barcelona, New York, and many other cities that have robustly moved to restrict Airbnb, one of Mayor Brugnaro’s concepts has been that rather than attempting to reduce tourism it should simply be spread more evenly throughout the entire city, thereby converting every last nook and cranny into a tourist district.
In the last year alone, Venice has lost 1,647 residents. Local realtors regularly report that their client base has almost exclusively transformed into foreigners looking for investment properties. If ever this housing crisis imbalance was robustly addressed and bed-and-breakfasts were forbidden except if run by those who actually remain and live in the same building where their bed-and-breakfast is located, the inflated rents and property values would collapse and reflect what Venice has in fact become— yet another abandoned, aging Italian village not so unlike those that are regularly publicized internationally with homes selling for 1 euro each in attempts to repopulate towns.
Instead, Venice’s one-thousand plus year vibrancy and traditions have become all but ghosts. What’s left is a fantasy playground for the rich, a film set for selfies. But amidst the beauty of the Grand Canal’s palazzos and emerald waters, what Bezos and his party might see if they peered closely enough is something never beheld here until recent years— unhoused people sleeping on the cobblestone streets of Venice.
