On pretty Lombard Street, San Francisco’s famous winding drive, residents are fed up with tourists.
Crowds of gawking, squawking tourists tromp up and down the street by the hundreds on any given hour of any given day, and the hullabaloo is even worse on the weekends. They talk loudly, wield selfie sticks like spears, get in the way of residents’ comings and goings, and intrude upon the private time Lombard Street residents spend in their own home.
Some are pushing for a reservation system where tourists would have to vie for limited access to the neighborhood. Some are also pushing for little Lombard Street to be a toll road.
But that’s genteel as far as pushbacks against tourists go.
In parts of Europe, people are actually staging protests against the throngs of tourists who are messing up their lives.
Signs are appearing in Italy, Spain and Croatia that say, “Tourists go home … Refugees welcome.” There have been large protest marches with residents chanting, “Go home, drunk tourists.” Residents in charming towns curse Airbnb for turning their small villages into little resorts and taking affordable housing away from local residents.
Travel writer Suzanne Moore described the growing sentiment in an opinion piece in the Guardian:
“You are not wanted. You are killing the thing you love. You are ruining everything. You are demanding and noisy and you drink too much. You think the locals are pleased to see you, but they are not. You are, in other words, a tourist. Before you tell me you are not that kind of tourist, that in fact you spend your time sourcing sausage in Puglia or patting peasants on the back in the Languedoc, let me say this: Tourism is tourism. Indeed, part of the joy of it is thinking you are better than other tourists.”
The same swell in tourism numbers affecting those places is affecting this place. Many of those loud, boorish tourists taking selfies outside people’s living room windows on Lombard Street are on their way to Hanauma Bay. Yet, in the islands, there hasn’t been an organized pushback against tourism in many years. It’s not so much the tourists themselves as it is the problem of scale: large numbers of people crowding into small spaces that, unlike a football arena or international airport or Disney World, just aren’t able to handle masses of humanity. Even if tourists aren’t being loud and obnoxious, if the numbers are beyond a place’s capacity, everyone suffers.
Are Hawaii residents too complacent, too passive, too brainwashed into their role as the world’s most welcoming hosts to say something? Has Hawaii become so completely dependent on tourism that no one dares raise a hand and say, “Hey, too much already”? We didn’t used to be so hesitant to express frustration. There were demonstrations in Waikiki in the ’90s with slogans like, “Aloha doesn’t mean ‘how can I be of service?’” But something has changed in the last two decades. We packed in closer together and got used to the crowds.
Reach Lee Cataluna at 529-4315 or lcataluna@staradvertiser.com.
