Sex Hotel

Shortlist of possible location for Amsterdam's prostitution hotel or center:

Amstel III in Zuidoost
Arenapoort in Zuidoost
Sloterdijk 2 Zuid in Nieuw-West
Sloterdijk Noord in Nieuw-West
Zuid/RAI in Zuid
Hamerkwartier in Noord
Eenhoorngebied in Oost
An as yet to be determined "water location"

Interesting idea. But location such as Arena just too out of the way

She will never give up but I will only believe it when it actually happens.....

Looks like a fantasy/vanity project.
It would be interesting to see how much it affects the tourist numbers.
Assuming they are only focused on the main RLD, the first casualty would be the Singel.
How long before she might be Trumped?

I have read the report.

Could see it working.Be like prague showboat that kind of setup.
They could police it more that way

To me, it’s not the actual design of the hotel that’s an issue. It looks pretty cool, actually. Definitely a step up from the grubby De Wallen kamers. The issue is that A. it’s going to be way out of the way of anything else I’d want to go to and will completely kill the convenience aspect, and B. it won’t change the issues with overcrowding in De Wallen. I’ve been a bit of a broken record about this, but the problem isn’t the mongerers, it’s the drunk people. It’s the hen and stag parties, the football fans, the pub crawls, and the other assorted dipshits. I have literally never heard of a mongerer causing trouble (unless he was drunk), I’ve heard TONS of horror stories about drunk idiots. Hell, I’ve witnessed a few.

Even if they close the windows, there are still going to be sex shops, the live sex shows, tons of bars and coffee shops, tattoo and body mod places, all that sort of stuff. It’s still going to attract crowds, and it’ll still be the same sort of people. It makes absolutely no sense to shut the windows down. It’s like if your kitchen was full of ants because you never cleaned the place up and just left dirty dishes and food everywhere and thought that you could get rid of the ants by just cooking in the bathroom from now on. The cooking wasn’t the issue, it was the fact that you left rotting food out. It’s just an idiotic idea. They need to deal with the drunks. Us mongerers just want to be left to our devices. This isn’t a tourism issue, it’s a shitty policing issue.

And you know what? I’m gonna say it: fuck the people who live in De Wallen. I know that’s harsh, I know it must suck having drunk, noisy idiots around all the time, I empathize, but they moved there. They knew what the place was and they made their choice. De Wallen has been like this for literally hundreds of years. It’s always been the red light district, it’s always been a raucous place. They knew what they were getting into. It isn’t even cheap to live there, I checked, so it’s not like these are people who are living there because they can’t afford to live anywhere else. No, these are people who moved into an area they knew would be loud and probably not so pleasant to live in, but thought “nah, it’ll be fine” and when it wasn’t, started throwing tantrums. You don’t want to live around sex workers and drunk idiots? Don’t fucking move to the world’s most famous red light district! Fucking wankers!

If they do this, it’s very likely I won’t be back, or at least nowhere near as frequently.

I agree, I think it will make very little difference to the RLD crowds.
Most are not there for the windows, other than to ogle and laugh.
Some might migrate to the Singel, new bars will spring up and encourage more, but again the RLD crowds won’t be that impacted.
I can’t imagine the Jordan residents sitting back and watching the RLD crowd invade.
So, they’ll then go after the sex shows, then the coffeeshops, etc.

I do have some sympathy with RLD residents.
Yes the RLD was there before they were and they should have known what they were getting into, but when I started visiting 25 years ago, it was never THIS bad.
There are far more drunk tourists now, you can barely move at the weekend.
Junkies were a bigger concern back then, but that was mostly during the daytime.
I remember the RLD being quite tranquil during the day.
I know that most residents are broadly in favour of the windows, at least they were, but want something done about the drunks.

If they really want to reduce tourist numbers, they should target hotel bed numbers first and then bars.
Attract tourists to other locations in the city.
I remember Leidseplein & Rembrandtplein/Thorbeckeplein et al being much more vibrant than they are today.

This is the thing. It's changed a lot over this timespan and the availability of cheap flights, in addition to the reasons you mentioned, had a lot to do with it. Some of the residents have lived there for decades and they've watched their neighborhoods become unlivable. So, while I can see both sides of this, I do have some sympathy for them.

In the meantime, this is what OZA looked like this past Saturday night:

Thanks Bluto, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the RLD that empty on a Saturday night.
Have the latest restrictions closed the windows again or are people just staying away?

Yeah, they decided, starting last Wednesday night (November 4th) to tighten the restrictions for at least 2 weeks, and this included closing the windows again, in Amsterdam and elsewhere. I've heard it's up to city authorities to determine the definition of "sex clubs", whether it applies to windows in their city, but as far as I know there are no RLDs in the country that remain open. Anyway, we'll see what happens later this month.

Nieuw-West is a shithole, so is most of Noord and I think the other areas aren't too nice either, which I suppose is the whole point. Anyway, assuming the new prostitution center is populated by the same sort of girls running the same business model, it just means tourists will have to go a bit out of their way to experience dishonesty, aggressive upselling and ridiculous restrictions, perhaps reducing traffic in the nicer parts of the city. I can understand the motivation to do it and it just doesn't bother me at this point, given what De Wallen has become in recent years.

That makes sense. To me, though this really only reinforces that it’s a policing issue, not necessarily a tourism one. As has been pointed out, junkies and dealers used to be a much bigger issue. De Wallen and even the Zeedijk area used to be kind of a no-go spot for a lot of tourists. They were able to clean it up, then moved the police precinct out of the area for some reason. So they’ve dealt with these issues with good policing and practical policies before. The issues I see is whenever I’ve been there in recent years is there’s drunk idiots everywhere, they have open containers with them, drinking openly in the streets, the harass the girls and take pictures of them, and no one does anything. Yeah, they put up signs, yeah, they have the people in the red jackets supposedly looking out for this sort of behavior, but I’ve seen people do it right in front of them (even right in front of police sometimes), and nothing gets done.

Fix that. Reopen the precinct, have more police around, increase fines for these sorts of behaviors (or maybe start throwing these idiots in jail overnight), send a message. Make it clear that this behavior is not acceptable in De Wallen. Otherwise, even if they move the girls out of the area, it’s not gonna change. Again, I very firmly believe that the girls are not the issue, it’s all the booze and weed and lack of accountability.

I think you are right.
So what’s the really reason they want to do this, Puritanism or they want to get their hands on some lucrative real estate?

Probably being unfaithful and stupid , why not work with we got ??? To put it probably a stupid old Texas way usually said when a pro sports team threatens to leave . “ This is just a new bunch of good old boys taking over a old business “. A new group trying to make a buck.

I mean, to me this is all moot anyway. The previous mayor couldn’t get funding to buy out the windows. This mayor thinks she’s going to get millions to buy out the windows AND open a giant sex hotel? I have my doubts. Plus, they’re gonna run into NIMBY issues. The people who live in De Wallen want the ladies out, do these people think other areas will want them moving in? They’d have to put it someone where there isn’t much residential property, which would put it pretty much out of the way of anything.

Only way I could see it working was if if was an actually hotel/resort where you’d stay and they’d have areas where you can go meet ladies or have them come to your room. Make it like an actual adult Disneyland. A whole big compound full of sex, booze, food, etc. Then they could put it on a floating platform or something away from residential areas. It would probably wind up being quite expensive to stay there, though. It would also probably kill Centrum.

I can see why the city government would think that the time has come to give these ladies a new home somewhere else. Mass tourism, literally everyone having high resolution camera phones in their pockets, Instagram picture sharing, sanitary conditions are a joke...