Saw this on CNN's site this morning.

https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/amst ... index.html

Big long article that's worth the read, but this quote is pretty scary.

Before the lockdown, Amsterdam Mayor Femke Halsema was already considering a major overhaul of the Red Light District in a bid to reduce disruptive behavior and protect the sex workers from degrading conditions. In May, she said that the pandemic has highlighted the "urgency to think about the city center of the future."
Halsema has presented four scenarios for the district, which range from reducing the number of brothel windows to moving sex workers to a new location.

She has also suggested opening a "prostitution hotel" outside the center and said in May that the search for a new location was well under way. The council will hold a vote on the scenarios after the summer, a spokesperson told CNN.

CNN are pretty late on this; I already read about these plans on other news sites weeks ago.

Not sure how I feel to be honest. I imagine the the so-called "prostitution hotel" would take a similar form to a German "eros centre", the biggest downside being that the casual tourists are less likely to visit due to that kind of environment being a bit more "intimidating", for lack of a better way of putting it. Not necessarily a bad thing, since the vast majority of tourists are only there to "window-shop" anyway, and those who really want to visit the girls will do so regardless.

On the other hand, isn't it also possible that the tourism could just follows the girls? Touristy stores, restaurants, etc. just set-up shop around the new location? As long as the girls are still around, people will still go to Amsterdam to see them.

Personally it doesn't affect me too much since I like my encounters to be a few steps above what De Wallen has to offer, but I'd still miss the atmosphere of it if it the girls were to move elsewhere.

The following questions may be answered in the article but here goes anyway...

Who will fund the purchase of an existing or new building ? I presume in theory from the taxes the ladies pay - but who then loses out from other areas of the city where the taxes currently go ?

The landlords of all the rooms in De Wallen and other areas must earn significant monies from the current rents with very little up keep of the rooms. I can't believe new tennents would pay anywhere near that - potentially €300 per day. So will landlords have a say. From what I've seen of Dutch building work - its not the quickest if renovation is the plan. No offence to any Dutch members (UK work can be just as slow)

It would be interesting to hear what PIC think about this, and most importantly the ladies themselves, have they been consulted ? So if anyone is out in the Dam - a fact finding mission for you !

As a downer - with Covid-19 probably here to stay - I think this is probably low down on the agenda of the council with funds needed elsewhere.

I need cheering up !

Moving sex work out of De Wallen seems like a fantastic way to kill a ton of the businesses in centrum.

As for the funding, you also have to figure in the cost of buying out the De Wallen window owners. They’ve already tried that and it didn’t go well last time.

Edit: also, didn’t they spend hundreds of millions of euros already on the old Project 1012? How much money did they sink in the MyRedlight project? So that was all just a giant waste of time and money if they decide to just shut everything down and move it anyway?

The girls don't want to leave the Wallen.

The city would be the landlord of a new "center", and charge rent just like the current system.

The goal seems to be gentrification of everything inside the canal belt. Buildings left by the girls would likely become condos. The housing market is Amsterdam is totally screwed up, with very low supply, but often fixed rents that are set too low. It doesn't make economic sense to build or renovate there under current rules. The city took a lot of property from Charlie Geerts years ago when he was run off for being involved in a variety of crime. Current RLD landlords would likely face the same fate.

I'm not sure any of this would help the housing market. Those are historic buildings, for the most part. They have to meet national, state, and local requirements for any work. It is incredibly expensive, and subject to a lot of input from tons of focus groups. Wealthy foreigners would be the most likely new residents.

I'm not sure the mayor and her Green party cohorts really want to find a solution here. They are very careful to say they support working women, and don't dare come across as anti-hooker...but they are anti-hooker.
They are also oppose air travel, farming, fossil fuels, cars, and tourism that does not involve a yurt on a commune.

They have looked at the German model, which puts these activities in industrial areas. That's what I expect, an Eros center in an industrial park near the airport. Yuk!

Weasel

That’s what I’ve been saying for years. Speaking as someone in the property management business, I’d never buy property in De Wallen unless I was given a brothel license. You can’t build condos there because, as you said, the buildings are historic and can’t be altered, so you’d be looking at converting the rooms into homes. They’d be very small, and you wouldn’t be getting too many of them. Doesn’t seem worth doing. Any other business will probably fail. We’re seeing this already. Nothing they open up in former windows lasts. Many former windows are still vacant.

Also, as I’ve said before, I have very little sympathy for the people living there. I do empathize with them, having loud, obnoxious, dickhead tourists around all the time must suck, but they knew what they signed up for. De Wallen has been the red light district for longer than anyone on this planet has been alive. If they had a problem living in an area like that, they shouldn’t have moved there. It isn’t even like it’s some affordable housing tenement, it’s smack in the middle of centrum. I’ve looked at prices for homes in Amsterdam, De Wallen is significantly cheaper than other canal-side properties, but still expensive compared to many other areas/suburbs. Seems like there are just people who are arrogant enough to think they can move in and change the place just because they want to. Shit doesn’t work that way.

As an aside, mongerers aren’t the problem anyway. It’s the drunk idiots. They close the windows, the bars and coffee shops will still be there and they’ll still have crowds of drunk/stoned idiots. This really doesn’t help anyone other than the ideologies who want to get rid of sex work. I’ll give them this: they’re much more sneaky about it than previous administrations were.

I doubt I’d go back to Amsterdam if they relocated the girls to some industrial area. I wouldn’t want to stay out there, nothing to do but monger, no shopping, no food, no sights to see, and I wouldn’t want to have to travel way out to the airport every day to monger. It’d completely kill the city for me.

This is exactly it. I love the atmosphere around De Wallen, with the way it is set up - that includes the sex shops, coffee shops, restaurants etc around it. Relocating to an industrial area and with the type of set up that is being talked about, that vibe and atmosphere would be dead.

If you're after quality of service and value for money, there are tons of better places around the world. However, despite all of the negativity around De Wallen and the fact its undoubtedly not as good as it was in the 90s and 00's, I still like the atmosphere.

Grim thinking of a future without it.

I mean, this whole thing is completely idiotic. I understand that Amsterdam has a love-hate relationship with tourists and wants to try to make sure they’re mostly getting “the right kind” of tourist, but here’s the thing (and not to toot my own horn here): I am the right kind of tourist. I’m polite and respectful, I don’t drink or smoke in excess, I behave myself, never cause any problems, and I spend a lot of money (and not just on the girls!). I’m exactly the sort of person a tourism destination city wants. Obviously, I don’t know you guys personally, but it seems like most of our esteemed regulars are good people too (when the occasion calls for it!). I don’t recall reading about anyone getting arrested in trip reports, despite Greenhoff’s best efforts. Driving away people like us doesn’t seem like a great move.

There's always this cheerful thought... as the world heads into a global recession and probably a depression, the council won't have any funds to carry out their plans. It will be the girls funding them !

Can someone take me back to 2019 when the world was such a happy place.

Im very similar, and spend decent amounts of money each time I am there, by anybody’s standards. I stay in the top hotels the city has to offer, spend lots on food & drink and have historically spent well on the various non RLD attractions the city has to offer. I also behave well, and never indulge in either the alcohol or the weed to excess.

I think the problem is the Mayor is a bit of a feminist and doesn’t like the idea of large numbers of tourists having the ability to entertain themselves by doing circuits of the RLD and sometimes mocking the girls. I must admit, in the evenings in particular, it is those other types of tourists who stand out. If the Mayor is so against all of that, the thought of ‘the right type’ of tourists existing wouldn’t have even entered her head!

I find it difficult to believe that tourism in Amsterdam wouldn’t suffer more than just a little dent, should the RLD change in the manner which is being suggested. Even on this board it has been suggested that losing the RLD will have little impact on tourism - I will only believe that when the Dutch confirm the figures in black and white; however I pray we will never have to make that comparison. We can only hope.

True, the jackasses coming to gawk at the girls and give them shit/take pictures are a big problem, but again, they’re not mongerers. Mongerers tend to keep a low profile. They’re mostly drunk/stoned assholes there for a stag party or to act like dipshits with their buddies. If anything, seems to me like closing/moving the bars and coffee shops would make a bigger impact in getting rid of the rude, disrespectful tourists. That’s obviously not terribly feasible, but at least maybe step up enforcement of the anti-public drinking laws and actually do something about tourists harassing the girls.

I agree that this won’t be a blip in their economy. Go to De Wallen at night, especially on a weekend. It’s packed to the brim. Like it or not, that’s what people go to Amsterdam for. Yeah, the museums are nice, but every city in Europe has museums and historical sites and people usually aren’t coming back multiple times for that stuff. They come once, maybe as part of a tour, they see it, they go. That’s it. Many of the restaurants in centrum seem to be patronized almost exclusively by tourists, too. I don’t see too many Dutch people at many of those places at all. I also have to think if they move the red light district away from centrum, a lot of people will start staying at hotels outside of centrum. Destroying De Wallen seems like a pretty good way to absolutely decimate centrum.

Let’s hope the money men in the Netherlands can make the decision makers understand the suicidal impact of the Mayor’s proposals. You’re right, they should focus on ways of controlling the rowdy tourists. I actually don’t think it’s *that* bad - but if they want more order a little extra policing alone would go a long way.

The situation has been under this sort of political discussion for some time and the ideas of mayor Femke Halsema have been widely publicised, she is not a bit of a feminist as someone suggested, she is, and acts on many issues like she has the interests of the girls at heart. This is all good news, the happier the girls are, the happier the mongerers will or should be.

She is, however, caught between a rock and a hard place, partly by her genuine feminism. In the months before Corona started to dominate our lives I spent quite some time in Amsterdam and was shocked about the extent to which the Wallen scene has changed. Various window closure schemes have failed and as a result the number of occupied windows has in fact increased which sounds good. The girls are not totally happy though because the number of actual mongerers or participants seems to have fallen.

For instance I experienced fighting my way through Oudekennis on numerous occasions with a full girl line-up on both sides, and noone actually taking the slightest interest in actually talking to, let alone doing anything else with any of them. Simply horiffic, the whole world was there, even with children, just to inhumanly gawk, laugh and taunt, a modern form of human zoo, and this is what Halsema freaks about, hell me too! It's not just guys going it, young women too, it's all simply pathetic and obvously soul destroying for the working girls themselves. It didn't used to be like this when I was there in 2013/14, and certainly the times I lived there in 2005-08.

Wallen tours were banned by Halsema, a good start, and then came Corona, but of course tourists make their own tours. So the question still remains how to get rid of most of the non-participants, or possibly changing their behaviour. I have heard of turnstiles with tickets, hey that maybe could work for Sexy-Land. I'm told Hamburg's Reeperbahn does operate some forms of control of who actually enters.

Let's see how things move here....

The problem with what she’s doing, though, is targeting the wrong people. Again, in my experience, it isn’t mongerers causing trouble with the girls, it’s the drunk idiots and the tourists who come to gawk. They’ve put the red light guides out, in theory they’re supposed to help direct the flow of traffic and stop people from harassing the girls/taking pictures, but the girls have told me many times that they mostly don’t do much of anything.

What they need to do is not move the girls out of the area, what they need to do is actually enforce the rules. Start handing out stiff fines for taking photos of the girls, make the groups of gawkers move along, start writing tickets for harassing the girls. Maybe they need to reopen the De Wallen precinct.

I can understand the appeal of moving the girls away, in theory you’d mostly only get serious mongerers, though I think you’d get lots of curious tourists as well. The girls largely don’t seem to want that, though. They understand that while tourists can be a pain in the ass, they’re also a big part of their income. A lot of guys go for a stroll through De Wallen not intending to indulge and wind up getting lured in, or get pressured by their buddies. I really don’t think moving them is the solution. It may solve some issues, but will introduce a whole host of others. Also, again, the economic impact on centrum would be devastating.

This isn't really feasible because De Wallen is a public space and gawking or taking photos from a public space is not illegal, and nor should it be (harassment on the other hand should not be tolerated).

If the girls moved to a German style "eros center", such rules could be implemented and enforced since that would be a private space.



De Wallen is one of the most popular tourist "attractions" in Amsterdam; I don't think removing the bars and coffeeshops is going to stop people going there. And even if you remove them, what would be your "radius of sobriety"? I could easily just get drunk in De Wildeman (or any other bar nearby) and then be in De Wallen in around 5 minutes. Do you remove all those bars too?



One could also make the same argument against the girls. Yes, De Wallen has been there for a long time, but the vast majority of girls who currently work have not, and they knew what they were signing up for when they decided to work there. It's not like De Wallen was their only option either; they opted to work in such a public space filled with tourists.

They wanted to do this years ago admittedly I haven't been in a long time, prostitution brings illegal drugs and crime don't know if the black guys are still hassling people that's one reason why I stopped visiting.

With the RLD gone to another district it would free up property which is in high demand, I'm also guessing you would lose a high number of tourists. I don't think Amsterdam would be the same without the windows moving it would probably kill it.

I haven't encountered any drug dealers for years in De Wallen. I think it stopped being a problem around 2012-ish?


Kill it in what sense? Sex work is perfectly viable without tourists; plenty of sex workers in other cities around the Netherlands manage just fine without any tourists at all.

in my opinion, drug dealing in Amsterdam is not a problem. at least if comparing to a large or semi large European city when going out a random friday/saturday.

Brussels RLD is a bit worse if comparing. not dangerous I would say, but I understand if some people doesn't like the vibe there. rather rough neighborhood. however plenty of cops 24/7 .