The rise and fall of Lisbon (2020-2024)
The rise and fall of ๐ต๐น Lisbon (2020-2024)
Lisbon arrivals have now returned to the levels of 4 years ago, just before it started to explode and suddenly get popular with foreigners and tourists alike
Why? The government stopped the NHR program (to attract foreigners to Portugal) in January 2024, many foreigners dispersed over other cities than Lisbon, and even more foreigners just left the country
It might be a good thing because Lisbon simply never had the capacity or infrastructure or desire to deal with it
But it's also a massive wasted opportunity: if Lisbon did have the capacity (or made it easy to build more homes and start businesses), it could have EASILY been the European Silicon Valley, with billions of dollars flowing into it and foreigners + locals starting companies that would have benefited the Portuguese with tax income and millions of jobs created
It has a high quality of life, amazing climate, near the beach, very similar to California. Lisbon even has a cloen of the ๐ Golden Gate bridge, and a ๐ก tram like SF!
Portugal has over 700,000 vacant houses, of which 150,000 in Lisbon, which could have been used to house all the people. Instead the government ignored the problem and Portuguese locals started complaining about rising rents and made foreigners the scapegoat! This forced the government to stop attracting foreigners in January 2024.
I'm in ๐บ๐ธ Austin, TX now and it's VERY similar to Lisbon in how it suddenly got popular during 2020 COVID and got massive migration to it, but if I ask locals about it, they generally love it:
They say there's much more stuff to do here, more job opportunities, they're richer now, and it's more fun to live here than when they grew up here
And this is because almost overnight Austin became a tech hub with companies like Apple, Google, Facebook, Dell, Oracle, IBM, Nvidia, AMD, Wise, and of course Tesla and SpaceX opening up offices here, most of them after 2020!
It might still happen in Lisbon though, but for now the foreigners seem to be leaving elsewhere, and they're taking their billions of dollars/euros with them
Many Portuguese will be glad that it's over, but long term it's questionable what it does to the economy and what an opportunity has been wasted here
http://nomadlist.com/trends/lisbon
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