Count the Lit Windows

Walk through the historic core of a well-visited European city at nine on a Tuesday evening in February and count the lit windows. The exercise is unscientific and the result is consistent: a great many are dark, in buildings that are neither derelict nor unsold. The centre has not been abandoned. It has been converted, one flat at a time, from housing into inventory.

The mechanism, stated plainly

A flat in a historic centre can earn more from visitors than from residents. That is the whole of it. Once the gap between the nightly rate times an achievable occupancy and the monthly rent a local household can pay becomes large enough to cover the extra work and the extra risk, conversion is the rational decision for each individual owner. Nobody has to intend the outcome for the outcome to arrive.

Two amplifiers make it faster than the raw gap suggests. Conversion is nearly frictionless in an unregulated regime — no planning application, no capital works beyond a keybox, and a platform that supplies the demand from day one. And it is self-reinforcing: each flat converted removes a household, which removes demand for the bakery, the school and the surgery, which makes the district less attractive to the next household, which widens the gap again.

The tenure structure decides the speed. Where the centre is owner-occupied and lived in by families with long attachments, the conversion is slow and partial. Where it is already a rental market with short leases and absentee landlords, it can flip in a decade.

No one decided to empty the old town. Several thousand people each decided, correctly, that visitors pay more than neighbours.

What is lost, precisely

Not charm — the buildings are, if anything, better maintained than before, because visitor income funds renovation that a low-rent tenancy never would. Photographs of a hollowed-out centre look better than photographs of the same street thirty years earlier. That is exactly why the process is hard to argue against in the language travel usually uses.

What goes is the set of businesses that only a resident population supports: the ironmonger, the shoe repairer, the greengrocer, the ordinary bar that opens at seven for people going to work, the pharmacy, the launderette. These are replaced by businesses with higher margins per square metre and a customer who visits once and will not notice if the quality falls.

The school closes when the catchment falls below viability, and the school closing is usually the point of no return, because a district without one cannot attract the families that would reverse the trend. The parish, the association, the market, the football club — the institutions that make a district a place rather than an address — follow on the same logic and roughly the same timetable.

What has actually reversed it

Very little, and honesty requires saying so. The interventions with evidence behind them are the strong regulatory ones: principal-residence requirements, licence freezes in defined zones, mandatory conversion back to residential use, and municipal acquisition of housing stock in the centre for social letting. All four are expensive, politically difficult and slow, and all four work by removing the price gap rather than by appealing to anyone’s better nature.

The soft measures — codes of conduct, voluntary caps, campaigns asking owners to consider the community — have no demonstrated effect anywhere they have been evaluated, for the same reason that the mechanism is not a moral failure. Every individual decision in it is reasonable.

The part a visitor is inside

Neither guilt nor abstention is useful here. A visitor who stays outside the centre and spends nothing in it has removed their money and not their effect. What is available is smaller and real: notice which kind of place you are staying in — a room in a building with residents, or a floor of flats with a keybox on every door and nobody’s post in the hall — and spend the day’s money in the businesses that need a Tuesday in February rather than only in the ones that thrive on an August Saturday.

That does not fix the mechanism, and claiming otherwise would be the kind of thing this desk exists to argue against. It is, however, the part of it a visitor is actually inside, and it is the difference between being a customer of a district and being a customer of the thing that replaced it.