: Why Amsterdam’s Red Light District May Not Survive the Coronavirus Pandemic #WorldNEWS One morning in mid-March, Lennard Roubos woke up to find his neighborhood transformed. For the best part of

Why Amsterdam’s Red Light District May Not Survive the Coronavirus Pandemic #WorldNEWS
One morning in mid-March, Lennard Roubos woke up to find his neighborhood transformed. For the best part of a decade, Roubos’ street, just outside the red light district in Amsterdam’s city center, has been filled with tourists. Drawn to the area by coffee shops where you can freely smoke marijuana and sex workers who solicit clients from the city’s world-famous window brothels, the tourists yell, drink, urinate, and sometimes buy drugs from dealers stationed near his first-floor apartment, Roubos says.
All of that stopped on March 15, when the Netherlands introduced lockdown measures to stem the spread of the new coronavirus, barring tourists from entering, closing bars and coffee shops, and shuttering the city’s roughly 330 brothel windows. The deserted streets were striking, Roubos says. “It was really an eye opener to see how the situation had gotten out of hand. “

For the area’s sex industry, and other local businesses that thrive on tourism, the short term impact of the lockdown has been tough. National government rules prevent sex workers from returning to work until September 1 at the earliest, even as other workplaces, including bars, hairdressers and massage parlours, reopen, leaving sex workers and the operators of brothel windows in deep financial trouble. And while a trickle of European visitors are now allowed to return, many of the coffee shops, souvenir stores, and restaurants that rely on the 1 million tourists that visit in a normal month, risk being unable to survive.
That upheaval may change the red light district for good. Residents groups fed up with tourism have been emboldened by seeing their streets calm for the first time, Roubos says. They’re also angry with how little the area’s amenities have to offer local people and are now putting pressure on the city to prevent a return to business as usual. A petition demanding the city limits the number of visitors and take swift action to change the area has quickly collected some 30,000 signatures—over the threshold needed to hold a referendum on the proposals. In a letter to the city council at the end of May, Mayor Femke Halsema wrote that the lockdown had underscored “the urgency to think about the city center of the future. ” While previous efforts to overhaul the area have failed, the pandemic’s lull in tourism gives officials a unique opportunity, she wrote, to consider measures like buying up empty properties and restricting business permits to make sure failed tourist businesses are replaced with a more “diverse” mix that caters to locals. Even before the pandemic, Halsema was considering options to limit sex work, and possibly move it out of the area entirely, in order to reduce tourism and overcrowding.