Thread by @KanStaandPijpen

The mayor of Amsterdam has gone public with a complicated but pretty vague statement about 'taking on' the 'problems' of the Red Light District. This is accompanied by a media push to paint the RLD in a bad light, and foreign media have copied the government story.

A thread.

First a little background: The Amsterdam RLD has been a red light district for *centuries*. Everything that a city needs but doesn't want, got concentrated on this part of town. Prostitution, flop houses, rowdy bars, this was the only place they were allowed. Since before 1600.

This meant that Amsterdam invested very little in this part of town, because it wasn't going to spend decent people's money on the whorehouses and dens of iniquity. The rest of town got makeovers and got transformed into significantly less pictureque boring cityscape.

The Wallen (the colloquial name for the Red Light District, meaning the defensive ramparts of the town) thus became very pretty in contrast to the rest of the modernized city. Not only that, the sailors' quarter of any town is the best place for a rowdy night out.

Due to peculiarities of Dutch culture, a segregation of subcultures has always been popular here. So beside the posh Amsterdam, there was a strong Red Light District of which even the upstanding people were proud. If not of the RLD itself, then at least of their own tolerance.

That shouldn't be read as if the RLD was treated well, though. It delapidated, it was left to its own devices, and when criminal gangs wanted to set up shop, police sat on their thumbs. It was considered part and parcel of being tolerated. That sucked big time.

In recent years, Amsterdam politicians got interested in the RLD. It's become prime real estate, and due to its exclusion from "city improvement", it's remained very characterful. A push was launched to remove all the "economically inferior activity" of sex and debauchery.

The municipal government thought this would be easy; after the removal of the Brothel Ban in 2000, it became much easier to shut down brothels and sex worker work places; all they had to do was to show there was human trafficking going on, and the brothel would be history. But...

It turned out that despite letting the worst human trafficking excess of the Netherlands fester, there was too little trafficking going on to shut it all down. Amsterdam went to court, and got stopped in its tracks by the judge because of lack of any evidence of their claims.

The municipal government then went to plan B: they used tax money and money they strongarmed from building societies to buy out the people they had been accusing of trafficking, spending dozens of millions on shutting down window brothels. This was called "project 1012".

At about the halfway point, the municipality and the building societies ran out of money. Government and bad budgeting, who could have guessed? Further buy-outs were stalled, although a lot of windows had been shut down. The results were palpable for everybody.

The windows had always been very dominant in the street scene. We set the mood, we watched the street. Once windows got shut down, those parts of the RLD lost much of their charm. Tourists flocked to the remaining few places where we had not been booted out yet.

It turns out that if you concentrate the tourist attraction, and the tourist flow doesn't diminish, you also concentrate the tourists. It became significantly more crowded in the significantly smaller RLD.

This continues to baffle the municipality. Or so they claim.

The buildings bought out were made available to hip enterprises, often at 0 rent. They went under by the bucketful, because nobody in the RLD is interested in that hipster shit. The only things that thrives are souvenir shops or places catering to stoners with the munchies.

Project 1012 has lingered on since vice mayor Asscher kicked it off, survived mayor van der Laan (who got beatified because he died in office, even though he was as nasty a politician as you get), and is now the problem of the new mayor Halsema.

Halsema is from the Green Left party, as radical a green party as you can get in the Dutch parliament. (Not very radical.) She takes over from decades of social democrat mayors, and people were expecting a shift in policy.

They were, of course, wrong.

So now mayor Halsema has broadcast new plans, but besides praising her for it, the media don't get far explaining the plans. So for the benefit of a colleague, and also now for you the reader,I made a little synopsis in Dutch here.

https://twitter.com/KanStaandPijpen/status/1147499009663262721

I will translate below.

In short: Halsema had already announced she'd continue project 1012. After months of delay (she'd promised to come clean this spring) she has proposed 4 scenarios, 'because something has to be done'.
Why 'something has to be done'?
No idea.

The 4 scenarios are:
1) Screen off all windows. Sex workers still operate in their rooms, but they must never be visible. Acquisition should happen via internet or something (which runs counter to the essence of window work, thus fatal for the work. Will be worse than expected).

2) Moving the workers from the charming canal windows to a Laufhaus (German style open megabrothel) situated in the same neighborhood. Still prostitution on the Wallen, but tucked away to repel tourists and gentrify the neighborhood. Expressed more vaguely than I do here.

3) Removal of all sex workers to a 'less busy place', undefined where, but I gather signals that there are proposals to use dilapidated harbor complexes. Far from tourist areas. The essence is not that we're moved TO somewhere, but that we're REmoved, whereto is unclear.

4) Expansion of workplaces. Also shuttered, and it would mean a ghetto where we can work, but the rest of town would be completely off limits to sex workers. Already Town Hall is protesting that there is 'no space' for more workplaces, reopening closed brothels is no option.

Number 4 is academic anyway; the plan is to use a quasidemocratic process to whittle 4 options down to 2, from which Town Hall will then select 1. These 4 options will therefore always offer the possibility of shuttering. That is not an accident.