After years of discussion, plans, opposition and growing complaints about crowds of rowdy tourists, Amsterdam’s City Council has approved a plan that will relocate the city’s ‘red light’ district with its window brothels to another area of the city.
It’s part of a plan to reclaim the city center for a calmer kind of local life and a different kind of visitor to those who come to visit or leer at the prostitutes and smoke marijuana in the city’s drug-tolerant ‘coffeehouses.’
The coffeehouses will also be affected by the planned changes with the city’s long-delayed decision to enforce the no-foreigners law that was passed nationally several years ago. The city had previously argued that enforcing it would simply move drug sales into the street.
The prostitution plan calls for creating of an ‘erotic center’ elsewhere in the city—location not yet chosen—but the plan has met opposition from sex worker groups who fear it would cause a loss of business.
The package of bills was supported by an unusual coalition of parties that crossed the spectrum.
I was on a German bus tour to Amsterdam back in the ’90’s which included a guided tour by bus through the infamous Red Light District. However, on our way to the district one of the travelers shouted out that her daughter was only 16 years old. All travelers on that tour were required to be over 18, so the driver had no choice but to turn around and we sat in our hotel room and were deprived of the tour. Bummer. I think the teenager was more angry that her mom deprived her of the tour.