Who pays for a tourist city

Kraków drew 14.7 million visitors in 2024, more than before the pandemic, and tourism now accounts for roughly 8% of the city's economy. In District I alone, short-let listings make up about 42% of the whole-flat rental market. The debate about what this does to the city was loud and confident on all sides.

It was also running on old evidence. The last solid survey of how residents themselves saw it was collected before COVID, in a city whose tourist numbers had since collapsed by three quarters and then rebounded past their old peak. The people living inside the change were the ones nobody had asked recently.

So the question was deliberately plain: how do permanent residents of central Kraków perceive and live with tourism, and what differentiates their attitudes? Not whether overtourism is real. What it does, to whom, and why some residents land somewhere very different from their neighbours.

I used a convergent mixed-methods design: the survey and the interviews ran at the same time, were analysed separately, and were brought together only at the end. That order matters. It stops one strand quietly steering the other, and it means a disagreement between them is a finding rather than an embarrassment.

The three districts weren't a convenience sample. They were picked as three phases of the same process: Old Town, where touristification is oldest and most complete; Kazimierz, where it arrived fast and came with nightlife and short-lets; and central Podgórze, only recently being drawn in. If the phase framing held, the districts should differ in a specific, predictable way rather than just being 'more' or 'less' affected.

The questionnaire was built from the four dimensions of urban tourism hypertrophy (spatial, social, economic, institutional), so the instrument followed the theory rather than being assembled ad hoc. Interviews were recruited from survey respondents by contrast: district against tenure against housing status against stated attitude.

The cost index sits well above the midpoint of the scale; the benefit index sits below it, at 2.87. But the interesting part isn't the average. It's the hierarchy underneath it.

What residents agree on most is not noise or crowds. It's money. Agreement that tourism drives up rents reaches 88.1%, with the smallest spread of any item in the questionnaire, the closest thing in the data to a consensus. Service prices follow at 76.8%, everyday shops being displaced at 65.7%.

The district comparison is where the study earns its keep. Podgórze is systematically milder across every summary measure: higher attitude (3.04 against 2.62 and 2.57), lower costs, higher benefits. Old Town and Kazimierz never differ significantly from each other; the line always falls between them and Podgórze.

But three items break that pattern completely, and they break it in the same direction. Rent pressure, short-term rental as a problem, and distrust of the city are statistically indistinguishable across all three districts. Meanwhile noise produces the largest effect in the entire study, and the sense of the district becoming an attraction rather than a home is close behind.

That split is the finding. Touristification is not one process of varying intensity. It runs in two registers at once. The economic and institutional register is city-wide: it reaches Podgórze at full strength, whatever phase the district is in. The everyday-experience register is graded: noise, crowding and the loss of domesticity track how far the district has actually travelled.

With attitude as the outcome and the usual suspects as predictors, the model is unusually clean. Perceived costs and perceived benefits carry it; age, gender, years in the district, working in tourism and owning your home are all flat.

This is the study's clearest theoretical result: attitude is a balance sheet, not a demographic position. Where you sit on tourism is explained by what you think it costs you and what you think it gives you, which is exactly what social exchange theory predicts, and exactly what the literature had found demographics fail to explain.

Between 13.9% and 17.8% of respondents had seriously considered moving out for tourism-related reasons, with no significant difference between districts. The model explains why the district label tells you so little, and what does.

Costs dominate: a standard deviation more perceived cost multiplies the odds of considering leaving by 5.5. Benefits protect, but far more weakly (0.54). The asymmetry is the point: costs push much harder than benefits hold.

Clustering on the standardised cost and benefit indices split the sample cleanly in two: 57.3% 'in conflict' (high costs, low benefits, and more than a quarter considering leaving) against 42.7% 'reconciled', with almost none considering it.

That result is real and useful for naming who is in the room. It is also considerably weaker evidence than it looks, and the thesis makes that argument against itself rather than waiting for a reviewer to make it.

Ten interviews, analysed reflexively, produced eleven themes: six anticipated by the theoretical frame, five that emerged from the corpus and turned out to carry the most interpretive weight.

The coding matrix is published rather than summarised, so the counts quoted in the text can be checked against it.

Convergence between the two strands was high and systematic, dimension by dimension. Which makes the one place they pull apart the most interesting row in the table.

The limits are part of the result, not an appendix to it.