Take a place that has been hurt, abandoned, impoverished or subject to seismic social and cultural change yet has become alluring to the young, poor and creative – and it more often than not gets labelled “the new Berlin”.

It’s not a pejorative term.

Because after people have abandoned their shops and their apartments, after the bottom has fallen out of the economy – the artists come. It’s the first stop to Destination Gentrification.

Take Athens. There are huge empty spaces to work on some giant clay and graphite installations and the rent is cheap and the drinks are half the price of what they are in New York. Two euros 50 will buy you a gyro the size of a baby’s arm.

I meet a gallerist in London who says all her artists have left Berlin and London for Athens and, when I arrive in the city, there are streets I go down that look a little like Berlin: enormous, excellent street art, lots of bars and coffee shops, alternative music venues, buildings that look abandoned – and a palpable energy on the street.

But for Athenians, the comparison rankles – and not just because it’s the Germans turning the screws on Greece over the debt crisis.

The conditions that make the city so ripe for a new global creative class to move in are born of pain and loss.

In Culture Trip, India Doyle writes, “Today, empty spaces are, more often than not, the direct result of austerity. Vacant shop spaces and an abundance of available homes are a reminder of a former owner’s loss. Opportunity comes at a darker cost than the ‘New Berlin’ narrative would suggest.”

*

On my first afternoon in Athens I meet two young, talented Greek artists. In their studio there is a painting that says “Berlin is the new Athens”.

Touche.

The guy that runs my Airbnb has been forced into the share economy – literally

The artists sell their work to overseas buyers but there’s not much of a market in Greece. In the corner is a painting about to be shipped to Australia.

One of the local artists, whose street art I later see all over the city, tells me that he has been featured in the Guardian and the New York Times but all writers want to talk about with him is austerity and politics.

“I’m not going to do any more interviews unless they’re about art,” he says, sounding tired and bummed out by the whole thing.

*

It’s been almost 10 years since the Greek financial crisis hit and the guy that runs my Airbnb has been forced into the share economy – literally.

He had a job that was reliant on government funding and, over time, was getting less and less work – and now he lives almost solely on Airbnb income.

When I arrive, my host tells me that I will sleep in his room and he will sleep on the floor of the kitchen.

I feel bad – I should sleep on the floor. Yet I don’t offer.



In cities further down the line of gentrification – Berlin (for example, again), Barcelona, Hobart, San Francisco, much of Brooklyn – activists talk about Airbnb displacing people. At first blush that can seem to be an abstract thing, because you don’t actually see the people being displaced. The original residents are just not there and you’re staying in what used to be their apartment, in the cool part of town. But here in Athens I feel as though I have actually, literally, displaced this guy – I’m in his bed.

That night, I can hear my host breathing heavily in his sleep through the door. On the street there is a festival – improbably – for Kali, the Indian goddess of death, time and doomsday. Dance music floats up through the open window and, later, there is an electrical storm that reminds me of northern Australia in its suddenness and violence.

The next day I wake up with a cold. I drag myself around the Acropolis and back to the man’s house to sleep. He has cooked dinner for me – a moussaka with tomato salad.

Then the power goes out in the neighbourhood. We are up high and all the towers around us are black. We eat by candlelight. He tells me about monasteries on a Greek island where women aren’t allowed to go and the monks don’t ever leave.

One of the monk’s mothers, unable to handle not seeing her son again, rowed round and round the perimeter of the island in a small boat but never got a glimpse of him.

He then tells me that in Greece family is everything, and family, not bailouts or schemes or gentrification, is getting them through the crisis.

*

I’m down by the port in Athens having a coffee with a Sydney friend who has lived in the city for many years.

“You name it, I’ve seen it,” he says, kind of wearily.

“Did you see a rush on the banks?” I ask. In 2015, Greece voted no in a referendum on austerity measures and the instability created a run on the banks.

“I was there and knew something bad would happen, so I took all my money out – $10,000 – and kept it in a cereal box at home,” my friend says.

Soon after the withdrawal limit was capped at 60 euro a day.

During the crisis my friend bought an apartment in the city centre for $50,000. We laugh at Sydney real estate prices – $200,000 for a deposit.

I do the calculations in my head – and have an evil but enticing thought. “We should get a group of mates together, and they sell their houses in Sydney and then we become gentrifiers in Athens! We could buy a whole building. Airbnb moguls! After all, just look at Berlin.”

He shakes his head and says what everyone has told me: “No, Athens is different.”

• Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia writer and columnist