Saudi Arabia is razing whole neighborhoods to make way for tourism and wealth

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/13/ [login to see] /saudi-arabia-demolition-jeddah
In an old, crumbling neighborhood in this port city, an older woman is waiting under the sun for a ride. Her face is covered in a niqab, except for her eyes and nose.

"Life is good, everything is good," she tells NPR. "But the demolition has brought us pain." She declined to give her name out of fear of the government.

Early in the year, the Saudi government announced a $20 billion project to redevelop old areas in the south of Jeddah, the second-largest city in the kingdom, to attract tourists and wealthy foreigners. But hundreds of thousands of people will be displaced in the process, many of them from working-class immigrant communities. Even though dissent in Saudi Arabia is risky, some of those being affected recently spoke to NPR about it.

The development will include luxury high-rises, hotels, parks, an opera house, a stadium, an aquarium and museums. All of this will affect 60 neighborhoods, an area about the size of 13,000 soccer fields, according to satellite imagery calculations by Amnesty International, which says the project violates human rights.