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The issue of airbnb is a sticky one. On one hand, being able to temporarily live in an apartment greatly enhances the immersiveness when your travel - you get to feel like a local and experience life in another place. Hotels suck as they cut corners to the point where an article posted here complaining about the lack of bathroom doors in hotels. On the other hand, these rentals drive up real estate prices and drives out locals. And often these rentals are in run-down low-income turning affordable yet poor quality housing into high quality temporary rentals. This drives out low income residents deepening income inequality issues while subjecting them to the threat of homelessness.
As long as we tolerate a society that only values ROI while ignoring the value of investing in humanity we won't resolve any of these issues. In a better world we would think about others and realize that easy access to shelter is foundational to stabilizing people to enable them to succeed in life. It's not hard, we have an abundance of materials and labor yet we have built a culture where helping others is some form of weakness for both parties.
Yes, if your local life is being inconsiderate and having parties till 3 because you're on holidays. Having an airbnb in your building is terrible as you don't know the people and they don't care about getting to know you.
> Hotels suck as they cut corners to the point where an article posted here complaining about the lack of bathroom doors in hotels.
The great thing about hotels is that they can be planned for and zoned correctly for. Even so, I've had a hotel go up 100m from my apartment and had to invest in blackout blinds since they chose for a modern design with glass all over (and the lights are bright at night).
The biggest problem here in Barcelona is that most airbnbs / short term rentals are companies buying housing as an investment and so are stealing the opportunity from actual people and families trying to live.
This problem exists regardless of who does the buying. Where I live the locals got into the market first. Still, it's a zero-sum game, every short-term rental is a house a family cannot live in and probably cannot afford to buy.
On my street 30% of the houses are short-term rentals. Some rent out for $10k/week just 8 weeks a year and are closed up the rest of the time. My daughter is currently the only kid on the street, which has over 100 houses.
Not only are all the houses now priced as income-producing investments, they are killing the community that used to exist here.
If I were a dictator I'd say taxes increase by 100% for every house after the first (or second), aiming for a nice balance between allowing people to have another home and limiting the crazyness of owning multiple homes.
I would expect that to be the minority of visitors.
I certainly don't do that when I stay in Airbnbs.
> The biggest problem here in Barcelona is that most airbnbs / short term rentals are companies buying housing as an investment and so are stealing the opportunity from actual people and families trying to live.
Sure, the problem is balancing that with the desire of tourists that want something better than a hotel.
Certainly, there is a tug of war between tourist dollars vs negative tourist impact, but this math is a function of how impactful tourist decline (if any) would occur by pushing out short term rentals. Hotels always remain an option. Real estate and politics are local, as the sayings go. AirBnB pushed negative externalities on local jurisdictions to achieve their valuation and economic success ("socialize the losses, privatize the gains"), and these efforts are just pushing them back in some form. Tourists should remember that they are guests in the places that host them, and it is a privilege to be hosted.
If you live next to one the "minority" is at least once a week, usually on a workday because they're in vacation while you're not.
You get extra trash everywhere, puke in the staircase, empty bottles in front of the building, condoms thrown out of windows, &c. it's a never ending nightmare
If you share a wall or ceiling or are next door to one, how small would the minority have to be to keep you from being annoyed?
That's exactly what we're not tolerating here in Spain. We have guaranteed right to "decent and adequate housing" enshrined in the constitution, which is why you're seeing these aggressive moves against companies that actively work against us having that.
I guess we in Spain are a bit of guinea pigs regarding this, as we've been hit hard by Airbnb et al, but we also have strong social movements trying to fight back, and right now being a bit successful. Gonna be interesting to see how it looks like in 5-10 years again, once we start to see the effect of the new laws passed these last few years.
Like a local with your fellow thousands of other tourists doing the same things, going to the same places, taking the same pictures? Traveling became the most abject consumeristic activity, there is nothing "local" left in these holiday hubs
There are very few hotels with kitchenettes. Most people don't cook (and don't want to cook) on vacation. Most hotels also don't cater to the low-income, and folks who cook on travel tend to be low-income. There's business rentals that offer this, but they're often not bookable for short-terms (usually 2+ weeks minimum).
Most hotels can accommodate 5+ people in a room, if you call them. Though no rooms (except suites) will have more than 2 beds, hotels will provide cots. In general, though, rooms aren't expected to host any more than that, and if you have more people than that, the expectation is that you'd book more than one room. Plenty of hotels have adjoining rooms for this purpose.
Again, though, hotels aren't really targeting low-income folks. Airbnbs can be cheaper in this regard, but most rentals on Airbnb charge by the person, so in some cases can be as expensive or more expensive than getting 2 rooms.
In either case, I think the issue is your needs are uncommon for vacation travel.
I am well aware that hotels will provide cots. Cots are torture. No one wants to sleep on a hotel cot. And even if hotels have adjoining rooms they often won't guarantee to give them to you when you make a reservation. It makes no sense at all.
Airbnb probably serves you quite well, but you're a bit of a niche market for the travel industry, so it makes sense why your need isn't generally addressed. Hotels have to maximize their space, and the vast majority of people don't need kitchenettes.
The monetary value has to match the damage it does to have people caring less about the “environment” they are in (gossip puts pressure on people to behave, just like renting puts less pressure on people to take care of their apartment).
This wouldn’t outright ban short-term rentals, but it would reduce the largest financial incentive.
I say this selfishly, as someone who wants to use the platform while still occupying my own place. Something that offering it as a full-time rental doesn’t allow.
Best way to reduce tourism is to levy taxes on tourist activities.
I think if a country let's someone in only for them to find out that they're not welcome there - they're probably not going back again. It's better to know that a place is very expensive to visit up front, or - like Bhutan - there are very few tourist permits given out.
What does this even mean? It's not illegal to travel
Stop and think a bit more instead.
Wow, it looks like unbridled capitalism isn't the answer after all.
Capital gains tax has zero effect on billionaires precisely because it is not levied on them in most cases. When one's total wealth hits high tens of millions suddenly they get access to instruments to use their wealth without triggering "taxable events". Probably the most well-known example are loans against shares.
This eliminates [some of] downward pressure on some asset prices, triggering positive feedback loop on price and thus wealth transfer.
If anything, taxing transactions hits the poor, as they don’t have the ability to borrow against assets they don’t have, and all their work (which is a transaction) is taxed.
I wonder if they all wiped out by the crisis (subprime really hit spain hard), and what we are seeing now is the consequence of that wipeout, and bankruptcies.
Problem is that it's in areas where people don't want to live. In the areas people want to live, the problem is the opposite, there isn't nearly enough housing, so you end up with some of the highest population densities in EU (#2 and #3 are both in Spain at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_Union_cities_... in "density per km2" for example, 50% of top 10 on that list is in Spain!) and prices keep going up.
Add in that salaries are pretty low so cost of living is subsequently low, so you end up with a ton of "expats" and other fun folks like "foreign investors" who purchase up all the livable/rentable properties with their "higher value" money, because everything is so cheap for them.
Owners realize this, and while the government is (now at least) trying to put a stop to all of this with limiting rent increases and more, owners still try to take advantage of it as much as they can.
Personally, I think we need to temporarily put a complete halt to non-residents buying any sort of properties or even land here, at least for a short period of time so the people who actually live and work here can recover from the situation.
For the average person with a normal job here and not working for foreign companies with a higher salary, it's short of impossible to be able to afford to eventually buy a house.
This is a big generalization but I think it's broadly true.
If you are in a "resource" area you'll get pollution and often instability and war.
If you are in a "playground" area you get massive cost increases and are eventually forced out.
As the trend is toward concentrating more and more wealth at the top, the slice of rich who can afford to enjoy the playgrounds becomes smaller and the number of refugees, homeless, and poor becomes larger and poorer.
That list does not make much sense, because it mostly consists of small municipalities that have been engulfed by growing metropolitan areas. Four of the five Spanish entries are like that, three in Valencia and one in Barcelona; and most other entries in the top 20 are suburbs of Paris, Athens or Naples.
> A city proper is the geographical area contained within city limits
I'm not sure about the others, but the one from Barcelona is a city actually, with their own local government and all, separate from Barcelona, exactly like Badalona on the other end of Barcelona. It is within the city-limits of Barcelona (region, not city) though.
(own property in Spain)
At 100€ per night, at 70% occupancy the equivalent monthly rent is ~2000€.
If the economics work out for landlords, a city can lose a lot of apartments to short term rentals way faster than it could increase supply. Especially in central districts where significant new construction is barely possible.
Airbnb is one of many problems, and all of them require something done about it. But one does not exclude the other, if you look up the "Spain" tag on your favorite international news source I'm sure you can dig out the other measures being taken currently.
Again, many small streams make a big river. Not one single action or new law will instantly fix the issue, you patch what you can and incrementally work towards something better.
Like it helps those who have one at a greater expense to renters without one
> People with a rent controlled unit will not leave even when they should, because they have it so good.
... What do you mean "when they should"? If they don't want to leave because the rent is OK and they like living there, why should they move?
I guess one fundamental difference with Spain VS US or probably many other countries, is that here in Spain we have "the right to housing" enshrined in our constitution. This makes it so it's more important for residents and citizens to be able to find housing, than it is for owners to be able to make profits on owning properties/land.
The laws in the country should reflect this, and thankfully, they're starting to, albeit slowly.
I think rent control advocates focus on people who might be lucky enough to get a rent controlled apartment, but it is much harder to think about what happens to all the people who want to move to a city but can't because no housing stock is available.
I have nothing against short or medium term rentals. If they are limited percentage of housing as total. This percentage is rather low.
I don't like AirBnB and I'm glad they got fined, but the Spanish government also needs to accept that they have been sitting around doing nothing for roughly 20 years. Looks like politicians all over will do everything in their power except actually building more apartments.
[1] https://www.leonidasmartin.net/artes/no-vas-a-tener-una-casa... (in Spanish)
I am totally unfamiliar with Spain, but wondering what would government have to do to improve the situation? They wouldn’t build government owned and operated houses? Or is it that they do not issue permits for builders, or tax incentives are all wrong?
A lot of other European governments took on too much public debt and had to enforce austerity measures. This proved very unpopular.
Unlike the US, the Spanish government did not bail out private industry debt. And so 15 years later here we are. Not enough housing stock and not enough private builders to carryon building more.
How much effect will 65000 flats have on this?
Not really true, Romania, Italy, UK, Ukraine, Peru, Germany, France and more are not hotter than Spain.
Is there something else you're trying to hint at that you don't dare to say out loud perhaps?
And meanwhile, getting any kind of building permits is super hard so there's only a trickle of new property being built that lags behind demand.
There's a real estate bubble where real estate value outgrows inflation structurally. So housing is getting more and more expensive. To the point where a normal person with a normal income has basically no chance at all at finding anything decent on the market.
The solution of building more housing and making it easier for property owners to rent out their property are consistently not happening. The Netherlands actually has large amounts of empty property where the owners prefer to not rent it out and keep their investment liquid because it's such a PITA to get out of an agreement. There's also a history of privatized housing corporations selling off their property to make some quick money for the share holders. The net result is a huge mess of private property that is either not rented out or rented out at extortion prices. At the same time there's also growing amount of empty commercial real estate. Because people work from home now. Converting that for housing is another regulation challenge.
The problem isn't greed but broken policy. The reflex of "protecting" renters has had the opposite negative effects on the rental market. Things like Airbnb are more like a symptom than the cause of this.
The way I see it, house construction should not be expensive. It's artificial scarcity. A 50K camper can be pretty comfortable. But forget about having the right to use that as a place to live. You are instead expected to pay extortion rents or buy your own 500K piece of shit tiny apartment that is actually smaller and less comfortable than the bloody camper. A camper is just a house with wheels. Those are mass produced in factories. Houses without wheels should be much simpler to make. This never was a technical problem. Prefab housing is kind of a solved problem. It's not that hard. Any idiot can construct a garden shed in an afternoon. If the rules were different, most big cities would have huge slums with campers and other improvised housing. Regulation is what keeps this under control. But when policy breaks down, slums like that become the next logical level of this crisis.
A good example of exemptions in the Netherlands are so-called holiday homes where people live permanently; despite this clearly being illegal. Evicting people would create an unsolvable problem for bureaucrats. So, a lot of people that live like that got their situation legalized. And of course recreational units tend to be in nice places too. So, it's a popular thing. If tens of thousands of people start parking their campers on the edge of town bureaucrats would struggle to address the issue without creating a bigger crisis.
Probably something like this will force a solution eventually.
Not great for prices (Ryanair is complaining about high landing fees) but it does mean tourists have a good job being dispersed into the countryside and having a good experience.
By what measure? Granted, I now live outside of Barcelona after moving here from an island with ~700 people on it, so for me pretty much any city is big, but I'm fairly sure Barcelona is within top 100 worldwide in terms of population living in it, so I'm guessing you're saying "not a large city" by some other metric?
This is the wrong way to frame this issue. A lot of cities like Paris and Amsterdam have this issue with short-term renting. "Build moar" is just not really an option for these type of city.
Firstly, the constructible area of the city is limited. So build, but build where ? You can expand horizontally, but this creates challenges with public transportation and other public services. And it can be slow since it means having to expel industry and agriculture further to rezone area into constructible home/office area. So the other option is to build up, which means destroying potentially historic building, changing the skyline and viewpoint. This would be bad for tourism (and people who live here might not like it either), since this is a big reason why people even come to visit.
In the past, cities had simple way to deal with this. With zoning and hotel licences, the city could have a real urban plan on how it wanted to evolve and how much space it wanted to dedicate to tourism vs industry vs offices vs homes. But AirBnb came and just said "fuck that" and bypass complitely the licence système and or building and operating permit usually needed for tourism. Greed and capitalism took advantage of that and the number of place to rent or buy descreased significantly in favour of short term tourism rental, making living in the city slowly unaffordable.
Building more is not that simple. AirBnb respecting the law is a simple solution. It won't complitely solve the issue of the availaibility of affordable home, but it sures as hell help.
Get over it! Seriously, most buildings are not historic. By trying to make them all historic you ensure they are all lost and the few that really are historic can't stand out for the history they represent. Save what is really history, but not everything.
Similarly, the skyline will change. That is life. Accept it. You do not own the view, it is the combination of everyone, and not everyone agrees with you so why are you forcing your preferred view on others?
It's a lot more selfish and malicious than that. They want to remain housed affordably, so they support rent control, but they don't care about the city being affordable in general or for anyone not already living there. Often they outright oppose it (because those moving in would be ethnic minorities or poorer, with concerns about crime), but they disguise their racism with ridiculous aesthetic preferences about "skylines" and "shadows" and "neighborhood character", block highrises, block most construction, and you end up with rent controls for current residents but years long wait lists. Working 100% as designed.
What locals in attractive locations really want is to restrict supply, because the majority are homeowners and want to preserve their paper net worth. They caused the problem, benefit from it and don't want it fixed.
Sure, everyone wants their particular city to be frozen in time for cuteness and nostalgia reasons. However, it sort of assumes that the sociopolitical environment is also frozen (it isn't).
so instead you end up with voters voting against densification because, essentially, "I got mine."
p.s. i'm not sure that places that banned/heavily restricted airbnb experienced a meaningful decline in rental prices (e.g. new york, san francisco, vancouver, etc). it's basically a distraction from failed policy.
p.p.s. new york is one of the most popular tourist destinations and incredibly built up, and doesn't seem to have issues with tourists wanting to visit. tokyo too. and these also still have their quintessential historic/preserved areas, too.
As long as it wasn't profitable for them to do bad stuff (which it wasn't, since the fine is 6 times the size of their profits from that period of time), I'm happy enough about. You win some, you lose some, this is closer to winning than loosing so thank you Ministerio de Consumo.
I know it's always been a bit of a financial asset, but the past 40 years have really seen this accelerate to pretty crazy levels. The issue, when you boil it down to the basics is: wealthy folks, development companies, overseas oligarchs, hedge funds, etc. owning many properties where they try to extract as much value as possible. This means that rents go up and short-term-rentals become more viable. This also means that young middle-class families can't afford to purchase or to live there, so it pushes out locals (this is especially bad in Lisbon).
The solution seems to be government telling you what you can or you can't do with your private property, which does not sit well with me, but it's becoming more and more clear that this can't go on forever.
The problem is that the supply/demand curves are being manipulated by, as mentioned, property owners which are destroying the fabric of their respective city via short-term rentals (or, by just owning an appreciating empty property), which, in turn, increases rents and prices for housing en masse. All of a sudden, a "boring" property becomes an investment that generates revenue. All of a sudden, hedge funds, banks, etc. want in on the action. There's money to be made, after all!
While this used to be the case in the past (if you bought, for example, farmland, or a factory, or something), the financialization of housing is a relatively new phenomenon.
Expats and global financial markets further complicate this: how can an average Spaniard that makes $50k compete with a California "digital nomad" that makes $150k? Obviously, we need to have some sensible rules that protect the citizens with heritage and history there.
I like what Singapore is doing - having a government built “base level” of housing that is both abundant and readily available - it can anchor the price where deep excesses are harder to end up with.
It’s like a market where a very significant player keeps the price law, because of its own reasons.
In such a scenario the price will not go up as sharply, so there would be less incentive for people to buy real estate just as a financial vehicle.
And the government can also prioritise who it sells the units it builds to - e.g. not investors.
I honestly am surprised why western governments are not trying this.
It's special because they made it that way.
Then along came 'right-to-buy', allowing tenants to buy their social housing for knock down prices (and so become a natural Tory [right of centre party] voter).
If councils had been allowed to use the money to build more social housing, then maybe this was fine. But they were not. So now we have affordability issues in the UK too.
I was surprised since you are such a prolific commentator. Almost fell for it. Hope it’s not social engineering.
But you still need to build more housing obviously
There are so many empty and decaying homes all over Europe, in Italy they sell houses for 1 Euro. Yes there's a catch but that catch is that you are supposed to renovate the house for a cost that ranges from 20K euros to 100K euros and this is still quite cheap considering that you end up with a proper house at a picturesque location.
Expats come, locals are pushed out, existing business is replaced by business catering towards expats. But an economy built on being a trendy expat location is not sustainable. Expats will leave to a new place eventually, and then the city is dead. This dynamic is accelerated by the fact that locals are forced out when expacts come, but the city was attractive in the first place because of how charming locals made it.
If you run the city - and imagine it’s a company, and you’re the CEO - you can see that your city is falling for a hype train that will eventually kill it. The smart thing is to not let that hype train happen.
Because expat purchase power is a mutliple of your locals, you need to find other levers. Every company would do the same thing.
In an economy where there is a housing shortage local population needs affordable and long-term (6-months+) rental contracts or they don't have stability.
Capitalism is great in general, but some things, such as healthcare, housing, electricity,... needs to have a stronger regulatory framework then eg TVs since the collapse of basic human necessities creates chaos and eventually becomes the foothold of extreme socialist/communist political parties which then finish the job of destroying the economy.
Housing and rent are already heavily regulated in Spain. Some regulations and side effects of those regulations:
* Minimum contract length of 5 years.
* Maximum increase of rental per year regulated to 2/3% (even during high inflation years).
* It can take years to evict a non-paying tenant. If there are children in the apartment, it's even harder.
* Even if the tenant is not paying, you, the landlord, have to keep paying the utilities, because if you stop paying, you'll be charged with "coacciones".
* If the landlord is not a person but a company, regulation is even harder.
* In some cities like Barcelona, regulation goes beyond. Maximum prices set by the local government, seasonal contracts banned, and even room rentals regulated.
* And all that is not going into detail of the "Okupa" problem.New York, as expensive as it is, is still considerably cheaper than cities like SF. Part of this is that they build more, part of it is that they have a usable train system, which allows people to live more spread out across the city, but part of it as well, is that they've banned airbnb. It would be ideal to also see empty unit taxes on units >$10m (inflation adjusted). It would also be good to see high taxes on sales of units >$10m (inflation adjusted).
> Minimum contract length of 5 years.
This is good, assuming it's one sided (the tenant can choose to move out, but the landlord can't break the lease). People need stability in housing more than landlords need to be able to end leases.
> Maximum increase of rental per year regulated to 2/3% (even during high inflation years)
Sure, it should be generally tied to inflation, but what other investment exists where you're guaranteed yearly increases? Why are people so adamant that landlords need to be guaranteed minimal increases in their profits?
Housing is a natural monopoly, and allowing businesses to maximize their profits, unchecked, isn't capitalism.
> It can take years to evict a non-paying tenant. If there are children in the apartment, it's even harder.
This is often brought out as a massive negative of regulations, but let's be honest, this is an outlier. Without tenant protections, however, it's common for landlords to evict tenants to increase rents. Even with protections, landlords still take illegal measures to try to evict tenants to increase rents, like doing constant construction at night, or refusing to do maintenance.
This is basically the same complaint about welfare programs. We have to accept some percentage of fraud to serve the greater good.
It's completely normal for most businesses to take a risk based approach to fraud, to maximize profits. Retail businesses, for example, will try to maximize their credit card auth rates, even though that may increase their fraud rate, if the increases in auth rate outweigh the cost of the fraud.
A stable society is worth a small percentage of fraud.
> If the landlord is not a person but a company, regulation is even harder.
Good. I don't see how this is a downside.
> Maximum prices set by the local government, seasonal contracts banned, and even room rentals regulated.
Again, this is good. If there's a housing crunch, then residents should be prioritized over tourists.
However, we should not only consider the stated objective of the law but the real consequences of them. My point is, housing and rents are quite regulated in Spain. More regulation is being added every year as it serves the political and electoral objectives of our leaders, yet the situation is getting worse. Regulation detached from practical realities will fail to reach the desired objectives.
Airbnb was not a bad idea, but it has been perverted. It's time to regulate it and probably break it too.
* The regional administration handed out licenses without problems until a year ago, even when everyone was complaining already about these rentals. It was just paperwork + fee to get the license. They did for years and now they wonder why there are so many flats: they allowed it.
* The main issue these rentals cause to the neighbors is people partying, being noisy, inconsiderate. Rentals have rules against these behaviors yet they happen frequently. I wish we or the police had tools to legally kick people out in the middle of the night for this behavior.
* Apart from legal rentals, which are being limited now, there are a lot of illegal rentals. They are only starting to crack down on them. AirBNB and others have not complied with the law and this should not come as surprise. They have actively enabled illegal businesses for years. People go to jail for that and they should shut them down.
* There is no affordable housing in the city-center. Rental flats make it worse but in many places the issue will not be fixed if they disappeared. The causes are deeper and a nice flat is not going to become "cheap" to rent in any case.
* Holiday rentals are a bit more profitable that long-term rentals, but not crazy unless you are doing it at scale and they come with their own problems. Many are switching now to "seasonal" rentals, which are rentals for a period less than a year and the tenants need to go then. They forgot to handle these in the new regulations. Long-term rental is problematic because you can't use your flat when you need it. i.e. if you have a flat that you come to spend your own holidays. So people in that situation have limited alternatives.
* I am personally not against switching to long term rentals, but the current situation wrt. licenses etc. puts me in a "wait and see" mode. My flat is legal, so they might make it more profitable by cracking down on illegal ones. Once I put a long-term rental I cannot ever go back to vacation rental either. There is little incentive to switch right now, but I will of course do it if I'm legally required to do so. For all the talk, they haven't taken that step, which is a testament to how politicians can say one thing and then do close to nothing in the end.
Across the street lies a hotel, a true tourist trap. They have a 6/10 rating on booking and rely on scamming British tourists, whom you can see balancing drunk on their balconies daily. It's owned by a national conglomerate. As you may guess, as of now the airbnbs are closed and the hotel is thriving despite only bringing the worst kind of tourist to the community. An astute observer will note that the hotel industry is one of the biggest lobbyists supporting the current government at a national level. I am not one to defend big companies, but for some people here Airbnb was freedom. Now they have to go work cleaning rooms or just collect retirement checks, as obtaining a license to run a hotel is impossible without political connections / corruption. My point is, not everywhere are laws as fair as in the United States. Before someone talks about housing pressure, this is a relatively out of the way area where 40% of houses sit empty most of the year.
How is it not better for them to stay across the street at the hotel than on a flat next to a family home ?
When I first arrived here I relied on these long stay airbnbs until I could find a way through the byzantine Spanish rental process. Now this option will no longer exist.
Again, you are not familiar with Spanish politics if you think this is by accident. I have myself given up on any attempts of doing business here after I spent 1 year waiting for a certain business license and could only obtain it (in a week) after a chance friendship with a local notary. :)