Barcelona has a population of ~1.7 million. The metro area surrounding is ~5.7 million. The metro area grew by ~100k in the past four years.
They are freeing up ~10,000 houses over the next four years with this legislation. Barcelona built ~15,000 new properties between 2011 and 2020.
The math don't math. It's a drop in the bucket. The entire impact of AirBnB + all housing built in the last decade does not offset the last half decade of population growth.
Housing must be built more quickly than your population is growing to keep prices down, or you must concede that you live in a nice area where people wealthier than you wish to be and that those people are going to gentrify the area and displace locals. It's an unpleasant reality of the world.
EDIT: some good feedback in the responses. thanks! I'm being a bit dramatic by saying it's just a drop in the bucket, this action frees up more housing than was built over the same timespan, and it's possible to have effects on pricing greater than what would be inferred by the raw numbers because economics is tricky. cheers.
Since this is HN, I was expecting a little more rigor in proving the math not mathing: how many people can be housed in 15 000[1] + 10 000 houses? How small is the drop and how big is the bucket?
From sibling comment, average density is 2.51 people per home * 25k houses which works out to 62 750 housed people out of the 100 000 population growth. If my math is correct, that is significantly more than a drop in the bucket, considering the Airbnb component is 40% of that number, or just over 25k people - which is a big drop indeed for a 100k bucket
[1] Edit: I later realized your comment has numbers from multiple time windows. Substitute "15 000" with whatever number of houses were built/added in the past 4 years.
The 15k houses were built over 10 years, but the 100k growth is over 4 years. So 4/10ths of 15k ~= 9k/47k housed.
I think it's fair to say I'm being dramatic by saying it's a drop in the bucket. The action frees up more housing than Barcelona built over the same time period. This is good.
However, it's still not a long-term solution. This is a one-time action that when taken, and combined with the housing being built, fails to provide for even 50% of the people moving to the city.
Voters want a solution that makes living more affordable not just one that makes it less affordable less quickly.
As an aside, I think people can become complacent when a one-time solution to a problem lessens the pain momentarily. Suddenly the issue isn't as high of a priority and so the underlying situation continues to exacerbate the problem.
What will voters do in a few more years when this lever doesn't exist to pull? Ban all foreigners?
I only hope this does not replace one problem with another:
Because Spain's high unemployment, in particular youth unemployment and the construction sector, actions that reduce tourism lead to fewer jobs and less income flowing into the city.
I'm not against the measure (last time in Barcelona I was in a hotel and my friends rented an AirBnB apartment instead; they had fun and I had to move hotel rooms because the guy above me flooded the bathtub), and excessive tourism (Barcelona, Edinburgh, Amsterdam all suffer from it) is annoying even putting housing prices and lack of availability to the side, but I just wonder.
> The tourism industry has a significant impact on Spain’s economy, generating over 70 billion euros in gross value added (GVA) in 2019. This represents a substantial contribution to the country’s GDP and employment, with over 2.5 million people employed in the tourism sector
Well maybe you will just tell Spanish government how to replace that?
Having lived in two tourism-heavy cities over my life, I don't think most cites are fundamentally opposed to tourism per se. But — and that is a big "But" it is a question of the amount and the kind of tourism. Too much of the wrong tourism in the wrong area of the city can be a negative thing for living quality, for life outside touristic seasons, for the general development of neighborhoods etc.
So it is within a cities interest to have some degree of control ofer the amount and kind of tourism. And controlling the number of accommodations is a pretty good lever.
> Too much of the wrong tourism in the wrong area of the city can be a negative thing for living quality, for life outside touristic seasons, for the general development of neighborhoods etc.
If that was really a concern, cities like Barcelona would be railing against hostels and would impose a higher baseline for tourist taxes to eliminate the economic feasibility of projects catering to low-cost party tourism.
Well yes and no. Cities do have hostels and hotels under control by their ability to give or deny permits. If everybody can turn their private flat into an tourist rental just by signing up to an online platform that is no longer the case. Suddenly what was zoned as residental turns into tourism.
Surely there are multiple ways ro tackle that, e.g. one could require permits for those as well, but I didn't defend the measures taken by Barcelona, I defended the fact that unregulated AirBnB can turn into a problem for a city and the people living there.
Im not saying one should ignore it. Just that it’s not a particularly good industry for a country, particularly poor countries.
The pay in tourism is terrible, usually minimum wage, except for the owners of capital, who gain enormous returns on investing in hotels / airbnbs / tourist aimed businesses.
That means it has an awful return for the ones most in need which are the poor. It’s not a distributive industry.
On top of that, it can cause a “resource curse” type phenomenon where great beaches or some other attraction causes enormous amounts of investment in tourist infrastructure leading to a lack of opportunity for other businesses which could thrive with investment. Tourist gives you such great returns on investment it doesn’t make sense to do anything else if you have capital.
Can tourism be A PART of a healthy economy ? Sure. But it shouldn’t be in charge of that economy, in which case I’d say you’re looking at a “resource curse” type economy where only the rich prosper.
Tourism has widely distorted market prices for housing and accommodation in Barcelona however. Proving it can have very nefarious effects even in relatively diverse economies.
As a share of the total number of people employed in New Zealand, direct tourism employment was 6.7 percent.
I think the main problem with tourism is that it is a luxury service and tourism income shrinks when the world economy stinks. The other issue is that many tourists are rude and unthankful, so it can be unpleasant working in a service industry, being a servant to well-off tourists.
New Zealand needs export income. Some of our product exports are worse for New Zealand than tourism (some farming particularly has negative effects and can have poor profits).
I wonder if part of the reason why Barcelona has population growth is because it has tourism income and jobs? Remove tourism and what happens next?
And it sucks in New Zealand that some of the most beautiful places are crowded and almost owned by tourists. Literally owned by tourists when we let foreigners buy property here and our current government wants to allow that again.
The pay in tourism is terrible, usually minimum wage, except for the owners of capital, who gain enormous returns on investing in hotels / airbnbs / tourist aimed businesses.
That means it has an awful return for the ones most in need which are the poor. It’s not a distributive industry.
On top of that, it can cause a “resource curse” type phenomenon where great beaches or some other attraction causes enormous amounts of investment in tourist infrastructure leading to a lack of opportunity for other businesses which could thrive with investment. Tourist gives you such great returns on investment it doesn’t make sense to do anything else if you have capital
Tourist gives you such great returns on investment it doesn’t make sense to do anything else if you have capital
Yep, I'm considering buying a vacation home to Airbnb for this reason. I have mixed feelings about it though, because I don't want to be part of the problem. But I live in NYC and I can't move (shared custody), nor can I buy a suitable home in the city, meanwhile the national housing market is exploding. I need some way to hedge for real estate inflation, and vacation rentals have better ROI.
Absolutely. I just don’t think that it should be more than 10% or so of an economy.
Any time I’ve visited a place where tourism was a larger industry, it felt the place had became a parody, a Disneyland type version of what once was there.
I know your comment is a "hot take", but the thing is about Tourism as an industry, is that the places where that /is/ the industry end up not gaining any other industries. So they become stuck as a "tourism" industry place
Similar to a country sitting on a large amount of natural resources like oil/gas. You don't have to bother about making your population productive.
Allowed all your productive jobs to be offshored? Mine the natural resource of tourists, as long as there was a golden age that left something interesting for them to visit.
It is exactly like oil and “resource curse”, for many poor countries.
The pay is generally minimum wage and the only ones who see big returns are the owners of capital. It’s not a distributive industry. If you have too much of your country’s economy invested, I’d say you’re almost always looking at an unhealthy economy.
I would argue that while there are some similarities, there are also many differences, and that claiming it's not distributive is incorrect. The number of workers I interact with (and to whom the money I spend flows) as a tourist is quite large compared to the number of people who benefit from use of an extracted natural resource.
> I know your comment is a "hot take", but the thing is about Tourism as an industry, is that the places where that /is/ the industry end up not gaining any other industries.
This discussion is about Barcelona.
Barcelona is one of the richest regions in Europe. It's hardly a third-world hellhole or a banana republic.
> Tourism is a shit industry. You could mostly annihilate it and replace it with productive things most of the time.
That's a bold statement, as if the whole world invests in tourism because they don't know better.
Spain's tourism sector represents a double-digit chunk of their GDP and is one of the rare sectors which has a direct effect in reducing unemployment, specially in the low-skilled, NEET cohort which is extremely problematic in countries such as Spain. Claiming that a country like Spain could simply annihilate it and replace it with something else is an extraordinary thing to say, specially as it lacks any support.
The world once had very little to no tourism and it worked just fine. It’s not essential to civilisation, and conceivably you could ban it with no major effects.
I’m not saying it’s a good idea to ban it. But tourism is anything but essential.
Sure the Spanish economy benefits from it right now but over reliance on it, as I explained above, can be a bad thing.
The larger context is Spain’s population is flat with declines in the last 24 months and trend likely to continue in the coming decades. Barcelona’s population peaked in 1979 and only recently recovered to the level seen in 1990. So they likely don’t actually need to add significant housing long term. Freeing up AirBnB apartments in the short term looks like a reasonable solution until population decline kicks in and removes the need for extra housing.
> I think it's fair to say I'm being dramatic by saying it's a drop in the bucket.
I don't think it's dramatic. The whole anti-tourist arguments are based on, to put it charitably, politically-motivated specious reasoning. In this particular example, this whole argument is based on these assumptions:
* making available each and every single one of those 15k houses for long-term rentals or sales instead of making them available for short-term rentals would prevent or significantly attenuate the existing housing crisis,
* Demand for short-term rentals has no positive impact on the housing market by creating demand for real estate investments and urban renewal programmes,
* Regulating away short-term rentals would not shift demand to classic HORECA offerings, which results in replacing whole residential buildings or even city blocks right in the city center. See for example Hotel Arts Barcelona or W Barcelona.
The whole anti-tourist sentiment is based on nonsense, like assuming that just because a luxury suite is on AirBnB it would otherwise be made available as affordable housing for working-class family.
And should I point out the "tourists go home, refugees welcomed" self-defeating propaganda piece?
> * making available each and every single one of those 15k houses for long-term rentals or sales instead of making them available for short-term rentals would prevent or significantly attenuate the existing housing crisis,
We can maybe both agree that doing something is better than doing nothing? Hopefully this is just one of the steps in a larger plan. Not a single thing will solve the current issues, but a combination of steps just might. At least someone is trying, which is a step in the right direction.
> Regulating away short-term rentals would not shift demand to classic HORECA offerings, which results in replacing whole residential buildings or even city blocks right in the city center. See for example Hotel Arts Barcelona or W Barcelona.
How is Hotel Arts or Hotel W examples of replacing whole residential buildings or city blocks? Both of them were built on previous undeveloped land (or sea in the case of Hotel W) and were new constructions when built, not reformations of existing buildings.
> The whole anti-tourist sentiment is based on nonsense
People's feelings are always "nonsense" if seen from a scientific/engineering perspective. People are hurt in numerous ways, and try to put the blame somewhere. They're being priced out of their homes, they see AirBnbs all over the place and you cannot walk outside without hearing loud tourists screaming in English and being awful, hard to blame people from drawing the lines between these things.
> We can maybe both agree that doing something is better than doing nothing?
Yes, that's the whole point. Doing something clearly better than doing nothing.
Railing against short-term rentals does absolutely nothing to fix the problem.
That does not grant anyone the right of fabricating scapegoats that do nothing to solve the actual problem. This is exactly what's happening regarding short-term rentals.
Blaming short-term rentals for the lack of affordable housing is one of the stupidest and miopoc scapegoats that can ever be put together. Airbnb is not the reason why your neighbor rents the apartment. Airbnb is not attracting new tourists. Worst-case scenario, Airbnb eats away at the profit margins of industrial-grade hotels.
The lack of affordable housing is caused by the lack of real estate investment, urban renewal programs, and even social housing. If most want to buy an apartment but they can't afford one, that's a telltale sign of short supply. You only fix this problem by significantly increasing supply.
It's also a politically motivated scapegoat. Barcelona's previous mayor built her whole platform on that scapegoat. She could have implemented urban renewal programs to actually increase the number of homes available in the market, she could have implemented public transportation programs to bring mass transit to low-density areas to attract private investment, she could have created a municipal tax on short-term rental to finance social housing programs or even subsidized low-income rental programs, etc.
But no. She did absolutely nothing even though the railed frequently against short-term rentals. Because that's the point: fabricate a convenient scapegoat to direct and focus the anger of the electorate. But that same electorate is only mobilized as long as the housing problem prevails, and thus they do absolutely nothing to fix it.
> How is Hotel Arts or Hotel W examples of replacing whole residential buildings or city blocks?
They aren't. They are however massive real estate investment in prime locations in Barcelona which could just as easily be residential buildings that easily provided hundreds of homes.
The issue is that the "airbnb" areas drive normal citizens out which during off-seasons drains foot traffic making local shops go out of business which further complicates the problem.
Not to mention that most tourists don't even sit around the local area, but rather go to the city attractions.
Airbnb and resident housing areas are just not compatible, they have different needs and require different infrastructure. Hotels are built around infrastructure supporting tourism and are much healthier for cities.
AirBnBs charge international prices, which creates a property market skewed by international investment.
I live in a tourist area, and prices here have gone up by between 100% at the low end to over 500% at the high end.
These are mostly holiday homes and holiday rentals, and the locals can't afford to live here any more - either renting or buying.
One of the results has been a huge political shift rightwards, with increasing hostility to tourists and immigrants. Of course the far right cynically take advantage of this issue, and of course they have no intention whatsoever of fixing anything.
But the fact that it's an issue at all is causing huge problems.
> charge international prices, which creates a property market skewed by international investment.
That ship has looong sailed. Especially in the days of full-time remote work jobs. Especially in the EU.
I wish a big barrel of industrial-grade luck to the good people of Barcelona! They definitely need it, because the changes they implemented so far (introducing rent control) did not help.
The problem with hotel rooms is that they’re more expensive, get much more expensive per additional person, and don’t have the amenities of an appartement.
If I’m somewhere with a group for longer than three days, we want to be able to hang somewhere and cook our own food. The only other thing that offers this feature set is private rooms in hostels, and those are both rare and nearly always fully booked.
I’m not saying having a good base for vacationing is anywhere near as important as residential housing supply, but saying “just book hotels lol” takes a very dim view on AirBnBs.
There are "apartments" (bedroom and living room with a mini-kitchen) built for short stays, I've stayed in on in Toronto (Vaughan area), but they seem to be more common in Berlin and other European cities where i have stayed in them as well.
The Toronto one was likely more expensive than an AirBnb, but in Berlin i don't remember it being that expensive.
Finding these places is a pain however, there is no universal name. Ive seen "Aparthotel" used a few times in Europe. Other times it is just "XXX Apartments" or "Residence" and you have to guess if they are for short-stay.
Sites like booking.com mix in people renting out their own property with these purpose built short stay locations which doesn't help discovery.
> The problem with hotel rooms is that they’re more expensive,
Maybe they are more expensive than the displayed rate for an AirBnB, but by the time you add in the cleaning fees and other non-sense things it turns out to be more expensive. Also, when I'm in a hotel, I'm not asked to wash the sheets, wash the dishes, or any of that nonsense as well as paying the cleaning fees.
No, it really is cheaper to rent Airbnb instead of hotel.
We are a family of four and I did the math several times. A couple years ago we were five, it was more difficult to find a suiting place.
You also have the added convenience of making food when you want without waiting a specific time, which is great when visiting a city.
AirBnBs have also started increasing rates based on extra people.
Maybe it's just me, but when I'm on vacation the last thing I want to spend my time doing is dishes. I'd also rather explore where I'm visiting than sitting in some random person's house.
Give me a hotel room with turn down service over an AirBnB every time.
I do like that when Airbnb, while there's no room cleaning or room service, you do often get a kitchen which is nice. You can also often stay in a "neighborhood" vs a commercial area.
It does feel like Airbnb is just reinventing hotels tho. (Just like streaming is re-inventing cable and Uber is re-inventing taxis)
They also provide you with a lot of hidden features that you will take advantage of if something bad happens. None of that is offered by airbnb.
The reason why hotels are expensive is because they're properly regulated and are forced to be a net positive which is passed down to the customer. airbnbs had none of that until recently and all the negative impact was pocketed by the landlords.
I’ve moved back to hotels exclusively after using airbnb for a long time.
Between the hosts and the platform itself, they just got too greedy with fees and extras. It ended up at the stage that hotels are both cheaper and provide a better experience.
"we want to be able to hang somewhere" ...just saying because I'm sorry I can't contain myself: This is exactly the use case Airbnb doesn't solve. I fly half-way across the world to meet my parents on vacation and almost without fail the only Airbnb I can find (or all the ones I can find) have a strict rule against guests. Hence I can't have my parents over 10 minutes to drink tea because if the owner, big brother, finds out I'll lose my entire remaining month of rent and be forcibly expelled. In Europe this is not joke, often a loss of $2000+
I truly hate Airbnb. Luckily since my parents only stay a week they can afford to stay in a hotel. Invariable we "hang out" with me sitting at the foot of their bed.
These "rules" become extremely oppressive when your home most of the year is an Airbnb room like me. This is why I use Booking or local corporate owned platfroms instead whenever possible
Camera's don't have to be hidden to prevent guests. It is allowed and becoming very common to have cameras at entrances and becoming common to restrict guests during the day as well as overnight.
I have never run into this alleged issue. In fact, we have several times booked AirBnB homes in the town of my youth and hosted Thanksgiving Dinner for my elderly mom and siblings who are themselves visiting and staying in AirBnB's. Yes, we asked the hosts before booking if we could cook and host a Thanksgiving Dinner and received their OK.
I truly love AirBnB and have stayed in them in most all my business and pleasure travels to Europe, Canada, Israel and across the USA.
Businesses are unable to plan around seasonality? What's up with that? In the US, businesses in touristy areas often will shut down for the slow season.
When I think of places dominated by tourism its not the tourism that did it. Its that the tourism is what is left after little other job growth in any other sector after whatever impetus that triggered building the town in the first places ceased to exist.
My personal example would be the old Turner Field in Atlanta.
Major sports team, but the area was a wasteland, because everything was developed around the 50,000 people flooding in for one afternoon. Parking lots, traffic flow, food stands.
The actual neighborhood was pretty dead.
Braves move up to a new stadium in Cobb county, some redevelopment, and now the old neighborhood is flourishing.
Saw the same as a (briefly) Florida resident.
I think it's difficult to establish "normal" development in an area subject to tourism tides, because many of the decisions are mutually exclusive.
Either {support tourism} or {support long term residential development}. And money intersects with politics, so eventually one set of interests win out.
Atlanta is a diversified economy though. When I think tourist dominated I think tourism is the main industry. Places like in the Caribbean that had to turn to that industry after the economics of whatever former niche cash crop the imperialists grew was obviated due to globalism.
Pricing moves at margins, not necessarily driven by totals. Ie. Pricing is primarily driven by the immediate demand and supply situation at a given time. Small changes in availability can have a dramatic effect. Good ways to understand this is to look at underlying data of auctions (richest in data) but pretty much any demand supply granular transaction data will show rhis. For eg. this is why small hoarding locally in emerging markets (where giant supermarkets will not immediately or easily truck in containers of products running short) also generates massive profits for traders.
Housing is of course a bit more complex - pricing is more sticky on the upside than downside (as home owners don't like to rent for less than before and may let units sit idle etc) and "instant" usually windows over weeks but fundamentally similar mechanics work. As an example, in Singapore, the government raised excise duty for non Singaporeans to purchase housing to 65% when housing became overheated. The number of rich foreigners buying property has always been small in absolute but was growing fast in rate as rich family money and bankers from Hong Kong started flowing to Singapore. Prices and also rentals across all classes of housing, not just the super premium properties favoured by the wealthy came down and people who had been pushed down at the margins into less than their preferred value housing (including ourselves) moved back up.
It should have helped its constituents by ensuring homebuilding meets population growth over periods of time, rather than allowing it to be constrained for decades and then point at AirBNB as the source.
True, and I agree this is nowhere near enough. But wouldn't a "defense in depth" approach be wise? There are no all or nothing solutions, especially when it comes to policy in a large city. Any bit of relief will no doubt likely be welcome.
Yeah, I agree. I think the change is a step in the right direction to address this specific concern. I think there will be some unintended consequences like loss of tourism dollars which will impact small business, but those concerns seem less important to voters.
Still, I fear that people generally look to politics for simple, one sentence solutions to problems which take decades to manifest.
Barcelona is the 68th densest city in the world. You look at a satellite map and you can see they have a very well planned city layout. It's dense and filled with tall buildings.
At some point the only lever left to pull is outright banning of foreigners. I'm not condoning that policy - just trying to highlight the futility of attempting to protect a desirable area from overpopulation.
> At some point the only lever left to pull is outright banning of foreigners.
That does not follow at all. If you look at the actual densities Barcelona is 1/3 as dense as the densest city in the world. There is plenty of room to accommodate more housing, they just need to build higher.
Barcelona the metropolitan area has around 3.5 million IIRC. It's the province has 5.3M.
The 15k new properties were only built in Barcelona? How many were built in the metropolis area?
It's obvious that more housing is needed, but freeing up housing in the city, potentially close to the center, is still a move that might make the city more livable as opposed to building something new in the outskirts.
But it's not just supply. The market rate for holiday letting has driven all lets up. Investors jump at a quick 10%.
This should depress prices, release rentals and sales. You're right, it's probably not enough, but like many urban centres, central Barcelona isn't that flexible.
Will this move solve the problem? No, but what alternative are you comparing it to where it fares so poorly?
I suspect even the staunchest proponents of unregulated construction of denser housing would only claim that it mitigates the problems of housing affordability, not that it solves them. This new STR policy could be one of many pieces of the puzzle.
Also, of course tourism is the first scapegoat. It’s visible, disliked, and inherently not going to stand up for itself. Take it away and people will be forced to confront that it wasn’t the primary problem. Regardless of how effective it is it’s a necessary first step.
That said cities across the developed world are struggling with housing, even ones that are not popular with tourists. Why it seems no one can build anymore is what is interesting.
Unregulated construction of denser housing solves housing affordability. It doesnt make housing free, but if we built china style mega towers with minimal regulation housing would be affordable for most people working full time.
Yes, let's replicate the model that was a famous disaster for China. Why do people feel the need to pontificate on issues they never bothered to learn about?
10,000 houses on 100k people is actually a substantial portion. I think its totally reasonable. And Airbnb houses that are permanent temp rentals have no special status in law when there's a housing shortage. Building more houses is important, but not incentivizing rental houses and even eliminating them is a good direction, and a significant step towards housing people.
The entire impact of AirBnB + all housing built in the last decade does not offset the last half decade of population growth.
Your retort here simply isn't logical.
10k doesn't fully offset 100k but it's a significant chunk of it, and when supply gets so compressed as to become inelastic, a 10k amelioration (that is also prevented from creeping up to 15k or 20k within a few years) can be quite significant. Plus certain districts are obviously impacted disproportionately compared to others by not just the reduction in housing available but the sheer foot traffic and other blight that comes along with a lopsided rise in tourist accommodations.
> The math don't math. It's a drop in the bucket. The entire impact of AirBnB + all housing built in the last decade does not offset the last half decade of population growth.
The population growth is largely due to rich foreigners moving into the city:
"I was born and raised in Barcelona, no longer live there however. I didn't remember how bad it was until I went to visit my family last summer. Me and some friends went to walk around the center and the girl that took our orders at a Pans&Company didn't even know Spanish or Catalan, only English. It was honestly quite depressing. She was surprised we didn't open the conversation with English."
People say that it has become difficult to hear Catalan or Spanish being spoken in the city center and there are waitresses who don't know Spanish. Some started to say that this is not a case of gentrification, but a colonization.
Assuming your stats hold up then it would seem like politicians are being politicians and blaming someone else for a housing shortage rather than actually directly addressing the issue. It’s easy to distract regular folks by making them angry at Air BnB instead of just working on real solutions.
That will more than double the housing production (1500/yr construction, 2500/yr freed up) during the years it's implemented. This is a finite change that will run out, and more housing will definitely be needed, but imagine the opposite: no new construction for 7 years.
I think your comment is still fair. 100k population growth isn't the metric I think to focus on as if it's the a measure of total 'new demand', to be compared to 15k new homes as 'new supply'. After all, population growth in cities that are in high-demand like Barcelona is very much also a function of supply.
If you magically create 100k affordable homes, you'll find population growth to fill up those homes within a relatively short period (<10y). If you magically remove 100k homes, you'll see population drop. So population growth isn't a complete measure of demand. Rather it just says something about how much the housing stock reasonably can accommodate. If you build nothing, population growth will be minimal, but it doesn't mean all possible demand has been accommodated. It just means there's lots of latent demand that have no homes to move into.
It's more sensible to look at the growth of the housing stock verus existing housing stock. I read in this thread: 15k properties built over 10 years (1.5k per year), a metro that has houses 5.7 million people, 2.5 people per home, means there are 2.3 million homes. 1.5k homes per year on 2.3m existing homes means they're adding 0.06% housing stock per year.
That simply IS a drop in the bucket. It's peanuts. Most in-demand (capital/a-tier) cities aim to construct at least 1% a year. For example, Amsterdam grew by 15% in the last 10 years, despite very stringent building requirements, green zones that can't be built, height restrictions to protect the character of the inner city, swamp land foundations and various environmental, water & electricity capacity challenges NL is facing right now.
So yes, if you're constructing at a fraction of the rate of other in-demand cities, then I would agree that eliminating tourist apartments is a band-aid solution, not a root-cause solution that works in the long term.
As for the balance of tourism vs locals, it's a tricky one. I think one thing we shouldn't forget is that 1 tourist apartment creates a lot of meaningful experiences within a year. An average tourist say of about 5 days in a city means that across a 10 year period an apartment can accommodate either one family living there full-time, or 700 different families having a holiday experience in Barcelona.
Put differently, these 10 thousand tourist homes that will come on the market, will house 10 thousand households more, and will prevent 700 thousand households from renting them on a 5 day trip to Barcelona, adding only 0.04% to the housing stock (one-time) and changing very little about the economics of housing in Barcelona for (new) locals.
It's easy to hate on tourists, but being a tourist can be a wonderful experience, that is meaningful and valuable, and shouldn't just be dismissed as some annoyance to locals. Of course all should be in balance. To speak on a personal note: I live in a city that takes in 20 million tourists a year on a population of less than 1 million, I don't work in tourism and for me it's mostly an annoyance. I definitely think we shouldn't grow the number of tourists anymore in my city, I think the same for Barcelona is true. But I also think it's worthwhile to maintain a big chunk of current tourism, even if it's annoying to me as a local, because I have no monopoly on enjoying my city. We've restricted tourist apartments to renting 30 days a year (the number of days a local is on holiday himself, and rents out his apartment), and I think that's fine. No need to eliminate it altogether though.
They are aware it is not a complete solution. As the article quotes him:
> “The measures we have taken will not change the situation in one day. These things take time. But with these measures we are reaching a turning point”
While some of the chosen phrasing in the article does read rather ideological, as you quoted, that could just as easily be the bent of the writer.
Your comment itself is actually more ideological and unfactual than anything in the article…
> In this case, facts and logic, being so inconvenient to ideological and political forces, likely had nothing to do with the decision.
Neither OP nor you nor any other commenter thus far has pointed out any factual inaccuracies. And nothing about the measure is illogical since incremental changes are still a step in their desired direction. And how did you determine their “likely” reasoning from a single article alone? Again, as quoted, they are aware their concerns are not fully addressed by this action alone.
One can be a political actor and still be factual and logical. Claiming otherwise is illogical and untrue. And doing so to diminish a policy you do not like …well that’s ideological and political.
This is red-baiting. Every politician is politically motivated and doesn't actually say anything about why it's bad to ensure people have housing and keep out obnoxious airbnb tourists from residential areas.
Spooky scary socialists, send shivers down your spine. Free healthcare will shock your soul, seal your deed tonight.
Here in Europe building denser housing is extremely frowned upon by cultural conservatives, who unfortunately are in charge everywhere. That's why there's hardly any high-rises in Europe.
Extreme height restrictions combined with extreme regulatory costs is what has lead to this issue.
Show a European politician, especially a local one in charge of urban development, an image from Tokyo and they will recoil in horror.
Here in Europe everything must be flat and look cultural.
The first of those 12 is Emperador, a city of 692 people, so you have 692 people living very densely. Meanwhile, Paris, two ranks down, has more than 2 million people living at basically the same density. You'd need to account for that. The arbitrary nature of municipal and regional boundaries has always been the bane of comparisons of population density.
You could weigh the density by population (effectively giving you population²/area?! I'm not saying this is a good idea), and you'd get a top10 of Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Bucharest, Berlin, Athens, Milan, Brussels, Vienna, Naples, which despite the slightly bizarre metric seems a more sensible ranking (Emperador is at the bottom rank), and which, to be fair, also features two Spanish cities.
But again, it's kind of a pointless endeavor, because of the arbitrary nature of the boundaries chosen -- why Paris and not Paris metro? etc. I guess ideally you'd have a function density(person) giving you the population density of any given person and you'd want to look at the distribution of that function, specifically the average per country of that function.
It's plain as day once you actually visit Spainish towns and cities (try a motorcycle tour, you can hit a dozen or more a day, I've toured Spain several times) and compare it with the UK (I lived in the UK for 15 years).
German towns and cities feel a bit denser than the UK (I live in Switzerland and visit Germany every month).
Spain seems to have planning laws that force density. Small agricultural towns in the middle of nowhere have people living cheek by jowl in apartments and townhouses, with an abrupt cutoff once you hit the town boundary.
As an Spanish guy living in Japan, let me tell you that Japanese urban planning and development is an utter disaster that we should not copy. Please find a better example.
Politicians being politicians. Seems like each Mayor recently likes to distract everyone and blame the city's housing problem mostly on tourism. Which is easy to do as the city gets a huge number of visitors
Capital moves faster than meat space. To defend the human (affordable housing), you have to regulate. The whole "just build more, I want my AirBnB" argument boggles the mind considering the physical system constraints in play. Easier to just ban AirBnB.
It would make sense to increase density around existing rail infrastructure. Barcelona has 7700 km2 of space, that's a lot. They have only 750 persons per km2 on average. Especially the outskirts of the province have really bad density. For example, Sant Joan de Vilatorrada has only 660 inhabitants per km^2 and it is only 3 km from the railway station, 80 min from the Sants station. That density is worse than Phoenix, Arizona, which has 1198/km2. So there is lots of available space.
> Note that these numbers are of the Province of Barcelona. I don't know why you'd restrain yourself to the city proper.
The article, submission and discussions are about Barcelona city, not some far off town like Sant Joan de Vilatorrada (population: ~10k). No one who lives there would say they live in Barcelona, at most they'd say Manresa as that's the closest city.
But yes, if you're willing to live in the Catalan country-side, then of course Barcelona doesn't suffer from the density for you, but it's not a solution for us who live in Barcelona city.
Barcelona city proper is in a kind of geographical bowl. Look at it on a terrain map, you can see why the city is dense. It's one of the reasons I really like Barcelona, the forced density of the geography increases the amount and quality of services (especially food!) available.
Sant Joan de Vilatorrada is nowhere near Barcelona city, it's 15 hours walk away.
That being said, in the US you can and should absolutely should build more, and basically get rid of most zoning regulations. You'd have a hard time finding anything as touristic and dense as Barcelona in the US.
I argue AirBnB should be banned anywhere building cannot be done at a rate which ensures affordable housing can exist for locals. Whether that is due to construction labor shortages, density, zoning, whatever, it does not matter. AirBnB can exist where there is surplus housing capacity, but should be banned anywhere else.
Locals get votes, tourists and AirBnB do not. The harm of not being able to afford housing is far worse than harm incurred by not being able to book a vacation rental you prefer.
Hotels go through an approval process to be built, and are regulated (where as AirBnB exists to skirt lodging regulation). Hotels are not competing against residential housing, but AirBnB is.
Outside of downtown areas in the biggest cities in the US, it is very unlikely that a hotel is built in an area that people would want to build residential housing.
Normally hotels are built near either business or tourist areas. Very few people want their residences in the suburban office park areas. Tourist areas tend to be older areas that have strong restrictions on new development--hotels there have to go through long permitting processes.
Well look at a map of Barcelona. Hotels are in the middle of residential areas throughout the city. Not sure what the permitting process has to do with any of this. Hotels take up land. Land that could be used for residential housing. Permitting can be changed by law (same as banning AirBnbs).
No one is suggesting getting rid of industrial zoning. "getting rid of zoning" for the vast majority of people saying it means removing density restrictions and mixed use (business + residential) restrictions.
I lived a few miles away from the Texas City plant, growing up. A good, stiff, wind, and a penchant for rhinoviruses can solve a lot of chemical-plant-related issues.
Except there don’t appear to be anywhere near enough airbnbs to put a dent in the rent increase. I’m not saying it won’t do anything; I’m just saying it won’t do much. If you want to lower rents, you’re going to need to find a place to build, and if you can’t find any place, then prices will continue to go up and who will you find to scape goat then?
It doesn’t have to do much, it just has to show some net benefit considering the cost to ban is low. Locals receive the consumer excess through reduced housing costs that would’ve otherwise been real estate investor and AirBnB short term rental profits.
The problem is that residents leave entire areas of the city since they become empty. Foot traffic drops, local shops close - a non ending cycle of death.
In Melbourne/Victoria, Australia, from 2025 they’re applying a government levy on vacation rentals and using it to fund new public and affordable housing projects [1].
They’ve also added a land tax on second homes to disincentivize hoarding of property (though this has had some perverse effects, notably, reducing long-term rental stock and moving into the owner-occupier segment).
It’s too early to evaluate outcomes, but this general approach seems more sensible than an outright ban. Tax the activity to reduce it somewhat whilst generating state revenue to fund programs to mitigate the negative effects.
Good idea: I was wondering if the AirBnB license prices in Barcelona could be made more expensive to fund social housing projects from it (no idea how much they are right now in €/year/m²).
You need to compare against the alternative, not just look at whether or not prices reduce YoY.
Objectively, this policy should be good for what it purports to do: reduce housing prices for permanent residents. This policy actually impacts both supply, forcing these 10k units to either languish unproductive or return to market as rental units or for sale, and demand, reducing sales demand for conversion to short term rentals.
Now, will this actually make a huge difference? Probably not. It’s only 10k units at most that return to the market in a city of 1.6M that likely has a lot of demand.
> I’d assume that the solution is to build more housing to increase the supply
Demand for tourist housing is probably a bit more elastic than for residential housing, so it'll probably help a bit, but in general, I agree that growing the pie is better than bitter fights over how to cut the pie up.
Elasticity of demand is the elephant in the room for build-more-housing advocates. Let's say NYC's mayor rubbed a genie's lamp and wished to double the city's housing supply overnight. Yes, rental and real estate prices would crash through the floor due to the glut of supply. But then millions of people would move to the city and buy up all that supply.
This would rapidly double the population of the city which would cause tons of businesses to move there to hire everyone and then commercial real estate would skyrocket. At the end of the day, the city would be twice as large and more overcrowded than ever. Sure, they'd be more efficient in terms of infrastructure (plumbing, electricity, transit) but rents would skyrocket to capture that extra efficiency for landlords.
The elephant in the room for people who are against building enough housing is that they're all convinced that everyone would move to their particular locale.
I have heard that "everyone" would move to
* San Francisco
* Bend, Oregon
* Boulder, Colorado
* Seattle
* Austin, Texas
* New York City
* Santa Barbara, California
* Hawaii
* Montana
* and on and on and on
You know what? No, not everyone is going to move to New York or Bend or San Francisco. Building more housing keeps rents in check. And if some more people get to live in a place they want to be, that is a good thing.
If you could get all cities to build more housing simultaneously then you’d be in great shape. The question is: how do you do that? Most of the biggest problems facing humanity are coordination problems. The answer to all these problems can’t be “everyone should just do X.”
In reality, your best hope is to get one city to build a lot of housing. Then everyone moves there and we’re all unhappy.
This, by the way, is the reason homelessness is so bad in San Francisco despite their government spending enormous amounts of money fighting homelessness. All the other cities in the US sent all their homeless people to SF!
It's going to happen in fits and starts and not all at once everywhere. But there's also something of a ratchet effect as places copy what's working in other places. And no one reforming because they're all waiting would be catastrophic.
And really, not everyone is going to move somewhere. You could not pay me enough to live in NYC or San Francisco. People who love NYC would probably be bored in my small city.
Burdensome parking mandates are being eliminated or reduced across the country, as one example.
It would work, but it also requires curbing the extra demand that is generated by foreigners moving into the city and scooping up the housing from the locals.
> I might be naive, but I’d assume that the solution is to build more housing to increase the supply instead of curbing the demand?
Spain is not the US. Neither Spain nor any other Mediterranean country has large surface area that could accommodate housing demand at such high levels - there is already scarce land that you can build on across the Mediterranean as there are limited shorelines and deltas that were created by rivers etc, and the rest is immediately mountainous or hilly landscape that is very difficult to build on.
These countries could easily cope with their local demand, but allowing foreigners to buy housing caused a large influx of foreigners exacerbating the demand for housing and crowding out these places way beyond their capacity. The investment funds that scoop up housing to profit worsen the situation.
Maybe the US could handle such a demand with its gigantic surface area - solely Texas is larger than ENTIRE Western Europe, mind that. Or Russia. Or China. But other countries in the world, especially the Mediterranean ones, don't have the space to even start comparing with those.
The only solution is to limit the demand to the carrying capacity of each locale, province and country.
I'm far from an expert but I'd think it would drive tourism prices up due to less supply of STR housing (which could harm a local economy, although a behemoth like Barcelona probably isn't super concerned here)
Prices may not go down on rents, but if it means that more folks who actually _want to live in the city_ can, I see that as a positive. I can see in NY the case where decrease in housing leads to folks being priced out and moving elsewhere (NJ, etc.)
People who own a home, and don't have plans to move, would benefit from housing prices falling everywhere: property taxes go down, and other prices correlated with housing go down.
Two categories where people don't want pricing to go down:
If you have plans to move and prices aren't falling everywhere, the proceeds of a sale aren't enough to buy elsewhere.
And if your bank owns the home rather than you, falling prices screw you over because you owe far more to the bank than you could make by selling.
That depends on the region. In many places they're based on property value, and in many of those places if your property value goes down you can apply to have your home re-assessed and get taxed according to the new value. (Conversely, if your property values go up your property taxes may go up accordingly, which can in some cases take people's homes from affordable to not affordable.)
The cost/student doesn't go down just because local housing prices go down--which is where a lot of local taxes go to--and, in fact, the cost/student often goes up if you increase the population density.
> And if your bank owns the home rather than you, falling prices screw you over because you owe far more to the bank than you could make by selling.
So like what 99% of homes? If you rent you don't own it, if you own a condo you don't own it, if you own a house outright you are probably close to 1%.
Most of Barcelona is rent/condos. There is not a ton of 250m2 mansions in downtown Barcelona.
> people who are in the biggest house they are likely to own and expect to downsize
That's covered by the case of "property values go down everywhere"; you only have a problem if your property value goes down but the value of property you want to buy doesn't.
No, if you have a $1m house and you're intending to downsize to a $500k house, and they both lose half their value, that's $250k less in your pocket for retirement.
Too bad prop 13 means prices would have to drop significantly before any longterm CA homeowner would see any drop. And the valuation dropping that much wiping out so much of their "on paper" wealth would be very unpopular.
Would it reduce the number of tourists? Not likely, they'd just pay more to hotels (and thus have less money to spend on other things - vacation budget is usually limited, but it's distribution between various types of expense is not predetermined). Would it make Barcelona a less popular destination for non-natives? Not likely, unless it objectively becomes worse place for natives too.
NYC, Barcelona and any major city that hasn't gone the way of SF and Portland, have the same problem - a lot of people like to be there, either temporarily or permanently, but the number of accommodations, both temporary and permanent, is not infinitely scalable and runs out pretty fast, especially if the city managers aren't actively working on fixing that problem by increasing the supply - which they often don't.
Increasing the supply is hard and leads to a tangle of its own challenges. Blaming somebody else - especially somebody that doesn't even vote in the local elections - is much easier, and by the time it turns out it doesn't help - which will be some 10 years ago from now - the managers could fail upwards, retire or think about some other scapegoat to blame.
Why would rent go down? There's a lot of factors at work. Since the default is rent spiraling upwards, a decrease in that rate would be a success by any standards.
My take is that real estate sold to foreigners is the best kind of export. You sell the good to the foreign investor, but the good stays in place. From time to time that investor visits and drops money in the local economy. Most of the time the guy is not there, but pays taxes. Pays taxes but does not consume government services.
This completely neglects the opportunity cost of the real estate being used for something else (like housing citizens) instead. Housing is also not fungible - so if you "export" your most desirable real-estate you can't just make more of it.
Take NYC for example. My guess is that at least half of the housing stock in NYC is "pre-war". The "war" in that expression is World War 2. No washer-driers, no elevators, but a good number of mice and rats.
You could absolutely take these buildings down and build back something better. And that better could have more apartment units.
I live in one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in NYC and in the world. All buildings are new (post 2000). If you replace the rest of the city with such buildings, you can certainly have enough housing for 30 million people.
But the foreign investors don't buy to come and live here. You can just build, sell, and not deal with the crowding.
And that could result in lower construction costs too. Why are new apartments so expensive? Because we don't know how to build anymore. We don't know because we don't build.
Absolutely baffling that you could come to the conclusion that houses being kept empty for the benefit of speculators while citizens sleep on the street is somehow the best outcome
Less housing for tourists, prices of remaining hotels goes up, less people visit, tourism economy takes a hit, existing residents not tied to tourism benefit.
Having seen what excess tourism can do - yeah, sounds right. But the tourism economy is very likely much more elastic than the non-tourist businesses that have already left town. Reversing the damage may take a long time or may never happen.
its not as simple , it's a catch-22, if you build a lot of housing the city will lose its appeal , either because of traffic/walkability, because of sprawl, or because of the people it attracts (high housing prices act as a sort of filter to attract more ambitious/adventurous residents).
At its current size the city seems to have hit a sweet spot of desirability which caused prices to skyrocket, and it brings a lot of tourist money to the same residents who are protesting.
I think we need to shift from simplistic housing availability calculations to more broadly considering the motivations of people
It certainly works, depending on what your goals are. Locals may appreciate fewer apartments in their building/neighborhood occupied by a rotating assortment of tourists, for example.
I've been living in Barcelona for a long time. The mayor is very, very cozy with the hotel industry, which is very much effected by tourist apartments and Airbnb. And he will most likely be out of power in 3 years, so won't actually have to see this through and is just doing this to make himself look good with the many citizens who believe we have too many tourist.
Helsinki is currently an interesting case, technically having oversupply of apartments. It's because the rising interest rates cratered the buyers' budgets -- the result is a mild downward trend in prices, definitely no crash. Building companies sit on a large supply on finished unsold apartments but steadfastly refuse to lower prices even a bit.
New construction has halted completely. Seems like the construction sector will rather hold their finished stock and wait for the demand side to pick up due to necessity (people still move in to the city), or due to interest rates eventually going down.
“Oversupply” is in the eye of the beholder. There’s a market clearing price for everything.
The builders can hold out for a while, but the shoe has to drop eventually. Builders only make profit when building, and if your credit is extended on old projects you can’t start new ones, hence why construction has halted.
The problem is covid. Pretty much everyone in any developed economy believes the inflation+interest rate increases will be temporary. So they’re betting inflation will go back to what it was, interest rate policy will loosen again, and people’s budgets will increase again.
I think they might be in for a very rude awakening. And not only that, housing preferences for the highest income professionals have fundamentally changed due to WFH. They could all get stuck dumping the wrong stock on a weak market all at the same time in a year or so.
Indeed, it's a waiting game now. The construction companies have a valid expectation that since new construction has halted, the current supply will eventually sell, and the city will even run into a state of undersupply. Only time will tell which way that goes.
Government should build housing and sell it at a modest loss. The markets are overheated and can do with some cooling. Too bad for anyone using property values as collateral for arcane financial schemes, should have managed your risk better.
Not in Finland. Each housing complex is a separate company, and when you buy an apartment you actually buy a share in the company. Until sold to the buyers, the housing company is usually owned by the construction company. Banks of course provide funding, but the construction company is the one left holding the bag if the apartments don't sell.
They want cheap housing in a popular place to live, but they don't want to change the character of where they live to support housing actually being cheap.
The best they can actually get is locking the city down so the current residents are effectively lottery winners, but no one from the outside can move there.
building more devalues their assets. we are creating artificial scarcity of a basic human need because we turned it into a financial investment vehicle.
That would be a paradox. It's not just housing-as-investment people who would be unhappy with increasingly dense housing/population - overdevelopment can sometimes ruin your home. The difficulty in developing in desirable areas isn't just due to a minority of rich assholes protecting their investments.
Spain is not the US. Barcelona had been building a lot of housing. Its not enough as they get converted to airbnbs or get scooped up by rich foreigners or foreign investment funds.
Real estate is only a good investment vehicle because the western world refuses to build shit. why on earth would you expect investors be enticed to buy a fundamentally depreciating asset instead of equities?
Lol what? Maybe back in 2007 before the crash that ruined tons of Spanish construction companies and investment in real estate. Otherwise the US builds a lot, and apparently Barcelona still doesn't build enough.
Barcelona can basically not grow horizontally anymore, being blocked in from all sides and all the ground is already covered by something.
So the alternative is to build vertically, but that also comes with trade-offs as the streets get less sun and city dwellers will be able to see less sky.
People on the internet will do anything but read before spouting their obvious solutions on the internet.
The "superblocks" (superillas) in Barcelona has little to do with height. I think you're referring to just the Cerdà-designed blocks that has been around for a long time. The "superblocks" in Barcelona is about reducing the traffic running through all the blocks, but has little to do with the height of the buildings in the blocks.
A lot of People in “colder” countries with higher purchasing power (specially in Europe) still want to move to Barcelona now that they can work remotely. I wonder how this fact affects the prices compared to tourism apartments.
> A lot of People in “colder” countries with higher purchasing power (specially in Europe) still want to move to Barcelona now that they can work remotely.
That's less and less true. And of those who actually moved to Barcelona, some already left (and companies too) when the independentists started being openly hostile to anything non-catalan.
Why someone with the means to do what is called "geographical arbitrage" would pick Barcelona is totally beyond me.
That sounds a lot like all the homeowners in California that have sold their significantly overvalued homes for 7 figures to move to states where real estate is a fraction of the cost. Generally it’s considered to be a factor in home price inflation in those cheaper states.
being a tourist destination seems to me almost like a resource curse, like oil wealth can be in certain countries.
tourism can be so lucrative that it is actually profitable to force out normal people and completely reorient the economy away from all other productive activities. eventually large parts of the city will become totally stagnant, but this doesn't seem to stop tourists from coming. there's often a constituency of people who are really benefiting from tourism (property owners, tour operators, restaurants) and who form a powerful bloc opposed to any restrictions or taxes.
it really seems quite similar to an economy where natural resource profits drive everything, it's impossible to get any other industries off the ground or make enough money to live in any other way.
I grew up and live in a city that's often top of the list for tourist destinations and where people are moving to. It is a great city, but it's also a curse with so many people here and more every day. Many of the things I used to do for fun are no longer feasible/easy to do. But, more jobs also came and property values have gone way up - both items are/were good for me.
Tourism is lucrative only for a handful of major tourism corporations/agencies, a few local businesses/shops that can cater to locals, and a few among the locals who can use their real estate for things like airbnb. Only 6% of Spaniards have more than one house. So only 6% of them could actually benefit from this situation even if airbnb was a good thing.
The reality of the matter is that what's happening in Barcelona ended up resembling more a colonization when tourism got combined with golden visas that allow rich foreigners and investment funds to scoop up local housing and the recent digital nomad wave. There are now more foreigners in the city center than locals and you are hard pressed to hear Spanish or Catalan being spoken around the place.
"I was born and raised in Barcelona, no longer live there however. I didn't remember how bad it was until I went to visit my family last summer. Me and some friends went to walk around the center and the girl that took our orders at a Pans&Company didn't even know Spanish or Catalan, only English. It was honestly quite depressing. She was surprised we didn't open the conversation with English."
I like AirBNB especially for housing me in a regular apartment with more local vibe, won't travel to Barcelona again because I hate hotels for being too impersonal, there are other places that don't close up to visit. I respect their choice, I also prefer tourism on my own terms.
Taxing short term rentals to build affordable housing seems like a good idea to me.
It's a short term authoritarian bandaid that doesn't even help that many people, all the while fostering resentment and opening up increasingly authoritarian measures in the future.
We should go the asian route of increasing density and size. It's not like Barcelona is fully developed border to border.
It's 67th in the world and less dense than 11 French cities, though not a great comparison because most of those are small cities. But just because it's in the top 100 doesn't mean it's maxed out. It still has 5000/sqkm fewer people than Paris.
Nor does it mean this trade off for a measly 10,000 flats is worth it in such a large city.
Please, the densities seen at the top of that list are really inhumane, more like prison camps than cities.
Also, increasing density might be easy if you demolish 100 single family homes to build 10 five-stories buildings, but replacing Barcelona's 5-6 stories blocks with 10-stories ones isn't going to be economically viable. And if some brave developer tries this, then the resulting apartments won't be cheap.
It's just basic urban planning and zoning. You can't run a factory in your apartment and you can't run a hotel. Plenty of cities restrict where hotels can operate. This is nothing special and certainly not authoritarian. These measures are quite popular because, shocking, people in residential neighborhoods like have real neighbors rather than hotel guests.
Yes, obviously everyone wants to be the last person allowed to move in somewhere, that's why they support these sorts of policies that foment resentment. NIMBYism also stifles most development in the US. But I don't see how it's not authoritarian.
Giving these 10k flats to locals isn't going to put a dent in the housing economy.
If this thread continues for a few more levels, I think you’ll end up justifying hiring your own private police force.
Ownership requires that a state exists to enforce your rights. There are tradeoffs with this arrangement, one of which is that the state gets to set boundaries/limits on how you can use the thing you own. Ideally, acting with the best interests of the population. This sometimes includes ensuring areas are off limits to transient inhabitants so that a society can develop.
> everyone wants to be the last person allowed to move in
This is uncharitable. What everybody wants is for the place they call home, either by inheritance or hard work, to not be harmed by overdevelopment. People will have varyingly (un)reasonable opinions on what "over" means, but even a place with zero development has new residents - people do not live in one place forever, nor do they live forever.
And yes, the locals want more authoritarianism to keep away the overcrowding tourists, rich foreigners, and people who think like you. That's what the problem needs and what people like you understand.
We have to ban accounts that keep doing this, so please stop doing this, and please make sure you're not using HN primarily for political or ideological battle.
(I suppose I should add the standard disclaimer that no, we don't care about your views. We care about your following the rules and using the site as intended, same as with any other user.)
Under this post and in every single post you referenced, people are taking the largest swipes at entire countries, even peoples/races without any repercussions.
> please make sure you're not using HN primarily for political or ideological battle
All the threads you referenced are filled with people using the site in a political and ideological manner. There are people who are literally doing propaganda against entire countries and people.
> no, we don't care about your views
If you don't care about the views of the users, don't care about them in an egalitarian way. So far the rules seem to be getting applied selectively.
> We have to ban accounts that keep doing this
Feel free to do so. I'll get me coat myself. No need to contribute to a platform that not only does not care about its users' views but also applies its rules selectively and in an exceptionalist manner.
I'd need links to specific posts to say anything about them, but you're right that other people also break the rules. That doesn't make it ok for you to break the rules! It's not ok for either you or them to break the rules.
> the rules seem to be getting applied selectively
Every commenter with strong passions feels like the mods apply the rules selectively and must therefore be on the other side. The people you disagree with are just as sure that we're secretly on your side. I say that with confidence even though I don't remember anything about your views at this moment, nor which side any of you are on.
The reason is sample bias. Everyone notices other people breaking the rules, but which cases you notice depends on your pre-existing views. What we (I mean all of us, i.e. humans generally) notice is governed by what we dislike [1]. We assign the most meaning to the cases that feel most unfair or offensive to us. Since everyone selects these based on their own feelings, opposite feelings lead to different samples and opposite conclusions.
When you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we just didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted. Also, I'm the only moderator who responds publicly and I can only write so much—not just because I have other responsibilities to worry about, but also because if I make even a slight mistake, it can (and often has) made a situation worse. It's a little bit like writing software in, I don't know, Agda as opposed to JS or something. You can't do it as fast or as much.
Which posts I respond to vs. not is determined by two factors: (a) what has been brought to my attention by others; and (b) randomness. If you or anyone sees a post that ought to be moderated, you can bring it to our/my attention by either flagging it (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cflag for how), or in egregious cases, by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
Moderation can't be consistent in any way that would require reviewing all posts, but it can be relatively [2] consistent as long as we work with random-enough samples and handle them in a principled-enough way. That's what we aspire to. We're not perfect at it, but we do at least have years of practice.
This works well enough to signal to most of the community that (a) HN is moderated, and (b) that it's moderated reasonably fairly [3]. But it leaves many cases that don't get moderated all, which means there are plenty of data points which people can select to draw whatever conclusions they want to about HN moderation—and believe me, they do!
We've all had this experience in other contexts. Take cops and speeding tickets. There's always a "me? why me?" reaction when you get pulled over. Plenty of other cars were speeding faster! The cops must have ulterior motives for picking on me [4]. Even if my brain knows about random samples, the feelings still work this way. Another example is sports and referees. The passionate fans are the quickest to feel that the refs are making calls unfairly, and it always feels like the calls are unfair against your team.
One last point, in the unlikely event that you read this far... when I said "we don't care about your views" I did not mean to belittle your views or to imply that they're about something unimportant. On the contrary, the divisive topics are extremely important—far more important than most things that appear on HN. I just meant that we don't (or at least try our best not to) consider your views when making moderation calls. And of course by "you" I don't just mean you personally, I mean everybody.
[2] I say 'relatively' because this is a complex problem with lots of failure modes, but they don't change the important point above.
[3] Wait, haven't I just contradicted myself, after talking about all the users who feel we're unfair? No, because the driving factor is the passions of the perceiver. The more passionately you (i.e. anyone) feels about a topic, the more this dynamic kicks in. Most of the community doesn't have strong passions on a given topic, so even when they see the same data points as you, they won't select them as evidence of unfairness. They'll also be more likely to notice cases of the mods scolding the other side as well, and to assign equal weight to those. In other words, the very things that indicate unfairness to you will feel like fairness to them. This is how the same moderation approach can both reassure the majority while at the same time convincing passionate partisans (on any side of any topic) that the system is biased against them. For a couple collections of vivid examples, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870.
[4] And maybe they do? This argument doesn't prove there's no bias; it just shows that any system, even the most unbiased, will produce strong feelings of bias no matter what you do.
I see AirBnB as a cheap-ish alternative to hotels, although short-term landlords are doing their best trying to extract as much money from their clients as possible (famous "$300 cleaning fee").
Thus, I don't think the city will really suffer from shrinking of the cheap tourism segment. Barcelona is already overcrowded, so making this crowd less dense and more rich at the same time is a net positive scenario. Also, the city needs long-term housing for those who work and study there.
There are lots of beautiful hotels in Barcelona. I visited the city about 10 times and never stayed in the same hotel twice, the choice is wild.
Barcelona seems wonderfully experimental in its governance. Iirc they also tested herbal decriminalization and developed new learning. I wonder what will be learned from this foray into property controls?
Well I certainly how it works well for them. It's a terrible feeling to feel like you're getting priced out of your own home.
We stayed in a few different week-long AirBnBs (or some other rental service) in 2019 in Barcelona and loved it. Although, and this could be a big source of the problem, both people we met up with to get keys were not Spanish and specifically asked if we could speak French or German instead.
This will be an excellent case study that the rest of the world can watch and learn from. Does it have the desired impact? Are there unintended consequences?
We can all speculate till the sun goes down about what we think is going to happen, now we're going to get real data. This is great.
Even if the outcomes are "bad", they can just undo this is ~5 years. At least we will have all learned from it.
One of my most distinct memories of visiting Barcelona in 2018 was going to a hip hang out spot with a few cousins who live there, turning a corner and seeing the words "TOURISTS FUCK OFF" graffiti'd in large letters along the side of the building. I remember thinking "oh they're talking about me."
> Following the liberalization [allowing more AirBNBs], for each one
percentage point increase in the share of STR as a percentage of the housing stock, housing prices increased 27.4% and 16.1% in the Lisbon and Porto MSA municipalities most exposed to STR, respectively. These results represent a much higher impact than that estimated in previous studies (Franco and Santos, 2021)
It's interesting hotels that feel like an AirBnB don't really exist. Even though the professional AirBnB hosts are doing all the functions that hotels do. Why not the reverse.
They recognize it exists. I'm even hearing podcast ads from Marriot or similar touting how much more reliable they are.
AirBnBs I've stayed in the past few years have all been janky, weird, and not really any cheaper than hotels. I don't have to do chores at hotels, and I can always get (and return) the key promptly. I've also been told on several occasions not to let anyone else in the building know I was an AirBnB guest. AirBnB used to be better, but the advent of "professional hosts" with many properties really degraded things. They often have the typical landlord mentality of expecting a lot of reward with little work or risk.
How else would you make or reaffirm a first-hand impression?
Also, while I'm not OP, I gave up on Airbnbs a long time ago for the same reasons, and that impression is occasionally refreshed when I stay in an Airbnb that _someone else_ arranged. I will go out of my way to avoid them if it's all up to me.
If you have a family of 5 or more, hotel rooms suck - either someone sleeps on the floor or you have to find a "suite" that accommodates that. Or multiple rooms.
The major travel sites all push you to multiple rooms - but lots of hotels now don't have "adjoining room" access (compared to say 30 years ago), and in one case, our 2 rooms were on different floors because of check-in time.
The travel sites are picking up on this and competing with airbnb as well. Typically my experience with those rented homes is a) cheaper than airbnb and b) better service. However, I'm sure they are the same type of superhost company that would be banned in Barcelona.
Not anymore. They were cheaper, and then the prices crept up, and the quality got worse. Classic enshittification. I loved AirBnB 10 years ago, but I'm back to hotels now.
They do exist and are increasingly common for new hotel builds, at least where I live. Here is an example of one in Montréal that I stayed in last autumn:
These still look [1] like artificial sanitized places. People like AirBnB because most of them have a home like feeling. Random decorations, casual atmosphere, etc.
I've stayed in many Airbnbs all over the world, and the majority of the city ones for the last few years are clearly just fulltime Airbnb, with basically zero personality. As soulless as a hotel room, sometimes more if they're trying to seem personal but clearly aren't.
Weird that. Almost as if it should be a home for someone. Not for you to play at being a Barcelona/Montréal/where ever resident for 2 weeks for Insta likes.
Hotels with similar amenities are usually priced at absurdly high rates for corporate clients.
The place you linked to has the equivalent of a studio apartment with no laundry machine going for over 9000 CAD for a month. AirBnB has plenty of one bedrooms going for a third of that.
What do you mean by a hotel that feels like an Airbnb?
If you want to stay at a place that has a kitchen, and multiple bedrooms, there are suite hotels (eg. Homewood suites) and extended stay hotels. If you want someone to host you, then a bed and breakfast is another type of accommodation.
- Wanting something that looks and feels like a home rather than a hotel room. This isn't available everywhere.
- Wanting something that isn't shared with a bunch of other hotel guests. (Aside: I have no problems with apartment buildings banning AirBnB/VRBO, because that's much more "cheap hotel substitute that might bother neighbors" than "unique offering that isn't likely to bother anyone".)
- In general, wanting something unique that doesn't tend to exist as a hotel.
It's difficult to quantify. Perhaps it's something as intangible as a space optimized for _living_ (like an apartment) as opposed to a space optimized for _profit_ (like a hotel).
Whatever the case, despite the existence of the options you list, Airbnb's are still popular. There's clearly some significant differentiator between them and an Airbnb.
It's definitely the vibe. A lot of it is how the space is decorated. The random assortment of furniture and other stuff in an AirBnB contributes quite a lot to the atmosphere people are looking for.
But there is a psychology to it that is, as you say, hard to pin dow. A hotel that has a random assortment of plates and cutlery in the kitchen (like my last AirBnB did) would feel cheap and tacky. The AirBnB didn't.
Or, holiday homes. These are furnished short term rental apartments with kitchens, often washing machines and dishwashers, etc. Common in parts of Europe. But at least in Germany they are well regulated and you actually sign a rental contract for your stay. I suspect that makes them a lot less accessible for tourists from abroad.
As far as I can tell, these do not exist in any meaningful number in Barcelona. They also rarely exist in city centers, at least everywhere I've seen in Europe. That's why entire buildings were turned into AirBNB.
I don't know if you meant specifically in Barcelona, but I'm in just such a unit in Montreal as I type this. Physically it's a 2BR apartment, with its own washer/dryer and full (though small) kitchen, but it's booked and run as a hotel. There's hotel-like housekeeping, not a note hidden somewhere that says I have to clean up myself before leaving or incur a hefty extra cleaning fee (on top of the one that's already buried elsewhere in the fine print). There's not much of a lobby, no concierge, no room-service menu, so it's not a four star hotel, but I'd still say it's a hotel that feels like an AirBnB and I think places like this are rapidly taking over that part of the market.
The move that Barcelona just made might actually be kind of like closing the barn door after the horses have escaped. Good political theater, I guess, but not really moving things in a direction they weren't already going.
It's a little unclear to me why this category wouldn't escape regulation, since it's clearly just an entire apartment building where they converted each apartment to an Airbnb for economies of scale around cleaning, maintenance, etc. They're displacing just as many residents as the same number of equivalent Airbnbs spread around a neighborhood. Whereas most traditional hotels feel purpose built for that and couldn't easily be apartments.
When talking about a matter of law or regulation, phrases like "feel purpose built" don't carry a lot of weight. Looking at legal definitions of "hotel" across many jurisdictions, it looks like a lot of of them center on the concept of temporary or transient usage. Intent to operate on that basis also shows up fairly often too. Here's a handy compilation (NB not the only source I consulted).
Note that style of construction does not seem to be a factor. Many hotels offer freestanding villas or cabins, practically small (sometimes even not so small) houses, and have for a long time. Chains like Residence Inn, Homewood Suites, or Extended Stay America have likewise offered hotel accommodation in the physical form of an apartment for almost as long. Personally, I think the inclusion of housekeeping services during a stay is a big differentiator, perhaps because it demonstrates intent to serve a transient clientele. By contrast, a "dual use" house or apartment that is owner occupied part of the time and rented out part of the time does not show such intent. Neither do the illegal sublets that are behind many Airbnb rentals.
In other words, the physical similarity between a suite hotel (like the one I'm in) and apartments doesn't seem determinative. Rather, what seems to matter is the financial difference between a nightly (or perhaps weekly) guest vs. a longer term lessee. I'm not saying whether it's right or wrong, but it does explain why different types of levels of regulation are applicable to each.
P.S. The ones "escaping regulation" are the Airbnbs, not the hotels. Hotels are subject to much more stringent standards wrt safety, sanitation, privacy, billing, etc.
>Personally, I think the inclusion of housekeeping services during a stay is a big differentiator, perhaps because it demonstrates intent to serve a transient clientele.
Yes, although a lot of hotels moved away from daily service during the pandemic and stayed there. Which is just fine by me.
If I were to stay longer than a week I'd probably cast my lodging net a bit wider. But hotels (or regular B&Bs, especially outside of cities) meet my needs pretty well for the most part. I have used AirBnB but I'm guessing the standard deviation is higher though I haven't had a bad (small sample) experience.
Even laundry which a number of people mention isn't really a big deal for the most part. I tend to optimize things that can be given a quick wash in the sink. I have stayed in ApartHotels with a laundry room and at B&Bs that will run a cheap load for you for longer trips involving more mud etc. And I've used a wash and fold place on a few occasions. Even as a very light packer, I've never felt the need to do laundry every few days.
There are aparthotels that offer larger living area and amenities such as a kitchen, a normal fridge, and laundry facilities, similar to an Airbnb. Additionally, they provide 24/7 reception, a breakfast room, optional maid service, much like a hotel. This has become a popular option in Europe recently.
Because we're adults that realize garbage dumps shouldn't be next to schools. And sometimes as society we make decisions that are good for the majority of people. I'm sure you'd love it if someone poisoned your ground water, but they did it by burying toxic materials on their property.
When Airbnb landlords won't rent to locals at all because it's not convenient enough for them do so what will you do for the good of the majority of the people? Forcefully seize their apartment because people need it?
That's very hyperbolized. It's still convenient to them, just less profitable. If they have mortgages less profit is better than no profit in all scenarios.
I knew an Airbnb host in Italy, he shared with me that by renting to tourist compared to the normal market prices to locals he would make 3 times more. It's a no brainer, but he would gladly accept 1/3 of that if the alternative is 0 (and he did during the pandemic when tourism stopped).
Those property rights exist because the locals consent to them. If the landlords' behavior undermines that consent then it only makes sense that the locals would revoke the property rights.
How else, besides continued maintenance of that consent, would property rights get their legitimacy?
Under that logic your breathing is a matter of their continued consent and lynch mobs are an expression of a democratic society. Protection of minority rights is an important function in government.
No need to forcibly sieze it. Simply outlaw dedicated short term rentals of apartments and houses and let the owners decide what to do with their apartment after that.
No. You just tax the living daylights out of the empty houses so that they will have to utilize or rent them. That is ALREADY the law in Spain, by the way.
> Forcefully seize their apartment because people need it?
The needs of the many come before the needs of the few. Someone said it somewhere across the ocean. But the country where it was said does not heed it at all. The rest of the world does.
That’s not how it works. There are already some laws that don’t allow owners to do certain things in/with their property (for example, you cannot just convert your flat into a disco for obvious reasons).
Your property is still subject to local and national laws and regulations, it's not some lawless piece of property where you can do whatever you want just because your name is on the property document.
I might own my own apartment, but I can't turn it into a pub, I can't turn it into a disco, I can't turn it into an auto service garage, I can't grow weed in it, I can't turn it into a shop, all these I can't do because it will negatively affect the life of my neighbors.
What if we hold people accountable to the zoning rules in an area they CHOSE to purchase within? You don't want zoning rules, you are free to purchase in a local that doesn't have and/or forbids zoning laws.
That is a good point and I totally agree with that, if you bought a house there for short-term rents then (in this case) you most likely made a risky investment.
Would you be okay with your neighbor using the same argument and running an industrial scale chemical manufacturing plant from their apartment? It is their own property after all.
Lol. They foreigners are buying homes like mad because there's no protection.
This is a distraction for an easy target. It won't help and it will make the quality of hotels worse.
It will also have a lot of under the table deals.
But hey, instead of fixing the real problems, it's easy to attack things some people don't use. They do the same to electric bikes and scooters. Ban ban ban! Things will surely improve!
> This is a distraction for an easy target. It won't help and it will make the quality of hotels worse.
Its not a distraction - its just a start. And hotel quality is still what it was before Airbnb and it will stay like that after airbnb goes away. The standards that national and international tourism institutions apply to the hotels has not changed one iota because of airbnb.
If people would just rent out their flats when they are not living there that would be fine. But people and corporations buy up housing and put them on Airbnb for above market prices. Suddenly you have no more place to live for the locals who have to work in the city. And a very high priced hotel room for the tourists.
Overpriced relative to a long-term rental in the same area.
Airbnb is a nightly rate that competes with hotel pries. Long-term rentals are a monthly rate that is usually much less than the nightly rate of a hotel or Airbnb.
Example: A hotel near my house is about ~$400/night. Or ~$12,000/month. Rent for a 1-bed apartment across the street is about $3000/month.
how is this functionally any different from a hotel? Do you complain that new hotel builds take housing away from locals, because presumably that hotel could have been residential housing instead?
Nice kitchens, laundry machines in the apartment, comfortable living rooms, access to attached outdoor space, and accommodations for larger parties traveling together are very difficult for hotels to compete with.
A suite hotel like a Residence Inn has a lot of that. Doesn't replace a whole house rental at the beach and probably doesn't have as many bedrooms. But it's pretty reasonable for a lot of purposes.
And for me, I value predictability and the availability of staff if I need them. I've certainly stayed at many B&Bs that didn't have a 24-hour desk but, by and large, I'm looking to stay at places where I can count on things going smoothly.
Great. Pick hotels. Why do you need to ban airbnbs? As a user of both the presence of airbnbs gives people a choice and sometimes one is clearly better than the other.
Problem is those who don't use certain services love banning them and pretend they're fixing some unrelated problem.
I don't think I wrote anything about banning AirBnBs one way or the other. By and large, my feeling is communities/municipalities/etc. should have pretty wide latitude about regulations they enact. And if voters en masse don't like it they'll presumably elect someone to do what they want--though of course that takes time.
For me, 2 nights or less then I look for a hotel. The reliability is important. But more nights, I prefer an AirBnB. I can cook meals, wash clothes, and it just feels more comfortable.
You can't stop the free market. Once it's out of the bag, given a long enough time-frame without volatility (technological innovation/political turbulence/labor/etc.) it always returns to feudalism. Sand aggregates into the form of a pyramid in the absence of winds. So do societies.
For the love of god, please learn what feudalism actually is. It isn't someone renting out land it is a government structured via a system of sworn allegiances.
> Don't have kids if you don't own at least one home
That isn't how human beings work, though, and it never has been. I tend to suspect that a person saying something like this has few if any deep relationships with people who cannot afford to own homes, because the statement shows no compassion for their experience.
The end result will be mass, society-wide indentured servitude. I say give it one century without any major paradigm shift (e.g. Industrial Revolution/geopolitical unrest).
Go to Kuwait, everyone, even commoners host their maids and cooks in their main residences. Maybe we'll see a mainstream return to these arrangements in the States.
It's not even poor people, in some "advanced economies" we're getting to a point where income means very little, and inheriting means a lot. I've only seen such a lack of empathy in teenagers or silver spoons.
I stayed in a hostel on my first Barcelona visit and it was economical, but I'd not use one again - too Spartan, not enough privacy. Good choice for young gregarious backpacker types though.
I have no data, but experience from many other cases shows that economics will take what it wants.
Scenarios I can imagine:
1. Black market, which will hurt tourists and locals alike
2. These flats rented to digital nomads instead
3. These flats sold instead, and will be bought buy some hedge funds who will just wait for price appreciation and still asking hight rent
But most plausible scenario is mix of the above plus something unexpected and bad
> experience from many other cases shows that economics will take what it wants
No such thing. Regulations work.
> Scenarios
No need to 'imagine' things. Wherever they implemented regulations here, they worked. From rent control to airbnb bans. Regulations work as long as you enforce them.
All politicians have been saying that a decade at least.
In Spain, home owners associations can forbid tourist apartments if they vote it. Why can’t they just do it?
Spain is suffering a multi-centralization process. Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Malaga are increasing their populations. The rest of the cities are losing inhabitants. Why? Because the job opportunities are not there.
> Spain is suffering a multi-centralization process. Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Malaga are increasing their populations. The rest of the cities are losing inhabitants. Why? Because the job opportunities are not there.
The depopulation problem of MOUNTAINOUS regions of Europe, including Spain, has little to do with jobs being available elsewhere. The depopulation in those mountainous regions is due to those regions being undesirable for human habitation all the way, and the recent advent of technology and infrastructure making it possible for people to go to other places. These regions were inhabited only because people had to live there and the human society's infrastructure could not carry millions of people in a central location.
I don’t think that’s true even less true in a digital economy we are all in.
Poorer regions like Extremadura and Andalusia have been neglected for centuries and now the economy is so dire we are seeing a mass migration from south Spain to other regions.
Airbnb has made it unnecessary to have friends in city X who will gladly let you couch surf - because lets face it: hotels are a prohibitive rip off. Hotel owners must hate it.
To me it seems much more likely that this is the reason for such bans because in housing terms the number of Airbnb properties seems far too small to make a difference.
Don't worry, at least here in the US the ridiculous fees that are being charged by homeowners are making hotels seems worth it again, no legislation required.
We looked at hotels for a recent Italy holiday but they were a good bit pricier and in worse locations. Good locations were wayyy more expensive than an apartment. The Airbnb we went with was pretty nice, and I much prefer the experience of an apartment to a hotel room anyway. I haven't holidayed in a hotel pretty much ever, come to think of it.
I've heard that the European AirBnB experience is similar to what it was like in the US around 2016. Much more friendlier, personal, and cheaper than hotels to boot.
My money is on what happens every time governments stick their hairy knuckles in the delicate mechanics of the free market: the economy works around them.
IMO, in this case, it will foster a huge black market (because there's strong demand for the stuff) and make a stream of taxable income disappear underground altogether.
any black market feasible to replace airbnb will immediately be discovered by the authorities. The effect will be to greatly reduce short term rental of units that should be dwellings for people who live in those cities. Any system that replaces airbnb illegally will simply have police renting these properties and arresting everyone involved or seizing properties illegally being rented.
You are missing that Spain's economy is not growing like the USA's.
Spanish wages grew only 2.7%/yr L10Y [1], and its nominal GDP/capita looks completely flat [2].
This explains why the city is affordable for international tourists but not locals. Regardless, a high "tourist tax" would probably be better for their economy than an outright ban.
At 2.7% that's 2.7% and .7% growth faster than wages.
Let's look at the bay's wage growth[0]: 11% (or ~1%/yr) from 2010-2020, but they removed CPI-U inflation[1], so it's something higher (annual was ~1-3% in that time period). Which puts the bay area housing at 5%+ higher growth, 2x to 7x worse than Spain.
So, once again - Spain is doing well when it comes to housing prices. Tourism frustrates locals because they think it's increased their housing costs wildly - but in fact it's because their economy is switching to a tourist economy unless they find an industry to grow.
Today's Wall Street Journal (Jun 20) has an article "Europe has a new Economic Engine: American Tourists", where this is written:
"While Germany’s economy is flatlining, Spain is Europe’s fastest-growing big economy. Nearly three-quarters of the country’s recent growth and one in four new jobs are linked to tourism."
Aren't those apartments concentrated in the old parts of the city, where no sane person would want to live long-term anyway? Full of noise, dirt, drunkards, junkies, prostitutes etc?
1. To outlaw AirBnB. Except if people are staying in your house while you're there. Other than that, it should be illegal;
2. 80% Capital Gains Tax on property sales other than your primary residence, withheld at source.
3. Withold 40% of rent income at source, which can only be credited against taxable income in the state and country; and
4. Tax non-primary residences at 2% of their market value every year in addition to any property taxes; and
5. If landlords want out, let the state buy them out and use those properties for affordable housing for all citizens. The UK previously came "dangerously" close to eliminating landlords this way last century [1].
EDIT: another big one:
6. Ban HOAs. Entirely. They are anachronism invented to enforce segregation. Any function they perform (eg picking up trash, tending communal parks) is and should be the function of local government, which is democratic. HOAs are not.
Lastly, the one exception I would carve out is for multi-families and ADUs (accessory dwelling units). These were once commonplace but are now prohibited in most of the US.
Just like renting out a room in your house while you're there, ADUs mean the landlord is also affected by any potential misdeeds or abuse by the tenant so is invested in that not happening.
It's really about ending real estate as a vehicle of creating generational wealth, an end to real estate speculation. At most, real estate should be an income generator, not a speculative asset.
There is so much wrong with real estate as a speculative asset. It leads us to create policies to limit housing (because existing owners have their assets increase in value).
The problem with this idea is that money has to come from somewhere. All we're doing is stealing from the next generation. It's a massive wealth transfer from the young to the old and wealthy. Housing is a necessity. It should not be withheld from people for the sake of investment gains.
Homelessness is primarily caused by unaffordable housing. People don't like the externalities this creates but they simply want to move those people away so they don't have to see them when the solution is as simple as giving them housing. Well, not entirely, but that gets you 90% of the way there.
Withholding shelter in the wealthiest nation the Earth has ever seen is unjustifiable state violence.
Bye bye to the great experience of living in Barcelona like a local for months. How will they limit temporal renting? Where is the limit line? Should you be a resident in the age of remote working?
You can still rent an apartment for months. It is going to be probably cheaper and as a tenant you will have legal protections that AirBnB users do not have.
> How will they limit temporal renting
Like any other illegal activity. My best guess is that the police will act when neighbors complain about noise or other nuisances. The fact that it is illegal will make easy to evict the occupants and fine the owner.
You didn't answer my question, just trolled it: what is the line between being a tourist apartment and/or a remote work apartment if you want to rent one for two weeks?
> You didn't answer my question, just trolled it: what is the line between being a tourist apartment and/or a remote work apartment if you want to rent one for two weeks?
If you don't work and you just visit for leisure, you're a tourist. If you're planning to rent an apartment for short-term remote work, you'll need to be a resident, and you'll have a short-term contract where at least your resident number is put as well (and don't forget to pay taxes on the income you earn while in the country too).
So I guess leisure vs work is the line you're looking for is.
I've understood that the lines were already drawn a long time ago. The short-term rentals discussed here are limited to 31 days. Normal long-term rentals are intended for stays of 1+ years. Between those two, there are temporary rental contracts intended for stays measured in months. I've understood that those contracts must include the specific reason of stay, as a measure to prevent abuse.
You could, you know, just build more housing. But that would be far too sensible. A 30% social housing requirement seems equally nuts. Who is going to want to build anything with those margins. If you want social housing, that’s great: raise taxes and pay for it. Throwing a massive wrench in the market machinery helps nobody apart from the politician who wants to create the impression that they are “doing something.” The unaffordability crisis is just going to worsen, until you end up with an S.F. situation, where the middle is hollowed out and only the extremes remain.
canada has no way to outbuild its insane immigration numbers. Airbnb being eliminated would be great and I approve, but I do not think it will substantially affect the housing market.
As they should. Speculating with housing is as disgusting as speculating with healthcare, the fact that is normalized in countries such as USA makes it not less disgusting.
They are freeing up ~10,000 houses over the next four years with this legislation. Barcelona built ~15,000 new properties between 2011 and 2020.
The math don't math. It's a drop in the bucket. The entire impact of AirBnB + all housing built in the last decade does not offset the last half decade of population growth.
Housing must be built more quickly than your population is growing to keep prices down, or you must concede that you live in a nice area where people wealthier than you wish to be and that those people are going to gentrify the area and displace locals. It's an unpleasant reality of the world.
EDIT: some good feedback in the responses. thanks! I'm being a bit dramatic by saying it's just a drop in the bucket, this action frees up more housing than was built over the same timespan, and it's possible to have effects on pricing greater than what would be inferred by the raw numbers because economics is tricky. cheers.