[HN Gopher] Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments
___________________________________________________________________
Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments
Author : voisin
Score : 205 points
Date : 2024-06-21 19:23 UTC (3 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (www.theolivepress.es)
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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.
| shoulderfake wrote:
| Have you been to Barcelona? You can't put any more shit than
| there already is.
| othello wrote:
| Barcelona has a 16,000 people per square km density - that's
| already one of the highest in Europe.
|
| https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/barcelona-
| pop....
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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.
| Detrytus wrote:
| 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.
| lbwtaylor wrote:
| 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.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| If you think zoning is authoritarian, you also think a
| bunch of normal, everyday measures are authoritarian.
| edoloughlin wrote:
| > But I don't see how it's not authoritarian.
|
| 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.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| > 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_.
| zrn900 wrote:
| > It's a short term authoritarian bandaid
|
| That's unintelligible. With that logic, every law and
| regulation is authoritarian.
|
| > all the while fostering resentment and opening up
| increasingly authoritarian measures in the future
|
| Here's the resentment:
|
| https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/travel/2023/10/09/fed-u...
|
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| Please make your substantive points without swipes (like
| "that's unintelligible" and "people like you").
|
| This is in the site guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
|
| Edit: yikes, you've unfortunately been breaking the site
| guidelines repeatedly and badly--examples:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40743149
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40743095
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40743048
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40675193
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40673804
|
| 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.)
| deutschepost wrote:
| Good. Tourists should sleep in hotels and locals should sleep in
| their flats.
|
| Platforms like AirBnB only put oil in the fire when it comes to
| housing crises.
| popcalc wrote:
| Alternatively, the population practicing birth control could
| solve the crisis. Don't have kids if you don't own at least one
| home :)
| utensil4778 wrote:
| "Poor people shouldn't be allowed to reproduce, that will fix
| our problems"
| popcalc wrote:
| You're allowed to ruin your children's lives, no doubt
| about that.
| twixfel wrote:
| Better to be alive, though, than simply never born in
| order to protect airbnb, as you would prefer.
| dindobre wrote:
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Who do you think is going to do the work every facet of your
| life requires?
| popcalc wrote:
| 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.
| phyllistine wrote:
| That is a worse system, and this public policy change is
| preferable to poor people having to be live in workers.
| eesmith wrote:
| Your "everyone" does not seem to include the maids and
| cooks, almost as if you consider them nobodies.
| lostlogin wrote:
| Modern slavery comes to mind.
| elmomle wrote:
| > 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.
| billfor wrote:
| We should at least stop treating population growth as an
| economic necessity (mostly because of corporations and the
| need to service a debt bubble).
|
| Where it ends up in the extreme case is people living on top
| of each other.
| popcalc wrote:
| 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).
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Hotels suck. I want a hotel with no staff. Thats airbnb
| popcalc wrote:
| [deleted]
| mattlondon wrote:
| Is renting from the landlord precisely what the problem is?
| Middleman or not, it is an apartment that a normal local
| person can't use.
| popcalc wrote:
| 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.
| ebiester wrote:
| They knew. They didn't care. It ended up being a good deal
| for both groups.
| enraged_camel wrote:
| Well, you can always sleep in a tent!
| switch007 wrote:
| Well, hotels barely have any staff these days, thanks to cost
| cutting ;)
| deutschepost wrote:
| 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.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The locals problem seems easy to follow but why do tourists
| continue picking the airbnb style offers if they are so
| over priced?
| alistairSH wrote:
| 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.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| 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?
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Build more housing
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| distances wrote:
| It's the locals, not the tourists staying in hotels, that
| want to ban Airbnbs.
| devbent wrote:
| Being able to do laundry makes Airbnb worth it almost every
| time.
|
| If I have a multi leg journey I'll make sure every other
| stop is at an Airbnb with a washing machine.
| matwood wrote:
| 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.
| jimbokun wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| 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.
| switch007 wrote:
| Aparthotels are fairly common. Then you gave the budget
| hotels with skeleton staff and almost no common areas and
| facilities
|
| What do you mean exactly by "feels like an Airbnb"?
| jfim wrote:
| 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.
| jupp0r wrote:
| 1. An actual kitchen that's good for cooking complex meals.
| This is great for family trips on holidays.
|
| 2. 3+ bedrooms. Good luck finding that in Hotels.
|
| 3. Things like private hot tubs or pools, BBQ in the
| backyard, etc are almost unheard of in hotels.
|
| 4. Laundry machines.
| Jaecen wrote:
| 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.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| 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.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| There's a wide variety of possibilities here:
|
| - Not wanting staff or service.
|
| - 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.
| ebiester wrote:
| 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.
| distances wrote:
| 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.
| xvaier wrote:
| They do exist and are increasingly common for new hotel
| builds, at least where I live. Here is an example of one in
| Montreal that I stayed in last autumn:
|
| https://griffintownhotel.com/en-us/apartments/
| laGrenouille wrote:
| 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.
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://griffintownhotel.com/en-us/apartments/comfort
| phatfish wrote:
| Weird that. Almost as if it should be a home for someone.
| Not for you to play at being a Barcelona/Montreal/where
| ever resident for 2 weeks for Insta likes.
| mjhay wrote:
| 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.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| > AirBnBs I've stayed in the past few years have all been
| janky, weird, and not really any cheaper than hotels
|
| And yet, you stay in them.
| mjhay wrote:
| 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.
| Clamchop wrote:
| 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.
| r00fus wrote:
| 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.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| Yeah I choose AirBnbs that have a bedroom for kids aren't
| impossible to cosleep in. Never found a hotel that wasn't
| miserable even with 2 kids.
| rokhayakebe wrote:
| I recently stayed in aparthotels in Milan and Casabalanca. It
| was fantastic.
| notacoward wrote:
| 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.
| mattrighetti wrote:
| > Tourists should sleep in hotels and locals should sleep in
| their flats.
|
| What if we let people decide what they should/n't do with their
| own property instead?
| dakiol wrote:
| 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).
| stfp wrote:
| Well the people are deciding what they want to do with their
| own city. Individualism has its limits.
| thinkingtoilet wrote:
| 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.
| mattrighetti wrote:
| 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?
| lnrd wrote:
| 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).
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| 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?
| LegitShady wrote:
| 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.
| zrn900 wrote:
| 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.
| FactKnower69 wrote:
| :)
| stavros wrote:
| I see you've never lived next to an Airbnb.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| Hold on, gonna go fire up some garbage incinerators in my
| yard to help pay for my mortgage.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| 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.
| mattrighetti wrote:
| 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.
| isaacremuant wrote:
| 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!
| zrn900 wrote:
| > Lol. They foreigners are buying homes like mad because
| there's no protection
|
| Yes and its a major problem. Some locations are already
| acting out.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/portugal-ends-
| golden-...
|
| > 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.
|
| > But hey, instead of fixing the real problems
|
| This is the real problem.
|
| https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/travel/2023/10/09/fed-u.
| ..
| lucasfcosta wrote:
| Honest question: does this work?
|
| It seems to me that this change will have unintended effects and
| will fail to produce the desired results.
|
| AFAIK rent in NYC hasn't gone down since they changed their
| short-term rental regulations.
|
| 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?
|
| Genuinely curious about others' takes on this.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| 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.
| cheeze wrote:
| 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.)
|
| Obviously not speaking with any data here.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Everyone wants lower housing prices, except for the house
| they currently own.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| 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.
| coryrc wrote:
| That's not how property taxes work.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| 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.)
| km3r wrote:
| 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.
| dubcanada wrote:
| > 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.
| dmurray wrote:
| Also, people who own multiple homes, and people who are
| in the biggest house they are likely to own and expect to
| downsize.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| > 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.
| dmurray wrote:
| 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.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| > People who own a home, and don't have plans to move,
| would benefit from housing prices falling everywhere
|
| Right... you go and make that pitch. Run for mayor with
| it.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Where in Barcelona would you increase density?
|
| https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/barcelona-pop...
|
| from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40752920 ("Barcelona
| has a 16,000 people per square km density - that's already one
| of the highest in Europe.")
|
| 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.
| pupperino wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| jupp0r wrote:
| Following your logic, why not ban hotels?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| jupp0r wrote:
| Of course hotels are competing against residential
| housing. They take up land that could be used for
| residential housing instead.
| bsder wrote:
| 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.
| jupp0r wrote:
| 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).
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/search/barcelona+hotels/@41.3
| 806...
| lotsoweiners wrote:
| > Very few people want their residences in the suburban
| office park areas.
|
| Not sure what you're implying here but in the US homes in
| the suburbs back up to office parks all the time.
| 38 wrote:
| > get rid of most zoning regulations
|
| "most" is doing a lot of work here. don't forget you
| probably don't want to live next to an airport, railroad,
| chemical plant
| km3r wrote:
| 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.
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| > Where in Barcelona would you increase density?
|
| 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.
| Here is a dense map of rail:
| https://www.urbanrail.net/eu/es/bcn/bcn-region-map.htm
| diggan wrote:
| > 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.
| barrkel wrote:
| 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.
| konschubert wrote:
| We nowadays have trains that can go uphill.
| Gimpei wrote:
| 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?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _I want my BnB..._
|
| Now, that's the way you do it.
|
| You play the market with a BnB.
|
| That ain't workin': that's the way you do it.
|
| Money for nothin' and your rent for free.
| walterbell wrote:
| _> rent in NYC hasn't gone down_
|
| NYC hotel and housing prices have been artificially inflated by
| government buying accommodations for homeless during 2020/2021,
| then migrants.
| lostlogin wrote:
| So prices have been inflated by people living in them?
|
| Is that artificial?
| readthenotes1 wrote:
| It is when the government, not the tenants, pay the rent
| dubcanada wrote:
| How so? What about if the government pays 50% and the
| tenant pays 50%? Where exactly is this line drawn?
| walterbell wrote:
| In this specific instance, city government bought out
| entire hotels, reducing room inventory.
| CPLX wrote:
| 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.
| tomhoward wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://amp.abc.net.au/article/102878180
| jll29 wrote:
| 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
| EUR/year/m2).
| davidw wrote:
| > 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.
| chongli wrote:
| 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.
| davidw wrote:
| 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_.
| trifurcate wrote:
| What is different between building more housing and
| building more highway lanes?
| chongli wrote:
| 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!
| davidw wrote:
| 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.
|
| One way to try to get more places to reform on a similar
| timeline is to join a nationwide group, like
| https://new.yimbyaction.org/ or
| https://welcomingneighbors.us/
| francisofascii wrote:
| 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.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| 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.
| creddit wrote:
| 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.
| credit_guy wrote:
| > Genuinely curious about others' takes on this
|
| 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.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| 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.
| FactKnower69 wrote:
| 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
| standardUser wrote:
| 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.
| seydor wrote:
| 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
| zrn900 wrote:
| 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.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| No.
|
| If you want cheaper housing for yourself, live somewhere with
| cheap housing.
|
| If you are sincere and worried that the lack of cheap housing
| hurts your community: great. All the more reason to leave.
| meow_mix wrote:
| Will this actually change anything? Curious if folks will just
| create a black market for these instead (this is basically how ny
| works)
| theragra wrote:
| 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
| zrn900 wrote:
| > 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.
| adolph wrote:
| 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?
|
| https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/catalonia-cracks-down-b...
| nvegater wrote:
| 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.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > 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.
| AequitasOmnibus wrote:
| 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.
| darknavi wrote:
| 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.
| sn_master wrote:
| Good. Dublin should follow next.
| grecy wrote:
| 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.
| JackYoustra wrote:
| People will do literally anything over building enough housing to
| make everyone happy
| smegger001 wrote:
| building more devalues their assets. we are creating artificial
| scarcity of a basic human need because we turned it into a
| financial investment vehicle.
| distances wrote:
| 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.
| fh973 wrote:
| Building companies don't own the apartments, banks do. Lower
| effective prices means writing off debt.
| distances wrote:
| 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.
| pembrook wrote:
| "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.
| distances wrote:
| 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.
| thrwwyfrobvrsns wrote:
| 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.
| happytoexplain wrote:
| 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.
| thrwwyfrobvrsns wrote:
| RIP your subjective comfort, long live someone else's ability
| to be within 4 warm, permanent walls when the temperature
| drops below freezing.
| zrn900 wrote:
| 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.
| anthonypasq wrote:
| 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?
| diggan wrote:
| 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.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > So the alternative is to buy vertically...
|
| And the superblocks in Barcelona are already quite high and
| suffocating.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| People want it all:
|
| 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.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| 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.
| switch007 wrote:
| 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
| isaacremuant wrote:
| It's demagogy and it works.
| jupp0r wrote:
| The term is populism.
| lostlogin wrote:
| For what it's worth, it's a little closer than your numbers
| imply. The city averages 2.51 people per household, so now they
| just need 75k more houses.
|
| https://www.barcelona.cat/infobarcelona/en/tema/city-council...
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| It still doesn't exactly look great that they "just" need ~45
| years of house production to have happened yesterday.
| sangnoir wrote:
| The Airbnb measure fixed a quarter of the problem. That is
| _huge_ by most standards
| mutatio wrote:
| But it's a one time event. What comes next and what if
| there are negative externalities?
|
| It feels like a land grab, the real failure here is a
| lack of construction, and that isn't the fault of people
| renting via Airbnb.
| voisin wrote:
| Classic governments, failing to do the right thing for
| decades and then blaming something that makes up a tiny
| part of the problem to shift blame.
| lostlogin wrote:
| A government making a regulation that helps the its
| constituents seems like what it should be doing.
| FredPret wrote:
| It's about votes, not math. The only solution is for people who
| can math to learn how to also get votes.
| LegitShady wrote:
| 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.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| 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.
| dnissley wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It's difficult to make work economically, other than
| shuttering for part of the year.
|
| Which is why tourist resort towns and stadium areas tend to
| have a lot of closed shops when they're not "on".
|
| Which in turn makes them less attractive for year-round
| residents, which spirals into intensifying seasonality.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| 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.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| 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.
| jorvi wrote:
| 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.
| silverpepsi wrote:
| "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
| jorvi wrote:
| I mean, that sucks a lot, but I have never ever
| encountered what you just described. N=1.
| resolutebat wrote:
| _Overnight_ guests are typically banned, but I 've never
| seen an Airbnb listing that says you can't have someone
| over for a cup of tea.
| dylan604 wrote:
| And how would they know? Oh right, hidden cameras.
| Nothing about airbnb is attractive to me any more.
| n_plus_1_acc wrote:
| That would be very illegal in many places.
| dylan604 wrote:
| and yet it happens
| samaltmanfried wrote:
| For what it's worth, they're also prohibited by Airbnb's
| terms of service:
| https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/3061
| johnp314 wrote:
| 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.
| Carrok wrote:
| 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.
| nielsbot wrote:
| 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)
| dylan604 wrote:
| > 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.
| konschubert wrote:
| no, they are really more expensive.
| phatfish wrote:
| 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.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| And then there's the effect on property prices.
|
| 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.
| YossarianFrPrez wrote:
| 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.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| 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.
| pelorat wrote:
| 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.
| christkv wrote:
| Spain is the one the de densest countries if not the densest
| country in Europe. Most people live in flats in dense cities.
| ck45 wrote:
| No, it's not, it's number 27. See https://en.m.wikipedia.or
| g/wiki/Area_and_population_of_Europ...
| blahedo wrote:
| This is really a different notion of "density" than the
| gp is talking about---it averages over the whole country,
| including a lot of _very_ empty areas.
| FactKnower69 wrote:
| Wrong again. Why are France and Germany 2x as dense as
| Spain and the UK 3x as dense as Spain then?
| jvican wrote:
| It is most representative to look at the list of densest
| European cities.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_Union_citi
| es_...
|
| As you see, Spain has 12 cities among the top 38 cities
| in Europe. L'Hospitalet (an urban centre close to
| Barcelona) is densest than Paris.
| morsch wrote:
| 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.
| barrkel wrote:
| The question being raised in this thread is if Spain has
| dense housing. And it does. It's clearly very dense.
| morsch wrote:
| No. The assertion was that Spain as a whole is one of the
| most densly, if not _the_ most densly populated countries
| in Europe.
| barrkel wrote:
| 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).
| barrkel wrote:
| That's the wrong metric.
|
| 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.
| cs702 wrote:
| [Deleted]
|
| See LightHugger's comment and my response below:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40753303]
| LightHugger wrote:
| 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.
| cs702 wrote:
| _> This is red-baiting._
|
| Hmm...
|
| Looking at my comment with the benefit of hindsight, I
| think you're right.
|
| While I still think the mayor's decision is...
| shortsighted, I've deleted my comment, as I no longer think
| it contributes much to the discussion.
| chimpanzee wrote:
| 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.
| sangnoir wrote:
| > The math don't math. It's a drop in the bucket.
|
| 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.
| SeanAnderson wrote:
| 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?
| jll29 wrote:
| 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.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Tourism is a shit industry. You could mostly annihilate
| it and replace it with productive things most of the
| time.
| oyashirochama wrote:
| Tourism has its uses, and is a service industry like most
| modern country industries including most "productive"
| ones.
| syspec wrote:
| 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
| phatfish wrote:
| 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.
| kranke155 wrote:
| That's exactly right.
|
| 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.
| dnissley wrote:
| 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.
| mapcars wrote:
| > 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?
| kranke155 wrote:
| 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.
| robocat wrote:
| In New Zealand, Tourism gross operating surplus (profit)
| looks to be about 20% from graph in
| https://www.stats.govt.nz/information-releases/tourism-
| satel...
|
| 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.
| kranke155 wrote:
| 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
| Retric wrote:
| They don't need a long term solution.
|
| 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.
|
| https://datacommons.org/place/wikidataId/Q1492?utm_medium=e
| x...
| Nevermark wrote:
| Pricing isn't linear on the supply-demand curve.
|
| Small marginal improvements in tight supply can result in
| noticeable price drops.
|
| Which would certainly be welcome, even if greater supply still
| needs to be created.
| oliwarner wrote:
| 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.
| pera wrote:
| 5.8 million is actually the population of the entire province
| of Barcelona, the metro area is 3.3 million, and the city 1.6
| million:
|
| https://www.amb.cat/en/web/area-metropolitana/coneixer-l-are...
|
| https://www.ine.es/jaxiT3/Datos.htm?t=2861
| sfifs wrote:
| 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.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| This reads like the Nirvana Fallacy to me [0].
|
| 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.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
| briankelly wrote:
| 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.
| pchristensen wrote:
| 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.
| seydor wrote:
| Also airbnbs aren't built/renovated to be family residences
| bedobi wrote:
| dunning kruger in full effect here
|
| prices are set on the margin
|
| this _will_ have an effect on them (and thank you for
| apparently admitting that possibility after the replies)
| leononame wrote:
| 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.
| zrn900 wrote:
| > 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."
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/askspain/comments/1833ub1/comment/k...
|
| https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/travel/2023/10/09/fed-u...
|
| 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.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| welcome to the real world, I guess, for these people? if your
| city is cheap by global standards then wealth will move in.
| it's quite simple really.
| racional wrote:
| _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.
| EasyMark wrote:
| 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.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Everyone wants to legislate free housing for themselves.
| NoLinkToMe wrote:
| 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.
| wslh wrote:
| 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?
| Frieren wrote:
| 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.
| wslh wrote:
| 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?
|
| How will you separate it into two types?
| diggan wrote:
| > 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.
| jltsiren wrote:
| 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.
| thr0waway001 wrote:
| Ya listening Canada? This is how it's done.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| Canada needs to relax their zoning policies a lot and build a
| ton more buildings. People mostly want to be in one of 3
| destinations in Canada:
|
| * Vancouver
|
| * Toronto
|
| * Montreal
|
| Which is where high paying jobs are, and which are mostly zoned
| for houses.
| LegitShady wrote:
| 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.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I honestly think we need:
|
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-
| of-...
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| So, basically, make landownership practically illegal except
| for primary housing?
| jmyeet wrote:
| 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.
| elforce002 wrote:
| I'm in favor of Responsible Capitalism. What we're seeing
| with Airbnb is all but that.
| currymj wrote:
| 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.
| dindobre wrote:
| You nailed it with the resource curse.
| matwood wrote:
| 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.
| zrn900 wrote:
| 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."
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/askspain/comments/1833ub1/comment/k...
| visarga wrote:
| 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.
| switch007 wrote:
| Ada Colau yapped about Airbnb too. She was Mayoress for 8 years.
| And the problem seems to only be worse
|
| Maybe it's a bigger problem than Airbnb?
| codemac wrote:
| This sounds silly.
|
| 70% is ~5.4% yearly, 40% is 3.4% growth yearly. Seems, fine?
|
| These are incredibly reasonable growth rates. Am I missing
| something?
| codemac wrote:
| For comparison, 2012-2019 in SF was 88% growth over 7 years, or
| >9% year over year growth.
| salamo wrote:
| Hostels and hotels are strictly better in my opinion. I stayed in
| a hostel in Barcelona. A group of us went to a football game and
| had a great time.
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| 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.
| elnatro wrote:
| 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.
| zrn900 wrote:
| > 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.
| elnatro wrote:
| 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.
| SaintSeiya wrote:
| 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.
| nhggfu wrote:
| any legit + non-paywall source? [this outlet will publish
| anything for $, so not even a "trusted source"]
| Gimpei wrote:
| 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.
| ur-whale wrote:
| What could possibly go wrong ?
|
| 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.
| LegitShady wrote:
| >foster a huge black market
|
| 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.
| keb_ wrote:
| 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."
| zrn900 wrote:
| It got worse now.
|
| https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/travel/2023/10/09/fed-u...
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Who cares? That is just some random loser who wrote that, who
| knows how long ago.
| t43562 wrote:
| 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.
| GenerWork wrote:
| 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.
| nmeofthestate wrote:
| 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.
| GenerWork wrote:
| 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.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Four year window for licenses to expire. Good time to get a pied
| a terre there. Should be fun!
| rock_artist wrote:
| Anyone knows how much of Barcelona's municipal revenue is
| originated from tourists directly and indirectly?
| johnp314 wrote:
| 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."
| nayuki wrote:
| Oh The Urbanity! - Vacation Rentals vs. Affordable Living: The
| AirBnB Dilemma: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1VeEGCzqn4
| verteu wrote:
| Nice video. To summarize the linked studies:
|
| 1) The effects of tourism on housing prices: applying a
| difference-indifferences methodology to the Portuguese market.
| https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/IJHMA-04...
|
| > 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)
|
| 2) The impact of Airbnb on residential property values and
| rents: Evidence from Portugal
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01660...
|
| > This article quantifies the impact of Airbnb's short-term
| rentals on housing affordability in Portugal.
|
| > We find that on average a 1pp increase in a municipality
| Airbnb share results in a 3.7% increase in house prices.
| ilikeitdark wrote:
| 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.
| SergeAx wrote:
| 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.
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