Comment by moksly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moksly | Hacker News Reader

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We used to have a good way to regulate the amount of tourists in specific areas, called city planning.

Maybe it’s a well known fact, but I didn’t personally know this before I started working at a municipality, but there are entire departments who do nothing but plan. The best description of what they do, is that they play really complicated real world sim city, and at some level they draw “residential area”, “industry”, “commercial area”, “hotel” on a map, and those plans determine what we’re allowed to build on those locations.

If they plan correctly, there is a finite amount of hotels or holiday homes available in an area, and once those are full, the town or city can house no more tourists. This means that you could actually regulate how many people could physically visit London at any given time by limiting the amount of hotels and the amount of rooms a hotel was allowed to house with city planning.

Private rentals and popular apps to handle it, broke this system. At least until regulation catches up.

Tourist destinations being overrun predates Airbnb by several decades. Take Venice, it was operating at maximum hotel capacity for at least 30 years. What happened is people stay in neighboring cities and take the train or bus in, or arrive and sleep on cruise ships. It has much more to do with the increased number of people who can afford to travel. Take China alone. In 1990, the number of Chinese citizens who could afford to travel to Europe for vacation was probable in the tens of thousands. Now it is in the hundreds of millions. Add in low cost airfare, things like Ryan Air, and it is simply that more people are able to afford travel.

Being capped at maximum hotel capacity isn't a bad thing per-se because it gives some measure of control. AirBNB blew that up.

Yes, but being maxed at hotel capacity wasn't solving the the overcrowding problem. It was just pushing tourists further out of the city. It would be like trying to solve traffic in San Francisco by freezing housing construction - it just spreads the problem out over a larger area.

Here is a NY Times article from 1987 talking about the overcrowding problem and limiting the number of tourists in Venice.

https://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/08/world/venice-moves-to-lim...

I can only speak of Salzburg but at least there the issue that the city faces is the opposite, namely that a huge % of visitors are just in town for a couple of hours congesting the city while not consuming anything.

Is that because of Airbnb rentals, or just more tourists that are also chasing a more shallow experience? Snap a few photos and take the bus to the next stop. If I had to pick a tech product to blame, it would be Instagram, not Airbnb.

Thats just an untapped opportunity. How do they get there? It’s either bus, car, train, or plane. Raise fares or tax rentals so you can build to ease the burden from their traffic.

Is that what city planners do in tourist cities?

Maybe this is just an American thing, but city planners in the US generally do not do any of that -- they exist solely to help property developers and landowners generate as much wealth as possible, as quickly as possible, so that the city can capture as much of the tax-base growth as possible.

Effectively zero thought is given to people, how they could live, work, transport themselves, utility infrastructure, schools, or anything of that nature. Affordability especially -- how real people are supposed to afford any of this -- is never ever planned for.

Planners talk about this all the time, of course, and love the illusion that their work somehow solves these problems. But in truth, they don't. And usually, the results of their effort are slightly worse than prior.

The only things planners routinely accomplish, are things that privatize urban core's wealth for the wealthy and/or increase taxable value of acreage -- things that make cities more expensive and less hospitable to human life.

> If they plan correctly, there is a finite amount of hotels or holiday homes available in an area, and once those are full, the town or city can house no more tourists

Is there any city that actually follows this? In the US, any idea of capping growth like this would get you labeled "anti-business", "NIMBY", and "economically illiterate". Capitalism demands infinite growth forever indefinitely (literally every facet of the whole world is just a commodity to be 'supply vs demand-ed', dontcha-know?), and any plan that limits that in any way would be immediately be rejected by every professional planner in the nation.

> Is there any city that actually follows this?

Yes? Many European cities are quite busy banning private rentals and requiring owners to actually live in their apartments. In my country it’s even illegal for foreigners to buy vacation homes.

Legislation moves a lot slower than the market though.

> Many European cities are quite busy banning private rentals and requiring owners to actually live in their apartments. In my country it’s even illegal for foreigners to buy vacation homes.

Those all seem like really great ideas. I wish we had anything as strong/effective as that in the US.

Could you please name a few such cities/countries? Or, better yet, link to some sources?

I'm very interested in planning best practices and not sure how to google this.

Barcelona, Amsterdam.

Berlin have limited it too, it's something like you can rent out spare rooms but not whole apartments, unless they're only rented out for no more than 90 days per year.

In every city in the US you cannot just build a hotel on a plot you owned. It must be zoned for a hotel, and that zoning level will tell you how tall you can go and how much parking you are required to provide.

Growth is already capped in the U.S., your last paragraph doesnt make much sense. It’s also not government but the residents themselves who are to blame. Look at LA. Most of the city is low rise apartments or single family homes and there is a housing shortage pushing rents to astronomical levels. Developers want to make money by building supply to meet demand. They want to build towers. They want 2000 units in a parcel. They dont want to have to build 5 stories of subterranean parking. But the councilmans ear who can make these projects possible doesn't listen to the developers. A developer doesnt vote in the councilmans district. The NIMBYs who vote in council elections are the ones suing these projects for vaguely racist and myopic reasons, suing transit projects, suing infrastructure projects, burning precious public money in litigation hand over fist, and they get treated like princesses in council meetings because renters do not vote in LA, and who votes runs this city.

This is not how planners work in most of the US. You sound like you are angry at a specific city.

> but city planners in the US generally do not do any of that

N=1 here, but that's nonsense where I live. Both the city and county have 10 year plans which describe how the area looks, feels, how people live, etc. Any significant changes (such as re-zoning residential to industrial, whatever) requires changes to both the city and county plans to be approved. These things simply do not happen willy-nilly or just because it brings in money.

Keep in mind that this is not a particularly liberal / progressive area. Maybe there are some places like you describe, but in my experience that's been very much the exception, not the rule.

> Maybe this is just an American thing, but city planners in the US generally do not do any of that

Yes, they do. It maybe often be true that parties with intense financial interest like developers pay the most attention to, and provide the most input and pressure on, things like city/county General Plans, but those plans almost always address all those areas you suggest are not considered.

Well Airbnb may have merged some % of the "residential" and "hotel" zones, but until tourists decide to sleep in tents they still have some way of approximately controlling the number of people in the city.

"Number of people in the city", yes. But the relative percentages of tourists to locals, no. Which tends to be the problem. Tourists spend money differently and create different logistical issues than residents.

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