EU cities contemplate life with less Airbnb
politico.eu
politico.eu
Tourism can decrease housing supply, making is less affordable for long-term tenants. At the same time it can also increases city and local business revenues. This is a tradeoff that cities should consider and decide where they want to stand.
Of course if you have unbounded house construction policy, than tourism would not effect long-term housing prices much (Though it can impact price distribution in terms of location). But such policy might be impossible in historical city centers such as Paris where buildings have historical value, and are probably one of the reasons for tourism in the first place.
On the other hand, short-term housing, especially through things like Airbnb, can often be offered by people who just have a spare room and who otherwise would not bother renting it out. Allocating this type of housing to tourists might not hurt the housing market by a lot. (Though I do wonder what percentage of Airbnbs actually have such a situation)
How many percent of buildings have any significant historical value? Maybe 2%?
That's a false dichotomy. New buildings could replace old buildings while maintaining the same style.
>That's a false dichotomy. New buildings could replace old buildings while maintaining the same style.
If it's the same style, than it will have similar or the same occupancy. More dense housing will simply look different. It will have to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krak%C3%B3w_Old_Town
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/50.06160/19.93683
And "rebuild most of city due to tourism" has its own costs. I would prefer to simply have less of a tourism. For start remove nasty parts like stag/hen parties and people traveling here because alcohol is cheap, they are anyway providing only worst kind of jobs.
Maybe make city famous that being drunk, yelling and vomiting during night causes you to be stopped by police? And dumb parties of "rent a roofless car, drive around and be loud during middle of the night" type gets ruined?
I'm not sure what's the size of this effect though. I've heard people making comparisons like "1/3 of the apartments for rent at any given moment is short term"- which doesn't make sense, as it ignores the amount of properties rented for long term that are currently not on the market (while a short term rental is always on the market). What I think is that it makes owning a house more attractive, because the possibility of renting it out now and then lowers the cost of ownership. And thus it increases property values.
> Of course if you have unbounded house construction policy, than tourism would not effect long-term housing prices much
(1) How long-term? If it will take 20 years for correction to complete then it severely harms people living there right now.
> Though I do wonder what percentage of Airbnbs actually have such a situation
AFAIK right now it is tiny unimportant part.
AirBnB does not create value, it extracts it from communities. It's not the kind of startup anyone should be cheering on
Unfortunately a lot of interests are also aligned against increasing the supply of housing, because steadily rising house prices ironically reduces the incentive to build (no rush to build if your return from sitting on the land until a suitable amount of time before you want to exit can get you the same ROI), while a lot of home owners don't get that it is often in their interest too to see prices slowly and steadily drop rather than increase (most of us would love to be able to trade up, and so would benefit from prices dropping at a rate similar to typical mortgage repayment, but a lot of people see their house as an investment and get excited when it goes up - for my part I look at the houses that were GBP 400k when my house was 200k, which are now 800k while my house is 400k, and wish the prices had halved instead of doubled).
Airbnb is doing opposite, it displaces long-term rental by converting flats/apartments into hotels.
There were 12+ people staying there in an apartment meant for 2 - 4 people at most. And that was just one apartment in the building, I assume more apartments were converted in a similar fashion because that's easy money.
They certainly weren't up to fire code. There weren't any emergency lights that would go on during an emergency and mark the fire exits, because there were no fire exits. In the event of a fire, panicked people would fall all over themselves in the dark as they all scrambled to the only exit, and the mass of people would most likely block it.
That's how they're able to give "better value" for the same price or less.
* cheaper
* better location
* feels more like home / feels cleaner
* more space
* kitchen
There are other examples like islands where the tourist attractions were destroyed because of lack of regulations - Maya Bay in Thailand or Boracay island in Philippines were closed for extended periods of time. Now they need to figure out how to prevent the situations that led to those closures from happening again, and imposing some limits on number of tourists is one of the possibilities.
At couchsurfing the rating of a person was quite important, if you had a good rating (which meant you hosted people and let them have a good time), the chance of beeing accepted at other couches was higher. Thus, beeing a good host, maximised your chances to having extraordinary travel experiences yourself at other couchsurfing places. Additionally, couchsurfing was a place to find likeminded people and even create friendships.
At AirBnb your goal is to earn money and you don't care who is hosting you or who your guests are, as long as they follow the house rules.
But they could also be used by business travelers.
Tourism isn't a particularly profitable industry anyway.
AirBNB isn't essential, it's a middleman that provides booking and marketing. If the hammer came down and all they could do is list rentals that are actually legal, they'd wind up looking a lot like a better-designed Expedia. And honestly, that's probably fine.
I would appreciate some references.
if you think of all the ways you could make airbnb service better, you end up with a hotel, basically.
US: https://www.epi.org/publication/the-economic-costs-and-benef...
US: https://hbr.org/2019/04/research-when-airbnb-listings-in-a-c...
Barcelona: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009411902...
Berlin: https://www.iamexpat.de/housing/real-estate-news/study-airbn...
E.g. if Greece is the same price as south of France. People would just go to France.
Luxury goods can behave oddly, but in general demand is independent of supply. Restricting supply causes prices to rise, which lowers demand (at that high price). The underlying demand (at the lower price) remains constant.
What is more visible as due to COVID this flats become available for a normal rental.
Obviously AirBnB, booking.com are only one of factors.
so are hotels, parking lots, malls, and everything else that take space right?
Residents of a city (via local government) may have some influence on hotel/mall/parking lot construction but this fails when anyone may buy apartments and starts hotel there anyway.
Eurozone and US Central Bank policies are more-or-less "Cash is Trash" so markets react by throwing their savings at literally any asset that can, at least in theory, preserve value, including real estate.
Can you stay an entire month at a hostel? Usually not. It's also the end of the spectrum in terms of privacy, although there is couch surfing also.
Yes, you can. You can probably negotiate a lower rate if you're staying that long or longer.
Now people bought lifing flats and converted them to girls.
Home > travel
And for example refusing to fix sidewalks and having funds to advertise city as a tourism destination.
While hotels take over local cinemas, shops, apartments, restaurants and other objects used by local residents.
Airbnb and similar is making it more problematic - as something that was constructed as apartments may easily turn into a de facto hotel.
What is especially irritating for real residents in the same building.
What you describe is only profitable if lots of people want to travel to the destination and they can keep the properties busy (it's a lot of work). What I hear is "I don't like to travel as much as other people so I don't want to be inconvenienced by them, and I'd rather they don't get to travel."
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-11674-3_...
This has a real impact on the people that live in those cities. Without it, there would still have been plenty of people that wanted to travel to these places, but without part of the housing supply meant for citizens going to tourism, the price of a room would simply go up.
It is a lot of work, but not for the property owner if you just hire someone to manage the property. Short term rentals are far more profitable than long term rentals (even though most of it is adjusting for risk, for both vacancy and property damage).
It is a serious problem, especially in the current housing market, that people with marginally more access to capital are able to buy investment properties and take priority over people looking to buy their primary residence. Sellers are incentivized to take cash offers instead of financed ones.
We alll know corporations sole existence is making money, and most show zero restraint.
In the USA, foreigners can buy real estate with a click, or a phone call.
(I don't believe foreigners should be able to buy our land. Become a citizen first, but that's another matter.)
And yes---I don't want to live next to tourists, and short term renters.
There's a delicate balance in most neighborhoods. The last thing Americans need is rich guys buying up housing to rent short term.
The rentals are never near the mansions, so they don't care who's there.
In my county, one, or two towns (Sausalito, and Belvedere) stopped short term rentals. (I believe it's still in effect, but to tired to look it up?).
In a world with 10 years of pretty much global Quantitative Easing policies it's certainly not one company driving the trend here, but if it's a single company who happens to have an outsized negative effect for local residents with quasi institutional, short term rent which outprices any local regular rents.... yeah, I'd say that is an issue very well worth addressing.
As you say, there are two housing supplies in a city. One for long term residents and one for short term residents.
The larger the ratio of short term supply to long term supply, the lower the prices and the more people will have an opportunity to visit the city, while prices will rise for property overall (assuming the city refuses to build). The more you constrict the supply, you start pricing out visitors from poorer areas who could never afford to live in that city, even if short term housing was banned altogether.
Everyone wants to use an example to show how your policy helps the little guy, but the reality is that there are winners and losers on both sides. Arguably, the poorest are those who could never afford to live in the idyllic tourist hotspot in the first place, so you don't want them to ever get a chance to see it? The people making the biggest fuss about AirBnB always seem to be middle class NIMBY's.
Though, let's be realistic: zoning exists and building regulations are - very much unfortunately - a hot mess, and I guess it is a complex topic. As a society, we don't benefit from hyper growth which eventually and inevitably collapses, externalizing the cost of the cleanup to everyone. I guess the Financial Crisis - caused by housing (!) - showed that quite clearly.
I hear your NIMBY sentiment and again, agree on that one, but I guess it's clear that both extremes are not beneficial: Neither totally uncontrolled building nor totally forbidden short term renting is optimal.
So what about finding a compromise of limiting short term rentals to allow for the possibility, but make it unattractive for institutional business sharks and probably much more attractive for the average Jane and Joe? Still not perfect, but I can much more get behind that idea.
AirBnb is all about making profit by externalitising the cost to someone else.
I do not mind sharing neighborhood with tourists. I'm happy to have a hotel across the street, in fact I had 2 hotels within 50m of my last place and I didn't mind it, even if it was occasionally quite noisy in the evenings.
What I do not want to share with tourists is the floor in the residential building where I live, and that's a big difference.
I think the future will have a place for people who do not want to buy or rent a place long-term. #vanlife is already starting to spread throughout the world, but I think airbnb hopping will become much more prevalent as well.
While there were downsides: we often didn't have friends in the places we visited, and we couldn't travel with all of our stuff -- the experiences and memories we've had made this a worthy thing to do.
This is really something that I don't think would have been possible before AirBnB, the same way travelling the world wouldn't have been possible without the B2C'ization of flying.
The biggest issue in housing is governments blocking construction to enrich existing residents.
Without fixing that, nothing can change. You can only create short-term slight easing.
I wonder - Why would they do that...
Also, it seems to me that AirBnB has democratized micro hotels at the cost of unattainable housing for would be residents. I feel conflicted using the service the more I see its impact.
How is this relevant? Not everyone wants children
This debate reminds of people complaining that they couldn't bring their kids in a bar...
The point is we have a limited resource (housing) to be divided up. Allowing (including by not banning via new laws) AirBnB to exist skews the housing market in one direction.
I still don't get how it hurts family life, you can just choose not to do it.
> The point is we have a limited resource (housing) to be divided up. Allowing (including by not banning via new laws) AirBnB to exist skews the housing market in one direction.
You had it right in the first sentence, currently housing is the bottleneck in some cities that refuse to build more (like SF). I think anger should be directed there, not at people who want to travel and stay at someone's place instead of a hotel.
The market is how we as a society value collectively decide which things are more valuable than others. If hosting on Airbnb is more profitable than traditional rental in a given market, that means that Airbnb is the more valuable use of limited land and building space. Who are these anti-Airbnb activists to decide that they know better than the market what's important?
Our prosperity as a society depends on allocating scarce resources to their "highest and best" uses. Banning economic activity on the grounds of badfeels makes us all worse off.
The notion of prosperity measured only by who can afford to pay the most is one that would make most of us miserable, to the extent that we've over time increasingly restricted what you can your way out of because of the massive harm it does to people.
Consider that your body parts are scarce resources. Do you think the prosperity of society depends on them going to the highest bidder?
Then they can out-bid the Airbnb people. How much you pay is an expression of much you care. That's the whole point of having prices. Prices haven't done "harm" to people: they've given us the modern world!
Your strategy will only kill cities. Nobody but tourists and the very rich would be able to live there. Then the tourists would stop coming because everything is dirty and nobody sells anything, and then the city is dead.
Votes are an expression of how much people care too. That's the whole point of having votes.
I have also never once come across this argument without it turning out that the person making it have not thought it through or are disingenuous. Pretty much nobody wants all constraints taken away and everything left to the free market.
Put another way: If I bought all the land around your place and denied you passage, you'd starve to death soon enough. Or I could just store open vats of toxic chemicals on the neighbouring property. Or a million other things that we regulate away because society have seen the harm that allowing price to control everything does.
Are you aware that some countries are poor? And people living there will be unable to pay as much as tourist from USA?
This seems like the worst kind of "because we can" meddling.
I could imagine if, say, someone were running a call center or mini-factory in their home; there is an argument (although one I do not make) for zoning. Simply using a residential unit or building for residing by people, however, shouldn't be any business of anyone but the people so residing or the people who own/rent the space.
Honestly it’s very easy to find explanations of the problems from different perspectives if you google. (I’m on mobile)
There's also just a raw market concern: using housing stock + AirBnB as an investment/storage for wealth has serious effects on the ability of people to live in these communities. The market is amoral; it's up to us to elect leaders who constrain it with rules that reflect our values.
To believe that you have some right to control the events in the home of another person (that doesn't affect you) is the part that, to me, is entirely amoral. There is no reasonable basis for it, in my view.
Substitute "having boarders" with "having kinky/non-heteronormative sex" or any other thing the neighbors would object to that doesn't affect them and isn't their business to see where I'm coming from.
It then gets comical when people try to use the "threat of violence" right libertarian mantra in defence of property.
If this use did not impact neighbours, I'd be entirely with you, but it does affect neighbours. You're arguing you should have a right to harm others, while they should have no recourse.
Both of the cities in which I live are huge tourist destinations and maybe the harm you are describing is totally invisible or something, but I haven't seen or experienced it, or known anyone else who has, despite living in the ground-zero neighborhoods for such things.
I certainly don't believe anyone has a right to infringe upon the quiet enjoyment of anyone else at home.
Good for you that you've not been affected. Lots of other people have, and you're arguing for depriving them of quiet enjoyment of their homes because you want people to be free to ignore the effects of their own actions on others.
Incidentally I'd be all for supporting proposals to zone to allow unrestricted tourist rentals in certain places if there's demand for it. But I sure as hell would never live in such a zone.
I think the burden of proof lies on the people who are claiming that this isn't hotel and tax protectionism.
If there is a big market for totally deregulated cities, I'm all for some cities choose to make residential areas free-for-all. But I certainly wouldn't want to move to a place like that.
If it's noise, there are already rules and enforcement mechanisms for noise that can be used.
But also e.g. increased traffic is a consideration many places, as well as simply reduced affordability for people actually connected to the place and working there.
People also pick places to live based on other factors, such as e.g. distance to schools and the like, and having density of actually available residential units driven down as such can be massively damaging to local communities, as well as drive up the costs of provisioning services as a result.
Quite the contrary; I moved out of my last Berlin flat due to precisely this. Apparently uncontrolled children are a free pass to avoid any sort of noise control regulations applied to buildings.
Reduced affordability is a function of supply and demand. If a place is in high demand, it is natural and expected for it to cost more to live there.
You used the right-wing libertarian threat of violence trope earlier, but ignored when I pointed out libertarianism has it's origin in going further than anarchism in rejecting property rights based on a similar line of thinking: that property rights only exists as a deviation from the natural by threat of violence.
This notion that arbitrary subjective political views are "natural" is pretty much always an attempt at waving away objections.
In this case to others it is "natural" that we should put the ability of inhabitants of a city to afford to live there ahead of maximising profit, and that using property rights in contravention of that is a demonstration of how property rights reduces freedom.
* privately owned/controlled real property
* market-based pricing
You have mischaracterized my views ("right-wing libertarian"), and seem to have misunderstood what I was pointing out. It isn't my view that prices should naturally increase as demand does: that is the view of the society and housing market under discussion, as that is how it operates today, and the system that both the hotels and AirBnB services in those markets operate within.
> You have mischaracterized my views ("right-wing libertarian")
I referred very specifically to the appeal to violence, which is a very distinctly right-libertarian argument.
> It isn't my view that prices should naturally increase as demand does: that is the view of the society and housing market under discussion, as that is how it operates today, and the system that both the hotels and AirBnB services in those markets operate within.
Except society is not static, and part of the view of society is that regulations are under the purview of democratically elected governments, with the power to restrict how such services operate.