Airbnb removes 80% of advertisements in Amsterdam after registration obligation
ruetir.com
ruetir.com
While many of the efficiencies and attractions of re-inventing various businesses for the "digital age" seem genuine, their deployment within a fog of regulatory risk seems like a lose-lose proposition for anybody but the most short-term minded.
Well here is the thing, in my country the majority of Airbnb rental are(at least were) illegal. Authorities knew this but hypocritically, illegal rentals were good for tourism, so the state cracked down on a few illegal rentals, for the example, while allowing 99% of them. This is regulatory arbitrage.
Uber on the other hand, didn't have the same luck since legal taxi drivers started to beat up Uber drivers so Uber quickly shut down their operation, as they were running illegal taxis and they couldn't have their cake and eat it too with the justice system... Sometimes it does backfire.
One of the reasons why all these SV tech business got away with it is the fact that they are all located in US, only the landlord or the driver are taking real risks legally. As I said before, if I tried such an operation in my own country, I'll be shut down in no time and sent straight to jail for running illegal hotels. "it's just an app" wouldn't work.
I still think that my government could have banned these apps if they really wanted to at first place, they are so eager to shutdown torrent/illegal VOD websites for instance, but they didn't.
Who's going to go file a complain? Uber running illegal taxis? Judges looking into this would be delighted for Uber to get a local presence in order for them to file a complain so the police could arrest a few of their executives...
In English "advise", alas, not used in the common language in regards to mail, like it is used in Polish (and Czech?).
Collins ...in British English (əˈvaɪzəʊ) - NOUN
"a boat carrying messages; a dispatch-boat"
You dont know how much you will pay (their estimates are always too low) and the first questions by the driver are to check if you know the town. If you dont sound like a local, then they will drive you through the longest route possible. And worst: you can do nothing about it. No way to report the licensed driver. Before uber it was like a license to steal.
In uber you can give 1 star - so the cheaters dont get any customers + you have some idea of price and route.
Or the taxi driver can be made aware of the bad reviews and they'd have to do a deal with the app user, e.g. a fixed price with a 20% discount, for a fair review. (Rough idea, there are probably bigger issues when you're dealing with crooked drivers).
For whatever reason, in the US the crowd self-selected towards the immigrant population, whereas in many less developed countries it went towards the bare knuckle boxing type of crowd. No wonder that the latter didn't hesitate to use their knuckles on Uber drivers, whereas in the US that rarely ever happened.
Well, they could still be (at the very least) prohibited from operating in your country.
Sadly, most of these services (Airbnb, Uber) were also illegal here in the US, but for "some reason" (aka lots and lots of $$$), no one ever bothered enforcement against them. Eventually they spent enough money on bribes^H^H^H^H^H^H lobbying to legalize themselves.
(Then, of course, at least in the case of Uber and friends, once they were established they quietly raised prices and reduced driver income, which were the very reasons the short-sighted public liked them so much.)
I can say I loved Uber et al primarily because unlike any experiences I ever had with calling a taxi, a car actually showed up to bring me to my destination.
If I correctly interpret your definition of “the public” to mean “the common men and women using these services”: it’s a bit unfair to give them the blame, rather than pursue a failure of regulators or regulations.
Before UberX was a thing I was paying more for Ubers than for cabs because I would get actual, quality service that way. The SF cab industry abused its regulatorily privileged position. If that industry (or their regulators) had enforced even basic decency and respect for their customers, there would've been no need for Uber in the first place.
It worked for the hotel and taxi industry, seems a logical way to succeed for Uber and Airbnb in the same domains.
The way it works is, you think I'll just Uber/Lyft to meet my friends. So you order one say 20 minutes before you're supposed to meet only to find an extremely high price. You pay it so you're not late but then you also vow to plan ahead so you never have to take it again. I haven't taken one since I was burned in June. Another friend got burned last month and I'd guess he's likely to not take another either.
To your second point, there are still scheduling options, "wait + save" where they do offer pickup 20 min from now and locking in your price, but... if you are using those features couldn't you also use the bus?
I don't see any of your problems steering you back towards taxis, especially in SF where they were AWFUL (can't say if they have improved in the last 7 years)
This is (usually) a better situation than when you're burned by phone dispatched taxi than never comes. At least you got where you were going.
In my country taxi drivers also started to beat up Uber drivers, but it backfired hard on them, it only reinforced the notion that taxi drivers are dangerous, not to be trusted (after all, if they are the kind of person capable of randomly assaulting business competitor, they certainly are capable of assaulting a client in a disagreement, so why would I risk ride with them?), so the beatings helped steer the public opinion in favour of Uber, resulting in the legalization of Uber. Also, in my country breaking a minor (administrative/civil) law doesn't mean you are not protected by more important criminal law, so the victim Uber drivers did seek criminal charges against the offending Taxi drivers.
Interestingly, in the aftermath, the taxi lobby (which used to be fiercely anti-consumer) worked to reform taxi laws to be much more pro-consumer in order to compete with Uber, they lowered their prices, removed the ridiculous accessory fees (extra for baggage, extra for more than 2 passengers, ...), added a requirement for background checks for drivers (this was a important one), gps tracking of cars, ... . So official taxis actually got much better due to Uber.
"[I]n recent years the realisation has dawned that what’s good for Silicon Valley is not always good for everyone. What started with scrappy upstarts promising to make the world a better place has morphed into something more sinister: a pantheon of faceless multinationals who collectively dominate the world’s digital infrastructure, flouting regulations, avoiding taxes, and taking advantage of precarious labour to make a small number of people tremendously wealthy."
right, yeah, so others are dumb and you're enlightened?
> It hasn't "morphed" into anything. It always was a way to easy money (while lying through their teeth)
i don't get comments like yours. i'm sharing this quote because i like that whole article by Wendy Liu. Wendy agrees with you, and so do i. so why not just read it? your comment comes across know-it-all-y and bitter.
Tell me again how Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Facebook were "easy money"
The devil personified in here, Mark Zuckerberg turned down the most "easy money" ever. 1 billion in cash for a couple years old company with an unproven business model, very few paying customers and no moat to speak of.
You gotta choose one, if extreme luck is involved in the process then it's not "easy" because it could have gone the other way as well, and the protagonists knew it too, but still decided to step into the arena.
We all know what happened to Digital Equipment which was the "easy money" company for the longest time.
Kodak? What happened to that "easy money printing machine"
Xerox anyone?
The reality is that you either die as a hero or live long enough to become the villan.
So now the villans are Bezos, Gates and Zuckerberg. Jobs and Allen died so they are the dear heroes who we miss and things would be much better if they were here today.
Musk is the hero charging on his white horse right now, but unless he OD's on that pure cartel coke he snorts or blows up together with one of his rockets , I expect the tide to turn against him violently and suddenly.
Then it's the turn of the crypto guys such as Brian Armstrong and Vitalik to have their moment of glory, and on and on and on.
No, you can make very easy money playing the lotto. All you have to do is give the gas station guy $2 and you're a billionaire. Just because you're the one who got lucky doesn't mean it's hard work or anything.
> Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born in White Plains, New York, on May 14, 1984,[9] the son of psychiatrist Karen (née Kempner) and dentist Edward Zuckerberg.[10] He and his three sisters (Arielle, businesswoman Randi, and writer Donna) were raised in a Reform Jewish household[11][12] in Dobbs Ferry, New York.[13] His great-grandparents were Austrian, German, and Polish Jews.
Sounds like the typical HN contributor to be honest.
Anyway, I agree with your stated point that children of rich people are "merely" risking a few years of hard work and an opportunity cost of a few hundred thousand dollars when they found companies, and disagree with the possibly unintended insinuations that children of rich people can't work hard because they have a safety net, that facebook was an easy success, etc etc.
did you really just try to defend the children of billionaires?
It's been a scourge on my small town. We were down to 0.01% vacancy. People were renting porches in a desperate attempt to find a roof over their heads and not pay $2,000 for the porch.
Obviously, if we just get rid of regulations entirely, the corruption problem will be solved.
.. or maybe the carton of milk i buy can now kill me.
Arbitrage offers exposure to a world without some regulation and people can decide if they like that or not.
There's nothing wrong with being a cultural hot-ground, a travel destination, a mindshare icon... but turning a city into an intensive farming Disneyland is another thing.
This is especially designed around the distributed hotel business model, for which the previous tracking and enforcement infrastructure was not qualified for.
I think the problems wasn‘t that they were not paying taxes, but that they operated private apartments as hotels without permission.
If you must compete, you must avoid taxes, thus cheat.
Ceteris Paribus is a thing in economics. Basically what he means is that if you optimize everything in your business, all that remains is what is outside the bounds of the law, if you cheat, you'll win, basically forcing the other to cheat as well.
Also, all big businesses cheat tax, either by using creative licensing agreements between subsidiaries or by miscategorizing things. This isn't new.
Your proposition that to compete I must cheat doesn't stand up. Individuals chose airbnbs based on quite a few variables. The only time things are going to be equal is if the units for rent are identically positioned, decorated to same standard, have the same furniture and appliances.
I agree, I mentioned this in my previous comment. >[...] Basically what he means is that if you optimize everything in your business [...]
Ceteris Paribus is a theoretical exercise or tool, if you will, but it is useful in trying to understand one of the variables involved in a calculation.
We're not disagreeing here, you don't have to cheat, nor should you, but if both of you had clone apartments one in front of the other but your neighbor doesn't pay tax, he's going to get picked first, every time.
What we found surprised all of them. A handful of people were listing sometimes over a dozen properties and avoiding the larger, but not optional, hotel tax. The 80% figure doesn’t surprise me much now just knowing how a few individuals can flood the short-term rental market in an area.
And, if it's like some cities (Dublin, Galway), they do this at the expense of the long-term rental market.
A common strategy in Irish government is if there's a problem, and you don't really want to do anything but want to make it look like you're doing something, then you give it to local government to implement, as they won't have the resources to do it.
As a bonus, you get to point to the law, secure in the knowledge that it won't be implemented.
Is there any western city where there isn't a housing crisis?
I don't want to sound too radical, but this seems to be inextricably connected to capitalism. We won't ever solve it without structural changes.
What Amsterdam is doing is a decent start at least.
Given this, any "solution" to housing affordability is "solving" a problem that a sizable and highly influential segment of the population doesn't want solved. On the contrary, you see real government action whenever home prices fall.
Get rid of the coercion and you get rid of the problems.
In the US, our shortsightedness has begun threatening the lower-middle class. People with some cash in the bank are facing homelessness, due to a historic lack of housing. The housing shortage came following dozens of contributors including NIMBY, AirBnB, single-use zoning, tunnel-vision'd pols/voters, corp house buyers, etc. Pointing to a single factor delays solutions.
The mechanism they all use for that is restrictive zoning. To win that you have to defeat them all. That's why it's hard to do.
Having failed to actually solve the problem, some people have had the idea to foist it onto someone else. Restrict who you can rent to, so people can't buy a property and use it for vacation rentals, on the theory that it will shift supply to long-term rentals. Then that makes the problem worse for short-term rentals, creating an incentive for regulatory arbitrage by AirBNB. Then long-term renters condemn AirBNB for thwarting their attempt to shift costs onto people who can't vote in the jurisdiction with the zoning problem.
All of that is bike shedding and friendly fire. The only real solution is to increase the housing supply.
That would be why I made the point repeatedly that it isn't any one factor that got us here and cautioned against trying to frame it that way.
If housing prices are too high, landlords will want them to stay high. You can say that it's male landlords and female landlords and gay landlords and redneck landlords and atheist landlords and thin landlords and fat landlords and look how many factors there are. But you're just bisecting the group "existing property owners" along arbitrary lines that have nothing to do with anything.
Finish paying mortgage, use the equity to buy a house 20 years ago and rent it out. Rent income > mortgage interest (and capital too)
House price increases, use equity to buy a few more houses.
Fast forward to today, you have 3 million in equity and 10k/month coming in after costs.
Houses were the most commonly owned assets, so governments that increased the price of housing made most of the middle class richer, making those policies popular.
Re-formulating the above, making housing expensive is popular policy.
Doing that policy long enough causes new entrants into the market to not be able to afford housing. So yes, there is something wrong with our housing system. Part of that is that we marketed 'own your house' as a great way to earn money, and then made good on that promise at the expense of new entrants into the market.
[0]: https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/
You won't make SV money but cost of living is unreal. I pull well over the 6 figure mark while getting to put ~60% of my take-home pay straight into savings and investments. And I'm not even close to frugal.
Today its dealing with the crisis, tomorrow its something else. I don't know how prevalent this thinking is but it could be on peoples minds as they look at property.
Once you account for some states have terrible weather, dysfunctional state governments, higher property taxes, etc. it might not make sense to trade a a net 20% change in overall CoL if it means you have significantly less to do. If your first thoughts are kids, pets, and gardening than sure the midwest is pretty good. If your primary concerns are career advancement, educated social/dating pool, variety in food and music, niche/luxury hobbies like skiing or surfing, etc. then your options for places to live becomes essentially drastically smaller and more competitive.
That said there are certain midwest cities that might strike a good balance.
The benefits of not being a tourist destination
Yes, the rest of the country is like this too, but for whatever reason Galway seems to have it extra bad; I know families that have split up over it.
It's infuriating that we let companies like this be founded on completely illegal premises and continue operating.
Is that not always the case with these American marketplace apps? Now that the property owners have to follow the rules, they have the same burden as the real hotels, but none of the economy of scale.
Same with all the places where they make Uber drivers be actual taxi drivers in actual taxis. Then all of a sudden they are competing directly against some very large, established players who have the market pretty well figured out already.
In some cities, pre-Uber taxi companies have upped their game and got themselves apps that'll give you a price and wait time both of which are actually right, that let you see the taxi on its way to you, tip included in the price, and let you pay by card.
In other cities, taxi operators provide shitty service where their card machine "doesn't work" and they "don't have any change" either.
On the flipside, I've actually never had a taxi driver do any of those things to me, although they sure do lie through their teeth.
(NOTE: I'm not intending to imply that it is the case here: I have no idea what the situation is in Amsterdam in this regard)
People do, and people get caught. Both have happened to people I knew.
There is not a big tourist tax here; the biggest tax evasions for private people is probably on their income tax level, but that's not solved by this.
The direct issue it addresses is the take over of many tourists of certain neighborhoods meant for living.
The favorite hobby of habitants of Amsterdam is complaining about tourists.
The fight against Airbnb is a symbolic fight for the left winged parties in the city. Airbnb stands for big bad capitalistic wolf that makes the city unlivable for the normal people.
The issue this bigger fight addresses is that Amsterdam is slowly becoming unaffordable for normal people and especially families. Tourist rentals are partly to blame, but there are many more causes (low interest rate, rich parents, students, limited space and more)
So there are a bunch of restrictive legislations trying to deal with this, this is just one of them. Another one for instance is that since last year it's required to have a permit if you want to live in a house with more then 2 adults.
Already for years it was required to register every night you rented out your appartment. Airbnb however refused to open the books so there was no way to check it for the city. Probably this way Amsterdam can check every registered appartment that's publically listed without the help of Airbnb.
Seriously? Numbers I just googled show like 10-20 million tourists vs a metro population of 2.5 million and you guys have some of the highest taxes in the world? Why are you taxing yourself so much when you can tax the tourists because it is pretty much the opposite in most tourist places in the US?
I moved to Amsterdam from NYC, and honestly the taxes are about the same, with NY city and state taxes taken into account.
As an example, a person making $100,000 would pay $22,754 in florida whereas someone in the netherlands making €86,176 would pay €32,989 in income taxes. Then you also need to factor in the 21% vat vs 6% sales tax. Also gas is $3.179 a gallon vs €7.158 a gallon. That's a pretty big tax difference!
That is just bullshit. The people complaining about their AirBnB neighbours are mostly in Zuid. Definitely in not Social housing.
Please don't start projecting left/right schoolyard tribe politics in an international context. You embarrass our country.
Usage of the phrase "left" and "right" is already dumb when Americans do it. But at least with their first past the pole democracy it is somewhat fitting.
We have many political parties that differ in more than one dimension. From immigration to taxation to gay rights.
Just go back to Dumpert already.
This confusion is understandable, but liberals never cared about the working middle class. Its just that in the US, the democratic party is a big tent of liberals, socialists and progressives, and the other side is a big tent of evangenicals, libertarians and conservative.
The ones that (claim to) care about the working class are the socialists. Liberalism comes from the French revolution, and is exported to the world through Amsterdam (appropiate in this topic!) and its value system is the foundation of modern day capitalism and enterpreneurship by free individuals (no matter how you pray or what you say) in a republic (every vote equal). So standard, you take it for granted.
You find the same disconnect between values in the other tent. Libertarians preaching small government for a republic ticket, even though every republican president has ended up spending more money than any president before.
One of the big downsides of first-past-the-pole is that a political world simplified to just two sides, doesn't do most people justice. Don't vote for the democrats if you want socialism. Don't vote for the republicans if you want libertarianism.
Evangelicals and progressives on the other hand, can do bussiness with the liberals and conservatives, since what they want isn't incompatible. Liberals hear progressives talk about 'inclusion' and they hear 'more customers' (hello, rich gay couples) or 'cheap labour' (hello, poor immigrants) and they get all wet in their stock portfolio.
Sidenote: If you ever wonder what America would look like when its just libertarians and socialists having to come together .. its called Burning Man, where autonomous libertarians feed socialist hippies, without liberal transactions or conservative judgment.
And indeed I wrote it in a way that complaining people led to the fight against Airbnb but I think there are many more reasons. GroenLinks ideology is definitely not caused by that to be sure.
And whether you agree with their policies or not. It's hard to argue against that they at least have made some symbolic political moves, for instance the removal of Iamsterdam because the I was to indivualistic.
Kinda counterproductive, no?
I'm generally not a fan of the word "sustainable" so I won't use the phrase "sustainable tourism", but it behooves cities (and countries) to find a balance between making themselves attractive to tourists and making sure that the costs of tourism don't exceed the benefits.
Tourism should allow tourists to experience a different place and everything that it's home to (the people, the food, the culture, etc.). When places fundamentally change in an effort to serve tourists, you basically have what I like to call "Disneyland syndrome". They become artificial destinations and the interests of the people who live there are sacrificed to create an optimal experience for the guests.
Airbnb is a parasite and one of the first things cities should look at when rethinking their tourism strategies.
I always said this. Italy is addicted to tourism, an addiction that so far has only benefitted a few, while impacting negatively the majority of the population.
As someone who has traveled extensively, I agree entirely about "disneyland syndrome", and I'm one of those travelers that tries to avoid such things. I generally don't travel to places which are tourist destinations, in the first place. Regardless, my mode of travel is to try to meet people, stay long enough that I can live normally as a local, mostly buy groceries and cook, and work during the week only going out in the evenings and weekends.
AirBnB is essential to the way I travel, because it allows me to rent an apartment for a month that has normal apartment amenities like a basic kitchen. Many of the places I've visited have few or no hotels. One place I actually did stay in a hotel... the only hotel in the entire town, which also had the only restaurant in the entire town in it. In communities like this, someone offering you a room in their home or letting you rent their apartment while they are away is a critical pathway to being able to travel there in the first place and I don't think attracts the sort of people expecting a packaged experience.
From my perspective, AirBnB has enabled me and others like me to connect to the world and experience things that would be impossible otherwise, and at the same time has provided opportunities for those we interacted with along the way (I leveraged my network while traveling to help many of the people I met, connecting a budding craft brewer with resources to help them succeed, introducing a very good local photographer to english-language resources online to let them sell their photography, connecting someone who wanted to come to the US as an SWE with the right people so they could get hired and have their H1B sponsored, etc).
It's not really AirBnB, or rather what AirBnB is in essence, that's the issue, it's that it creates and enables a pathway for individuals to skirt location regulations to make a profit. Many of the places I visited had no regulations against short-term rentals because the idea that someone might do such a thing wasn't really on the mind of local regulators, but in key tourist destinations this is very much on the mind of local regulators, not the least of which because they can tax tourism directly via stays.
The thing is that as a tourist/traveler, it's not all about you (or me). You need to consider and be respectful of the impact your experience can have on the very locals you want to live like.
Your desire to have a kitchen is reasonably not more important than a local's desire to not see the apartment next to them converted into a illegal short-term rental where random strangers routinely come and go, or to be priced out of the market because it's more profitable for landlords to convert properties into illegal short-term rentals.
Incidentally, "living like a local" is about more than having a kitchen and this is in my opinion one of the most overused terms among the nomad set, but that said, if you really want to stay somewhere longer term and have a visa that lets you do so, you can try to rent a property legitimately. In fact, finding a legitimate rental, meeting a landlord, signing a lease, etc. is a perfect opportunity to "live like a local".
> Many of the places I've visited have few or no hotels. One place I actually did stay in a hotel... the only hotel in the entire town, which also had the only restaurant in the entire town in it. In communities like this, someone offering you a room in their home or letting you rent their apartment while they are away is a critical pathway to being able to travel there in the first place and I don't think attracts the sort of people expecting a packaged experience.
As you said, some places don't even have regulations because they don't see many tourists. It's one thing to show up in a town that's off the beaten track and be introduced to someone who will rent you a room for a few nights. It's another to have property owners interested in maximizing their earnings advertising their property to every Tom, Dick and Harry using the internet.
How are you not Tom, Dick or Harry? When I first started traveling, I believed the "I'm different" thing too, but it's a bit hubristic. Tourists come in all shapes and sizes these days and there are a lot of location-independent folks ("nomads") who will move around every few weeks or months, not days.
In my experience, most "off the beaten path" places that have Airbnb listings almost always have at least one legitimate hotel, hostel, or homestay. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that most places that have Airbnbs aren't nearly as "off the beaten path" as you're telling yourself.
I think that's kind of my whole point, to some degree. In the Age of the Internet, the world is more connected than it has ever been before, which means the path is less beaten by roadways than it is by wires and signals from wireless towers. If a place has any form of reasonable Internet connectivity, it's probably not really that far "off the beaten path", but that's also essential as a basis for any reasonable accommodation. So, no, I'm not visiting remote tribes in the Amazonian jungle, but I also wouldn't for many reasons including ethical considerations. Visiting a rural village in the countryside of a country not known for tourism, but that nevertheless has broadband Internet, is not as far off the beaten path, but it is still outside the awareness of typical tourists.
The world being more connected is generally a good thing, and I'd say a net good, but it's not all roses and cherries, and in fact there are many negative externalities to this connectivity as well. AirBnB provides people a way to arbitrage those externalities, but it's not wholly evil either, it also has positive attributes that can benefit both parties.
On the whole, Airbnb is a parasite. Those "off the beaten track" places we're talking about (where, again, legitimate hotels, hostels and homestays are typically available as well) almost certainly account for a very small part of Airbnb's listings, bookings and revenue.
The high-volume locations (think cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam) have experienced significant damage as a result of Airbnb.
That's the stance I fully despise. My country (Russia) has suffered tremendously (and still does, 100 years later) because people sharing such ideas took power, killing dozens of millions in the process.
If the solution is that then why the rich oppose the increase of minimum wage? What should be the solution to making workers wealthier without touching the bosses? The stock market? After all the crashes and wealth theft of funds? Do you guys ever connect the brain before typing?
(My guess is based on the amount of a plundering socialist rhetoric in your comments)
Most of the time minimum wage increases just result in cost push inflation at the bottom of society. Yes, that means the middle class and above will have to pay more for services provided by minimum wage workers. The upper classes aren't hurting for money so they actually end up paying those wages anyway.
That’s completely false. While they were at one point two blocs in the same party, the dispute was never resolved, and it split into two different parties before the overthrow of the monarchy, and continued to have conflict through the revolutionary period culminating in the Mensheviks being banned by the Bolshevik-led regime in 1921, and a supposed attempt to restore the party was the notional basis for one of the earlier of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s.
Where is the 'battle' thing in all these events? Bolsheviks took power, and Mensheviks never had it, and were never a force in the subsequent civil war. They were just banned and later former members were mostly purged.
From this, we can logically conclude that poster would be most happy if rich people get plundered, deprived of their property and possessions, tortured, raped and killed, because these things are the worst that can happen to a person.
I can hardly interpret it as a call to introduce some fairness to the market.
And as far as I'm seeing, their bargaining power is only going up, workers can survive without their bosses, it's the bosses that get richer by thieving wealth from their workers
But we should stop thinking about the past and think about the current situation and how to fix it
I've read a bit and I think the problem with russia was not the communism, it is cultural, it sucked even before when the tsars were burning books and limiting the expression possibilities, including the fact that Russia and the eastern europe has never been through the renovation process of western europe and the liberal movements never took place there, I would hardly use russia as an example for anything, so please stop using russia as a background to don't add anything useful to principle exposed, we fought fascism which was on-par with the totalitarianism of tsarism and communism, and created a fair society that lasted for few decades, which now needs help in order to get better, if you guys decided to suppress a totalitarian government with a worse one, it's not the fault of ideas, it's just your culture and/or approach that is wrong
I'm sorry to come off as harsh but it's been all day that you wanted to use Russia as an example ignoring that you have had the same issues of lack of freedom, redistribution and fairness even before communism was even an idea
You've read the wrong bits. Before the WW1 Russia had a booming cultural and scientific spheres, was undergoing a rapid industrialization and had a lot of philosophical schools and movements. All was hampered by an ineffective and inadequate authoritarian rule, but the human capital was there and rapidly closing the gaps to leading economies. In fact, the seeds planted at that time allowed Russia to quickly rebuild and industrialize after the revolution, withstand Germany in WW2 and emerge as a leading world power on par with the USA, maintaining this status for many decades, doing all of this despite the ineffective socialistic rule.
Now, the reds came to power only after they have staged a successful coup late in 1917, toppling the interim government that was in power after the Tzar abdication. After the coup the Reds won the brutal civil war, chanting those very slogans you are repeating. I believe that if not for this unfortunate event, Russia would peacefully transition to democracy and by now would be one of the leading European economies, with twice the population it has now. The world could have learned a lesson from all of this, but the ideas of equality and justice are sounding so seductive to unlearned audience. If only they knew that equality means mediocrity.
Oh, and Tsars never burned books, that was what Nazis did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Censorship_(Russian_...
But even seeing at what's happening now, you have a rogue state, made of oligarchs, killing journalists, and I guess it's hardly communism to be blamed, I think happening in Russia was the worst thing that could've happened to the communist ideas
It’s morally and intellectually equivalent to neo-Nazism.
I suppose the Nazis were defeated in 1945, and the bulk of the Communists in 1991, so maybe we just need a few more decades for the cancer to die out.
Why wouldn't we want to continue have mobs of drunken British yobbos throwing up in the streets? (Note: I'm British for a little bit longer, so I can say such things.)
And we're seriously thinking of banning cruise ships here in Amsterdam - against, too much hassle, not enough revenue, lot of pollution. If that happens, they will raise the bed of the river IJ 4 meters and put a bike tunnel underneath it!
Then, there's this permanent humiliation of feeling like a servant in your home-town, because the local upper class makes very clear to you peons, that you're less important than the tourists, and they also think this very clearly.
Any business not related to tourism is basically discouraged, because it could "change the character of our lovely paradise".
Basically, unless you're rich and have business in tourism, tourism is not that great. Yeah, it puts food on the table when you're poor, but so other jobs that you could have if it were not for the damned tourists that make you a second class citizen in your own place of living.
We see this happen in the US, too, when a handful of billionaires buy up small town property and turn it into a resort town, driving out the locals. Some of my friends in that situation got "servant" level jobs as teenagers and really think that, somehow, serving the rich for $12/hr will lead to them becoming "one of them."
> somehow, serving the rich for $12/hr will lead to them becoming "one of them."
Tourists are good for certain local business. Mostly low quality bars, restaurants, shops. Anything more upscale doesn't benefit from an endless stream of people who seem to have nothing better to do than just walk around.
Without tourists, buildings would quickly fill with residents. Bars, restaurants, and shops have to up their game to sell to local people.
Obviously, there is no reason to get rid of all tourists. But restricting the number of tourists to avoid an overcrowed center is a good idea.
Visitors here are always surprised that the locals don't all seem to be weed/cocaine/whatever using junkies. Pointing out that the bulk of the tourists does not come to Amsterdam for the architecture but for the dope and the red-light district usually doesn't go down well because they are not that kind of tourist.
The very last thing we should work hard to achieve is turning cities into major tourist destinations.
On one side, many tourist destinations are happy to share the beauty of their landscape, the clean beaches, historical areas and the likes. And they make lots of money from it.
On the other side, it's extremely easy to delve into over-tourism, particularly if local politics are bought out / otherwise influenced by tourism profiteers (e.g. large hotel owners in the whole Balkan area, or breweries in the case of Munich's Oktoberfest). Then, you have problems like hoteliers building out a massive over-supply of hotels in areas that could also be used for regular housing (which in turn drives the housing market mad, such as it is in Munich), or hotels built too close to protected habitats, forest fire lines etc., or - inarguably the worst result - hordes of tourists swarming natural beauty spots for Instagram photos and ruining them by sheer mass (trampling over plants, disturbing animals with noise, relieving themselves, ...).
The "heroin" aspect comes into play for the really big destinations, the likes of Venice or Amsterdam. Over the last decades, tourism only knew one direction - upwards, and steadily. That meant that often local economies shifted towards tourism, sometimes completely... and then corona hit, and suddenly there was nothing to do, no reserves to weather the storm. Cold turkey, and no methadone (aka, government assistance for affected people and businesses) in way too many countries.
Edit: and actually, now after almost two years of pandemic, the situation is now worse. Many people who worked in tourism (and hospitality in general) had to move off to new employment, hotels and other industry closed down / got sold or otherwise repurposed. Again, the heroin comparison comes into play... as the infrastructure for tourism has shrunk, even lower numbers of tourists than a decade pre-Corona will now make the system fall over. Just look at the chaos at the Berlin airport BER (https://www.rbb24.de/politik/Flughafen-BER/BER-Aktuelles/av7...)... that's a forewarning of what is to come.
Withdrawal syndrome is the only word I can find to describe the state Firenze was left in without tourists, during the initial lockdowns.
"Over-tourism" as you describe it is just one possible symptom of excessive capitalism.
There are many nice spots with tourists, and many ways to ruin a place without any tourists when regulations are lax or poorly enforced, e.g. privatization and massive price increases in the crucial infrastructure, or reckless industrial projects.
And some things are just dumb traditions. Of course Oktoberfest sucks for the locals, but so does new year's eve in Berlin if you dislike continuous explosions until dawn and rockets flying horizontally. Tourism doesn't change the nature of these events much, just the scale.
Many other big economical sectors are also highly dependent on a small set of factors that could quickly change and cause ripple effects when they go down. This is not unique to tourism. Think e.g. the decline of Detroit.
I don't care much about 2 weeks of drunkards. The problem is that the hotel supply is excessive as it's scaled to the peak demand times Oktoberfest and Bauma (construction fair) - the average occupancy is only 50% (https://www.welt.de/regionales/bayern/article172019924/Exper...).
Assuming a total of ~85k hotel rooms, that is room to house 40.000 people!
Good point, but how little oversight does this country have of money being sent to peoples accounts from Airbnb etc? In my country (Norway), all transactions > 500 USD, (or multiple transactions from the same sender of lesser amounts), would register with the tax office. The receiver would have to disclose the source of these transactions to the tax office.
If money coming in or out of peoples accounts are governed by self-reporting, people must pay highly inaccurate taxes in the Netherlands.
If its the latter, that would be considered a massively over reaching collection drag-net here.
Besides that, this is a municipal tax, whereas the income information is only present at the national tax authority. Getting those to inter-operate is quite difficult. Especially since our national tax authority is known to be digitally incapable, and currently has some other much bigger issues to contend with.
(Note I think we should not be as much of a tax haven)
I have a 30+ day stay that had been booked close to 6 months in advanced canceled 7 days before my stay because the user sold their house. Airbnb said they would help me find a new comparable place. What they meant was they would send me a $200 gift card and say tough shit that all the comparable houses are booked already.
I hope they get regulated hard. Maybe someday they will start giving a shit about their users too.
I expected them to have some plan to ensure users don't get fucked if someone sells their house. Dozens of similar, but more expensive, places sat empty during that holiday. Airbnb could have given us a coupon for the difference between one of those and what we pair for our original place. That is what their initially made it sound like they were going to do. That is not what they did.
I'm a frequent user but not because I like them as a company. Because they are a monopoly.
Well, they probably banned the owner from the platform, easy-peasy;)
Yeah the owner should be forced to pay to put you up in a hotel of your choice if they optionally choose to cancel on short notice.
> I'm a power user of Airbnb. I have never disliked a service as much that I pay continue to pay for other than LinkedIn
As someone who has more or less been living out of Airbnbs for 5 years as as digital nomad I couldn't agree more. There is however a secret code language for talking to there support where you can generally get them to treat you fairly by being very selective in the language you use to describe situations to make sure you never fall outside the boundries of their insane policies.
Don't you find this stressful? Or are you just used to living with a bit of uncertainty?
And listings are ads, just with deferred payment (eg, once rented, then you kick a percent at the platform).
Another "common person" thinks of it differently than we do, thing?
FWIW, real estate listings are "advertisements" here.
I don't know if any solution exists. It seems to me that the only way to preserve the original experience is via some sort of exclusiveness, which immediately provokes a backlash. Especially exclusions based on money.
Crowds, wait times, littering etc. Large numbers can ruin a lot of things.
Let those who damage the planet for fun or for profit suffer! >:)
I personally know several people previously living in Amsterdam that left the city or parts of it simply because their day-to-day lives were getting disrupted by tourists taking over residential neighborhoods. They create a lot of noise, get drunk and high, vomit in the porches, leave trash everywhere etc.
A city should be for people that live there, not a theme park for those looking for a rush.
The other four bungalows are owned by a single owner who rents them out as AirBnB's. This had made our friends life a nightmare. Stag and hen parties, teenagers booking them for parties, people returning home from an evening out drunk and trying to get in to her house by mistake. Also, the local parking has been messed up as well.
The worst thing is that when they are empty the street is really eerie. Also, the landlord keeps the keys to the houses in combination lock boxes bolted to the walls just outside the front door of each property. He'll give renters the code so they can retrieve the keys when they arrive. Local teenagers have been known to spend the time needed to crack the code and then let themselves in to the property and raise havoc.
She has reported the problems to the local council many times, but they just don't seem to care. Reports to AirBnB, unsurprisingly, go nowhere. When she has approached the owner to complain his response was to offer to buy her out, which is a bit cheeky as that has been her family home for three generations.
Being surrounded by so many AirBnBs can really have a negative effect on your life.
Now I am 100% out of the sphere of technology, but isn't skirting regulation to make money exactly how AirBnB got started?
Now, of course, AirBnB encourages fully investing in it as a landlord platform, where you rent and automate multiple whole properties and never meet the guests. That behavior lowers the quality of life in many tourist destinations today.
I live in Sweden and most "condo" associations (bostadsrätt) have rules regarding short-term hires and subletting. I imagine it is the same in the Netherlands.
Says who? This is a rather bold assumption to make and does not have any connection with the reality in most of the world.
There might be such implicit assumption somewhere, but it for sure isn't a general one.
I for one don't have any such expectations regarding the neighbours in my condo. (I don't live in Sweden/Netherlands though.)
However, a six month minimum rental period is very different from having new neighbors every weekend.
I also live in Sweden and that is a very Sweden specific assumption. Even just across the border in Norway that assumption doesn't hold.
Sweden on the whole is very anti small private landlords and have lots of laws making it basically impossible to make money by buying a few flats and renting them out, but that is also a pretty uniquely Swedish take on the property market.
Any annual rent increases are set via a form of collective bargaining, and if a landlord charges more, the renter is entitled to their money back.
The upshot of this is that it's much more profitable to buy a rental building and flip it to the renters via a bostadsrättsförening (a bit like a condo) or to only build to sell.
This is an extremely idealized version of the real situation - at least in Stockholm. Here, the only real cap on the number of apartments being bought for (often illegal) hire, is the spiralling cost of real estate. Many of my colleagues rent their apartments on the black market - which is often the only way to get a home within the city.
Official rental apartments generally have a waiting-list of around 20 years within the city-limits, and even needing to commute from far out in the suburbs a newly-arrived person will probably need to rent on the black-market. This is a well-known and documented situation.
Airbnb has definitely made the situation much worse in Stockholm - the supposed '3600' apartments are actually far greater in number, as can be seen if one switches off location-permissions in your browser, and take a look at available rentals in the area.
In fact when I moved back to Sweden after working abroad for a few years after University I spend the first 18 month living in a illegally rented flat, so I'm painfully aware of how the system works in real life.
I don't know why you're using Sweden as a 'good' example of democratic control of Airbnb: the opposite is actually true, where the authorities are very well-disposed to people hiring-out their apartments, and see it as an opportunity to get more tourists visiting locations in Sweden[0] From the article in the citation:
"Politicians in Copenhagen want to introduce a maximum limit of 60 rental days per year via Airbnb - but Stockholm is choosing a different path and continues to welcome private rentals via the US giant. According to statistics from Airbnb, there are now over 3,600 listed homes actively offered as tourist accommodation in Stockholm."
In that article there are officials saying the same as you - that local restrictions put some sort of 'natural' limit on the number of Airbnb apartments - but the reality is that for people working here in Stockholm and trying to find an apartment to rent, the only option has now become Airbnb or the black-market in rented accommodation - effectively pricing normal people out of the market altogether.
As for these supposed restrictions on hiring-out apartments that are in the 'rulebook' of a house, it's perfectly easy to circumvent them. In my house in central Stockholm it's forbidden, but I often meet small groups of Italians, Spaniards or other obvious tourists coming and going in the communal areas of the house, and looking very sheepish at being seen - very obviously hiring an apartment illegally.
[0] In swedish: https://www.svd.se/stockholm-gar-emot-airbnb-trenden-inget-p...
https://www.thelocal.se/20210916/swedens-first-case-against-...
How do you spell "externalities"?
https://www.nobleprog.nl/en/gimp/training/amsterdam
>Gimp Training in Amsterdam
>Online or onsite, instructor-led live Gimp training courses demonstrate through interactive discussion and hands-on practice the fundamentals and advanced topics of Gimp and Gimpshop.
>Gimp training is available as "online live training" or "onsite live training". Online live training (aka "remote live training") is carried out by way of an interactive, remote desktop. Onsite live Gimp training can be carried out locally on customer premises in Amsterdam or in NobleProg corporate training centers in Amsterdam.
https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/ShowUserReviews-g188590-d1491...
>Different and enjoyable, but expensive
>Travelled to the Supper Club with my girlfriend and we had a great time. Waiters in gimp suits, rubber gloves upon arrival and comfy beds to lounge on while we ate, created a unique experience.
I dislike how some diminish this term, with such frivolous complaints. Yes, surely the waiters were hobbled. Or beaten to death. Or starved, worked 18 hour days, etc.
Totally similar!
- had proper insurance on their properties to protect the guests
- maintained the property according to the health and safety guidelines proscribed by law
- had a license for their business activity
- paid the appropriate taxes for this additional income
Hotels have rules, regulations and need to be inspected according to hotel rules in terms of safety, hygiene and price rules. Rentals have rules and regulations related to basic standards of living, pricing, and again, safety and hygiene.
Airbnb allowed landlords to rent out substandard temporary housing, skirting around laws covering both hotels and rentals as well as relevant taxes. In part, they are responsible for the housing crisis.
Laws are voted for the interest of the community (ie. country) by elected officials (elected by the people), ownership, freedoms, &c. exist within these boundaries, or as a smart person put it a long time ago: "Obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom". It's always a battle of individual gains vs collective good, if we wanted to live like egoists cavemen we wouldn't have build organised societies.
The current requirement to assure that a renter doesn't get ripped off is to use a credit card that will refund their money in the event the owner tries to rip them off. Good luck to the un-banked and working poor.
Another one that I'm not surprised has happened yet is a ~$5,000 dollar per day fine for an unattended cash register. That would get rid of CVS and Walgreens overnight.
In that way you don't want a Walgreens or CVS in your neighborhood in the same way you don't want a 24 hour liquor store in your neighborhood.
I live in the north Dallas suburbs. About 75% of the time the entire non-pharmacy part of any CVS store near me is completely unattended. About half the time you walk into any one of them you'll hear the robot voice going off because someone just walked out with whatever they stole.
These stores are every bit as bad at imitating Amazon's fascination with automation as they are at scheduling and distributing COVID vaccines. For that matter, my proposal of a $5000/occurrence fine for unattended registers would also pre-eliminate one of those ridiculous unattended Amazon stores from popping up in your neighborhood...
The same goes for grocery chains. It's pretty obvious that the word has come down from corporate to store managers at Kroger and Albertsons to try and herd people into unattended checkouts. In the case of the latter, I've seen them have an attendant not work a register, but face-to-face try to "invite" people to the unattended checkout. All of this while a dozen registers sit closed.
These would all be very easily solved by a municipality imposing a minimum number of attendants per square foot of floor space and a fine for unattended registers.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/27/buildi...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/may/30/readers-reply-...
Also you still want to keep tourist concentrations low in certain areas to keep neighbourhoods liveable.
AirBnb may or may not be a big problem here but, if it is, it's a subset of a bigger problem: buy to let. I'd like to see buy to let severely curtailed within the city, as it's certainly driving up already high prices for buyers.
If the problem is tourism: ban tourists from the city. It doesn't make sense to ban short-term rentals but continue to build hotels and run advertising campaigns promoting tourism to Amsterdam
Why doesn't it? Why should tourists get to say in the same type of places as locals, often at the expense of locals? To me, it makes perfect sense to ban short-term rentals but still let tourists stay in hotels and places meant for them, without taking up real estate that can be used for residences.
I'm familiar with the argument that AirBnB reduces rental stock by devoting it to tourism. But I rarely encounter someone who is mad that more rental stock is being added.
Wouldn't you want rental prices to fall by increasing the availability of rental stock? Is a big gap between the cost of renting and the cost of owning a good thing?
The government has made some moves towards making BTL less profitable, but realistically this has only had the effect of discouraging new entrants, and driving the sector to a corporate model, which is even worse.
Let's say you borrow at 0% interest and with zero down. And you take out an interest-only loan -- that's the loosest possible lending standard, right?
Still you would not pull the trigger and buy to let unless:
rent > interest + maintenance + cost of dealing with tenants.
That means that lax lending standards can at most drive the price of ownership up to the price of renting (but not really, since there are gaps between renters). At the same time, the more rental stock is added, the more rents fall, making housing cheaper in the area.
So I disagree that low mortgate rates can allow rental investment to create a bubble. Rental investment is the one place where you are guaranteed there isn't going to be a bubble, because they are approaching this as a cashflow decision.
Where you see bubbles is in people buying homes for themselves to occupy, so there is no sanity check to see if it pencils out our not in terms of rental cash flows.
So cheap credit can absolutely cause high prices as a result of owner-occupants, but not as a result of buy to let. When that happens, you see rental stock being taken out of the market and used for owner occupancy.
This is why nations with a large share of renters, like Germany, are also nations with the fewest housing bubbles. Housing bubbles are a phenomena for owner-occupants, because the value of living in a place is so subjective and can be devoid of actual incomes. Rent, on the other hand, must be paid with income.
You can argue about whether buying property is a good model or not: in lots of countries in Europe it's not considered the norm, but I'm talking specifically about the UK where it is. Having more rental properties here is fine, but it's also not necessarily what people here want: many people want to buy their homes, and it's better that they do so in a market that isn't skewed by private landlords mopping up large quantities of property. In some parts of the country, though as I've already acknowledged it's unclear to me that this applies to Cambridge, AirBnb (and holiday homes in a more general sense) are a significant contributor to a lack of available property for long-term residents, or people who want to be long-term residents.
Real estate isn't a particularly attractive investment, even in the best of times. Single family homes net around 8%, which is 2-4% less per year than what you would expect to get with an index fund. This is with leverage. It only becomes lucrative when you have a change in interest rates (lower mortgage payments leads to higher cash returns), demand (which is why AirBnB rentals are so popular), or regulations.
Of course, the occasional property will sell for well under market, but so will any other type of asset.
> Maybe it should generate 1-2% a net per year and in 50-100 year timeframe depreciate to zero.
I think you're suggesting that real estate should have a lower annual return than other forms of investing, which I agree with and - in general - is what actually happens.
[0] Table on page 15 from the pdf: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19817584
On the one hand the city wants to encourage growth and innovation. On the other they do this by promoting the most tedious urban sprawl around the edges because of some arcane rule about buildings not being allowed that are taller than, is it Great St Mary's or Kings College Chapel? I forget, but it's too irritatingly stupid to think about. Oh, and the rent and business rates are an absolute outrage. How's anybody supposed to make any money[0]?
At the same time the infrastructure and public transport situation is awful. Infrastructure is rarely upgraded to keep pace with new developments and increases in population. The addition of Cambridge North station is welcome but it took far too long to get it done. Likewise the busway. And there are huge swathes of the city and county that aren't adequately served by any public transport which, of course, forces everybody into their cars and clogs the also inadequate road network.
From where I live, within certain restricted hours of the day (e.g., not after about 6.30pm), and not on Sundays, it's pretty easy to get a bus into the city centre and back again. It's not frequent enough, and it takes too damn long, but it can be done. The trouble comes if you want to go somewhere that isn't the city centre or somewhere in a direct line from here to there. Then you have to go into the city centre and wait however long for another bus. The last time I did this it took me about 2.5 hours to get from my place to a business located in Shelford - a total distance of something like 13 miles. Never again. I literally could have run it quicker.
I don't know what's gone on with the sewage plant, but I remember that moving it was being discussed at least as far back as 2002 and yet, 19 years later, here we still are. Not to labour the point but that's a quarter of a human lifetime. It clearly takes FAR TOO LONG to get things done that will improve the lives of people who are alive here, now, and today.
[0] On this point it annoys me intensely when I hear handwringing about vacant shops and business premises in the city centre where nobody addresses the obvious point: it's unreasonably expensive for businesses to be there.
If you go directly against the wishes of most of the residents, you will not find yourself in the city government for very long. So I think this "simply build enough housing" is only a good solution in internet forum comments.
It's not just about the housing shortage but also the fact most people don't want to live in a hotel.
Once the state becomes addicted to enforcement via big tech, it becomes reluctant to break up those big tech companies and promote competition.
See https://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/bldcontentnl/... for details (Dutch page)
With 'savings' as an asset class now a liability there is a huge flight of capital into real estate, which so far has been pretty resilient against this.
I'm truly sympathetic. I compare how I could live post-university and it's just not achievable now.
Here's the rub: if you support the view that housing is too expensive and people can't find places to live then you should be absolutely against AirBnB. At least, AirBnB of whole units. I'm completely fine with someone renting out rooms in their house or an additional unit on their property.
It is undeniable that AirBnB makes houses more expensive and reduces supply to buyers and renters.
Cities should be first and foremost for the people who live in them. AirBnB facilitates running illegal hotels. I'm also against people using residential property to park their money. We given real estate exemptions from reporting requirements that no other asset class has.
Landlords need to exist otherwise who will provide rental stock. Those landlords should be residents of those cities and not some faceless hedge fund.
Paywalled Dutch language link: https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/airbnb-raakt-dr...
> Het gaat vooral om slapende advertenties van woningen die al een tijd niet verhuurd werden.
> It mainly concerns sleeping listings of units that have not been rented out for a while.
The number of listings is also expected to increase again if the number of tourists bounces back up after Covid.
Of course, the linked article also mentions this, albeit without claims of it being large part of the number:
> This may concern ‘dormant’ advertisements of which the tenant is no longer active. For example, because the corona pandemic has shut down tourism in Amsterdam for a long time.
It's like uber, a taxi service without drivers/cars.
It did not start out as a hotel booking service though.
Those same regulations also kept a higher floor of taxi quality, which helped avoid the stereotype that exists in the US of "regular taxis are always dirty and late", so there wasn't consumer outcry for their return like US cities which had tried banning them.
But because its USA megacorp it takes years before it gets slap on a wrist.
So when the Taiwan border opened by 3 weeks before I was due to go to the serviced apartment, I couldn't cancel without losing 100% of the money as the 'new' cancellation policy was 100% non-refundable.
Contacting Airbnb they said there's a different policy if the booking is for more than 28 days, and so it's up to the host, so in the end the host reluctantly agreed to a 75% refund.
I could have paid 10% extra on Agoda for the same serviced apartment, and cancelled 24 hours before checking in and got 100% refund.
Airbnb letting hosts dictate cancellation policies, and not properly relaying information when paying, prevents me ever touching airbnb again.
In that process, we were expected to do (light) housework to help prepare the house for the next guests.
We did it, but it really left a negative feeling for us to have to do housework on vacation when it wasn't expected.
The owner left us a slightly negative review saying that perhaps we weren't the right kind of customers for AirBNB and that we'd be more comfortable with all the amenities of a hotel instead. True, but a nasty thing to leave in a review.
There were other problems with the house that prevented my wife from sleeping well there that the owner gave half-assed suggestions for, and left negative comments about in the review, too.
Obviously we won't be using AirBNB again and won't be recommending it.
Anyhow, with the lack of regulations, there's no guarantee that you know what you're actually signing up for on AirBNB, especially with policies stating that the cancellation policy changes to whatever the owner says. Had we known that, we probably wouldn't have stayed there at all. Luckily it didn't affect us like it did the other poster above.
During the search, it states that it’s 100% refundable upon cancellation.
Because I booked for 30 days it exceeds some apparent 28 day duration threshold where the cancellation policy is dictated by the host.
It only stated that it’s $0 refund on the cancellation screen.
So unsure how I read fine print where it’s stated1 way during booking but in reality there’s some hidden rule you find out when you cancel.
https://nltimes.nl/2016/10/13/amsterdam-center-overrun-touri...
https://www.travelandtourworld.com/news/article/amsterdam-is...
https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2020/01/amsterdam-house-prices...
I'm no expert on Amsterdam, but checking your last article mentions rent control; why would property developers bother building new housing when the returns are artificially deflated by government action? This is precisely the problem with regulations, they damage price signals. It would not at all surprise me if the government is in part causing all of these problems.
I will also note that housing being expensive in a large, popular city is basically the case the world over, and I suspect tourists are just an easy scapegoat to deflect blame from policy failure.
Because it sucks and nothing should be included in it.
There was a policy failure, in allowing Airbnb to run huge unlicensed hotel business.
This policy is addressing that. They didn't stop Airbnb from operating, they just made sure that they operate more in line like other hotels.
This will in turn enable them to make sure that the tourist flow is sustainable, by raising or lowering tourist taxes on such rentals.
I am telling you this because I want you to know that i have as close of an experience with local governments in regards to this subject matter as almost anyone can have.
From my experience, and the experience of my parents, uncles and grandparents i can assure you there is almost no place where you will find more corruption and needless bureaucracy as in local councils.
while there does indeed need to be some forms of regulation, say by outlining noise limits outside the properties, or by establishing emissions standards or light level restrictions, the vast, vast majority of restrictions and regulations are fundamentally senseless and exist primarily to make work for local council employees, and to enforce peoples views on what other can do with their property.
It is NIMBYism of the worst kind, and we would all be significantly better off if local councils had their powers castrated.