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.
It's infuriating that we let companies like this be founded on completely illegal premises and continue operating.
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?
[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.
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.
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.
The benefits of not being a tourist destination
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.
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.
Get rid of the coercion and you get rid of the problems.
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.
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.
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.