It's also the facilitator par excellence that flips 'bad' into 'unsustainable' in the housing domain, all else being equal.

It's true that Airbnb is only part of the problem. A larger problem is that there is a lot of illegal temporary renting, in fact many people I know have never seen a rental contract. Officially, there needs to be a sign on the house for "alojamento local" but few places have it. I can't blame the apartment owners, if you have another place to stay just renting out one apartment is enough to make a living.

But the problem is even deeper, I recently spoke to a friend on the phone who considers to move to Portugal. He told me that if he rents out his apartment in L.A., he should get about 10,000 USD/mo for it. For that money he could literally rent a whole house in Portugal. How could Portuguese with an average salary below 1,000 USD compete with that on the housing market?

In some countries, AirBnB is like "tax evasion as a service" so I'm not surprised that politicians choose them as their target. Also, people usually hate it if their neighbor starts inviting strangers every day, because it causes thrash and misbehaviour on a level that permanent residents wouldn't.

The slowness with which the biggest European cities with housing issues have tackled the problems of both short term rentals, second home ownerships and properties as investments tell you all you need to know about whose interests the main European parties are really serving.

Airbnb should be regulated to the ground.

On the other hand construction regulations should be removed and government intervention lowered down so the market can fill the gaps by building like crazy.

Exactly, Lisbon is destroyed beyond repair due to this madness.