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> I have friends living in Lisbon and Porto for 10+ years, others that were born and raised there. All of them mention how entire neighbourhoods are slowly being emptied out from locals and getting rented on AirBnB. It's more profitable to rent an apartment short-term for a season than having permanent tenants. There are neighbourhoods hollowed out from people living in them and are just boxes to be rented during peak tourism season and left empty during winter.

I'm currently living in Nashville, Tennessee, and one can see the same effect here.

The town is completely unequipped to handle the level of tourism and unregulated hotels it has. The price of housing has shot up to insane levels (by local pay standards), and neighborhoods are inundated with drunken revelers.

I would never wish this fate on a city, but many seem to foster/welcome it with open arms. I know Nashville has, because the tourist money spends. But be careful what you with for, turning a city into a theme park / tourist destination has some horrible effects on the people who actually live there, and it seems like it should not be sustainable.

Sadly, it looks like it is. For another example in Tennessee, look at Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge. Even as recently as 50-60 years ago most the locals lived in the areas. Since then, they've been priced out by all the tourists and cabins, etc. And it doesn't really show any signs of slowing down, to my knowledge.

The same in Amsterdam. The 55 square meter apartment that I lived in from ages six to ten is now split into two studios rented out on AirBnB in the hipster neighborhood of 'de Pijp' for a large multiple of what it would fetch in rent (which are already way too high).

This goes for many of the listings on AirBnB in Amsterdam, four stories worth of not-quite-a-hotel instead of room for four families to live are pretty common. And there always was a housing shortage in Amsterdam, now it is much worse than before.

Yes but the difference is that expats in Amsterdam work for companies based in the Netherlands. They ad to the economy they aren't just here for the weather and cheap housing (nobody comes to the Netherlands for the weather and cheap housing).

But he’s talking about Abnb

this is an issue that I've seen in several beach towns in france as well, and it's not limited to airbnb. You will see real estate places that offer weekly rentals of beachside properties at very high rates. Of course those places are basically unused outside of that.

This sort of stuff sets in, and then of course people are shocked that their entire local economy lives or dies off of one season. We should build more housing of course, but limiting the percentage of places that can just be sitting empty most of the years seems super important. At least making it extremely expensive to keep them empty

Yep.. happening everywhere.

Somehow the regulators (and governments) prefer more money over their own citizens. Banning short term rentals would solve (or atleast reduce) housing problems in many cities, while tourists can still come and stay in hotels.

why not simply build more houses?

We are building, but building takes time, and all the houses and apartments are bought by 'investors' that then use them for airbnb... This is even more true in places like portugal (and many others), where realestate prices are so high compared to normal peoples income (due to speculative and airbnb investments), that normal people cannot afford them anymore, and only people with a lot of money or other realestate (for mortgages) can buy them, and the best way to earn back investments is again, airbnb.

So, you need to both build new stuff and ban airbnb for any chance that normal people with normal incomes will ever be able to afford to buy anything decent to live in. Also somehow stop buying realestate for investments. Also fix zoning laws in many places. Also...

> but building takes time

this is by choice.

> and all the houses and apartments are bought by 'investors' that then use them for airbnb

if the demand is there then the only sensible solution is to build a lot more.

Building more housing just to satisfy speculative demand never ends well. You get ghost cities/districts and lots of pink elephants; and when the bust comes, its a huge mess to clean up, and a lot of those units will never be used before being torn down.

If it were that easy and simple, it'd have been done.

The places where AirBNB and their like are causing problems are not in the places where there's abundant land going, it's in the areas where there's significant tourist demand. This is in the cultural hubs.

People with capital are able to buy up the limited stock of housing and make a lot more money through short-stay, rather than long-term tenants.

This causes major flow-on effects.

Businesses which cater to long-term residents find their customers disappearing, and leave in favour of those catering to tourists/visitors.

The nature of the people in the area change: people in short-term stays are less likely to respect the local cultural-norms like not partying until 3am, or other behaviours.

The people who work in the local businesses, find it harder to do so - instead having to commute from longer distances because they now can't afford the rents/property prices locally.

Knocking down a few apartment blocks and putting in more high-density accommodation won't solve it.

places change, no? people move, businesses go out of business, new people move in, new businesses get setup etc etc

Changes can be good and bad. Without regulation the incentives can hollow out desirable places of all but the richest occupants and tourists. Over time even the rich may leave if the help cannot afford to live or commute to serve them. The end game could be ghost towns or whole communities essentially becoming artificial, amusement parks.

You cannot build new houses in Venice, or Amsterdam center. That's where tourists want to go, not in those new houses in the peripheries where you would forcibly relocate your citizens with the proposed housing projects.

> You cannot build new houses in Venice, or Amsterdam center.

sure you can. it's just that people don't want to.

> That's where tourists

aka money.

Housing doesn't follow the simplistic supply/demand model. What happens in a lot of places here in Europe during the past 10+ years of low interest rates: developers + investors buy land and buildings to develop them, either chopping up older larger apartments into smaller units or building new housing but they don't sell all of them at once after developing. They hold onto units and drip-feed the market to keep prices high, the lost opportunity cost of selling earlier is offset by selling later at the inflated price.

I bring up low interest rates because getting a larger amount for a mortgage is cheaper, buyers will go to banks to check what's the largest mortgage they can get to fit into their budget to then go shopping for a house, so the prices are directly correlated to how much credit you're able to get, pushing prices upwards which the investors/developers can scoop up.

Now prices are extremely high, mortgages aren't so easy to get and we see prices going down (here in Sweden there's been a 10-20% fall), but they are still much, much higher than 10-15 years ago. It's pushed people like me, with a decent salary but no family wealth whatsoever to be basically priced out of the market. I'd need to save about 20-30% of my net salary every month for about 2-3 years to afford just the down payment for a small apartment on the outskirts of the city. I'm not able to do that while my parents depend on me and I still have rent to pay.

>Housing doesn't follow the simplistic supply/demand model

Yes it does, and I'm tired of pretending that it doesn't.

If I want to build a house in Portugal, if I am even allowed to do so, I will have to spend about half of the cost to the government.

From VAT, to real estate tax, to licensing fees, etc... That's a significant portion of the cash spent going directly to the state for no actual practical reason.

And that's not even mentioning the time spent dealing with all that, or the fact that housing is essentially banned in the majority of the country.

My family has been in real estate for generations, and Ive listened to multiple generations on both sides of the family for years struggle with these politically inflicted issues.

There is no housing crisis.

There is a political choice to make housing unaffordable and unbuildable. Anything that doesn't address that issue will only make things worse.

Housing is not a commodity. [0]

[0] https://ggwash.org/view/10809/housing-is-more-than-supply-an...

Except it is.

I can assure you, if you build 1000 times as many houses as there are people who want to live there, housing prices there will decrease.

For a lot of these places there are enough houses for the people who want to live there. Or it's a whole hell of a lot closer. The issue is there's not enough houses for the people who want to live there and all the tourists who feel entitled to be able to stay in a house on their vacation. A house that takes away from locals, and destroys any culture of the neighbourhood.

So there aren't enough houses.

Also, why do you think you should be the arbiter of what "enough" is?

What right do you have over the property of others?

> So there aren't enough houses.

There are close to enough for the locals. The problem is when tourists feel entitled to houses, like I said. Stick them on the periphery, and let the locals actually live where they work. Instead, we're doing the opposite, and destroying cities and neighbourhoods and pricing out locals in the process.

> What right do you have over the property of others?

I suspect this is where we're going to inherently disagree. People don't own their property in a vacuum, nor do they (nor should they) have unlimited 'rights' to do what they want with it. We don't let people dump toxic waste or oil on their properties for good reasons, and I think extending this to short-term lets is perfectly sensible due to the overwhelmingly negative benefit it has on residents. Doubly so when its corporate landlords in question doing it.

Again, it is not that simple as you can see from London's issues with drip-feeding new housing from developers. [0]

[0] https://blog.shelter.org.uk/2019/08/more-planning-permission...

It really, really is that simple and anyone making the argument that it isn't either hasn't thought this through, has never actually looked at the data, or is outright maliciously lying about it.

[This chart on it's own with no further context is enough to disprove any argument anyone may have that attempts to claim housing prices aren't solved by building more housing](https://twitter.com/JeremiahDJohns/status/161535236504076697...)

It's really that simple.

A Twitter chart vs the arguments of people working with research in housing departments in some of the largest cities in the world. I guess I know what source I'll actually trust a bit more.

The cities that built 1000 times more houses are actually more expensive. Does anyone think that Manhattan-like density in San Francisco is going to lead to Houston prices?

>Yes it does, and I'm tired of pretending that it doesn't.

It doesn't, because the housing market is not the "free" market like the one for commodities, but is an asset heavily manipulated by government, banks, NIBYs and institutional investors to maintain a steady increase in value of their investments above inflation, and incidentally above wage growth. The bigger the growth of their investments, the better for them.

Again, that's a political choice, not a housing crisis.

Low interest rates also mean it’s practical to hold real estate and drip-feed the units. Much harder to do when you’re paying 10% interest on a construction loan.

It's crazy that Portugal, a country with almost exactly the same GDP and population as Hungary, Lisbon has average square meter prices reaching 7k EUR/m2. Budapest is barely 2-2.5k EUR/m2. That's just the effect of airbnb.

Where would you rather go as a tourist

Why should a tourist get a house? Especially if it takes away from the locals being able to actually live somewhere.

That’s kind of funny, I just spent a week meeting a Hungarian co-worker who, from the sound of things, refuses to return home until Orbán is out. She claimed that there were state-sponsored billboards that read things like (this is her words) “IMMIGRANTS RAPE WOMEN.”

If there’s any truth to that, then I’d say their rental market is pretty well-protected from foreign workers, to say the least…

100% true in Ireland. In 2020 the number of long-term lets doubled due to AirBnB people fleeing into long-term when tourism was basically non-existent. Sadly, they've all moved back to AirBnB by now, and Ireland is now facing the worst housing crisis yet.