Airbnb has absolutely wrecked most of the holiday spots in the UK. Locals can't afford to rent, so it's killing local shops - only the tourist traps remain.
A multi-billion dollar corporation that actively strategizes to benefit from no regulation or bad regulation. Likely they also lobby for favorable regulation that will actively harm locals.
A local government not properly regulating.
I'd compare it to PG&E or Comcast in the United States.
What actually bothers you is that this is what people want and it will get built and it will be patronized.
Yes. It does bother me that the utility function of "the market" does not align with what is good for me, and that therefore it frequently produces results that are worse for me.
In fact this applies not just to urban development, but also to many other things.
Even high-end condos cost less than a low-end house to build, since the land costs are amortized among many units.
Perhaps because a tall residential building in a tourist spot is an eyesore.
People go there to see something scenic, not more of what they have at home, or worse.
If you build it like an eyesore, it will be an eyesore, yes. Here is a multi-story building that I lived as a student in and it housed another 10k: https://www.ruseducation.in/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/LOMON...
But I agree that building glass+concrete rectangles is a not a great idea for tourist spots (or anywhere, really).
When they were young, my grandparents moved into a whole district built from scratch for the purpose of housing workers from a nearby steelmill.
Communism notwithstanding, the district is amazingly well planned and - what's dearly missing in modern, hyper-optimized construction - sufficiently spread apart.
Exactly! If you rise up enough, it becomes possible to have green zones around these big buildings and make living actually enjoyable.
On the other end of the spectrum is Hong Kong and most of Manhattan - I don't look forward to living there, even if some condos are really nice inside.
In my corner of the world people move out of large cities not because they enjoy driving so much, but because they don't have the credit score for anything within city limits
Space and access to sunlight are also components of quality of life and you have neither in very dense housing.
That's because there's not enough housing in the city limits.
>Space and access to sunlight are also components of quality of life and you have neither in very dense housing.
That's not true, adding a few more sky scrapers increases the amount of space for people and does not impact the amount of sunlight people can enjoy.
Cities can also do things like add more rail lines, so people can commute from further away -- which also increases the amount of space for people.
The U.K. has had a housing shortage for decades, and solving it becomes harder each year as the backlog increases.
There are places in the USA where a builder could take this bet, but it would be much, much riskier.
How is airbnb and different?
Or do hotels not have the capacity?
They just block up the pavement lining up photos of landmarks (and anything else) with their mobile phones, that they could certainly download from Insta and get a better photo. Every square foot of this town has already been snapped a million times.
If this is your perspective, you’re either incredibly privileged, jaded, or both. I don’t think that poor people are necessarily owed cheap accommodation or transportation in any sense, but I also don’t think that active steps should be taken to remove more affordable options simply because they can’t afford to patronize high-end restaurants and stores or do the more expensive tourist activities.
My perspective on poor people and travel is that international air-travel is hopelessly underpriced; it isn't reasonable for all 6 billion people in the world to travel for holidays. I don't really care who travels; tourists don't better my bread, whether they're rich or poor. But the argument that tourists are good for the local enconomy depends on them being willing to spend money. Huge columns of overseas students don't spend much money.
My town is pretty, and world-famous. It is quite capable of sustaining itself without tourists; it has two universities, and several large hospitals. Housing is in short supply, and expensive. It's not a great shopping destination; tourists who want to shop shop elsewhere.
> but I also don’t think that active steps should be taken to remove more affordable options
Every housing unit devoted to tourists is a housing unit that isn't available for the local people. The Council is right to try to restrict residential housing to residential use.