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Comment by amadeuspagel | Hacker News Reader

There is a limited supply of apartments. If a digital nomad lives in one, then a native portuguese can't live there. This is basic math.

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Yep! I was there recently for work and we decided to go on a walking tour given by a local who grew up there, arranged by a coworker who was from there. Our guide took us through one neighborhood and commented that this neighborhood used to be bustling all day and long into the night, but now it is 95% airbnb. During the winter, most of the houses are completely empty. It's effectively a dead neighborhood, but the architecture is neat. Just 15 years ago, you'd walk through the neighborhood and experience a thriving night market ... now it's just somewhere you walk through to get to the next place.

This has very little to do with nomads and everything with tourism.

15 years ago Lisbon was in terrible shape, mostly collapsing due to rent controls.

And this is still the case to a degree. You have an enormous number of houses where the (older than, I think, 55) tenants pay 50 Euros per month that cannot be increased and the landlords pay more than that just in taxes and basic fees. So no renovation is done, everything is falling apart.

This is no longer true, the older rents were unfrozen by Assunção Cristas, about a decade ago. As a consequence, many older people were thrown out of their homes to make way for AirBnB, particularly in the touristy areas.

The rent comtrols have been there for the better part of a century, but they were only a problem when tourism boomed, rent control cannot be a cause of shortages if it was in place before without problems.

Move fast and break culture.

What limits the supply? Are they not allowed to build new apartments in Portugal?

I don't know the answer to that exactly, suffice to say that I'm all in favor of building apartments, but there is no obvious limit to how many people might want to live in a city. If Lisbon is a global city, there's no amount of apartments they can build to ensure that there are enough for natives.

Why would you think that anyone who is profiting from having a limited supply housing would want more housing built?

The salaries are extremely low and construction in Lisbon or around is not cheap. The prices would simply be too high for new constructions, average Portuguese cannot afford them.

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