Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments
theolivepress.es
theolivepress.es
They are freeing up ~10,000 houses over the next four years with this legislation. Barcelona built ~15,000 new properties between 2011 and 2020.
The math don't math. It's a drop in the bucket. The entire impact of AirBnB + all housing built in the last decade does not offset the last half decade of population growth.
Housing must be built more quickly than your population is growing to keep prices down, or you must concede that you live in a nice area where people wealthier than you wish to be and that those people are going to gentrify the area and displace locals. It's an unpleasant reality of the world.
EDIT: some good feedback in the responses. thanks! I'm being a bit dramatic by saying it's just a drop in the bucket, this action frees up more housing than was built over the same timespan, and it's possible to have effects on pricing greater than what would be inferred by the raw numbers because economics is tricky. cheers.
https://www.barcelona.cat/infobarcelona/en/tema/city-council...
It feels like a land grab, the real failure here is a lack of construction, and that isn't the fault of people renting via Airbnb.
By this logic a government can never change its priorities.
It’s done something wrong in the past and is trying make up ground now.
Not to mention that most tourists don't even sit around the local area, but rather go to the city attractions.
Airbnb and resident housing areas are just not compatible, they have different needs and require different infrastructure. Hotels are built around infrastructure supporting tourism and are much healthier for cities.
Which is why tourist resort towns and stadium areas tend to have a lot of closed shops when they're not "on".
Which in turn makes them less attractive for year-round residents, which spirals into intensifying seasonality.
Major sports team, but the area was a wasteland, because everything was developed around the 50,000 people flooding in for one afternoon. Parking lots, traffic flow, food stands.
The actual neighborhood was pretty dead.
Braves move up to a new stadium in Cobb county, some redevelopment, and now the old neighborhood is flourishing.
Saw the same as a (briefly) Florida resident.
I think it's difficult to establish "normal" development in an area subject to tourism tides, because many of the decisions are mutually exclusive.
Either {support tourism} or {support long term residential development}. And money intersects with politics, so eventually one set of interests win out.
If I’m somewhere with a group for longer than three days, we want to be able to hang somewhere and cook our own food. The only other thing that offers this feature set is private rooms in hostels, and those are both rare and nearly always fully booked.
I’m not saying having a good base for vacationing is anywhere near as important as residential housing supply, but saying “just book hotels lol” takes a very dim view on AirBnBs.
I truly hate Airbnb. Luckily since my parents only stay a week they can afford to stay in a hotel. Invariable we "hang out" with me sitting at the foot of their bed.
These "rules" become extremely oppressive when your home most of the year is an Airbnb room like me. This is why I use Booking or local corporate owned platfroms instead whenever possible
I truly love AirBnB and have stayed in them in most all my business and pleasure travels to Europe, Canada, Israel and across the USA.
Maybe it's just me, but when I'm on vacation the last thing I want to spend my time doing is dishes. I'd also rather explore where I'm visiting than sitting in some random person's house.
Give me a hotel room with turn down service over an AirBnB every time.
It does feel like Airbnb is just reinventing hotels tho. (Just like streaming is re-inventing cable and Uber is re-inventing taxis)
Maybe they are more expensive than the displayed rate for an AirBnB, but by the time you add in the cleaning fees and other non-sense things it turns out to be more expensive. Also, when I'm in a hotel, I'm not asked to wash the sheets, wash the dishes, or any of that nonsense as well as paying the cleaning fees.
I have never encountered those requirements in European / Asian / S-American / African AirBnBs.
Occasionally you’re asked to do the dishes or take off the sheets and leave them on the beds, but that’s it. No fees.
The Toronto one was likely more expensive than an AirBnb, but in Berlin i don't remember it being that expensive.
Finding these places is a pain however, there is no universal name. Ive seen "Aparthotel" used a few times in Europe. Other times it is just "XXX Apartments" or "Residence" and you have to guess if they are for short-stay.
Sites like booking.com mix in people renting out their own property with these purpose built short stay locations which doesn't help discovery.
The reason why hotels are expensive is because they're properly regulated and are forced to be a net positive which is passed down to the customer. airbnbs had none of that until recently and all the negative impact was pocketed by the landlords.
Between the hosts and the platform itself, they just got too greedy with fees and extras. It ended up at the stage that hotels are both cheaper and provide a better experience.
AirBnBs charge international prices, which creates a property market skewed by international investment.
I live in a tourist area, and prices here have gone up by between 100% at the low end to over 500% at the high end.
These are mostly holiday homes and holiday rentals, and the locals can't afford to live here any more - either renting or buying.
One of the results has been a huge political shift rightwards, with increasing hostility to tourists and immigrants. Of course the far right cynically take advantage of this issue, and of course they have no intention whatsoever of fixing anything.
But the fact that it's an issue at all is causing huge problems.
Have you any pejorative memes for "liberal" "democracy", which is what broke it in the first place, or do they get a free pass as usual?
That ship has looong sailed. Especially in the days of full-time remote work jobs. Especially in the EU.
I wish a big barrel of industrial-grade luck to the good people of Barcelona! They definitely need it, because the changes they implemented so far (introducing rent control) did not help.
Still, I fear that people generally look to politics for simple, one sentence solutions to problems which take decades to manifest.
Barcelona is the 68th densest city in the world. You look at a satellite map and you can see they have a very well planned city layout. It's dense and filled with tall buildings.
At some point the only lever left to pull is outright banning of foreigners. I'm not condoning that policy - just trying to highlight the futility of attempting to protect a desirable area from overpopulation.
That does not follow at all. If you look at the actual densities Barcelona is 1/3 as dense as the densest city in the world. There is plenty of room to accommodate more housing, they just need to build higher.
Extreme height restrictions combined with extreme regulatory costs is what has lead to this issue.
Show a European politician, especially a local one in charge of urban development, an image from Tokyo and they will recoil in horror.
Here in Europe everything must be flat and look cultural.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_Union_cities_...
As you see, Spain has 12 cities among the top 38 cities in Europe. L'Hospitalet (an urban centre close to Barcelona) is densest than Paris.
You could weigh the density by population (effectively giving you population²/area?! I'm not saying this is a good idea), and you'd get a top10 of Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Bucharest, Berlin, Athens, Milan, Brussels, Vienna, Naples, which despite the slightly bizarre metric seems a more sensible ranking (Emperador is at the bottom rank), and which, to be fair, also features two Spanish cities.
But again, it's kind of a pointless endeavor, because of the arbitrary nature of the boundaries chosen -- why Paris and not Paris metro? etc. I guess ideally you'd have a function density(person) giving you the population density of any given person and you'd want to look at the distribution of that function, specifically the average per country of that function.
German towns and cities feel a bit denser than the UK (I live in Switzerland and visit Germany every month).
Spain seems to have planning laws that force density. Small agricultural towns in the middle of nowhere have people living cheek by jowl in apartments and townhouses, with an abrupt cutoff once you hit the town boundary.
See LightHugger's comment and my response below:
Spooky scary socialists, send shivers down your spine. Free healthcare will shock your soul, seal your deed tonight.
Hmm...
Looking at my comment with the benefit of hindsight, I think you're right.
While I still think the mayor's decision is... shortsighted, I've deleted my comment, as I no longer think it contributes much to the discussion.
> “The measures we have taken will not change the situation in one day. These things take time. But with these measures we are reaching a turning point”
While some of the chosen phrasing in the article does read rather ideological, as you quoted, that could just as easily be the bent of the writer.
Your comment itself is actually more ideological and unfactual than anything in the article…
> In this case, facts and logic, being so inconvenient to ideological and political forces, likely had nothing to do with the decision.
Neither OP nor you nor any other commenter thus far has pointed out any factual inaccuracies. And nothing about the measure is illogical since incremental changes are still a step in their desired direction. And how did you determine their “likely” reasoning from a single article alone? Again, as quoted, they are aware their concerns are not fully addressed by this action alone.
One can be a political actor and still be factual and logical. Claiming otherwise is illogical and untrue. And doing so to diminish a policy you do not like …well that’s ideological and political.
Since this is HN, I was expecting a little more rigor in proving the math not mathing: how many people can be housed in 15 000[1] + 10 000 houses? How small is the drop and how big is the bucket?
From sibling comment, average density is 2.51 people per home * 25k houses which works out to 62 750 housed people out of the 100 000 population growth. If my math is correct, that is significantly more than a drop in the bucket, considering the Airbnb component is 40% of that number, or just over 25k people - which is a big drop indeed for a 100k bucket
[1] Edit: I later realized your comment has numbers from multiple time windows. Substitute "15 000" with whatever number of houses were built/added in the past 4 years.
I think it's fair to say I'm being dramatic by saying it's a drop in the bucket. The action frees up more housing than Barcelona built over the same time period. This is good.
However, it's still not a long-term solution. This is a one-time action that when taken, and combined with the housing being built, fails to provide for even 50% of the people moving to the city.
Voters want a solution that makes living more affordable not just one that makes it less affordable less quickly.
As an aside, I think people can become complacent when a one-time solution to a problem lessens the pain momentarily. Suddenly the issue isn't as high of a priority and so the underlying situation continues to exacerbate the problem.
What will voters do in a few more years when this lever doesn't exist to pull? Ban all foreigners?
Because Spain's high unemployment, in particular youth unemployment and the construction sector, actions that reduce tourism lead to fewer jobs and less income flowing into the city.
I'm not against the measure (last time in Barcelona I was in a hotel and my friends rented an AirBnB apartment instead; they had fun and I had to move hotel rooms because the guy above me flooded the bathtub), and excessive tourism (Barcelona, Edinburgh, Amsterdam all suffer from it) is annoying even putting housing prices and lack of availability to the side, but I just wonder.
Any time I’ve visited a place where tourism was a larger industry, it felt the place had became a parody, a Disneyland type version of what once was there.
Allowed all your productive jobs to be offshored? Mine the natural resource of tourists, as long as there was a golden age that left something interesting for them to visit.
It is exactly like oil and “resource curse”, for many poor countries.
The pay is generally minimum wage and the only ones who see big returns are the owners of capital. It’s not a distributive industry. If you have too much of your country’s economy invested, I’d say you’re almost always looking at an unhealthy economy.
So you can have some tourism to keep some people employed, sure. But if it’s +15-20% of your economy, I’m not sure that’s a good idea.
This discussion is about Barcelona.
Barcelona is one of the richest regions in Europe. It's hardly a third-world hellhole or a banana republic.
Well maybe you will just tell Spanish government how to replace that?
The pay in tourism is terrible, usually minimum wage, except for the owners of capital, who gain enormous returns on investing in hotels / airbnbs / tourist aimed businesses.
That means it has an awful return for the ones most in need which are the poor. It’s not a distributive industry.
On top of that, it can cause a “resource curse” type phenomenon where great beaches or some other attraction causes enormous amounts of investment in tourist infrastructure leading to a lack of opportunity for other businesses which could thrive with investment. Tourist gives you such great returns on investment it doesn’t make sense to do anything else if you have capital.
Can tourism be A PART of a healthy economy ? Sure. But it shouldn’t be in charge of that economy, in which case I’d say you’re looking at a “resource curse” type economy where only the rich prosper.
This is true of any sector. New York get volatile when over-reliant on FIRE; San Francisco goes into a depression when valuations dip.
Also, this is a story about Barcelona. An industrial city. Tourism is a minority.
So it is within a cities interest to have some degree of control ofer the amount and kind of tourism. And controlling the number of accommodations is a pretty good lever.
If that was really a concern, cities like Barcelona would be railing against hostels and would impose a higher baseline for tourist taxes to eliminate the economic feasibility of projects catering to low-cost party tourism.
Surely there are multiple ways ro tackle that, e.g. one could require permits for those as well, but I didn't defend the measures taken by Barcelona, I defended the fact that unregulated AirBnB can turn into a problem for a city and the people living there.
In Barcelona, making apartments available as short-term rentals involves the exact same type of reglatio that hostels need to go through to operate.
If AirBnB is suddenly deemed a problem in spite of the absolute lack of evidence, in the very least regular horeca businesses are more to blame.
As a share of the total number of people employed in New Zealand, direct tourism employment was 6.7 percent.
I think the main problem with tourism is that it is a luxury service and tourism income shrinks when the world economy stinks. The other issue is that many tourists are rude and unthankful, so it can be unpleasant working in a service industry, being a servant to well-off tourists.
New Zealand needs export income. Some of our product exports are worse for New Zealand than tourism (some farming particularly has negative effects and can have poor profits).
I wonder if part of the reason why Barcelona has population growth is because it has tourism income and jobs? Remove tourism and what happens next?
And it sucks in New Zealand that some of the most beautiful places are crowded and almost owned by tourists. Literally owned by tourists when we let foreigners buy property here and our current government wants to allow that again.
Yep, I'm considering buying a vacation home to Airbnb for this reason. I have mixed feelings about it though, because I don't want to be part of the problem. But I live in NYC and I can't move (shared custody), nor can I buy a suitable home in the city, meanwhile the national housing market is exploding. I need some way to hedge for real estate inflation, and vacation rentals have better ROI.
I would keep looking. If you feel like it’s an ethically compromised decision, perhaps you’ll have a hard time to live with it in the end.
That's a bold statement, as if the whole world invests in tourism because they don't know better.
Spain's tourism sector represents a double-digit chunk of their GDP and is one of the rare sectors which has a direct effect in reducing unemployment, specially in the low-skilled, NEET cohort which is extremely problematic in countries such as Spain. Claiming that a country like Spain could simply annihilate it and replace it with something else is an extraordinary thing to say, specially as it lacks any support.
I’m not saying it’s a good idea to ban it. But tourism is anything but essential.
Sure the Spanish economy benefits from it right now but over reliance on it, as I explained above, can be a bad thing.
The larger context is Spain’s population is flat with declines in the last 24 months and trend likely to continue in the coming decades. Barcelona’s population peaked in 1979 and only recently recovered to the level seen in 1990. So they likely don’t actually need to add significant housing long term. Freeing up AirBnB apartments in the short term looks like a reasonable solution until population decline kicks in and removes the need for extra housing.
https://datacommons.org/place/wikidataId/Q1492?utm_medium=ex...
I don't think it's dramatic. The whole anti-tourist arguments are based on, to put it charitably, politically-motivated specious reasoning. In this particular example, this whole argument is based on these assumptions:
* making available each and every single one of those 15k houses for long-term rentals or sales instead of making them available for short-term rentals would prevent or significantly attenuate the existing housing crisis,
* Demand for short-term rentals has no positive impact on the housing market by creating demand for real estate investments and urban renewal programmes,
* Regulating away short-term rentals would not shift demand to classic HORECA offerings, which results in replacing whole residential buildings or even city blocks right in the city center. See for example Hotel Arts Barcelona or W Barcelona.
The whole anti-tourist sentiment is based on nonsense, like assuming that just because a luxury suite is on AirBnB it would otherwise be made available as affordable housing for working-class family.
And should I point out the "tourists go home, refugees welcomed" self-defeating propaganda piece?
We can maybe both agree that doing something is better than doing nothing? Hopefully this is just one of the steps in a larger plan. Not a single thing will solve the current issues, but a combination of steps just might. At least someone is trying, which is a step in the right direction.
> Regulating away short-term rentals would not shift demand to classic HORECA offerings, which results in replacing whole residential buildings or even city blocks right in the city center. See for example Hotel Arts Barcelona or W Barcelona.
How is Hotel Arts or Hotel W examples of replacing whole residential buildings or city blocks? Both of them were built on previous undeveloped land (or sea in the case of Hotel W) and were new constructions when built, not reformations of existing buildings.
> The whole anti-tourist sentiment is based on nonsense
People's feelings are always "nonsense" if seen from a scientific/engineering perspective. People are hurt in numerous ways, and try to put the blame somewhere. They're being priced out of their homes, they see AirBnbs all over the place and you cannot walk outside without hearing loud tourists screaming in English and being awful, hard to blame people from drawing the lines between these things.
Yes, that's the whole point. Doing something clearly better than doing nothing.
Railing against short-term rentals does absolutely nothing to fix the problem.
That does not grant anyone the right of fabricating scapegoats that do nothing to solve the actual problem. This is exactly what's happening regarding short-term rentals.
Blaming short-term rentals for the lack of affordable housing is one of the stupidest and miopoc scapegoats that can ever be put together. Airbnb is not the reason why your neighbor rents the apartment. Airbnb is not attracting new tourists. Worst-case scenario, Airbnb eats away at the profit margins of industrial-grade hotels.
The lack of affordable housing is caused by the lack of real estate investment, urban renewal programs, and even social housing. If most want to buy an apartment but they can't afford one, that's a telltale sign of short supply. You only fix this problem by significantly increasing supply.
It's also a politically motivated scapegoat. Barcelona's previous mayor built her whole platform on that scapegoat. She could have implemented urban renewal programs to actually increase the number of homes available in the market, she could have implemented public transportation programs to bring mass transit to low-density areas to attract private investment, she could have created a municipal tax on short-term rental to finance social housing programs or even subsidized low-income rental programs, etc.
But no. She did absolutely nothing even though the railed frequently against short-term rentals. Because that's the point: fabricate a convenient scapegoat to direct and focus the anger of the electorate. But that same electorate is only mobilized as long as the housing problem prevails, and thus they do absolutely nothing to fix it.
> How is Hotel Arts or Hotel W examples of replacing whole residential buildings or city blocks?
They aren't. They are however massive real estate investment in prime locations in Barcelona which could just as easily be residential buildings that easily provided hundreds of homes.
Small marginal improvements in tight supply can result in noticeable price drops.
Which would certainly be welcome, even if greater supply still needs to be created.
This should depress prices, release rentals and sales. You're right, it's probably not enough, but like many urban centres, central Barcelona isn't that flexible.
https://www.amb.cat/en/web/area-metropolitana/coneixer-l-are...
Housing is of course a bit more complex - pricing is more sticky on the upside than downside (as home owners don't like to rent for less than before and may let units sit idle etc) and "instant" usually windows over weeks but fundamentally similar mechanics work. As an example, in Singapore, the government raised excise duty for non Singaporeans to purchase housing to 65% when housing became overheated. The number of rich foreigners buying property has always been small in absolute but was growing fast in rate as rich family money and bankers from Hong Kong started flowing to Singapore. Prices and also rentals across all classes of housing, not just the super premium properties favoured by the wealthy came down and people who had been pushed down at the margins into less than their preferred value housing (including ourselves) moved back up.
Will this move solve the problem? No, but what alternative are you comparing it to where it fares so poorly?
I suspect even the staunchest proponents of unregulated construction of denser housing would only claim that it mitigates the problems of housing affordability, not that it solves them. This new STR policy could be one of many pieces of the puzzle.
That said cities across the developed world are struggling with housing, even ones that are not popular with tourists. Why it seems no one can build anymore is what is interesting.
prices are set on the margin
this will have an effect on them (and thank you for apparently admitting that possibility after the replies)
The 15k new properties were only built in Barcelona? How many were built in the metropolis area?
It's obvious that more housing is needed, but freeing up housing in the city, potentially close to the center, is still a move that might make the city more livable as opposed to building something new in the outskirts.
The population growth is largely due to rich foreigners moving into the city:
"I was born and raised in Barcelona, no longer live there however. I didn't remember how bad it was until I went to visit my family last summer. Me and some friends went to walk around the center and the girl that took our orders at a Pans&Company didn't even know Spanish or Catalan, only English. It was honestly quite depressing. She was surprised we didn't open the conversation with English."
https://www.reddit.com/r/askspain/comments/1833ub1/comment/k...
https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/travel/2023/10/09/fed-u...
People say that it has become difficult to hear Catalan or Spanish being spoken in the city center and there are waitresses who don't know Spanish. Some started to say that this is not a case of gentrification, but a colonization.
I've lived here for more than a decade, I'm not native Catalan or Spanish and never experienced any xenophobia from anyone here.
Your retort here simply isn't logical.
10k doesn't fully offset 100k but it's a significant chunk of it, and when supply gets so compressed as to become inelastic, a 10k amelioration (that is also prevented from creeping up to 15k or 20k within a few years) can be quite significant. Plus certain districts are obviously impacted disproportionately compared to others by not just the reduction in housing available but the sheer foot traffic and other blight that comes along with a lopsided rise in tourist accommodations.
If you magically create 100k affordable homes, you'll find population growth to fill up those homes within a relatively short period (<10y). If you magically remove 100k homes, you'll see population drop. So population growth isn't a complete measure of demand. Rather it just says something about how much the housing stock reasonably can accommodate. If you build nothing, population growth will be minimal, but it doesn't mean all possible demand has been accommodated. It just means there's lots of latent demand that have no homes to move into.
It's more sensible to look at the growth of the housing stock verus existing housing stock. I read in this thread: 15k properties built over 10 years (1.5k per year), a metro that has houses 5.7 million people, 2.5 people per home, means there are 2.3 million homes. 1.5k homes per year on 2.3m existing homes means they're adding 0.06% housing stock per year.
That simply IS a drop in the bucket. It's peanuts. Most in-demand (capital/a-tier) cities aim to construct at least 1% a year. For example, Amsterdam grew by 15% in the last 10 years, despite very stringent building requirements, green zones that can't be built, height restrictions to protect the character of the inner city, swamp land foundations and various environmental, water & electricity capacity challenges NL is facing right now.
So yes, if you're constructing at a fraction of the rate of other in-demand cities, then I would agree that eliminating tourist apartments is a band-aid solution, not a root-cause solution that works in the long term.
As for the balance of tourism vs locals, it's a tricky one. I think one thing we shouldn't forget is that 1 tourist apartment creates a lot of meaningful experiences within a year. An average tourist say of about 5 days in a city means that across a 10 year period an apartment can accommodate either one family living there full-time, or 700 different families having a holiday experience in Barcelona.
Put differently, these 10 thousand tourist homes that will come on the market, will house 10 thousand households more, and will prevent 700 thousand households from renting them on a 5 day trip to Barcelona, adding only 0.04% to the housing stock (one-time) and changing very little about the economics of housing in Barcelona for (new) locals.
It's easy to hate on tourists, but being a tourist can be a wonderful experience, that is meaningful and valuable, and shouldn't just be dismissed as some annoyance to locals. Of course all should be in balance. To speak on a personal note: I live in a city that takes in 20 million tourists a year on a population of less than 1 million, I don't work in tourism and for me it's mostly an annoyance. I definitely think we shouldn't grow the number of tourists anymore in my city, I think the same for Barcelona is true. But I also think it's worthwhile to maintain a big chunk of current tourism, even if it's annoying to me as a local, because I have no monopoly on enjoying my city. We've restricted tourist apartments to renting 30 days a year (the number of days a local is on holiday himself, and rents out his apartment), and I think that's fine. No need to eliminate it altogether though.
It seems to me that this change will have unintended effects and will fail to produce the desired results.
AFAIK rent in NYC hasn’t gone down since they changed their short-term rental regulations.
I might be naive, but I’d assume that the solution is to build more housing to increase the supply instead of curbing the demand?
Genuinely curious about others’ takes on this.
Prices may not go down on rents, but if it means that more folks who actually _want to live in the city_ can, I see that as a positive. I can see in NY the case where decrease in housing leads to folks being priced out and moving elsewhere (NJ, etc.)
Obviously not speaking with any data here.
Two categories where people don't want pricing to go down:
If you have plans to move and prices aren't falling everywhere, the proceeds of a sale aren't enough to buy elsewhere.
And if your bank owns the home rather than you, falling prices screw you over because you owe far more to the bank than you could make by selling.
So like what 99% of homes? If you rent you don't own it, if you own a condo you don't own it, if you own a house outright you are probably close to 1%.
Most of Barcelona is rent/condos. There is not a ton of 250m2 mansions in downtown Barcelona.
That's covered by the case of "property values go down everywhere"; you only have a problem if your property value goes down but the value of property you want to buy doesn't.
Right… you go and make that pitch. Run for mayor with it.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/barcelona-pop...
from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40752920 ("Barcelona has a 16,000 people per square km density - that’s already one of the highest in Europe.")
Capital moves faster than meat space. To defend the human (affordable housing), you have to regulate. The whole "just build more, I want my AirBnB" argument boggles the mind considering the physical system constraints in play. Easier to just ban AirBnB.
Locals get votes, tourists and AirBnB do not. The harm of not being able to afford housing is far worse than harm incurred by not being able to book a vacation rental you prefer.
Normally hotels are built near either business or tourist areas. Very few people want their residences in the suburban office park areas. Tourist areas tend to be older areas that have strong restrictions on new development--hotels there have to go through long permitting processes.
https://www.google.com/maps/search/barcelona+hotels/@41.3806...
Not sure what you’re implying here but in the US homes in the suburbs back up to office parks all the time.
Of course they do.
I was just observing yesterday a big condo development right across from a recently-vacated office complex in an ex-urban area where I used to work.
"most" is doing a lot of work here. don't forget you probably don't want to live next to an airport, railroad, chemical plant
It would make sense to increase density around existing rail infrastructure. Barcelona has 7700 km2 of space, that's a lot. They have only 750 persons per km2 on average. Especially the outskirts of the province have really bad density. For example, Sant Joan de Vilatorrada has only 660 inhabitants per km^2 and it is only 3 km from the railway station, 80 min from the Sants station. That density is worse than Phoenix, Arizona, which has 1198/km2. So there is lots of available space.
Note that these numbers are of the Province of Barcelona. I don't know why you'd restrain yourself to the city proper. Here is a dense map of rail: https://www.urbanrail.net/eu/es/bcn/bcn-region-map.htm
The article, submission and discussions are about Barcelona city, not some far off town like Sant Joan de Vilatorrada (population: ~10k). No one who lives there would say they live in Barcelona, at most they'd say Manresa as that's the closest city.
But yes, if you're willing to live in the Catalan country-side, then of course Barcelona doesn't suffer from the density for you, but it's not a solution for us who live in Barcelona city.
Sant Joan de Vilatorrada is nowhere near Barcelona city, it's 15 hours walk away.
Now, that's the way you do it.
You play the market with a BnB.
That ain't workin': that's the way you do it.
Money for nothin' and your rent for free.
In Yonghe (a suburb of Taipei), the population density is over 38,000/sqkm.
They don't ban AirBnB apartments and renting a normal lease there, I was paying about $300 USD/month for rent until 2022, when I moved to LA.
NYC hotel and housing prices have been artificially inflated by government buying accommodations for homeless during 2020/2021, then migrants.
Is that artificial?
They’ve also added a land tax on second homes to disincentivize hoarding of property (though this has had some perverse effects, notably, reducing long-term rental stock and moving into the owner-occupier segment).
It’s too early to evaluate outcomes, but this general approach seems more sensible than an outright ban. Tax the activity to reduce it somewhat whilst generating state revenue to fund programs to mitigate the negative effects.
Demand for tourist housing is probably a bit more elastic than for residential housing, so it'll probably help a bit, but in general, I agree that growing the pie is better than bitter fights over how to cut the pie up.
This would rapidly double the population of the city which would cause tons of businesses to move there to hire everyone and then commercial real estate would skyrocket. At the end of the day, the city would be twice as large and more overcrowded than ever. Sure, they'd be more efficient in terms of infrastructure (plumbing, electricity, transit) but rents would skyrocket to capture that extra efficiency for landlords.
I have heard that "everyone" would move to
* San Francisco
* Bend, Oregon
* Boulder, Colorado
* Seattle
* Austin, Texas
* New York City
* Santa Barbara, California
* Hawaii
* Montana
* and on and on and on
You know what? No, not everyone is going to move to New York or Bend or San Francisco. Building more housing keeps rents in check. And if some more people get to live in a place they want to be, that is a good thing.
In reality, your best hope is to get one city to build a lot of housing. Then everyone moves there and we’re all unhappy.
This, by the way, is the reason homelessness is so bad in San Francisco despite their government spending enormous amounts of money fighting homelessness. All the other cities in the US sent all their homeless people to SF!
And really, not everyone is going to move somewhere. You could not pay me enough to live in NYC or San Francisco. People who love NYC would probably be bored in my small city.
Burdensome parking mandates are being eliminated or reduced across the country, as one example.
One way to try to get more places to reform on a similar timeline is to join a nationwide group, like https://new.yimbyaction.org/ or https://welcomingneighbors.us/
Objectively, this policy should be good for what it purports to do: reduce housing prices for permanent residents. This policy actually impacts both supply, forcing these 10k units to either languish unproductive or return to market as rental units or for sale, and demand, reducing sales demand for conversion to short term rentals.
Now, will this actually make a huge difference? Probably not. It’s only 10k units at most that return to the market in a city of 1.6M that likely has a lot of demand.
My take is that real estate sold to foreigners is the best kind of export. You sell the good to the foreign investor, but the good stays in place. From time to time that investor visits and drops money in the local economy. Most of the time the guy is not there, but pays taxes. Pays taxes but does not consume government services.
Actually you can. It's called building.
Take NYC for example. My guess is that at least half of the housing stock in NYC is "pre-war". The "war" in that expression is World War 2. No washer-driers, no elevators, but a good number of mice and rats.
You could absolutely take these buildings down and build back something better. And that better could have more apartment units.
I live in one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in NYC and in the world. All buildings are new (post 2000). If you replace the rest of the city with such buildings, you can certainly have enough housing for 30 million people.
But the foreign investors don't buy to come and live here. You can just build, sell, and not deal with the crowding.
And that could result in lower construction costs too. Why are new apartments so expensive? Because we don't know how to build anymore. We don't know because we don't build.
At its current size the city seems to have hit a sweet spot of desirability which caused prices to skyrocket, and it brings a lot of tourist money to the same residents who are protesting.
I think we need to shift from simplistic housing availability calculations to more broadly considering the motivations of people
> I might be naive, but I’d assume that the solution is to build more housing to increase the supply instead of curbing the demand?
Spain is not the US. Neither Spain nor any other Mediterranean country has large surface area that could accommodate housing demand at such high levels - there is already scarce land that you can build on across the Mediterranean as there are limited shorelines and deltas that were created by rivers etc, and the rest is immediately mountainous or hilly landscape that is very difficult to build on.
These countries could easily cope with their local demand, but allowing foreigners to buy housing caused a large influx of foreigners exacerbating the demand for housing and crowding out these places way beyond their capacity. The investment funds that scoop up housing to profit worsen the situation.
Maybe the US could handle such a demand with its gigantic surface area - solely Texas is larger than ENTIRE Western Europe, mind that. Or Russia. Or China. But other countries in the world, especially the Mediterranean ones, don't have the space to even start comparing with those.
The only solution is to limit the demand to the carrying capacity of each locale, province and country.
Definitely not, Texas is ~700,000 km2 while Spain is ~500,000 km2.
If you want cheaper housing for yourself, live somewhere with cheap housing.
If you are sincere and worried that the lack of cheap housing hurts your community: great. All the more reason to leave.
NYC, Barcelona and any major city that hasn't gone the way of SF and Portland, have the same problem - a lot of people like to be there, either temporarily or permanently, but the number of accommodations, both temporary and permanent, is not infinitely scalable and runs out pretty fast, especially if the city managers aren't actively working on fixing that problem by increasing the supply - which they often don't.
Increasing the supply is hard and leads to a tangle of its own challenges. Blaming somebody else - especially somebody that doesn't even vote in the local elections - is much easier, and by the time it turns out it doesn't help - which will be some 10 years ago from now - the managers could fail upwards, retire or think about some other scapegoat to blame.
New construction has halted completely. Seems like the construction sector will rather hold their finished stock and wait for the demand side to pick up due to necessity (people still move in to the city), or due to interest rates eventually going down.
The builders can hold out for a while, but the shoe has to drop eventually. Builders only make profit when building, and if your credit is extended on old projects you can’t start new ones, hence why construction has halted.
The problem is covid. Pretty much everyone in any developed economy believes the inflation+interest rate increases will be temporary. So they’re betting inflation will go back to what it was, interest rate policy will loosen again, and people’s budgets will increase again.
I think they might be in for a very rude awakening. And not only that, housing preferences for the highest income professionals have fundamentally changed due to WFH. They could all get stuck dumping the wrong stock on a weak market all at the same time in a year or so.
So the alternative is to build vertically, but that also comes with trade-offs as the streets get less sun and city dwellers will be able to see less sky.
People on the internet will do anything but read before spouting their obvious solutions on the internet.
And the superblocks in Barcelona are already quite high and suffocating.
They want cheap housing in a popular place to live, but they don't want to change the character of where they live to support housing actually being cheap.
The best they can actually get is locking the city down so the current residents are effectively lottery winners, but no one from the outside can move there.
That's less and less true. And of those who actually moved to Barcelona, some already left (and companies too) when the independentists started being openly hostile to anything non-catalan.
Why someone with the means to do what is called "geographical arbitrage" would pick Barcelona is totally beyond me.
tourism can be so lucrative that it is actually profitable to force out normal people and completely reorient the economy away from all other productive activities. eventually large parts of the city will become totally stagnant, but this doesn't seem to stop tourists from coming. there's often a constituency of people who are really benefiting from tourism (property owners, tour operators, restaurants) and who form a powerful bloc opposed to any restrictions or taxes.
it really seems quite similar to an economy where natural resource profits drive everything, it's impossible to get any other industries off the ground or make enough money to live in any other way.
The reality of the matter is that what's happening in Barcelona ended up resembling more a colonization when tourism got combined with golden visas that allow rich foreigners and investment funds to scoop up local housing and the recent digital nomad wave. There are now more foreigners in the city center than locals and you are hard pressed to hear Spanish or Catalan being spoken around the place.
"I was born and raised in Barcelona, no longer live there however. I didn't remember how bad it was until I went to visit my family last summer. Me and some friends went to walk around the center and the girl that took our orders at a Pans&Company didn't even know Spanish or Catalan, only English. It was honestly quite depressing. She was surprised we didn't open the conversation with English."
https://www.reddit.com/r/askspain/comments/1833ub1/comment/k...
Taxing short term rentals to build affordable housing seems like a good idea to me.
We should go the asian route of increasing density and size. It's not like Barcelona is fully developed border to border.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/barcelona-pop....
Nor does it mean this trade off for a measly 10,000 flats is worth it in such a large city.
Also, increasing density might be easy if you demolish 100 single family homes to build 10 five-stories buildings, but replacing Barcelona's 5-6 stories blocks with 10-stories ones isn't going to be economically viable. And if some brave developer tries this, then the resulting apartments won't be cheap.
Giving these 10k flats to locals isn't going to put a dent in the housing economy.
If this thread continues for a few more levels, I think you’ll end up justifying hiring your own private police force.
Ownership requires that a state exists to enforce your rights. There are tradeoffs with this arrangement, one of which is that the state gets to set boundaries/limits on how you can use the thing you own. Ideally, acting with the best interests of the population. This sometimes includes ensuring areas are off limits to transient inhabitants so that a society can develop.
This is uncharitable. What everybody wants is for the place they call home, either by inheritance or hard work, to not be harmed by overdevelopment. People will have varyingly (un)reasonable opinions on what "over" means, but even a place with zero development has new residents - people do not live in one place forever, nor do they live forever.
That's unintelligible. With that logic, every law and regulation is authoritarian.
> all the while fostering resentment and opening up increasingly authoritarian measures in the future
Here's the resentment:
https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/travel/2023/10/09/fed-u...
And yes, the locals want more authoritarianism to keep away the overcrowding tourists, rich foreigners, and people who think like you. That's what the problem needs and what people like you understand.
This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Edit: yikes, you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and badly—examples:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40743149
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40743095
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40743048
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40675193
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40673804
We have to ban accounts that keep doing this, so please stop doing this, and please make sure you're not using HN primarily for political or ideological battle.
(I suppose I should add the standard disclaimer that no, we don't care about your views. We care about your following the rules and using the site as intended, same as with any other user.)
> please make sure you're not using HN primarily for political or ideological battle
All the threads you referenced are filled with people using the site in a political and ideological manner. There are people who are literally doing propaganda against entire countries and people.
> no, we don't care about your views
If you don't care about the views of the users, don't care about them in an egalitarian way. So far the rules seem to be getting applied selectively.
> We have to ban accounts that keep doing this
Feel free to do so. I'll get me coat myself. No need to contribute to a platform that not only does not care about its users' views but also applies its rules selectively and in an exceptionalist manner.
> the rules seem to be getting applied selectively
Every commenter with strong passions feels like the mods apply the rules selectively and must therefore be on the other side. The people you disagree with are just as sure that we're secretly on your side. I say that with confidence even though I don't remember anything about your views at this moment, nor which side any of you are on.
The reason is sample bias. Everyone notices other people breaking the rules, but which cases you notice depends on your pre-existing views. What we (I mean all of us, i.e. humans generally) notice is governed by what we dislike [1]. We assign the most meaning to the cases that feel most unfair or offensive to us. Since everyone selects these based on their own feelings, opposite feelings lead to different samples and opposite conclusions.
When you see a post that ought to have been moderated but hasn't been, the likeliest explanation is that we just didn't see it. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted. Also, I'm the only moderator who responds publicly and I can only write so much—not just because I have other responsibilities to worry about, but also because if I make even a slight mistake, it can (and often has) made a situation worse. It's a little bit like writing software in, I don't know, Agda as opposed to JS or something. You can't do it as fast or as much.
Which posts I respond to vs. not is determined by two factors: (a) what has been brought to my attention by others; and (b) randomness. If you or anyone sees a post that ought to be moderated, you can bring it to our/my attention by either flagging it (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cflag for how), or in egregious cases, by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
Moderation can't be consistent in any way that would require reviewing all posts, but it can be relatively [2] consistent as long as we work with random-enough samples and handle them in a principled-enough way. That's what we aspire to. We're not perfect at it, but we do at least have years of practice.
This works well enough to signal to most of the community that (a) HN is moderated, and (b) that it's moderated reasonably fairly [3]. But it leaves many cases that don't get moderated all, which means there are plenty of data points which people can select to draw whatever conclusions they want to about HN moderation—and believe me, they do!
We've all had this experience in other contexts. Take cops and speeding tickets. There's always a "me? why me?" reaction when you get pulled over. Plenty of other cars were speeding faster! The cops must have ulterior motives for picking on me [4]. Even if my brain knows about random samples, the feelings still work this way. Another example is sports and referees. The passionate fans are the quickest to feel that the refs are making calls unfairly, and it always feels like the calls are unfair against your team.
One last point, in the unlikely event that you read this far... when I said "we don't care about your views" I did not mean to belittle your views or to imply that they're about something unimportant. On the contrary, the divisive topics are extremely important—far more important than most things that appear on HN. I just meant that we don't (or at least try our best not to) consider your views when making moderation calls. And of course by "you" I don't just mean you personally, I mean everybody.
---
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[2] I say 'relatively' because this is a complex problem with lots of failure modes, but they don't change the important point above.
[3] Wait, haven't I just contradicted myself, after talking about all the users who feel we're unfair? No, because the driving factor is the passions of the perceiver. The more passionately you (i.e. anyone) feels about a topic, the more this dynamic kicks in. Most of the community doesn't have strong passions on a given topic, so even when they see the same data points as you, they won't select them as evidence of unfairness. They'll also be more likely to notice cases of the mods scolding the other side as well, and to assign equal weight to those. In other words, the very things that indicate unfairness to you will feel like fairness to them. This is how the same moderation approach can both reassure the majority while at the same time convincing passionate partisans (on any side of any topic) that the system is biased against them. For a couple collections of vivid examples, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26148870.
[4] And maybe they do? This argument doesn't prove there's no bias; it just shows that any system, even the most unbiased, will produce strong feelings of bias no matter what you do.
The city of Barcelona quite literally is fully developed border to border. Or where are you suggesting these new developments are gonna be made?
I think this working as it should.
Thus, I don't think the city will really suffer from shrinking of the cheap tourism segment. Barcelona is already overcrowded, so making this crowd less dense and more rich at the same time is a net positive scenario. Also, the city needs long-term housing for those who work and study there.
There are lots of beautiful hotels in Barcelona. I visited the city about 10 times and never stayed in the same hotel twice, the choice is wild.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/catalonia-cracks-down-b...
We stayed in a few different week-long AirBnBs (or some other rental service) in 2019 in Barcelona and loved it. Although, and this could be a big source of the problem, both people we met up with to get keys were not Spanish and specifically asked if we could speak French or German instead.
We can all speculate till the sun goes down about what we think is going to happen, now we're going to get real data. This is great.
Even if the outcomes are "bad", they can just undo this is ~5 years. At least we will have all learned from it.
https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/travel/2023/10/09/fed-u...
1) The effects of tourism on housing prices: applying a difference-indifferences methodology to the Portuguese market. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/IJHMA-04...
> Following the liberalization [allowing more AirBNBs], for each one percentage point increase in the share of STR as a percentage of the housing stock, housing prices increased 27.4% and 16.1% in the Lisbon and Porto MSA municipalities most exposed to STR, respectively. These results represent a much higher impact than that estimated in previous studies (Franco and Santos, 2021)
2) The impact of Airbnb on residential property values and rents: Evidence from Portugal https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01660...
> This article quantifies the impact of Airbnb’s short-term rentals on housing affordability in Portugal.
> We find that on average a 1pp increase in a municipality Airbnb share results in a 3.7% increase in house prices.
Platforms like AirBnB only put oil in the fire when it comes to housing crises.
That isn't how human beings work, though, and it never has been. I tend to suspect that a person saying something like this has few if any deep relationships with people who cannot afford to own homes, because the statement shows no compassion for their experience.
Where it ends up in the extreme case is people living on top of each other.
Airbnb is a nightly rate that competes with hotel pries. Long-term rentals are a monthly rate that is usually much less than the nightly rate of a hotel or Airbnb.
Example: A hotel near my house is about ~$400/night. Or ~$12,000/month. Rent for a 1-bed apartment across the street is about $3000/month.
Problem is those who don't use certain services love banning them and pretend they're fixing some unrelated problem.
If I have a multi leg journey I'll make sure every other stop is at an Airbnb with a washing machine.
What do you mean exactly by "feels like an Airbnb"?
If you want to stay at a place that has a kitchen, and multiple bedrooms, there are suite hotels (eg. Homewood suites) and extended stay hotels. If you want someone to host you, then a bed and breakfast is another type of accommodation.
2. 3+ bedrooms. Good luck finding that in Hotels.
3. Things like private hot tubs or pools, BBQ in the backyard, etc are almost unheard of in hotels.
4. Laundry machines.
Whatever the case, despite the existence of the options you list, Airbnb's are still popular. There's clearly some significant differentiator between them and an Airbnb.
But there is a psychology to it that is, as you say, hard to pin dow. A hotel that has a random assortment of plates and cutlery in the kitchen (like my last AirBnB did) would feel cheap and tacky. The AirBnB didn't.
- Not wanting staff or service.
- Wanting something that looks and feels like a home rather than a hotel room. This isn't available everywhere.
- Wanting something that isn't shared with a bunch of other hotel guests. (Aside: I have no problems with apartment buildings banning AirBnB/VRBO, because that's much more "cheap hotel substitute that might bother neighbors" than "unique offering that isn't likely to bother anyone".)
- In general, wanting something unique that doesn't tend to exist as a hotel.
The place you linked to has the equivalent of a studio apartment with no laundry machine going for over 9000 CAD for a month. AirBnB has plenty of one bedrooms going for a third of that.
AirBnBs I've stayed in the past few years have all been janky, weird, and not really any cheaper than hotels. I don't have to do chores at hotels, and I can always get (and return) the key promptly. I've also been told on several occasions not to let anyone else in the building know I was an AirBnB guest. AirBnB used to be better, but the advent of "professional hosts" with many properties really degraded things. They often have the typical landlord mentality of expecting a lot of reward with little work or risk.
And yet, you stay in them.
Also, while I'm not OP, I gave up on Airbnbs a long time ago for the same reasons, and that impression is occasionally refreshed when I stay in an Airbnb that _someone else_ arranged. I will go out of my way to avoid them if it's all up to me.
The major travel sites all push you to multiple rooms - but lots of hotels now don't have "adjoining room" access (compared to say 30 years ago), and in one case, our 2 rooms were on different floors because of check-in time.
The travel sites are picking up on this and competing with airbnb as well. Typically my experience with those rented homes is a) cheaper than airbnb and b) better service. However, I'm sure they are the same type of superhost company that would be banned in Barcelona.
The move that Barcelona just made might actually be kind of like closing the barn door after the horses have escaped. Good political theater, I guess, but not really moving things in a direction they weren't already going.
https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/hotel
Note that style of construction does not seem to be a factor. Many hotels offer freestanding villas or cabins, practically small (sometimes even not so small) houses, and have for a long time. Chains like Residence Inn, Homewood Suites, or Extended Stay America have likewise offered hotel accommodation in the physical form of an apartment for almost as long. Personally, I think the inclusion of housekeeping services during a stay is a big differentiator, perhaps because it demonstrates intent to serve a transient clientele. By contrast, a "dual use" house or apartment that is owner occupied part of the time and rented out part of the time does not show such intent. Neither do the illegal sublets that are behind many Airbnb rentals.
In other words, the physical similarity between a suite hotel (like the one I'm in) and apartments doesn't seem determinative. Rather, what seems to matter is the financial difference between a nightly (or perhaps weekly) guest vs. a longer term lessee. I'm not saying whether it's right or wrong, but it does explain why different types of levels of regulation are applicable to each.
P.S. The ones "escaping regulation" are the Airbnbs, not the hotels. Hotels are subject to much more stringent standards wrt safety, sanitation, privacy, billing, etc.
Yes, although a lot of hotels moved away from daily service during the pandemic and stayed there. Which is just fine by me.
If I were to stay longer than a week I'd probably cast my lodging net a bit wider. But hotels (or regular B&Bs, especially outside of cities) meet my needs pretty well for the most part. I have used AirBnB but I'm guessing the standard deviation is higher though I haven't had a bad (small sample) experience.
Even laundry which a number of people mention isn't really a big deal for the most part. I tend to optimize things that can be given a quick wash in the sink. I have stayed in ApartHotels with a laundry room and at B&Bs that will run a cheap load for you for longer trips involving more mud etc. And I've used a wash and fold place on a few occasions. Even as a very light packer, I've never felt the need to do laundry every few days.
What if we let people decide what they should/n't do with their own property instead?
I knew an Airbnb host in Italy, he shared with me that by renting to tourist compared to the normal market prices to locals he would make 3 times more. It's a no brainer, but he would gladly accept 1/3 of that if the alternative is 0 (and he did during the pandemic when tourism stopped).
How else, besides continued maintenance of that consent, would property rights get their legitimacy?
> Forcefully seize their apartment because people need it?
The needs of the many come before the needs of the few. Someone said it somewhere across the ocean. But the country where it was said does not heed it at all. The rest of the world does.
I might own my own apartment, but I can't turn it into a pub, I can't turn it into a disco, I can't turn it into an auto service garage, I can't grow weed in it, I can't turn it into a shop, all these I can't do because it will negatively affect the life of my neighbors.
This is a distraction for an easy target. It won't help and it will make the quality of hotels worse.
It will also have a lot of under the table deals.
But hey, instead of fixing the real problems, it's easy to attack things some people don't use. They do the same to electric bikes and scooters. Ban ban ban! Things will surely improve!
Yes and its a major problem. Some locations are already acting out.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/europe/portugal-ends-golden-...
> This is a distraction for an easy target. It won't help and it will make the quality of hotels worse.
Its not a distraction - its just a start. And hotel quality is still what it was before Airbnb and it will stay like that after airbnb goes away. The standards that national and international tourism institutions apply to the hotels has not changed one iota because of airbnb.
> But hey, instead of fixing the real problems
This is the real problem.
https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/travel/2023/10/09/fed-u...
But most plausible scenario is mix of the above plus something unexpected and bad
No such thing. Regulations work.
> Scenarios
No need to 'imagine' things. Wherever they implemented regulations here, they worked. From rent control to airbnb bans. Regulations work as long as you enforce them.
In Spain, home owners associations can forbid tourist apartments if they vote it. Why can’t they just do it?
Spain is suffering a multi-centralization process. Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Malaga are increasing their populations. The rest of the cities are losing inhabitants. Why? Because the job opportunities are not there.
The depopulation problem of MOUNTAINOUS regions of Europe, including Spain, has little to do with jobs being available elsewhere. The depopulation in those mountainous regions is due to those regions being undesirable for human habitation all the way, and the recent advent of technology and infrastructure making it possible for people to go to other places. These regions were inhabited only because people had to live there and the human society's infrastructure could not carry millions of people in a central location.
Poorer regions like Extremadura and Andalusia have been neglected for centuries and now the economy is so dire we are seeing a mass migration from south Spain to other regions.
To me it seems much more likely that this is the reason for such bans because in housing terms the number of Airbnb properties seems far too small to make a difference.
My money is on what happens every time governments stick their hairy knuckles in the delicate mechanics of the free market: the economy works around them.
IMO, in this case, it will foster a huge black market (because there's strong demand for the stuff) and make a stream of taxable income disappear underground altogether.
any black market feasible to replace airbnb will immediately be discovered by the authorities. The effect will be to greatly reduce short term rental of units that should be dwellings for people who live in those cities. Any system that replaces airbnb illegally will simply have police renting these properties and arresting everyone involved or seizing properties illegally being rented.
> "Spain is Europe’s fastest-growing big economy. Nearly three-quarters of the country’s recent growth and one in four new jobs are linked to tourism"
70% is ~5.4% yearly, 40% is 3.4% growth yearly. Seems, fine?
These are incredibly reasonable growth rates. Am I missing something?
Spanish wages grew only 2.7%/yr L10Y [1], and its nominal GDP/capita looks completely flat [2].
This explains why the city is affordable for international tourists but not locals. Regardless, a high "tourist tax" would probably be better for their economy than an outright ban.
[1] https://www.ine.es/jaxiT3/Tabla.htm?t=59150
[2] Compare https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=spain+gdp+per+capita+10... vs https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=USA+gdp+per+capita+10+y...
Let's look at the bay's wage growth[0]: 11% (or ~1%/yr) from 2010-2020, but they removed CPI-U inflation[1], so it's something higher (annual was ~1-3% in that time period). Which puts the bay area housing at 5%+ higher growth, 2x to 7x worse than Spain.
So, once again - Spain is doing well when it comes to housing prices. Tourism frustrates locals because they think it's increased their housing costs wildly - but in fact it's because their economy is switching to a tourist economy unless they find an industry to grow.
[0]: https://bayareaequityatlas.org/indicators/income-growth?year... [1]: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/CUUR0000SA0&output_view=pct_...
An apples-to-apples comparison illustrates my point:
L10Y cumulative change in:
Bay Area rent: +46.0% [0]
Bay Area wages: +45.7% [1]
Vs:
Barcelona rent: +70% (if we believe TFA)
Spain wages: +30% [2]
Or:
Cumulative 2010-2020 change in:
Bay Area rent: +57% [0]
Bay Area wages: +34% [1]
which also looks bad (but not as bad as Barcelona L10Y). Indeed, there were lots of complaints about housing costs in SF then.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUURA422SEHA [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU06418840500000003 [2] https://www.ine.es/jaxiT3/Tabla.htm?t=59150
I guess it just doesn't look bad to me in terms of their real estate, thanks for pointing me to these better data sources.
"While Germany’s economy is flatlining, Spain is Europe’s fastest-growing big economy. Nearly three-quarters of the country’s recent growth and one in four new jobs are linked to tourism."
3.9% of Barcelona's GDP in 2022.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1346730/tourism-contribu...
5.4% of Catalonia's GDP in 2022.
Source: https://economia.gencat.cat/web/.content/70_economia_catalan...
11.6% of Spain's GDP in 2022.
Source: https://www.bde.es/f/webbe/GAP/Secciones/SalaPrensa/Interven...
1. To outlaw AirBnB. Except if people are staying in your house while you're there. Other than that, it should be illegal;
2. 80% Capital Gains Tax on property sales other than your primary residence, withheld at source.
3. Withold 40% of rent income at source, which can only be credited against taxable income in the state and country; and
4. Tax non-primary residences at 2% of their market value every year in addition to any property taxes; and
5. If landlords want out, let the state buy them out and use those properties for affordable housing for all citizens. The UK previously came "dangerously" close to eliminating landlords this way last century [1].
EDIT: another big one:
6. Ban HOAs. Entirely. They are anachronism invented to enforce segregation. Any function they perform (eg picking up trash, tending communal parks) is and should be the function of local government, which is democratic. HOAs are not.
Lastly, the one exception I would carve out is for multi-families and ADUs (accessory dwelling units). These were once commonplace but are now prohibited in most of the US.
Just like renting out a room in your house while you're there, ADUs mean the landlord is also affected by any potential misdeeds or abuse by the tenant so is invested in that not happening.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-...
There is so much wrong with real estate as a speculative asset. It leads us to create policies to limit housing (because existing owners have their assets increase in value).
The problem with this idea is that money has to come from somewhere. All we're doing is stealing from the next generation. It's a massive wealth transfer from the young to the old and wealthy. Housing is a necessity. It should not be withheld from people for the sake of investment gains.
Homelessness is primarily caused by unaffordable housing. People don't like the externalities this creates but they simply want to move those people away so they don't have to see them when the solution is as simple as giving them housing. Well, not entirely, but that gets you 90% of the way there.
Withholding shelter in the wealthiest nation the Earth has ever seen is unjustifiable state violence.
What? Most HOAs seem to be one house one vote? Or what does not make them democratic. Should it be one vote per dweller?
Maybe it's a bigger problem than Airbnb?
> How will they limit temporal renting
Like any other illegal activity. My best guess is that the police will act when neighbors complain about noise or other nuisances. The fact that it is illegal will make easy to evict the occupants and fine the owner.
How will you separate it into two types?
If you don't work and you just visit for leisure, you're a tourist. If you're planning to rent an apartment for short-term remote work, you'll need to be a resident, and you'll have a short-term contract where at least your resident number is put as well (and don't forget to pay taxes on the income you earn while in the country too).
So I guess leisure vs work is the line you're looking for is.
* Vancouver
* Toronto
* Montreal
Which is where high paying jobs are, and which are mostly zoned for houses.