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Comment by mft_ | Hacker News Reader

It may be much more straightforward than you suggest, and not at all related to xenophobia.

A core problem is that an influx of tourists hits the housing supply. Short-term tourism incentivises conversion of local housing to accommodate them (AirBnB, etc.) and long-term tourism results in foreigners buying local housing as their permanent or long-term holiday home.

The result is obviously a relative shortage of housing and rising prices, both of which make it harder for locals (who are often relatively poorer) to live where they need to. This pattern has been repeated from small villages in scenic areas, to big cities (e.g. Barcelona), to whole islands (e.g. Mallorca).

I’m probably one of the people that has contributed to this to some extent over time; and yet I fully understand the frustration of the locals.

It may result in apparent xenophobia in some, but its roots are rational and economic.

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> A core problem is that an influx of tourists hits the housing supply.

This is the explanation these activists rely on and it’s cribbed directly from posts I was reading on /pol/ ten years ago. While it sounds plausible, I’ve never found it to have any basis in empirical reality. Tourist accommodation represents a negligible proportion of dwellings outside of resort towns, and in resort towns the whole economy is based around tourism. Some people might object to tourism changing the character of the cities they live in, but their primary objection is cultural, not economic.

If you look at the signs you see in Latin America (“Expat? No! You are an immigrant!” and “Speak my language!”) or the graffiti in Barcelona (“Tourists go home, refugees welcome.”) it becomes fairly apparent that most of these people don’t have coherent objections at all, they just resent people they perceive to be wealthier than themselves; this is why the refugees are not targeted, despite their having had far greater impacts on housing markets in Latin America and cultural cohesion in Europe.

While in some cases there may be other aspects at play, it really is the case that turning rentals into AirBnBs for visitors has dramatically increased rent in towns such as Barcelona, and even in Central Sydney where I used to live. (I say this has someone who has rented in the center of big cities, and also as someone who has taken advantage of accomodation which has been “cheap” for me, as an outsider, in cities such as Barcelona).

One can have zero racist sentiments, but if you suddenly get kicked out of your rental, because it’s more profitable for your landlord to make money from tourists, you will be outraged. (And it’s not an insignificant number if inner city apartments impacted by this). Obviously other cost of living factors have led to increased rents, but this is still a big factor in some cities.

> Sydney

“Sydney has 18,000 Airbnb listings, of which 80% are whole homes. This equates to around 3.2 Airbnb listings per 1,000 residents or 0.9% of Sydney’s private homes.” [0]

This is about half of the usual 2% figure I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, which is what the numbers are for London, Los Angeles, and New York City (before the ban).

> Barcelona

Barcelona has 19,410 listings, of which 11,828 are whole-house-apartment listings.[1]

[0]: https://matusik.substack.com/p/airbnbs

Note that the author is pulling his data from here:

[1]: https://insideairbnb.com/sydney/

I'm not sure you've looked very hard. Let's consider Mallorca. It's not all a resort town, but no doubt it's an attractive destination.

Estimates of course vary, but there are estimates that 60% of the total housing stock is owned by foreigners [0] and in 2024, >40% of all houses sold were bought by foreigners. [1] (It's also worth noting that [1] suggests foreigners purchased >20% of houses sold in Valencia, the Canary Islands, Murcia, and Catalonia, so this isn't limited to Mallorca.)

If these numbers are even close to accurate, this would be your empirical reality, and such numbers would certainly by sufficient to drive demand, shortage, and price increases.

[0] https://www.falcrealestate.com/en/magazine/property-market-t...

[1] https://humansofmallorca.com/balearics-lead-spain-for-homes-...

> It's not all a resort town

Tourism comprises 45% of the economy, which is what I was characterizing as a resort town. If you look at cities that have anything else going on for them, you’re looking at figures of less than 2% of housing stock. London is around 2.5%, New York City was around 2% before the ban, Los Angeles is around 2.1%.

So… except for the places where the concept applies, it doesn’t apply?

In places where the economy is not based on tourism, the percentage of short term rentals rarely exceeds 3% of housing stock.

The original disagreement was (to simplify) around whether locals' objections to tourists was due to economics (housing becoming more expensive), or other possible factors (including xenophobia).

So we seem to have agreed that, yes, in areas where there's a significant influx of tourists (whether short or long-term), there are likely to be sigificant economic factors that might explain the locals' antipathy?

> So we seem to have agreed that, yes, in areas where there's a significant influx of tourists (whether short or long-term), there are likely to be sigificant economic factors that might explain the locals' antipathy?

Are you seeing these demonstrations in the resort towns or in the cities under the 3% threshold?

I think you're trying to shift the goalposts, or you're just not seeing that we're stuck in circular logic.

----

You originally said there isn't an economic basis to locals' antipathy to outsiders.

I provided evidence to show that an economic basis is plausible.

You then use that evidence, and define any examples where it's happening as a 'resort town', and then require evidence that it's also happening in places you wouldn't define as a 'resort town'.

I can't do that, because you excluded the places I can provide positive evidence for, by defining them as resort towns.

----

My basic point remains: there are plenty of places where an influx of short- or long-term tourists causes a meaningful economic shift in the cost of housing (especially) which therefore makes it logical (and not just xenophobic) that the locals might resent the tourists.

Build more?

> Expat? No! You are an immigrant!

This is just anger about the insane double standard at play - if I as a European move to Latin America, I’m a sophisticated expat and they should be happy that my rich ass is living there - whereas when it’s the other way around they are immigrants and treated like actual scum, working the lowest of low jobs. The double standard at play makes me sad and angry even if I’m the one on the surface benefitting from it.

> Speak my language

This one i can also understand - I know American “expats” who lived in my country 15+ years but never bothered to learn the language, not even a little tiny bit. I don’t expect you to write a doctors thesis but if you can’t even order food in the local language or have some smalltalk it’s pretty pathetic and disrespectful. Meanwhile non-English speaking “immigrants” get yelled at if they don’t speak the local language perfectly.

Not everything is as easily explained away by “progressives training to be xenophobic”

> Some people might object to tourism changing the character of the cities they live in, but their primary objection is cultural

Is that not a valid objection? I know places in Greecethat have been utterly RUINED by the (mostly Anglo-Saxon) tourists, for example Santorini or Mykonos. These used to be really beautiful and chill places in the 70/80s, now they are horrid

> These used to be really beautiful and chill places in the 70/80s, now they are horrid

Isn’t this a bit of gatekeeping? What do you propose the solution is? Ban tourists? Take it another incremental step and now you’re banning immigrants too. “Don’t visit! Stay in your country!” “Go home tourists/immigrants”, it’s the same song and dance. It’s the same sentiment.

There is a solution to the tourist “problem” though, which is to just charge a shitload of money to visit. But then you’ll be accused of being inequitable or hating poor people or something.

Lottery system solves this issue but then people start thinking of reasons that they deserve to visit more than someone else and try to implement quotas affording priority access to their group (e.g. local residents, ethnic minority, etc.)

It’s an intractable problem encountered when dealing with scarce resources; the key is navigating to a point that the functional number of people consider to be fair.

Yea lottery works too though it can be a huge pain for coordinating plans. I think making everything much more expensive at least gives people flexibility in their arrangements. Like say you want to go to Paris and visit Musee de Orsay and also Versailles. You get lottery ticket to one and not the other - bummer.

If you take the current $20 prices and make them, say, $200 that would alleviate a lot of extra visitors. I guess some people say it’s not fair, but based on my visits I don’t think most people really go to these sites to do much more than check a box, which is unfortunate. A higher price at least allows those with interest to have a better experience instead of fighting crowds of selfie-takers, which is the current experience.

On the other hand, maybe some of these artworks should be more spread out to be enjoyed by more people instead of concentrated in a select few prestigious museums.

There is no absolute solution of course and I don’t really have great ideas.

Mostly it’s rich people exploiting a place until nothing is left - I’ve seen it in my hometown; the lovely neighbourhood i grew up in has been transformed into something entirely different by investors and other leeches until the very thing that made it great is gone

The expat-immigrant distinction is a simple one; an expat lives abroad, an immigrant intends to gain citizenship and stay. This isn’t actually necessarily reflective of how illegals view the country anymore; a lot of them intend to leave after working a few years so that they can retire in their country of origin. The reason Latinos get so upset by this distinction is quite simple: Very many of them move to developed countries and want to stay there. By contrast, hardly anyone moves to to Latin countries, and virtually none of those that do will ever attempt to become citizens. An Australian who moves to Peru and becomes a citizen is still an immigrant, not an expat; this just basically never happens, so a subset of Latinos wrongly assume it’s a race thing.

> This one i can also understand - I know American “expats” who lived in my country 15+ years but never bothered to learn the language, not even a little tiny bit.

It is obnoxious. My point was that the objection these people have to tourists is not rooted in their actual economic impact, but cultural anxiety that they are being left behind or disrespected. These anxieties are warranted, the issue I take with it is that cosmopolitans will chastise Cletus for not wanting to be replaced by Mexicans who refuse to learn English but celebrate Jose for saying the same thing but in Spanish.

>> RUINED by the (mostly Anglo-Saxon)

I've heard that Norman invasion dealt with them long before Santorini became a tourist hotspot. You probably should decrease consumption of content created by russia today.

No idea what’s that is supposed to mean but I got this story from some older Greek people who knew the place before tourist hordes arrived

There’s been tons of studies in tons of cities. It’s quite clear, for a landlord you make more per month on Airbnb than on a long term rental. So economically it makes sense. Toronto had to do those studies before city council passed a law to restrict airbnb.

You also saw it through covid when all those units flooded the rental market when international borders closed.

> There’s been tons of studies

Such as?

> You also saw it through covid when all those units flooded the rental market when international borders closed.

Toronto had an average of 12,270 daily active listings in 2019 [0]. Toronto had a population of around 2.7 million in 2019. The majority of this impact was caused by people leaving the cities to buy in the suburbs, move in with family, or return to their country of origin.

[0]: Page 7 https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2021/ph/bgrd/backgroundf...

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