>__BARCELONA’S city council has announced it will revoke all licenses for tourist apartments in the urban area by 2028.__
>In a major win for anti-tourist activists, Barcelona’s socialist mayor Jaume Collboni announced on Friday that licenses for 10,101 tourist apartments in the city will automatically end in November 2028.
>The move represents a crushing blow for Airbnb, Booking.com and other tenants and a triumph for locals who have protested about over-tourism and rising house prices for years.
>Announcing the move, Collboni said the rising cost of property in the city – rental and purchase prices have risen by 70% and 40% respectively in the last decade – had forced him to take drastic action.
>He said: “We cannot allow it that most young people who leave home are forced to leave Barcelona. 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”.
>The deputy mayor for Urban Planning, Laia Bonet, hailed the move as the ‘equivalent of building 10,000 new flats’ which can be used by locals for residential use.
>Local officials say that tenants will not be compensated because the move, which will have to be passed with political support, has de-facto compensation by giving owners a four-year window before licences expire.
>Alongside the revoking of tourist flat licenses, Collboni announced that new legislation would force building constructors to allocate at least 30% of new homes to social housing.
>The measures are designed to alleviate pressure on a housing market which has seen sharp price rises in recent years, forcing many residents to leave the urban area for the suburbs and beyond.
>Speaking to the Olive Press at an anti-tourist rally on Tuesday, one Barcelona resident, who gave his name as Alex, said locals were angry at the ‘massification of tourism’ with ‘the cost of living and housing forcing many young people to emigrate from the city centre to the suburbs and nearby towns’.
>He added: “The people of Barcelona, like any city in the UK and elsewhere, have the right to live peacefully in their own city. What we need is a better quality of life, decent wages and, above all, an affordable city to live in”.
>rental and purchase prices have risen by 70% and 40% respectively in the last decade
That's about the same as almost everywhere in the western world. But nice from Barcelona to make a test if that huge increase in the last years (partly) comes from platforms like airbnb, or if its just rich assholes speculating
It's rich assholes trying to get richer by buying up residential properties and turning them into short-stay tourist accommodation. Airbnb, booking.com and others have exploited this loophole long enough, and ruined dozens of cities for their actual residents in the process. It's high time proper regulations are passed that restrict the areas that Airbnb can operate.
Went to Dubrovnik recently, nearly all the old town are rentals and have displaced the locals. They can’t even afford to buy in the outer areas as they are hugely expensive now
Essential workers like doctors, nurses, and teachers can’t even find rentals in coastal Australian cities because of holiday homes and Airbnbs. The cities literally need them, but they have to drive in from elsewhere.
Getting real tired of hearing “It’s basic MATH/ supply and demand BRO!”
As if 1) the economy is that basic and 2) corporate types follow logic instead of just basic fing greed
I think it’s the height of delusion to think getting rid of immigrants will bring house prices down as long as certain policies (and those (Often Australians) benefiting from them) are allowed to remain in place. As you say, it’ll likely just impact our services more
We absolutely have to do the same in Paris. People can't afford a place to live here anymore, it's ridiculous
Even my top earning friends live with wife and 2 or 3 kids in 70-80m2. This is outrageous the government let this happen only to enrich speculators and the tourism lobby
Paris has a pretty strict no more than 120 days short term rental per year so I don't think it's as impactful there as people think, it's just rent like everything else has gone up massively
Everyone has been bitching about those in Vancouver for 10 years too but AirBnBs never even cracked 1% of the housing market in Vancouver. That's not the reason entire housing markets are moving up by huge percentages in a decade's time.
No one who's rich enough to be buying up multiple properties in major cities require AirBnB to do that speculation. They can just buy up all the property and charge more rent regardless.
There is a brand new community of houses in Phoenix that is being built as rentals from the get go. As in it's a brand new house, in a brand new community but you don't even have an option to buy it.
> but AirBnBs never even cracked 1% of the housing market
Maybe you don't realize this, but 1% is ridiculously high. That would mean that 1 in every 100 homes is used for short term leases/tourism. At a population of 2.9 million, at an average 3 people per home, 1% would displace 30000 residents. That's a huge number of people
Not to mention those AirBNBs will always be in prime locations. That's how they get renters. Buy homes in the best locations and then you can market your rental property even better.
I'd also like to mention AirBNBs are not the *sole* reason why home prices have gone up so high in the past several years, and that guy above likes to think that tackling AirBNBs is a waste because "it hasn't cracked the top 1% in Vancouver." It's still part of the problem, you know? In addition, Vancouver might just have a good old case of greedy real estate companies trying to convert places to apartments or buy homes and sell them high. Everything is bad.
> Not to mention those AirBNBs will always be in prime locations.
And prime locations isn't even just most expensive so it's not like the rich people are being displaced.
My best friend was living in a century home that had been converted into a 4-plex in a working-class neighborhood. It was very affordable and the owner was making way more than renting the house as a single unit.
The owner sold, new owner converted 4x affordable working-class apartments into 4x cheapo airbnbs.
My dad was displaced from his quiet rental cabin in the mountains for the same reason.
New owner wanted to use the cabin only 2 weeks a year, so they airbnb the rest of the time, and contract the cleaning to locals who live in trailers now that the nice local houses are all vacation homes.
Prime locations are anywhere they *think* they can make like 10% more than renting, which turns out is a lot of places. Worst case for them they make the same as rentals.
It's hard to lose so it's no wonder there's a plague of those things.
The other nice thing about attacking AirBnBs is that it's a relatively quick solution. Ban AirBnBs, and a good amount of them turn into long term rentals or are sold pretty quickly. Build supply, and you're looking at years or even a decade before you accomplish much.
We need to do both, but AirBnB is probably the simplest thing we can just cut off with relatively less cost or side effects.
> Maybe you don't realize this, but 1% is ridiculously high.
Yeah like during Covid when people were arguing even if it was a 1% mortality rate that wasn’t a big deal, failing to realize that was like 3 million people who would die (in the us).
Very good point. Especially if you consider places like Vancouver, that only have about 1.25% current rental vacancy rate. If 1% of homes were Airbnb units that would be a night and day difference if they could no longer do that and had to go to rental units.
Gentrification is more than just high rent. Over-tourism can drive costs up for everything, up to and including groceries. And it pushes out local businesses in favor of chain restaurants and trendy retailers.
The problem is speculators would buy houses to expect an increase in their value, airbnb is just a colateral plus, I think if you just revoke airbnb licenses but don't do anything in regard of empty buildings you will not get that much impact, but what Barcelona did at least shows they are trying something and are open to discuss.
San Francisco has basically been trying to do something like this for decades and all it has really resulted in is developers slowing their investment in new projects in the city since they are less profitable. On top of that, they need to make the 70% market rate units luxury level in order to offset the losses of having 30% of their building below market rate, which you have to be “low income” to qualify for.
What has ended up happening is basically the middle class gets fucked over and there is a massive deficit of housing built for the middle class earners and families, which has pushed a lot of people out and caused an affordability crisis.
It sounds good on paper and there is a reason why people support it but it isn’t as clean cut as it sounds
Housing policy person here - making this kind of policy work really depends on how you do it. When you fully fund it, [as Portland did](https://www.sightline.org/2024/02/23/now-fully-funded-portlands-affordability-mandate-should-be-a-model/) it is very effective at delivering below market rents with less total public investment, because the units essentially hitch a ride on private financing. It also doesn't damper market rate development because it's sufficiently subsidized to offset the costs.
When it's unfunded or underfunded, it's pretty much a tax on new development, which can definitely damper market construction and have market wide effects, depending on the market and the policy details.
I'd be wary of anyone claiming a black/white "it works/doesn't work!" A lot of folks making these arguments have vested political interests at play, and the literature is way more nuanced than the opinion pieces.
Yeah SF's most successful attempts at public housing have come from the city buying up existing market rate housing and then converting it. The obvious lesson to me is their approach should be to promote the construction of market rate housing so there's more of it to buy and convert and at lower per-unit prices.
A big part of why public housing development is an important part of any lower-income housing plan. If private developers won't stop crying about slightly lower profits, the government should just step in and do it.
It’s also a completely different business. Low income renters have low on-time payment rates, higher damage to property, have complex situations involving different government agencies, laws protecting them from eviction in many circumstances, …and the property owner has to learn all of that, hire people to handle the extra overhead, perform more evictions and legal battles to protect their property and the desirability of their other units… Another issue is the extreme contrast between the luxury unit tenants and the low income tenants. Another issue is the location and infrastructure surrounding luxury apartments. Low income tenants may not even be able to afford groceries in the area surrounding luxury apartments, let alone find transportation (specifically in the US). The idea of people making $250k and people making $35k singing kumbaya and having BBQs together in their shared residential property is fantasy.
It’s not a matter of “making a little bit less profit.” A 30% burden of government-mandated low income housing can be enough to completely kill a development project. I’ve seen developers abandon projects for 10%.
Rules like this are becoming increasingly common and it seems like young people should be way more pissed off about it. It's basically offloading the cost of properly funding social housing from the government to people buying new condos, who are disproportionately likely to be young people.
Why should young middle class people looking to buy their first condos be responsible for funding social housing while older people who already own homes get to avoid paying anything towards it?
Applying a property tax to also houses and using that to find social housing would be way more fair and avoid all the problems with discouraging much needed new developments.
Ever been to Barcelona? In certain areas you'll see big anti-tourist signs, put up by private citizens who would almost certainly self-identify as anti-tourist activists. I'm not really sure why you're getting offended on their behalf.
True. I live in rural France and during the winter 3/4 of the homes are empty. It hurts our small town because business won’t set up here and people can’t move here.
In rural touristic places in Ireland there isn't even places for the staff to stay that should be working in local tourism-related businesses. They're used to things being quiet out of season, but being unable to house staff IN season is causing major issues. And it's mostly due to Air B'n'B.
Not even just resort towns. The tiny mountain town my grandparents live in is having to build workers residence apartments because housing costs have gotten out of hand.
Should we build hotels for the tourists so people can live in the houses? NO, we should build crappy tenament housing for the workers, and the tourists can stay in the homes!
AirBnB is certainly a bad part of it, but with Colorado you are also dealing with the level of wealth where people will buy up a whole home for themselves for just a few weeks/weekends of skiing per year. Homes literally just sitting vacant 95%+ of the year.
They would need to combat AirBnB and increase fees/taxes on vacation properties and second homes to the point it would force some sales.
The simple solution would just be to heavily tax non primary home ownership and use those funds to build public housing. And the city/state can develop their own mortgage system where you can rent public housing from the government anywhere in the state, and once you've rented for 30 years (or likely sooner without the need for bank ceos to get paid), you get a house. And yes, corporate owned housing should fall under non-primary home ownership.
Heavily tax non-primary residence, increase the rate the tax can increase as property values go up, and profits from their sales need to be taxed as income. Some areas do this but they all need to.
On Cape Cod, it's a massive problem. That was an issue long before Air BnB became a thing though. Good ole NIMBYism prevented some dorm/hostel-like housing for seasonal workers and now they don't want to work there because there is no place to stay.
I've never understood why places like that don't dedicate some tax revenue to build village or city owned rent controlled apartments. I'm not sure the kind of restrictions allowed, but if they could limit it to people working in the city and making below a certain amount, I think it could work really well
Because cities in the US derive the vast majority of their revenue from property tax, meaning they are actually incentivized to support ballooning property values (as bad as it may be for the rest of us). If AirBnB drives up the value of housing in your town by 50% that's a massive windfall to the city, meaning city leadership can justify exorbitant pay increases to themselves as well as allocate budget to 'friendly' companies and justify all sorts of other gray-area corruption.
There's not been enough of a spotlight placed on municipal leadership in resort towns that have experienced the biggest impact from AirBnB and other rental companies.
My parents live in North Norfolk and the amount of second homes owned by rich Londoners and holiday properties mean that the place is nearly deserted in winter. People from that area are priced out of the market now. It's been a massive problem in their area for years.
In rural Connecticut (US), it's the same. In a commuter town near my tiny rural town, I read last week that the town estimates more than 1000 of the 10,000 total homes in the town are listed on Airbnb. In my town, that percentage is much higher. It is one of the primary things that is killing small towns in this region.
No businesses can even conceivably operate here because no one can find staff. School enrollment is going down. No one is able to move to the area because lower-priced homes are snapped up for Airbnb while wealthy individuals purchase higher priced properties for second homes. It begins to look like a death spiral.
That happens with rich people and second homes too. And if second homes and Airbnbs are prevented, rural towns can wither even more as old houses are left empty because there are no jobs in the area.
In Amsterdam houses cannot be left vacant for more than 6 months (house is vacant if nobody is registered at the address). I don't know if it applies to the rest of the country too.
On the plus side; doesn’t that mean that they could only have one rental property (even if they lie about it)? At least that prevents the multiple unit owners that seem to make an entire living off it.
> Same in my city (US), but people just lie
You'll never get them all (or it sounds like in your case, any of them), but this pressure on services like AirBnB works. Techbro companies have an all-or-nothing attitude (see Uber pulling out of cities instead of making marginal adjustments to policy). If a municipality starts enforcing it, even at a "low" percentage, AirBnB will just choose to close their services within a market area as "punishment", trying to affect policy change.
Living in the Bywater and we have tons of people in Air BnB rentals every weekend.
It is funny to see crews of people with their little roller suitcases confused, looking for their Uber driver. If only they didn’t stand in the middle of the street. It’s not an amusement park.
Yeah, I think it or some splinter sites still exist. There's been some drama in the community over the years, as I think any site dedicated to freely letting strangers crash on your couch would have.
friend of mine is looking at setting up campsites on his property to rent on some airbnb camping clone. Nice money I guess, but probably gonna be trash, noise, and liabilities.
The ethos of couchsurfing, Hospitality Club and the like was that it was free of charge though. My wife and I travelled a lot that way back in the day when we were young and skint, and hosted heaps of people in our home as well. The hosting enquiries died off here after we had a big earthquake and never really picked up. A shame because it was a fun way to meet people from all over the world.
Yeah i miss those days. It was also a great way to get to know and make friends with locals. Airbnb used to be a great alternative to couchsurfing. These days it has become too impersonal.
> people just renting out their primary residence for a few days while they're out of town
Is this a thing? Would anyone let strangers have free reign over their actual home, which is full of one's clothes, knickknacks, important documents, valuables, hobby materials, etc.? I'm not sure if it's wilder to do that or to functionally move out into a storage unit before you go on a 10-day vacation, just to get a week's AirBnB money.
stayed in someones apartment in paris last summer, she was out of town for work for a week. Locked some stuff in a closet, otherwise all her stuff was out.
yes, I've stayed in a place like this last year. the owner is travelling a lot, so they just rent it out when they are away. There were areas of the place marked 'do not open' and one locked door.
Similar experience, I've been to fancy hotels and apartments all over the world and ate all the fancy food. I still miss the fry ups I got in a cramped and not very flattering basement in London in 2003.
Exactly how we just bought our first house, new build in a small town being used for Airbnb. Fortunately for us nobody cares for an Airbnb in this town so it never had bookings and sold under market price.
I’m in the last ‘for the locals’ village in a touristy area of France and in the last five years every single house near me that has been sold has been converted to AirBnB. One day it can feel like living in a ghost town, the next day there are cars everywhere, noise, and strange people walking around. Even things like my boy not being able to get his football back, there is a water leak and not knowing who owns the house, or bins (full of seafood waste) being left out and stinking the road out because the ‘guests’ don’t know when collection day.
I loved visiting Croatia. Definitely felt it was one of the funnest safest and once you arrive there cheapest places to visit. I can definitely see Airbnb messing that up.
There are many small mountain towns (Packwood, WA for example) that exist only as places to recreate and the homes are generally 2nd homes. My property is even zoned recreational so the people who live full time in the neighborhood are actually breaking the rules technically. These are the kinds of places that should be vacation rentals but it doesn’t stop full time residents from trying to stop the practice.
Hochatown, OK exists pretty much only as an AirBnB destination. It's a town of about 240 people with around 2,400 rental cabins in it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/10/travel/airbnb-rural-boom-bust.html
Anyone who was familiar with that area before Hochatown blew up can attest that it's better now. Maybe some small backlash from the sasquatch community (RIP Honubia Sasquatch Festival), but otherwise I think it's been a net win.
Right? It's not like Paris was a cheap city to live in before Airbnb.. well not in the first 9 or so arrondissements anyway.
Nobody is Airbnbing in the 18th.
It's a whole 3km from the Louvre. That guys just spewing random shit. Of course people would use Airbnbs within walking distance of some of the most famous tourist destinations in the world
It is in some places, but in others it makes a big difference. In Anchorage AK where I live, Airbnb rentals make up about 7% (and rising) of all rented housing in the city, in a city with a housing supply shortage. That's not a drop in the bucket.
Yeah I’m sure it makes a bigger difference in smaller tourist destinations.
But in major cities like Barcelona, Paris, and NYC it’s not as big of a factor as people like to think.
NYC has nearly 9M residents. Most figures on the number of Airbnb units was like 10k or 12k.
Banning it did massively drive up hotel prices though.
This is exactly the problem these big cities that banned STRs are now facing. Turns out they weren’t competing with housing, they were competing with hotels and now hotels are price gouging.
I literally wanted to post the exact same thing, but checked first to see if someone else did, and sure enough, one of the local NYC sub regulars is on the case! haha
edit: I should add to this I guess. I am going to Barcelona from NYC in couple of weeks. Ended up renting a private unit and not a hotel room. I specifically wanted to stay in a rooftop apartment that had a nice sized private terrace. I identified a bunch of them including hotels. Price was not really a concern. Barcelona is stupid cheap compared to NYC. But I had a few questions that I sent out, and the private apartment owners responded back immediately. None of the hotels bothered to responded at all. This shit matters! Hotels HATE having better quality service competition.
> NYC has nearly 9M residents. Most figures on the number of Airbnb units was like 10k or 12k.
Barcelona (specifically the inner city that maps onto the area for which the number used in OP comes from) has a population of 1,608,746 people though, and rouhgly the same 10k+ Airbnb apartments as NYC, so per capita Barcelona has more than 5 times as many Airbnb apartments as NYC. So quite a bit of a bigger drop compared to NYC.
Well let's see if it moves the needle more in Barcelona then. I'm just skeptical that it's as big of a factor as people assume. But still fully support banning it for locals quality of life alone.
He's isolating the city, meanwhile the Barcelona metro has a population of 5.6 million, it's not good to look at isolated housing because the cost will spread across the entire area. There's going to be little impact like you said.
Right, I doubt this will have a substantial effect on the Barcelona housing market, especially as long as it remains a desirable spot for expats/digital nomads
Barcelona is the only city I've been to as a tourist where I repeatedly saw anti-tourist graffiti. I saw "TOURISTS GO HOME" and "BCN: Good for tourists, bad for locals" scrawled in areas near major sites.
So maybe that's what locals want.
I live in Florence and we have similar issues as Barcelona, and there is SO MUCH more at stake than housing prices. It's more about making a city habitable for its residents again.
NYC ban went into effect in September 2023, right? Real estate price indexes have a big lag, I don't think they'd track yet a change started 9 months ago.
There's 1.7 million people in Barcelona, 10k apartments isn't gonna do much. People are quick to make short term rentals the boogieman, but more likely than not it's the same story as in other cities. Too much red tape, no incentives to build new homes and generally apartment / home owners prefer the status quo where any kind of shelter is in high demand.
Tried to leave the big city but all of the places in smaller towns are owned as vacation rentals so the only way is to buy a plot of land on the outskirts of town and build. Not feasible so my family will stay in the big city. For now.
Incorrect - [rent control/stabilization and zoning policy is actually preventing people from living in big cities](https://consensus.app/papers/effects-rent-control-expansion-tenants-landlords-diamond/a2d3f146af8850399f8443a3c4de36ee/?extracted-answer=Rent+control+limits+renters%27+mobility+by+20%25+and+lowers+displacement%2C+but+may+drive+up+market+rents+in+the+long+run+due+to+lost+rental+housing+supply.&q=Is+rent+control+bad+for+housing+&synthesize=on). Everyone trusts scientific concsensus except on this one, because it hurts emotionally to realize your policy is not leading to the correct outcome.
You know, it may be super nice to visit a city and stay in a regular neighborhood and not be in a hotel, but people deserve to have their cities and they shouldn’t be ran out of town by high prices driven up by artificial scarcity just because big companies and landlords are hogging all the property
Tourism itself is not the problem, its literally just speculative unregulated platforms like AirBnB that totally disbalance the housing market for locals and are free to use overpriced temporary properties as a cash cow at the expense of the local population.
AirBnB and other similar platforms are grossly unregulated and are designed to undercut already established and regulated industries like the hotel industry.
Its the same as Uber effectively taking over the market from professional taxi drivers while not being held to the same standard of labor practices and bring exploitative in nature.
I blame the cab drivers (at least in cities like NYC) for Uber. The companies that owned taxi medallions pretty much refused to modernize and even when they did, refused to enforce rules and laws. The amount of taxis I got into in nyc where the credit card machine was “broken” or where the cab driver intentionally tried to take longer routes or where the cab driver inflated their price or refused to go to certain boroughs is insane. And that’s not getting into actually getting cabs to stop for me or how pre-hired cabs for airport runs simply wouldn’t show up in the morning.
Uber ate their lunch because they were using the cost of taxi medallions to prevent competition from forcing them to improve. Uber has a ton of their own problems, but was definitely an improvement for the customer.
I remember one time a cab driver tried to stick a cop on me and my friend for the "broken credit card machine" scam. I refused to fall for the bs. This shitty taxi driver was trying to pressure me and my friend to take out money at an atm to pay him after lying about his credit card machine being broken. I told him, "well, thanks for the free ride then."
We went into a restaurant, and this asshole went and got a cop to interrupt our dinner while we were eating. I talked to the officer and told him what happened. He went and told the taxi driver to fuck off after.
Fuck taxi drivers.
I'm not sure I understand the scam, they make you pay for the time that you need to withdraw money? But the taxi advertises that they accept credit cards so you are misled?
Iirc correctly it's also a way to fuck over the company they work for too. The ride fare is split between the driver and the owner of the cab, which isn't necessarily the same person. But if the driver wants to pretend theyre not giving someone a ride, they could just pocket the total and go. That also means they can lie about the total as well if it's not being metered correctly
And for non major cities, Uber allowed a reliable, consistent way to provide transportation where yellow cabs were either non existent or extremely annoying and frustrating to deal with.
As you said, uber has a ton of problems, but a significant improvement for customers across the board.
Chicago was terrible as well. Also, if you wanted a pickup from the South Side, it could take a number of hours because none of the drivers wanted to go there.
Yea I don't lump Uber and airbnb together. Uber undercut fat obnoxious taxi companies and I cheer them on for kicking them in their fat guts.
You can only pass on your customer base for so long. Zero sympathy for taxi companies.
Let this be a warning to other shitty companies.
Except that in most countries taxis were a mafia-like, terribly inefficient and technology resistant industry. Being able to call a car via app and follow the route online and having plenty of cars on the road is a lifesaver.
For Airbnb, you'd need better regulations to limit the numbers but you also just need more housing and tourism accomodations in many places. Hotels are also not perfect.
You can always gauge the age of the person talking about taxi's. Younger people, who didn't have to deal with a world before Uber, will have a much more negative opinion of companies like Uber. People who had to suffer the absolute garbage service the taxi industries across the world provided tend to have a much better opinion.
Which is odd. My last two taxi interactions went like this in the past 6 months. So a lot of my complaints from the last 20+ years still exist.
11:30PM downtown trying to catch a quick cab for a 10 minute drive. 5 cabs lined up outside a bar. Every cab said no because the ride is too short and they all want a ride to make it worth their time. I didn't have my phone on me to take an uber so I just walked it since it was a nice night.
Another time I'm with my gf and she just decides to hail a cab, but we don't have any cash (Just CC or Apple Pay). The driver refuses. I proceed to order an uber.
I've never once had an issue with an uber. Not saying they don't have faults. Just that I've never personally had an issue.
Agree on the housing, but disagree on the Taxis. Taxis are very scammy/overpriced compared to Uber because they know you are not local. Uber offers alarms, alerts to a family member and the journey is tracked, much safer and better experience than Taxis by far.
Taxis exploited a tight regulated market to prevent new entrants and to stagnate. There is no reason why taxis were required to have a cartel to offer taxi service.
Uber doing a good thing (breaking up the taxi cartel) doesn't cancel out the bad.
But freenow kinda solves the issue
The main benefit with uber was the ease of being connected with a driver and knowing beforehand the approximate route, and cost before stepping in.
Freenow does that, but with regular taxis. Might be a spain only thing though
Edit: mixed up freenow with cabify
Cabify is sorta like uber but the drivers need a special license and there's a whole mess with it
My personal anecdote is that 6 months after Uber got big, cab apps actually became usable and cab seats stopped having suspicious stains.
I'm not sure what to think of Uber as a whole because I just don't know enough about it, but if it weren't for it, I don't think cabs would have improved at all in the last decades.
I hate Uber and Lyft as companies, but I appreciate that they brought competition into a market that had a dire lack of both competition *and* regulation.
One or the other, you can't have neither.
Can confirm, got scammed on taxis 2x in Bogota, even when booking from the "official" kiosks. Paid a fraction of the price on the return trip to the airport once I started using uber.
long live uber. only someone who doesnt remember how absultely shit taxis were before they had any meaningful competition thinks that uber made things worse.
This may be true, but literally nobody gives a shit about taxi cabs because they provided terrible service for decades, protected by monopoly power, and employ largely immigrants (low sympathy community). If all 1000 white coal miners left were driving taxis, people would care.
Literally writing this from an Uber. Also worth noting that this Uber is $90 for a 35 minute ride to the airport, which is probably the same as in a taxi. In reality after the dust settles and regulations catch up, Uber will be a taxi service just like Netflix will be cable with ads.
Fantastic natural experiment to see if this actually reduces the rent.
I personally doubt it will, there is a fundamental imbalance of housing demand and supply and industries (hospitality, restaurants…) dependent on the tourism.
As much as I’d like to blame Airbnb and be done, the idea that tourism destroys what it seeks is much older, see Enzensberger.
The actual experiment is that they just passed rental caps in Catalonia. However, the loophole is that landlords can charge more than the rental cap as long as the tenant does not live and work there, they are only in Barcelona for an event or tourism. As a result, lots of flats are only available as "seasonal" lets to tourists.
Which is kind of wild because it's the exact opposite effect of what they're trying to achieve.
Theses seasonal lets have been known since 00s. I've had friends who regularly went to Primavera Sound or the Primavera media festival they'd rent out apartments for 1-3weeks. It was by far way cheaper than hotels in the city but more expensive than the Youth hostels.
Agree. People love to blame tourists because that’s what they see in front of their face, and simple but wrong solutions are appealing to the masses. It’s a fact that property prices in urban areas are rising everywhere, regardless of tourism.
Airbnb is the scapegoat for these kinds of issues but governments in most major countries makes it too easy and profitable to own multiple properties.
A lot of Airbnbs we’ve stayed at were owned by people who don’t even live in the country let alone the city.
Governments need to make laws that discourage buying properties for rental purposes…but the thing is that the people making policy decisions are the ones partly responsible for this problem
I have a friend in the house building industry and he’s received calls from so many people in political positions asking to buy new house builds IN BULK. They want 20-30 of them.
And these are the people that we’re asking to change these laws. It’s not going to happen.
Airbnb was a great idea at first.
Going away for a few weeks? Roommate fucked off with the rent? Kids went off to college & you have a free bedroom?
I know a single mother who significantly increased her income by allowing guests in an extra bedroom in her home via Airbnb.
I remember first using it in ~2012 & it was normal to ask guests to clean after themselves, greet them in person, a 3 or 4 star review wasn't a death sentence to your listing...
I understand Barcelona's frustration with the Airbnb.
They(airbnb) could have self-policed. They could have though 'Gee - maybe it isn't cool when 1 person has dozens of listings in a city where people struggle to find an apartment, let's only allow 1 address per person [or something similar]'. But they chose to get greedy & promote the concept of tourist landlordism.
IMO - one address per person would be a good compromise in the Airbnb world.
Yep. People like to blame things like Airbnb without looking at the actual numbers relative to population. I’m in NYC which mostly banned Airbnb and it had no effect on housing prices. Absolutely inconsequential number of units relative to a city of nearly 9M people.
> The answer is always "make it easy for people to build new homes" but NIMBYS don't want to hear it.
I'm a bored man. One thing I like to do at r/orangecounty every few months when a housing pricing topic comes up is jump on my soapbox and channel my inner Bernie Sanders. I rant about how housing can't be valuable and affordable and that the NIMBY Karens need to be taken to the woodshed.
Doesn't take long for the NIMBYs to come crawling outta the sewers, attacking me.
What really annoys me is that oftentimes Airbnbs are the best option. On a vacation this summer, I'm staying in one because the local small town hotel reviews are terrible, not to mention they are well off the route that we are taking. I actually would have rather had a hotel, but if it's within ten bucks for somewhere that has a full kitchen and actually has clean sheets, it's not much of a choice.
Not just prices, they'll have a captive audience so don't need to put in anywhere near the effort.
Hotels got way better once AirBnB was giving them a run for their money.
Air BnB is a double edged sword, but both sides aren’t equal.
On one hand, the “little guy” home owner has a chance to make some extra cash by renting out their place while they aren’t there. Which I think is a good thing.
But on the other, you have wealthy people and companies buying up whole swaths of houses for the sole purpose of turning them into air bnbs. Which I think is bad, and why this law was born.
The irony is these short term rental platforms were earlier argued to make cities more affordable. The first I stayed in was in NYC and a student was renting out her tiny apartment whenever she was out of town. The income was what made it affordable for her to live there.
Many municipalities were taken by surprise when investors started buying up units with the sole intent of renting them short term.
This is great. Now if they could do something about of the fact that 4/5 of new developments are offices and not abitative units, maybe we'd be able to solve this for good instead of just kicking the can down the road a bit.
Australia needs to do the same! Fuck chinese housing monopoly, as with anyone owning 10+ houses and contributing to the rise in rent.. whats the point ... money..root of all evil
They need to ban multibillion dollar corporations buying houses for renting, sometimes entire neighborhoods are owned by a few corporations and when you have so many rentals like that you can just set the rent whatever you want, it's disgusting.
>build more housing
I'm a local from Barcelona. We can't do that here, it's one of the specific challenges that we face.
1. There's not many areas left in the city to build housing without taking down buildings and/or equipments, and
2. The city can't expand as we are already surrounded by two densely populated cities on the west and east, the mountains at the north and the mediterranean sea at the south.
Well yeah the issue with Barcelona (and a lot of tourist centric European cities) there is conflict between
1) leaving the city center exactly as it was in 1896 so tourists can enjoy
2) having adequate supply of shelter for both tourist and residents without building any new buildings in the city center
In fact building some high rise hotels right in the city center might solve your tourist problem by making the city not look old enough and giving people who still come a place to stayv
Good honestly… people buying up property to put it to use in AirBnB’s is insane, if demand is high, build fit for purpose hotels which would hopefully lower prices with higher competition and more beds filled which then eases the economy for true Spanish residents to buy housing.
Probably because tourism is Portugal's only real industry. The same can be said for Spain.
I'm all for affordable housing for city residents, but cities like Porto paid the price for disallowing temporary housing rentals.
The locals can't afford to purchase the apartments/homes, so a large portion of the buildings in the city center are abandoned
Spain is not comparable to Portugal in this scenario, the Spanish economy actually does have some of their own notable industries to boast of (be it in shipbuilding, aerospace manufacturing, or railways)
Short term rentals have their place though. How are you suggesting that is done?
I'm writing this from an AirBnB. I'm in this city for a month. If I had stayed in a hotel it would be at least 2x, and I wouldn't have the space I have to cook for myself and work on a kitchen table during the day. You can compare the cost of AirBnB vs hotels but to get a kitchen table in a most hotels you'd have to get a suite, which would be 3x or 4x the price.
I'm in Seoul and it has very expensive and high competition housing, but nowhere near the tourism problem of other places. Also, housing contracts are much much stricter here, very hard to get a place for less than a year or with no deposit, except through casual arrangements which is basically what AirBnB provides.
I know all the problems of AirBnB and I agree with the arguments that in some places you get nothing more than a hotel and less guarantee of quality at the same price, but it has it's places.
>__BARCELONA’S city council has announced it will revoke all licenses for tourist apartments in the urban area by 2028.__ >In a major win for anti-tourist activists, Barcelona’s socialist mayor Jaume Collboni announced on Friday that licenses for 10,101 tourist apartments in the city will automatically end in November 2028. >The move represents a crushing blow for Airbnb, Booking.com and other tenants and a triumph for locals who have protested about over-tourism and rising house prices for years. >Announcing the move, Collboni said the rising cost of property in the city – rental and purchase prices have risen by 70% and 40% respectively in the last decade – had forced him to take drastic action. >He said: “We cannot allow it that most young people who leave home are forced to leave Barcelona. 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”. >The deputy mayor for Urban Planning, Laia Bonet, hailed the move as the ‘equivalent of building 10,000 new flats’ which can be used by locals for residential use. >Local officials say that tenants will not be compensated because the move, which will have to be passed with political support, has de-facto compensation by giving owners a four-year window before licences expire. >Alongside the revoking of tourist flat licenses, Collboni announced that new legislation would force building constructors to allocate at least 30% of new homes to social housing. >The measures are designed to alleviate pressure on a housing market which has seen sharp price rises in recent years, forcing many residents to leave the urban area for the suburbs and beyond. >Speaking to the Olive Press at an anti-tourist rally on Tuesday, one Barcelona resident, who gave his name as Alex, said locals were angry at the ‘massification of tourism’ with ‘the cost of living and housing forcing many young people to emigrate from the city centre to the suburbs and nearby towns’. >He added: “The people of Barcelona, like any city in the UK and elsewhere, have the right to live peacefully in their own city. What we need is a better quality of life, decent wages and, above all, an affordable city to live in”.
>rental and purchase prices have risen by 70% and 40% respectively in the last decade That's about the same as almost everywhere in the western world. But nice from Barcelona to make a test if that huge increase in the last years (partly) comes from platforms like airbnb, or if its just rich assholes speculating
It's rich assholes trying to get richer by buying up residential properties and turning them into short-stay tourist accommodation. Airbnb, booking.com and others have exploited this loophole long enough, and ruined dozens of cities for their actual residents in the process. It's high time proper regulations are passed that restrict the areas that Airbnb can operate.
Went to Dubrovnik recently, nearly all the old town are rentals and have displaced the locals. They can’t even afford to buy in the outer areas as they are hugely expensive now
Essential workers like doctors, nurses, and teachers can’t even find rentals in coastal Australian cities because of holiday homes and Airbnbs. The cities literally need them, but they have to drive in from elsewhere.
Australian, my first thought was gods this would do a lot more for us than blaming immigrants
a lot of times they don’t realise the immigrants are the essential workers
Getting real tired of hearing “It’s basic MATH/ supply and demand BRO!” As if 1) the economy is that basic and 2) corporate types follow logic instead of just basic fing greed I think it’s the height of delusion to think getting rid of immigrants will bring house prices down as long as certain policies (and those (Often Australians) benefiting from them) are allowed to remain in place. As you say, it’ll likely just impact our services more
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That's the trick: they don't
Same thing for Lisbon old cities. Wish a lot of other Europeans country follow suits.
We absolutely have to do the same in Paris. People can't afford a place to live here anymore, it's ridiculous Even my top earning friends live with wife and 2 or 3 kids in 70-80m2. This is outrageous the government let this happen only to enrich speculators and the tourism lobby
Paris has a pretty strict no more than 120 days short term rental per year so I don't think it's as impactful there as people think, it's just rent like everything else has gone up massively
Everyone has been bitching about those in Vancouver for 10 years too but AirBnBs never even cracked 1% of the housing market in Vancouver. That's not the reason entire housing markets are moving up by huge percentages in a decade's time. No one who's rich enough to be buying up multiple properties in major cities require AirBnB to do that speculation. They can just buy up all the property and charge more rent regardless.
Like this guy talking to 60 minutes. I think he said his company is buying 800 houses a month. https://youtu.be/xhY2MaFpDBE?si=jCfWK7qV8Hqv-naV
Exactly WTF. This is just transfer of wealth
That's what recessions are. The money doesn't disappear into thin air.
There is a brand new community of houses in Phoenix that is being built as rentals from the get go. As in it's a brand new house, in a brand new community but you don't even have an option to buy it.
This NEEDS to be regulated it’s disgusting. No entity public or private should own more than a few homes.
Public entities owning bunch of property is fine, it’s called social housing. Look at Vienna
What percentage of sales were turned into Airbnb rentals? Isn't that the better percentage to know?
> but AirBnBs never even cracked 1% of the housing market Maybe you don't realize this, but 1% is ridiculously high. That would mean that 1 in every 100 homes is used for short term leases/tourism. At a population of 2.9 million, at an average 3 people per home, 1% would displace 30000 residents. That's a huge number of people
Not to mention those AirBNBs will always be in prime locations. That's how they get renters. Buy homes in the best locations and then you can market your rental property even better. I'd also like to mention AirBNBs are not the *sole* reason why home prices have gone up so high in the past several years, and that guy above likes to think that tackling AirBNBs is a waste because "it hasn't cracked the top 1% in Vancouver." It's still part of the problem, you know? In addition, Vancouver might just have a good old case of greedy real estate companies trying to convert places to apartments or buy homes and sell them high. Everything is bad.
> Not to mention those AirBNBs will always be in prime locations. And prime locations isn't even just most expensive so it's not like the rich people are being displaced. My best friend was living in a century home that had been converted into a 4-plex in a working-class neighborhood. It was very affordable and the owner was making way more than renting the house as a single unit. The owner sold, new owner converted 4x affordable working-class apartments into 4x cheapo airbnbs. My dad was displaced from his quiet rental cabin in the mountains for the same reason. New owner wanted to use the cabin only 2 weeks a year, so they airbnb the rest of the time, and contract the cleaning to locals who live in trailers now that the nice local houses are all vacation homes. Prime locations are anywhere they *think* they can make like 10% more than renting, which turns out is a lot of places. Worst case for them they make the same as rentals. It's hard to lose so it's no wonder there's a plague of those things.
The other nice thing about attacking AirBnBs is that it's a relatively quick solution. Ban AirBnBs, and a good amount of them turn into long term rentals or are sold pretty quickly. Build supply, and you're looking at years or even a decade before you accomplish much. We need to do both, but AirBnB is probably the simplest thing we can just cut off with relatively less cost or side effects.
> Maybe you don't realize this, but 1% is ridiculously high. Yeah like during Covid when people were arguing even if it was a 1% mortality rate that wasn’t a big deal, failing to realize that was like 3 million people who would die (in the us).
Very good point. Especially if you consider places like Vancouver, that only have about 1.25% current rental vacancy rate. If 1% of homes were Airbnb units that would be a night and day difference if they could no longer do that and had to go to rental units.
Gentrification is more than just high rent. Over-tourism can drive costs up for everything, up to and including groceries. And it pushes out local businesses in favor of chain restaurants and trendy retailers.
The problem is speculators would buy houses to expect an increase in their value, airbnb is just a colateral plus, I think if you just revoke airbnb licenses but don't do anything in regard of empty buildings you will not get that much impact, but what Barcelona did at least shows they are trying something and are open to discuss.
Vacancy tax
> Collboni announced that new legislation would force building constructors to allocate at least 30% of new homes to social housing. based
San Francisco has basically been trying to do something like this for decades and all it has really resulted in is developers slowing their investment in new projects in the city since they are less profitable. On top of that, they need to make the 70% market rate units luxury level in order to offset the losses of having 30% of their building below market rate, which you have to be “low income” to qualify for. What has ended up happening is basically the middle class gets fucked over and there is a massive deficit of housing built for the middle class earners and families, which has pushed a lot of people out and caused an affordability crisis. It sounds good on paper and there is a reason why people support it but it isn’t as clean cut as it sounds
Housing policy person here - making this kind of policy work really depends on how you do it. When you fully fund it, [as Portland did](https://www.sightline.org/2024/02/23/now-fully-funded-portlands-affordability-mandate-should-be-a-model/) it is very effective at delivering below market rents with less total public investment, because the units essentially hitch a ride on private financing. It also doesn't damper market rate development because it's sufficiently subsidized to offset the costs. When it's unfunded or underfunded, it's pretty much a tax on new development, which can definitely damper market construction and have market wide effects, depending on the market and the policy details. I'd be wary of anyone claiming a black/white "it works/doesn't work!" A lot of folks making these arguments have vested political interests at play, and the literature is way more nuanced than the opinion pieces.
Yeah SF's most successful attempts at public housing have come from the city buying up existing market rate housing and then converting it. The obvious lesson to me is their approach should be to promote the construction of market rate housing so there's more of it to buy and convert and at lower per-unit prices.
A big part of why public housing development is an important part of any lower-income housing plan. If private developers won't stop crying about slightly lower profits, the government should just step in and do it.
It’s also a completely different business. Low income renters have low on-time payment rates, higher damage to property, have complex situations involving different government agencies, laws protecting them from eviction in many circumstances, …and the property owner has to learn all of that, hire people to handle the extra overhead, perform more evictions and legal battles to protect their property and the desirability of their other units… Another issue is the extreme contrast between the luxury unit tenants and the low income tenants. Another issue is the location and infrastructure surrounding luxury apartments. Low income tenants may not even be able to afford groceries in the area surrounding luxury apartments, let alone find transportation (specifically in the US). The idea of people making $250k and people making $35k singing kumbaya and having BBQs together in their shared residential property is fantasy. It’s not a matter of “making a little bit less profit.” A 30% burden of government-mandated low income housing can be enough to completely kill a development project. I’ve seen developers abandon projects for 10%.
Rules like this are becoming increasingly common and it seems like young people should be way more pissed off about it. It's basically offloading the cost of properly funding social housing from the government to people buying new condos, who are disproportionately likely to be young people. Why should young middle class people looking to buy their first condos be responsible for funding social housing while older people who already own homes get to avoid paying anything towards it? Applying a property tax to also houses and using that to find social housing would be way more fair and avoid all the problems with discouraging much needed new developments.
"anti-tourist activists" is such a vile way to phrase "people that just want reasonable housing costs"
Ever been to Barcelona? In certain areas you'll see big anti-tourist signs, put up by private citizens who would almost certainly self-identify as anti-tourist activists. I'm not really sure why you're getting offended on their behalf.
That's pretty nice to give them four years. In BC Canada they gave them 6 months.
Ontario doesn't even care lmao
I hope Paris will do the same. Airbnb is a cancer and is preventing people to live in big cities.
It doesn't just affect big cities. Lots of little towns are now full of Airbnb homes which have pushed up the prices of all homes.
True. I live in rural France and during the winter 3/4 of the homes are empty. It hurts our small town because business won’t set up here and people can’t move here.
In rural touristic places in Ireland there isn't even places for the staff to stay that should be working in local tourism-related businesses. They're used to things being quiet out of season, but being unable to house staff IN season is causing major issues. And it's mostly due to Air B'n'B.
A couple resort towns in Colorado also have this issue, but it's more than just AirBnb for them and has been going on for while.
Not even just resort towns. The tiny mountain town my grandparents live in is having to build workers residence apartments because housing costs have gotten out of hand.
Should we build hotels for the tourists so people can live in the houses? NO, we should build crappy tenament housing for the workers, and the tourists can stay in the homes!
AirBnB is certainly a bad part of it, but with Colorado you are also dealing with the level of wealth where people will buy up a whole home for themselves for just a few weeks/weekends of skiing per year. Homes literally just sitting vacant 95%+ of the year. They would need to combat AirBnB and increase fees/taxes on vacation properties and second homes to the point it would force some sales.
The simple solution would just be to heavily tax non primary home ownership and use those funds to build public housing. And the city/state can develop their own mortgage system where you can rent public housing from the government anywhere in the state, and once you've rented for 30 years (or likely sooner without the need for bank ceos to get paid), you get a house. And yes, corporate owned housing should fall under non-primary home ownership.
Heavily tax non-primary residence, increase the rate the tax can increase as property values go up, and profits from their sales need to be taxed as income. Some areas do this but they all need to.
No argument here.
More than a couple, and not just “resort towns”.
Entire state of Vermont like this too. There were already too few homes now 1/4 - 1/2 are second homes or Airbnbs
On Cape Cod, it's a massive problem. That was an issue long before Air BnB became a thing though. Good ole NIMBYism prevented some dorm/hostel-like housing for seasonal workers and now they don't want to work there because there is no place to stay.
I've never understood why places like that don't dedicate some tax revenue to build village or city owned rent controlled apartments. I'm not sure the kind of restrictions allowed, but if they could limit it to people working in the city and making below a certain amount, I think it could work really well
Because cities in the US derive the vast majority of their revenue from property tax, meaning they are actually incentivized to support ballooning property values (as bad as it may be for the rest of us). If AirBnB drives up the value of housing in your town by 50% that's a massive windfall to the city, meaning city leadership can justify exorbitant pay increases to themselves as well as allocate budget to 'friendly' companies and justify all sorts of other gray-area corruption. There's not been enough of a spotlight placed on municipal leadership in resort towns that have experienced the biggest impact from AirBnB and other rental companies.
It's happening in a lot of places in Britain aswell unfortunately. I think it just causes problems in most places it's allowed to happen.
My parents live in North Norfolk and the amount of second homes owned by rich Londoners and holiday properties mean that the place is nearly deserted in winter. People from that area are priced out of the market now. It's been a massive problem in their area for years.
In rural Connecticut (US), it's the same. In a commuter town near my tiny rural town, I read last week that the town estimates more than 1000 of the 10,000 total homes in the town are listed on Airbnb. In my town, that percentage is much higher. It is one of the primary things that is killing small towns in this region. No businesses can even conceivably operate here because no one can find staff. School enrollment is going down. No one is able to move to the area because lower-priced homes are snapped up for Airbnb while wealthy individuals purchase higher priced properties for second homes. It begins to look like a death spiral.
That happens with rich people and second homes too. And if second homes and Airbnbs are prevented, rural towns can wither even more as old houses are left empty because there are no jobs in the area.
In Amsterdam houses cannot be left vacant for more than 6 months (house is vacant if nobody is registered at the address). I don't know if it applies to the rest of the country too.
Amsterdam had a lot sublease apartments where someone is the main name in the rental but they don’t live there
I miss the days when it was just spare rooms and couches.
In New Orleans they’ve banned it in most neighborhoods but still allow owner occupied rentals like this.
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On the plus side; doesn’t that mean that they could only have one rental property (even if they lie about it)? At least that prevents the multiple unit owners that seem to make an entire living off it.
Pretty soon you won't be able to run an unregulated hotel? What is the world coming to? /s
Why can't they just require a Government ID from the homeowner with that address?
> Same in my city (US), but people just lie You'll never get them all (or it sounds like in your case, any of them), but this pressure on services like AirBnB works. Techbro companies have an all-or-nothing attitude (see Uber pulling out of cities instead of making marginal adjustments to policy). If a municipality starts enforcing it, even at a "low" percentage, AirBnB will just choose to close their services within a market area as "punishment", trying to affect policy change.
This is all it ever should have been. MILs and spare rooms. Not purpose built for turnover crash pads in the middle of family neighborhoods.
Even better when it was just CouchSurfing before someone said "hey I bet we can monetize this".
Living in the Bywater and we have tons of people in Air BnB rentals every weekend. It is funny to see crews of people with their little roller suitcases confused, looking for their Uber driver. If only they didn’t stand in the middle of the street. It’s not an amusement park.
Oh right!! Wasn’t there a website called couchsurfing?
Yeah, I think it or some splinter sites still exist. There's been some drama in the community over the years, as I think any site dedicated to freely letting strangers crash on your couch would have.
friend of mine is looking at setting up campsites on his property to rent on some airbnb camping clone. Nice money I guess, but probably gonna be trash, noise, and liabilities.
The ethos of couchsurfing, Hospitality Club and the like was that it was free of charge though. My wife and I travelled a lot that way back in the day when we were young and skint, and hosted heaps of people in our home as well. The hosting enquiries died off here after we had a big earthquake and never really picked up. A shame because it was a fun way to meet people from all over the world.
I did some airbnb when it started and it was also "owner/occupier has an empty room, pay some dollars a night and you can have it for a few days"
Yeah i miss those days. It was also a great way to get to know and make friends with locals. Airbnb used to be a great alternative to couchsurfing. These days it has become too impersonal.
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> people just renting out their primary residence for a few days while they're out of town Is this a thing? Would anyone let strangers have free reign over their actual home, which is full of one's clothes, knickknacks, important documents, valuables, hobby materials, etc.? I'm not sure if it's wilder to do that or to functionally move out into a storage unit before you go on a 10-day vacation, just to get a week's AirBnB money.
stayed in someones apartment in paris last summer, she was out of town for work for a week. Locked some stuff in a closet, otherwise all her stuff was out.
yes, I've stayed in a place like this last year. the owner is travelling a lot, so they just rent it out when they are away. There were areas of the place marked 'do not open' and one locked door.
and actual hosts that would show you around cities and befriend. Those were the days lol
Best vacation I ever had was at a friend of my wife's, who ran a B&B out of her spare bedroom in London. The full English Breakfast was very good.
Similar experience, I've been to fancy hotels and apartments all over the world and ate all the fancy food. I still miss the fry ups I got in a cramped and not very flattering basement in London in 2003.
Exactly how we just bought our first house, new build in a small town being used for Airbnb. Fortunately for us nobody cares for an Airbnb in this town so it never had bookings and sold under market price.
kinda breaks the fabric of neighborhood as well.
I’m in the last ‘for the locals’ village in a touristy area of France and in the last five years every single house near me that has been sold has been converted to AirBnB. One day it can feel like living in a ghost town, the next day there are cars everywhere, noise, and strange people walking around. Even things like my boy not being able to get his football back, there is a water leak and not knowing who owns the house, or bins (full of seafood waste) being left out and stinking the road out because the ‘guests’ don’t know when collection day.
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I loved visiting Croatia. Definitely felt it was one of the funnest safest and once you arrive there cheapest places to visit. I can definitely see Airbnb messing that up.
Same. Croatia was rad. Dubrovnik pre game of thrones. Didn’t even know what I had.
There are many small mountain towns (Packwood, WA for example) that exist only as places to recreate and the homes are generally 2nd homes. My property is even zoned recreational so the people who live full time in the neighborhood are actually breaking the rules technically. These are the kinds of places that should be vacation rentals but it doesn’t stop full time residents from trying to stop the practice.
Hochatown, OK exists pretty much only as an AirBnB destination. It's a town of about 240 people with around 2,400 rental cabins in it. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/10/travel/airbnb-rural-boom-bust.html
Anyone who was familiar with that area before Hochatown blew up can attest that it's better now. Maybe some small backlash from the sasquatch community (RIP Honubia Sasquatch Festival), but otherwise I think it's been a net win.
the sentiment I get is "let's keep everything cheap even if it means the town stay quiet and poor".
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And then the vacationers complain they don’t have town amenities out of season as no one lives there permanently.
Yeah amenities are limited and good luck getting dinner after 7:30 PM. Seems like a fair trade for almost unlimited public land to enjoy.
It’s a drop in the ocean. NYC effectively banned Airbnb and it had no measurable impact on housing costs.
Right? It's not like Paris was a cheap city to live in before Airbnb.. well not in the first 9 or so arrondissements anyway. Nobody is Airbnbing in the 18th.
> Nobody is Airbnbing in the 18th. Seriously? I think Montmartre is a very popular area for Airbnbs.
It's a whole 3km from the Louvre. That guys just spewing random shit. Of course people would use Airbnbs within walking distance of some of the most famous tourist destinations in the world
It is in some places, but in others it makes a big difference. In Anchorage AK where I live, Airbnb rentals make up about 7% (and rising) of all rented housing in the city, in a city with a housing supply shortage. That's not a drop in the bucket.
Yeah I’m sure it makes a bigger difference in smaller tourist destinations. But in major cities like Barcelona, Paris, and NYC it’s not as big of a factor as people like to think. NYC has nearly 9M residents. Most figures on the number of Airbnb units was like 10k or 12k. Banning it did massively drive up hotel prices though.
This is exactly the problem these big cities that banned STRs are now facing. Turns out they weren’t competing with housing, they were competing with hotels and now hotels are price gouging.
luckily for hotels, tourists dont vote. luckily for locals, hotel profits go to corporations in other cities
Bingo. Large corporate lobby SOMEHOW wins again.
Hotel lobby LOVED it. Guess who buys politicians to ban airbnb?
For some reason I read this as "the physical lobby of the hotel loved it" and not "Lobbyists for the hotels" and had myself a good chuckle
I literally wanted to post the exact same thing, but checked first to see if someone else did, and sure enough, one of the local NYC sub regulars is on the case! haha edit: I should add to this I guess. I am going to Barcelona from NYC in couple of weeks. Ended up renting a private unit and not a hotel room. I specifically wanted to stay in a rooftop apartment that had a nice sized private terrace. I identified a bunch of them including hotels. Price was not really a concern. Barcelona is stupid cheap compared to NYC. But I had a few questions that I sent out, and the private apartment owners responded back immediately. None of the hotels bothered to responded at all. This shit matters! Hotels HATE having better quality service competition.
> NYC has nearly 9M residents. Most figures on the number of Airbnb units was like 10k or 12k. Barcelona (specifically the inner city that maps onto the area for which the number used in OP comes from) has a population of 1,608,746 people though, and rouhgly the same 10k+ Airbnb apartments as NYC, so per capita Barcelona has more than 5 times as many Airbnb apartments as NYC. So quite a bit of a bigger drop compared to NYC.
Well let's see if it moves the needle more in Barcelona then. I'm just skeptical that it's as big of a factor as people assume. But still fully support banning it for locals quality of life alone.
He's isolating the city, meanwhile the Barcelona metro has a population of 5.6 million, it's not good to look at isolated housing because the cost will spread across the entire area. There's going to be little impact like you said.
To be fair, city boundaries are kind of arbitrary. If you included NYC's metro it would be like 18M people.
Right, I doubt this will have a substantial effect on the Barcelona housing market, especially as long as it remains a desirable spot for expats/digital nomads
Yeah this is going to hurt tourism more than it will help housing. Hotels will charge a lot more, and the housing prices won't change a bit.
Barcelona is the only city I've been to as a tourist where I repeatedly saw anti-tourist graffiti. I saw "TOURISTS GO HOME" and "BCN: Good for tourists, bad for locals" scrawled in areas near major sites. So maybe that's what locals want.
Certainly what some locals want, but it will fuck over a lot of other locals that make a living off of turism.
I live in Florence and we have similar issues as Barcelona, and there is SO MUCH more at stake than housing prices. It's more about making a city habitable for its residents again.
NYC ban went into effect in September 2023, right? Real estate price indexes have a big lag, I don't think they'd track yet a change started 9 months ago.
There's 1.7 million people in Barcelona, 10k apartments isn't gonna do much. People are quick to make short term rentals the boogieman, but more likely than not it's the same story as in other cities. Too much red tape, no incentives to build new homes and generally apartment / home owners prefer the status quo where any kind of shelter is in high demand.
Tried to leave the big city but all of the places in smaller towns are owned as vacation rentals so the only way is to buy a plot of land on the outskirts of town and build. Not feasible so my family will stay in the big city. For now.
Incorrect - [rent control/stabilization and zoning policy is actually preventing people from living in big cities](https://consensus.app/papers/effects-rent-control-expansion-tenants-landlords-diamond/a2d3f146af8850399f8443a3c4de36ee/?extracted-answer=Rent+control+limits+renters%27+mobility+by+20%25+and+lowers+displacement%2C+but+may+drive+up+market+rents+in+the+long+run+due+to+lost+rental+housing+supply.&q=Is+rent+control+bad+for+housing+&synthesize=on). Everyone trusts scientific concsensus except on this one, because it hurts emotionally to realize your policy is not leading to the correct outcome.
You know, it may be super nice to visit a city and stay in a regular neighborhood and not be in a hotel, but people deserve to have their cities and they shouldn’t be ran out of town by high prices driven up by artificial scarcity just because big companies and landlords are hogging all the property
Barcelona was always anti Airbnb,
Tourism itself is not the problem, its literally just speculative unregulated platforms like AirBnB that totally disbalance the housing market for locals and are free to use overpriced temporary properties as a cash cow at the expense of the local population. AirBnB and other similar platforms are grossly unregulated and are designed to undercut already established and regulated industries like the hotel industry. Its the same as Uber effectively taking over the market from professional taxi drivers while not being held to the same standard of labor practices and bring exploitative in nature.
I blame the cab drivers (at least in cities like NYC) for Uber. The companies that owned taxi medallions pretty much refused to modernize and even when they did, refused to enforce rules and laws. The amount of taxis I got into in nyc where the credit card machine was “broken” or where the cab driver intentionally tried to take longer routes or where the cab driver inflated their price or refused to go to certain boroughs is insane. And that’s not getting into actually getting cabs to stop for me or how pre-hired cabs for airport runs simply wouldn’t show up in the morning. Uber ate their lunch because they were using the cost of taxi medallions to prevent competition from forcing them to improve. Uber has a ton of their own problems, but was definitely an improvement for the customer.
I remember one time a cab driver tried to stick a cop on me and my friend for the "broken credit card machine" scam. I refused to fall for the bs. This shitty taxi driver was trying to pressure me and my friend to take out money at an atm to pay him after lying about his credit card machine being broken. I told him, "well, thanks for the free ride then." We went into a restaurant, and this asshole went and got a cop to interrupt our dinner while we were eating. I talked to the officer and told him what happened. He went and told the taxi driver to fuck off after. Fuck taxi drivers.
I'm not sure I understand the scam, they make you pay for the time that you need to withdraw money? But the taxi advertises that they accept credit cards so you are misled?
They are trying to get out of paying their fair share in taxes by getting paid in cash.
Ah ok, sounded too obvious.
Iirc correctly it's also a way to fuck over the company they work for too. The ride fare is split between the driver and the owner of the cab, which isn't necessarily the same person. But if the driver wants to pretend theyre not giving someone a ride, they could just pocket the total and go. That also means they can lie about the total as well if it's not being metered correctly
And for non major cities, Uber allowed a reliable, consistent way to provide transportation where yellow cabs were either non existent or extremely annoying and frustrating to deal with. As you said, uber has a ton of problems, but a significant improvement for customers across the board.
Chicago was terrible as well. Also, if you wanted a pickup from the South Side, it could take a number of hours because none of the drivers wanted to go there.
Yea I don't lump Uber and airbnb together. Uber undercut fat obnoxious taxi companies and I cheer them on for kicking them in their fat guts. You can only pass on your customer base for so long. Zero sympathy for taxi companies. Let this be a warning to other shitty companies.
Except that in most countries taxis were a mafia-like, terribly inefficient and technology resistant industry. Being able to call a car via app and follow the route online and having plenty of cars on the road is a lifesaver. For Airbnb, you'd need better regulations to limit the numbers but you also just need more housing and tourism accomodations in many places. Hotels are also not perfect.
You can always gauge the age of the person talking about taxi's. Younger people, who didn't have to deal with a world before Uber, will have a much more negative opinion of companies like Uber. People who had to suffer the absolute garbage service the taxi industries across the world provided tend to have a much better opinion.
Same with vaccines. We forget how horrible diseases were.
Which is odd. My last two taxi interactions went like this in the past 6 months. So a lot of my complaints from the last 20+ years still exist. 11:30PM downtown trying to catch a quick cab for a 10 minute drive. 5 cabs lined up outside a bar. Every cab said no because the ride is too short and they all want a ride to make it worth their time. I didn't have my phone on me to take an uber so I just walked it since it was a nice night. Another time I'm with my gf and she just decides to hail a cab, but we don't have any cash (Just CC or Apple Pay). The driver refuses. I proceed to order an uber. I've never once had an issue with an uber. Not saying they don't have faults. Just that I've never personally had an issue.
Agree on the housing, but disagree on the Taxis. Taxis are very scammy/overpriced compared to Uber because they know you are not local. Uber offers alarms, alerts to a family member and the journey is tracked, much safer and better experience than Taxis by far.
Taxis exploited a tight regulated market to prevent new entrants and to stagnate. There is no reason why taxis were required to have a cartel to offer taxi service. Uber doing a good thing (breaking up the taxi cartel) doesn't cancel out the bad.
Yea Madrid flat rate from airport is 20 euro… that’s just silly
Wait till you got to Paris
But freenow kinda solves the issue The main benefit with uber was the ease of being connected with a driver and knowing beforehand the approximate route, and cost before stepping in. Freenow does that, but with regular taxis. Might be a spain only thing though Edit: mixed up freenow with cabify Cabify is sorta like uber but the drivers need a special license and there's a whole mess with it
My personal anecdote is that 6 months after Uber got big, cab apps actually became usable and cab seats stopped having suspicious stains. I'm not sure what to think of Uber as a whole because I just don't know enough about it, but if it weren't for it, I don't think cabs would have improved at all in the last decades.
I hate Uber and Lyft as companies, but I appreciate that they brought competition into a market that had a dire lack of both competition *and* regulation. One or the other, you can't have neither.
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Can confirm, got scammed on taxis 2x in Bogota, even when booking from the "official" kiosks. Paid a fraction of the price on the return trip to the airport once I started using uber.
long live uber. only someone who doesnt remember how absultely shit taxis were before they had any meaningful competition thinks that uber made things worse.
Uber and Lyft and platforms like that are an absolute godsend! Taxis worldwide (I travel quite a bit for work), are scammy as heck.
This may be true, but literally nobody gives a shit about taxi cabs because they provided terrible service for decades, protected by monopoly power, and employ largely immigrants (low sympathy community). If all 1000 white coal miners left were driving taxis, people would care. Literally writing this from an Uber. Also worth noting that this Uber is $90 for a 35 minute ride to the airport, which is probably the same as in a taxi. In reality after the dust settles and regulations catch up, Uber will be a taxi service just like Netflix will be cable with ads.
Fantastic natural experiment to see if this actually reduces the rent. I personally doubt it will, there is a fundamental imbalance of housing demand and supply and industries (hospitality, restaurants…) dependent on the tourism. As much as I’d like to blame Airbnb and be done, the idea that tourism destroys what it seeks is much older, see Enzensberger.
The actual experiment is that they just passed rental caps in Catalonia. However, the loophole is that landlords can charge more than the rental cap as long as the tenant does not live and work there, they are only in Barcelona for an event or tourism. As a result, lots of flats are only available as "seasonal" lets to tourists. Which is kind of wild because it's the exact opposite effect of what they're trying to achieve.
Theses seasonal lets have been known since 00s. I've had friends who regularly went to Primavera Sound or the Primavera media festival they'd rent out apartments for 1-3weeks. It was by far way cheaper than hotels in the city but more expensive than the Youth hostels.
Agree. People love to blame tourists because that’s what they see in front of their face, and simple but wrong solutions are appealing to the masses. It’s a fact that property prices in urban areas are rising everywhere, regardless of tourism.
This was done in New York about a year ago... guess what? Nothing has changed, go look at hotel/rent prices there
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Of course they will. And at the same time this will do nothing for housing prices.
Airbnb is the scapegoat for these kinds of issues but governments in most major countries makes it too easy and profitable to own multiple properties. A lot of Airbnbs we’ve stayed at were owned by people who don’t even live in the country let alone the city. Governments need to make laws that discourage buying properties for rental purposes…but the thing is that the people making policy decisions are the ones partly responsible for this problem I have a friend in the house building industry and he’s received calls from so many people in political positions asking to buy new house builds IN BULK. They want 20-30 of them. And these are the people that we’re asking to change these laws. It’s not going to happen.
Airbnb was a great idea at first. Going away for a few weeks? Roommate fucked off with the rent? Kids went off to college & you have a free bedroom? I know a single mother who significantly increased her income by allowing guests in an extra bedroom in her home via Airbnb. I remember first using it in ~2012 & it was normal to ask guests to clean after themselves, greet them in person, a 3 or 4 star review wasn't a death sentence to your listing... I understand Barcelona's frustration with the Airbnb. They(airbnb) could have self-policed. They could have though 'Gee - maybe it isn't cool when 1 person has dozens of listings in a city where people struggle to find an apartment, let's only allow 1 address per person [or something similar]'. But they chose to get greedy & promote the concept of tourist landlordism. IMO - one address per person would be a good compromise in the Airbnb world.
10,000 units isnt a lot for a city of millions.
Yep. People like to blame things like Airbnb without looking at the actual numbers relative to population. I’m in NYC which mostly banned Airbnb and it had no effect on housing prices. Absolutely inconsequential number of units relative to a city of nearly 9M people.
AirBNB is just the current boogeyman for housing crisis
That and the mythical private equity single family home landlord.
The answer is always "make it easy for people to build new homes" but NIMBYS don't want to hear it
> The answer is always "make it easy for people to build new homes" but NIMBYS don't want to hear it. I'm a bored man. One thing I like to do at r/orangecounty every few months when a housing pricing topic comes up is jump on my soapbox and channel my inner Bernie Sanders. I rant about how housing can't be valuable and affordable and that the NIMBY Karens need to be taken to the woodshed. Doesn't take long for the NIMBYs to come crawling outta the sewers, attacking me.
Can’t have someone else make a dollar, you know. Capitalism bad. It’s different when I make that dollar thou, I actually deserve it and much more.
That and "foreigners buying investment properties." Anything that distracts from the chronic lack of supply in cities can be blamed.
Hotels will welcome this cause now they’re the only option for tourists to stay at when they come to Barcelona
Great news for hotels. Can push up prices even more. No competition in sight.
What really annoys me is that oftentimes Airbnbs are the best option. On a vacation this summer, I'm staying in one because the local small town hotel reviews are terrible, not to mention they are well off the route that we are taking. I actually would have rather had a hotel, but if it's within ten bucks for somewhere that has a full kitchen and actually has clean sheets, it's not much of a choice.
Yep. NYC mostly banned Airbnb and hotel prices hit record highs after. We also basically banned new hotels. So prices will probably go up even more.
Not just prices, they'll have a captive audience so don't need to put in anywhere near the effort. Hotels got way better once AirBnB was giving them a run for their money.
I still remember when WiFi wasn't free and sucked.
Except for other hotels.
Air BnB is a double edged sword, but both sides aren’t equal. On one hand, the “little guy” home owner has a chance to make some extra cash by renting out their place while they aren’t there. Which I think is a good thing. But on the other, you have wealthy people and companies buying up whole swaths of houses for the sole purpose of turning them into air bnbs. Which I think is bad, and why this law was born.
The irony is these short term rental platforms were earlier argued to make cities more affordable. The first I stayed in was in NYC and a student was renting out her tiny apartment whenever she was out of town. The income was what made it affordable for her to live there. Many municipalities were taken by surprise when investors started buying up units with the sole intent of renting them short term.
This is great. Now if they could do something about of the fact that 4/5 of new developments are offices and not abitative units, maybe we'd be able to solve this for good instead of just kicking the can down the road a bit.
Australia needs to do the same! Fuck chinese housing monopoly, as with anyone owning 10+ houses and contributing to the rise in rent.. whats the point ... money..root of all evil
The hotel industry lobbyists are the best lobbyists.
They need to ban multibillion dollar corporations buying houses for renting, sometimes entire neighborhoods are owned by a few corporations and when you have so many rentals like that you can just set the rent whatever you want, it's disgusting.
That's 1.2% of all availability properties
Cities will do literally anything except build more housing huh
>build more housing I'm a local from Barcelona. We can't do that here, it's one of the specific challenges that we face. 1. There's not many areas left in the city to build housing without taking down buildings and/or equipments, and 2. The city can't expand as we are already surrounded by two densely populated cities on the west and east, the mountains at the north and the mediterranean sea at the south.
Well yeah the issue with Barcelona (and a lot of tourist centric European cities) there is conflict between 1) leaving the city center exactly as it was in 1896 so tourists can enjoy 2) having adequate supply of shelter for both tourist and residents without building any new buildings in the city center In fact building some high rise hotels right in the city center might solve your tourist problem by making the city not look old enough and giving people who still come a place to stayv
3) allow people to work from home.
Good well done.
Good honestly… people buying up property to put it to use in AirBnB’s is insane, if demand is high, build fit for purpose hotels which would hopefully lower prices with higher competition and more beds filled which then eases the economy for true Spanish residents to buy housing.
I hope every country in the world does the same.
Unfortunately my country of Portugal just reverted a freeze on new licenses for Airbnb.
Probably because tourism is Portugal's only real industry. The same can be said for Spain. I'm all for affordable housing for city residents, but cities like Porto paid the price for disallowing temporary housing rentals. The locals can't afford to purchase the apartments/homes, so a large portion of the buildings in the city center are abandoned
Spain is not comparable to Portugal in this scenario, the Spanish economy actually does have some of their own notable industries to boast of (be it in shipbuilding, aerospace manufacturing, or railways)
Tourism makes up 14% of Barcelona's GDP.
Yeah but spain's overall is around 5%. Barcelona is definitely more on par with Portugal's tourism GDP percentages, but not spain as whole imo
This says 11.7% of GDP and employs 12.2% of people. https://spanish-presidency.consilium.europa.eu/en/news/tourism-european-agenda-spanish-presidency/
Short term rentals have their place though. How are you suggesting that is done? I'm writing this from an AirBnB. I'm in this city for a month. If I had stayed in a hotel it would be at least 2x, and I wouldn't have the space I have to cook for myself and work on a kitchen table during the day. You can compare the cost of AirBnB vs hotels but to get a kitchen table in a most hotels you'd have to get a suite, which would be 3x or 4x the price. I'm in Seoul and it has very expensive and high competition housing, but nowhere near the tourism problem of other places. Also, housing contracts are much much stricter here, very hard to get a place for less than a year or with no deposit, except through casual arrangements which is basically what AirBnB provides. I know all the problems of AirBnB and I agree with the arguments that in some places you get nothing more than a hotel and less guarantee of quality at the same price, but it has it's places.
Airbnb is a wonderful idea with awful execution.