I'm from a small ski resort in Norway. How this has been "solved" here is that it's always been "boplikt", aka "duty to live", in the residential zones. And then there are separate zones for cabins and rental apartments. So the normal houses, someone has to live in, or you will get fined. You can't just buy a normal house and use it as a cabin or for short time rental.
This creates two markets with different prices. A similar sized "cabin property" is probably 3-4x as expensive as the same house on a boplikt-property. But this has kept locals from being prized out.
(I write "solved", as it's not easy to just move to the small city and find somewhere to live, but that's not really because of airbnb like situations. It's more that no one dares to build housing hoping someone will move here, and possibly have it unsold for ages)
It gotta be enforced. In a huge city with huge apartment complexes it might be hard to know what's going on. But in my small city with 2500 people and mostly houses, you would instantly know if someone bought a house in your neighborhood and didn't live there. And people would probably report it, as they want to keep their neighborhoods nice. But yeah, this might not scale.
And while this keeps the prices of homes lower than not having it, it gives some weird incentives. For instance it's more profitable for the city to zone more of the cabin properties, as they can sell them to developers for much more. And developers rather build houses they can sell to a larger market (people in the whole country), instead of building a house and hoping someone will move to the city soon. These things would probably also happen without the living restrictions in homes, but the restrictions haven't solved these issues.
Zoning is typically for building. This would be closer to deed restrictions or “covenants, conditions and restrictions” (CCRs), which governs land use and transfer restrictions regardless of ownership.
Zoning actually addresses both construction and land use and often a lot of other things. Where I live, it would be absolutely routine to see something like short-term rental restrictions in the zoning code.
By the book, "Zoning is a legislative act dividing a jurisdiction's land into sections and regulating different land uses in each section in accordance with a zoning ordinance" [1]. So in theory, zoning rules deal with any kind of "land use", however the governing body chooses to approach the topic. In practice, you'll of course see zoning district rules that describe some of the more obvious "allowed uses" such as "dwellings, one-family, other than mobile homes" as well as construction/building characteristics like "detached homes", "townhomes", "multi-story buildings", etc. I think that is the kind of thing you're expecting of a zoning code, and it's definitely a big part.
But, zoning regulations get quite specific in dealing with uses too, and often these details have little or nothing to do with the buildings or construction. A major example is what kinds of business uses are allowed in a particular zone, for example: "Retail stores selling soft goods, clothing, leather goods, health aids, eye glasses, toys, jewelry, cosmetics, printed materials, glassware, home furnishings..."
It goes beyond characterizing the primary use of a parcel or structure. "Accessory" and "prohibited" uses are often even more specific, e.g. "entertainment (piano player, guitarist, small combos, dancing, etc.) in restaurants and movie theaters". You'll also see regulations for things like in-home occupations (hairstylists, massage therapists, etc), gardening, operation of vending machines, storage of construction materials and refuse, butchery and meat processing, etc.
Certain "performance" requirements are also sometimes listed, which usually deal with noise, light emission, and other nuisances, but these can get as oddly specific as this: "All surfaces shall be of a dust-free nature."
All examples listed are from the zoning code where I live [2].
Yep, it would not be exceptional to see short-term rental regulations in zoning codes in the US. I'm guessing in some states you'd have legal challenges if you required owner occupancy or even perhaps establishment of residency or domicile, but it's fairly universal in this country that you could write zoning laws dealing with transient occupancy and accessory or primary uses that resemble hotels, guesthouses, B&Bs, etc.
Yeah, it's a kind of zoning. But a quite strict one. And one that's not easily abused.
For instance, if you're tax based in Oslo, you would have to "move" to buy a family home in my city and use it as a cabin. And that move on paper has implications. Where you can vote, where your children can go to kindergarten or school, how you're taxed etc. So people don't do it.
When I was living in Dublin Ireland, I was paying 1500 EUR a month for a one bedroom appartment, nothing special but expensive, the landlord say he was not going to renew the contract because he was going to change it to an AirBnB.
I met him a few months later and he was telling me he was making over 4000 a month. I can't blame the landlords in this case.. It's obviously the better option for them, even as the article suggests, the landlords can afford to have the locations close during the `off-season` because there is so much money to be made.
Some regulation around the pricing would be nice, but I have no idea how you would even navigate doing that.
I’ve been to far too many cities and every city the locals are blaming some external person for their housing/rent problem
An external person they want to be mad at when they think of them
But they’re all missing their neighbors: the individual non-corporate landlords who they could actually put peer pressure on more effectively
Landlords could always have gambled on the highest possible rent and it has nearly nothing to do with the recent influx, they can always just as easily not attempt the highest possible price. The wealthier visitors always had the funds to afford the higher prices, and can afford even higher prices than today, double, triple whatever is in the back of your mind. The wealthier people don't care if the presented rent in your area is $500 or $5000, most of them will accept what is presented.
The rents here in Dublin are crazy! I honestly don't know how people can afford to rent, which is tragic because we also have an entire generation who cannot afford to buy.
In my apartment complex, AirBnB and short-term rentals are technically forbidden, but people still do it if they feel they can get away with it.
One approach I've heard of that specifically addresses short-term rentals is to limit the number or density of such units within a city or a particular district.
Rent control has the efect of locking people in and reducing mobility, favoring those already in the market at the expense of those looking to get in to the market.
how does rent control lock people in? only if moving is not possible without raising rent. effective rent control is about preventing excessive rent, not about preventing the raise of rent to existing tenants.
as far as i can tell, the effect of rent control in germany is mostly that similar properties cost a similar rent which does not prevent people from moving, because they are not risking an increase just because of the move.
how would additional supply fix that? there is no space in the city to build more. additional supply would happen at the edges, where most people do not want to move until the area is sufficiently developed, and there are local jobs too.
a more desirable area will always be more expensive. rent control allows to keep that in check, no control will mean that even if there is enough supply elsewhere, those more desirable areas will remain expensive. rent control is needed to prevent gentrification too.
Infill development comes with its own challenges. A coordinated effort to increased density in a city would necessarily be disruptive to a lot of people's housing. That's not to say it shouldn't be done, but it complicates the matter if you care about displacement, right-to-return, etc.
That's what all NIMBYs parrot. Berlin population only grew by ~250k people ... since 1990, and back then Berlin was basically depopulated. It's also one of the least dense capitals in Europe today, Berlin is not Amsterdam to not have any space.
Saying "there's no more space" doesn't pass the smell test. There's more than enough space but there's too much real estate speculation going on to jack up the prices because certain interest groups need to make money from it.
>most people do not want to move until the area is sufficiently developed, and there are local jobs too
Once that area is sufficiently developed it's too late to move because you'll already be priced out. If you want to live somewhere you need to move thee before it becomes "cool" and "hip".
Berlin population only grew by ~250k people ... since 1990, and back then Berlin was basically depopulated
ok, fair point. so berlin does have other options. but the rent problem is not only in berlin, and other cities don't have that space. and nevertheless i stand by the claim that even if more rental units are going to be built in that space, rent prices will not go down without any additional effort.
a good example of doing it better is vienna. somewhat similar to berlin, population was shrinking until the turn of the century. down to 1.5 million. then suddenly in the last 20 years it grew back to 2 million. faster than berlin. vienna government itself is building new housing (a program that started 100 years ago). and infrastructure with jobs to go with it. 25% of people in vienna live in government owned and subsidized housing. (apparently berlin has something similar, but it is privately owned with a government mandate)
Once that area is sufficiently developed
ignoring the option to work remote, if an area doesn't have jobs close enough to easily reach by public transport i am not going to move there, no matter how attractive the rent.
that is about an additional more restrictive form of rent control on top of the already existing nationwide rent-control laws:
"The court ruled on Thursday that the Berlin government had overstepped its powers in introducing the law, as federal law governing rents was already in place."
this does not support an argument against rent control in general, but only against outright freezing rents in place which is what this law tried to do.
the stories about landlords getting around the rent limit by charging extra for furniture are also not helping the argument because the law covered that too, so they were effectively breaking the law. the only argument that is valid is the fact that less units were available for rent, showing that this particular law didn't work. but again, this does not prove that rent-control on general is bad.
german rent-control generally means that rent may not be charged higher than about 20% of the average rent in an area. this means that rents are still somewhat flexible and they can rise, but not excessively so.
Rent control in Germany also fixed the housing shortage and creates great incentives for new construction. In 2022, Germany had a record in new apartment and buildings finished - 2023 will probably even better. The new ECB interest regime of 4+% actually had very limited effect on the market in this respect thanks to rent control.
Like honestly, rent control is just beyond dumb. There are like 1000 ways that actually solve the problem - but unfortunately they require cities and bureaucrats to work instead of just passing a law. Supply and demand. If it takes LONGER to get a building permit that to actually build a housing complex… When cities are not planning ahead creating new space (argh, infrastructure, public transportation, this sounds like work…
i am a bit confused. rent control in germany works, but then you are arguing against it?
actually i disagree that simply allowing to build enough property will work. businesses tend to charge as much as they can, and if we want actual competition in rent prices, then the supply would have to vastly exceed the demand and not just meet it. with all the best intentions, that is not going to happen, and i don't think it is desirable either.
> and if we want actual competition in rent prices, then the supply would have to vastly exceed the demand and not just meet it.
So, having less than 1% of the housing stock go to AirBnB supposedly makes cities unaffordable but increasing the supply of housing will not have the opposite effect until supply greatly exceeds demand? Why?
because prices aren't lowered until there is pressure to do so. and that won't happen until enough properties remain empty that it starts to cost money. as far as i can tell, the preference currently is to leave properties empty instead of renting them out at low prices, so all creating more supply will do is to create more empty properties, unless landlords are literally forced to rent them out at lower prices.
part of the "problem" is that rent contracts are unlimited, so if rents are to low, then it may make sense to wait until they rise before renting out, especially in sight of a law that doesn't allow any raises for the time being. but as the article points out, many instead opted to sell outright.
So, to your point, this law of capping rents would then incentivize landlords to keep rental units vacant? Wow, sounds like exactly the kind of effect one can expect from laws suggested by Red-Red-Green in Berlin that lack any common sense or basic understanding of markets.
the very article you posted earlier shows that when the price controls were applied, a significant amount of rental properties were instead offered for sale. my interpretation is that these sellers didn't think that renting out at those prices was worth it, or soon wouldn't be.
i highly doubt that these people, when confronted with a more competitive market would choose to lower rent to compete instead of again just sell.
so i highly doubt that more rental units will automatically lead to lower rents.
“ so i highly doubt that more rental units will automatically lead to lower rents.”
They will IF landlords can expect positive returns on their investments given a certain price level. You can dig into the public filings of companies like LEG, Vonovia and TAG who publish the average rental prices and the occupancy. In cities with supply exceeding demand, rents are lower (e.g., high vacancy rates). Example: https://irpages2.eqs.com/download/companies/legimmobilien/Qu..., page 5.
There is of course also a big callout with respect to “correlation does not imply causation”, e.g., it is very likely that there is a hidden confounder (economic prosperity) that drives down vacancy rates and drives up rents which ties back to my earlier argument that capping rents doesn’t make sense if the cities, politicians and bureaucrats fail miserably at their jobs.
Maybe get a business degree or learn something about it. Your statements make me cringe very much the same way an MBA explaining LLMs to you may make you very miserable.
There is no single company that dominates a city or market enough to “profit from keeping rental units vacant at scale”. Vacancy rates and driving them down is a massive talking point in investor calls. High vacancy is bad because investors mainly care about rental income. The aforementioned companies achieve 3% or so organic rent growth - which is LOWER than inflation.
You have very little understanding of how the business world works and I’d recommend to take a couple of courses or classes in that field. It’s the same suggestion you would give an MBA type posting his opinion about programming or ML on Hacker News I suppose.
There are strategic investors though that buy run down buildings without any intention of renting them out ever but holding them for speculation. This is wrong and harms society. Land zoned for urbanisation is a right that is granted by society and has implicit value only from society granting these rights. Speculations on these artificially (by said society) limited building permissions needs to be eliminated. The space does not have much “inherent value” in itself (e.g., assuming no building for the ease of argument) - but only gains value by being artificially limited in quantity by society.
You can really blame him. He is destroying his own community, by destroying the future of young locals, for short-term gains - greed. Then he will have to move somewhere else, and probably destroy that community too. Like a plague.
We stayed in Aviemore (Scotland) last year and the local businesses were really struggling for staff. We were told that there was very little accomodation for seasonal staff, because it was more lucrative to rent it out to tourists. So you can go stay in Aviemore, but good luck finding anywhere to eat your dinner.
St Andrews, where I went to university, suffers from the same issue. When rich tourists can spend hundreds of pounds a night to stay in AirBnBs at the "home of golf", the broke students get forced into paying £2000pcm for a dilapidated council house.
I honestly don't understand using AirBnBs in most places in the UK -- traditional, proper B&Bs offer a better experience, often at a better price point. I guess if you've got a whole family, children in tow and all, maybe AirBnB begins to make sense, but even then, there are so many good self-catering options that don't eat up the local housing market.
Sheer availability beats everything. And as the other commentor says, quite a lot of BnBs are just staying in someone's house that isn't intermediated by a global megacorp.
Real B&B’s and Hotels are much better in the states too. The AirBnB fees and crappy experience make it only feasible if large numbers of people want to stay together. Even then I’ve found VRBO and direct renting to be superior in everything except having a phone app.
I stayed at B&Bs in Scotland 20 years ago and it was a very memorable experience.
I, too, absolutely love traditional UK B&Bs – but in my experience they typically operate from what rather looks like a converted regular house, so couldn't they, too, be accused of taking away regular housing?
Even better would be house sharing either banned or severely restricted.
It is ruining our society, making renting impossible in some towns, driving up house prices, pushing society towards "houses for the rich, nothing for everyone else".
I'd really like to give a big middle finger to AirBNB.
The disparity is what I find so sad. On one hand there's entire generations that can't afford to rent let alone buy but there are enough people traveling all over the world affording USD400 a night Airbnb's to price them out.
OMG I know a girl who went through exactly this. She signed a 1 year lease on an apartment in a ski town, then a few months in out of nowhere, her landlady was kicking her out. Why? Landlord decided to Airbnb the place for a month to make twice the profit. And she had signed a lease! This was a town in France, and so it's affecting places around the world.
I used to live in France, and I remember hearing about how it's functionally impossible to evict someone who refuses to move out.
There are many horror stories of people squatting places, or just not paying rent anymore. The police won't intervene as it's a civil matter, and you need to get a court order which takes anywhere from 6 months to multiple years. The tennant has 2 months to comply with the court order. If after the two months, the tennant still hasn't complied, you need to get a "commissaire de justice" to execute the eviction (who is typically appointed by the court).
In addition to this, there are specific months in the year where you cannot evict people (November-April). Whenever a tennant wants to live somewhere for free, they just use that clemency period as a weapon and make the court proceedings wait from one year to the next. Obviously, "for free" means you still owe the rent after all is said and done. But if you file for bankruptcy and wait 10 years, the debt is forgiven.
If a landlord attempts to evict the tennant themselves, they risk a 30k€ fine and 3 years in jail.
In other words: your friend was most likely served an illegal eviction (it's also not possible to end a "bail" in France on a whim), and she could've just stayed put.
Edit: the reason for the fine/jail time for a landlord is because an individual's home is considered quite sacred. Trespassing is taken very seriously by the law, it's called "violation de domicile" for a landlord to enter a tennant's home without permission.
There are very few reasons for a landlord to prematurely terminate the lease in France, and deciding to lent it for more money is specifically not one of them. In winter, you can't evict anyone at all (making money from ski town rentals likely means this is winter high season). There is unfortunately a lot of abuse, especially if the tenant is young and/or foreign and wouldn't know how to fight back.
It's not housing-as-a-good that's a problem it's the land.
Land owners didnt create the land. Rights to land are always acquired, ultimately, through violence.
Land owners dont make it valuable - a good teacher drives up her own rent.
Supply and demand work in reverse. The more land owners buy and hoard it the more valuable it becomes.
Unlike, say, income taxes, which discourage work, taxing land just discourages hoarding and unproductive use. Higher taxes would thus relieve shortages on top of bolstering government budgets.
Airbnb isnt a direct cause of those shortages, it just partook in the rent bonanza driven by the global property hoarding frenzy. Banning or strictly regulating it in tourist hotspots is probably a good idea but doesnt resolve the underlying problem.
Living in a city heavily impacted by it, I couldn't agree more. People love it, because they feel entitled as tourists to live like locals, at the expense of the actual locals. It's literally all about entitlement, while forcing the negative externalities on the community you came to visit! Outta sight, outta mind.
Tourists don't "feel entitled", they rent apartments because hotels and guesthouses are full, or the price is cheaper, or they think the price is cheaper. Tourists have no blame in this - they book what is on offer.
And on top of that there's nothing in renting an AirBnB that provides a "local" experience. It's an ego-based illusion of experiencing the local life at best.
Many small cities we visit have apartments (Airbnb's) near the city center where it's walkable whereas hotels/motels are often in less walkable parts of the city. For me that makes for a more "local" experience.
And I guess you yourself are the exception in that you are entitled to living in a tourist-free city, and all the tourist-dependent businesses in your area and all the tourists that want to visit can go to hell?
Maybe we should just build enough housing for everyone.
I think the resentment comes from the fact that, for many large cities, the tourism aspect is a very small part of the city. Take for example the city I grew up in - Edinburgh. Tourism contributes £1.3bn to the cities economy, but the city has a GDP of £26bn. So tourism is 5% of GDP, yet it has a completely disproportionate impact on the city centre.
If you play "count the lockboxes" in the centre you realise almost every flat in the centre is an AirBnB. Those flats take in 4x what a normal rented flat will make, so of course there's a strong incentive for landlords to rent on AirBnB. Right now the city is going through a huge housing shortage - people are having to defer degree courses or live outside the city because they literally can't find anywhere to rent.
Of course, tourists aren't the only cause of this. There's a huge intergenerational issue (I know countless people in their 60s living in very large houses), and the city has historically been very conservative about building new houses to match population growth.
Ultimately the city is owned and run mostly by the people who live there. Most of them have no choice about the level of tourism, and it's pretty reasonable to want to have a discussion about whether you really want to have your city turned into a theme park.
> the city has historically been very conservative about building new houses to match population growth.
This is the main problem. Solution is simple: Allow more new construction, lots of it.
Local people have voted against their own long term interests, if they have voted for politicians who have opposed new construction.
It is easy to succumb to short term selfishness: "I already have a home, so I don't want any new construction near me. I oppose building new homes." But in time, every one of us will need to move to a new home. Then you will start to wish that if you had supported building new homes, it would be easier for you, too, to find a new home.
It's an inherent problem in tourism: tourists want an "unspoiled" view, which means not building infrastructure for tourists or locals.
Building definitely is happening. See the Plan: https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/downloads/file/25264/edinburgh-... - but of course you can't build just houses, you have to build roads and schools and waste disposal and public transport to go with them. The city has struggled with its tram project and the railways are at capacity.
When the younger generation takes over, I predict a massive wave of construction globally. Most millennials have had it up to here both with high rent and the anti-development I've-already-got-my-own-house crowd that caused it.
And I'll be the old guy yelling about it in the street. I've lived in the same town for most of my life, so I've seen it metastasize across the countryside, gobbling up farmland, wildlife habitat and open spaces, replacing them with McMansions, apartment buildings and Costcos, just to make room for more ... frikken ... people. It's like watching your best high school friend turn into a junkie whore before your eyes.
I don't know what the answer is, but there is something to be said for retaining some beauty at the expense of fewer people, and maybe rethinking the idea that growth is necessary to success, 'cause we're running out of room and that definition can't last forever.
This issue has been solved very well in other countries with
medium and high-density construction. Many US communities feel overcrowded because they are low-density.
Yeah I think you're right there, at least to a degree. So many American towns have really crappy zoning laws that limit the amount of high density construction, even though it's awesome for a tax base (especially if you allow for mixed use areas (which has the double benefit of helping mitigate food deserts)).
Literally the old guy yelling in the street, so yeah, drama much and much drama.
What you say is true, and also isn't anything new to the discussion. Change is awesome, and isn't even the point. It's more about the unsustainable quest for growth that is the foundation of our economy.
That's a complete narcissistic take. Other people are crowding your view? Would it be possible for you to understand that you take up as much space as any other person? That you are crowding their view? "At the expense of fewer people" - do you want to start killing your fellow man?
I don't know why you're getting downvoted, maybe the "narcissistic" part. Nah man I don't know what the answer is, only that I see the destruction happening. There has to be a more sustainable way to manage growth.
No you don’t. Investors and speculators want to rent it out, giving young people without credit scores and saved-up capital housing options.
Even speculators who buy and hold empty houses aren’t a problem. No investor is satisfied with no returns (ie, no sale and no rent) indefinitely. Speculators that are dumb enough to be happy with zero returns ought to be, and always are, separated from their capital.
Within a short time the market will balance out between the builders, the buy-to-let landlords, the single-family owners, and the flippers and speculators… assuming you don’t have some crazy regulations putting a thumb on the single-family owner end of the scale by blocking construction.
This is the real kicker. If Venice turns into a tourist Disneyland I’d feel a bit bad for the people who had lived there, but maybe it would be for the best.
But if downtowns of cities are being hollowed out and filled with tourists, it’s not going to go well for anyone - because eventually even the tourists won’t really want to be there anymore.
Too right. Glasgow is cracking down on new AirBnBs but not hard enough in my opinion. A city is for the people that live and work there, primarily. Tourism should be supported, but in almost no case should it take priority over making the city itself better for the people that have made it their home.
It has nothing to do with tourists visiting. It's tourists taking up the local housing. Tourists are planned into any good urban planning -- but they're not expected to stay in the residential areas, especially while the local residents are getting hurt because of it.
The issue isn't tourists, it's where they're staying. Tourists are welcome, they're not entitled to live like 'locals' at the local's expense. Stay in a hotel.
> Maybe we should just build enough housing for everyone.
Except that won't ever be enough because more and more will just come. And there's already even a glut on AirBnB for tourists, so none of that housing will go the locals. Building isn't the only solution.
That's fair. From a tourist's point of view, hotels suck, and houses are much better. Home owners also have the right to rent out their houses, as limited by the zoning.
I maintain that the issue can be fixed with more development - build a new tourist zone with hotels that appeal, or AirBnB friendly zoning, or something like that. And for locals, more housing = more options. The local housing can be built outside tourist zones if it has to.
The fact is we have a growing population, a growing global economy, tons of people exiting poverty and entering the global middle class and travelling. This will all accelerate for hundreds of years to come.
Hotels suck only to those buying into the relatively recent religion "live like locals" and they are not that many percentage-wise. Most of the AirBnB customers go there hoping for lower prices and that's all there is. Tax the hosts like the hotels are taxed, make them offer the same services the hotels are offering, and I'm sure the main problem will be solved. I say only the main problem because Venice will be Venice and the increase in tourists numbers will be felt either way, so at some point the bigger issue will need to be discussed: should we limit the number of tourists? Sell them time schedule tickets or something? Venice has this discussion already.
Hotels suck for other reasons. If you're travelling as a group you often don't want to have separate hotel rooms with no shared space. If you're travelling as a family you might have kids that need to go to bed before you. There's much more of a trend to build serviced apartments now - which solve most of those issues.
Exactly. I rent houses and apartments because they have kitchens to cook in, a patio to hang laundry on or relax on, a separate bedroom for the kids, they allow dogs, and it's the same price as a hotel. If hotels start sucking less they can take the business back.
> Tourists are welcome, they're not entitled to live like 'locals' at the local's expense. Stay in a hotel.
I feel this is an artificial distinction. It's not really the type of building that's involved. People tend to pick whichever of AirBnB or hotel is the most economical for their stay. It's the massive conversion of property from residential to "hotel" by the (often local!) owners that's the problem.
If there only was some type of accommodation offering rooms to tourists right there where they want to go but respecting the local laws and regulations... maybe we could call them "hotels" or something.
There is (was?) a missing middle that Airbnb was nice for - “family” - but once you start looking into it you realize that cities do quite a bunch of thought into hotel location and connecting them to transport, in ways that quieter residences aren’t built for.
And neither should focus on just „build more houses“ or „grow more tons of food“. Both must be high quality in terms of (mental) health as well as environment.
For a start, I'd like to immediately outlaw short-term rentals (outside of traditional regulated hotels, etc.).
Then we need to end institutional and foreign investors ownership of single-family and few-unit homes. (I don't mean this as a "wouldn't it be great if someday, but we're never going to do it", but I think the housing crisis some places warrants state legislative efforts this year, requiring immediate halt to new purchases, and liquidation within 12 months.)
We might first have to outlaw campaign contributions.
Without appropriate regulations you're just building more AirBNBs.
A little less flippantly, just adopting this YIMBY line without thinking through regulating the market to ensure houses are for human habitation will not address the underlying issues. It will just line the pockets of real estate developers.
Typically (in all countries i know) the usage of land is defined by the state. Residential vs. commercial usage is clearly differentiated. I have not researched it, but i'd assume that a hotel must be built on commercial ground (all i know are). With airbnb the commercial rental of a residential housing became common and is unregulated up till now.
It's definitely impacted Dublin, where I live, and the rest of Ireland. There's 10x more rooms on AirBnB than there are long-term rents in Dublin; in other parts of the country it's 100x.
Can confirm it's a mess in Dublin, and it doesn't help that a significant amount of the politicians are themselves landlords so it's in their interests to keep the status-quo.
I'm glad I left and wont look back but whenever I need to travel back for whatever reason I have to crash at a friends place because the cost of an airbnb or hotel is simply extortion.
Is that "10x more rooms on AirBnB then there are open rental ads in Dublin"? Surely there aren't literally 10x more rooms on AirBnB then there are renters in Dublin?
I am also very frustrated at rental markets in many place, though I'm still unsure how much of this is merely displacing hotels/hostels relative to actually sucking up long-term rental slots.
I am very prepared to lay a lot of blame on Airbnb for high prices, just haven't seen anything conclusive (US-centric stuff I've seen, the fact that building has crawled to a halt feels way more relevant)
Yes, 10x more rooms on AirBnB than open rooms to rent in Dublin. At least with single bedrooms; I haven't looked into more rooms as I'm only searching for a new place for myself.
> though I'm still unsure how much of this is merely displacing hotels/hostels relative to actually sucking up long-term rental slots.
It very much is happening. Dublin saw this during the pandemic, when the long-term rent market doubled after tourism was shut down. These are houses that are zoned for residents, not people coming in, and landlords see they can easily make more money letting them out to the tourists.
> Pre-Covid there were more than 5,000 homes in Dublin available to tourists via Airbnb alone.
Dublin has a population of over 1.5 million. On average, a dwelling in Dublin has 2.5 people. 5000 AirBnB's account for less than 1% of the total housing stock.
I constantly hear about people complaining about how short term rentals are running the housing market but the numbers never add up.
It may be 1% of total housing stock but what is it relative to long term rental stock? It wouldn't take much to have a significant effect on the cost of long term rentals.
Google says that 30% of the population is renting in Ireland, I imagine that it's a bit higher in Dublin... but yeah. I think it's reasonable to say there's an effect.
I don't think that it is the primary effect, but we can walk and chew bubblegum!
Hotels were one of the few ways multi-unit residential buildings could get past the ubiquitous pests known as nimbys. Moving from hotels to airbnbs is going to reduce density in many places.
In Vancouver its build build build and the investors buy buy buy. You need to make the new build available for people who want to live in them. Simply building more is not enough. Vancouver proves that in spades.
In Vancouver every new unit that is built rents for more than the cities median rent, meaning for every new unit built, rents go up overall. How that is supposed to help with "Affordability" is beyond me.
Until they instituted an un-occupancy tax, many of those units weren't even rented. Local Vancouver businesses were getting killed by big buildings that should have lots of tenants being ghost towns. It reminded me of a mostly empty Beijing apartment building.
Just go to AirBnB and check -- right now, there are over 1000 open rooms for one guest in Dublin. Going to daft.ie, Ireland's main rental site, there's only 200 one-bed places to let (and that includes one room open in otherwise occupied houses). An order of magnitude difference, and it'll get worse throughout the summer.
It's a cancer that has directly impacted and caused the skyrocketing of prices and constraint of supply. The answer isn't to (just) build more, but to end the exploitation from AirBnB.
Why isn't the answer to build more? Of course that's the answer.
Clearly there's demand for tourists to come and visit Dublin, maybe they should either tax the tourists into not coming (and hit the economy), or build enough room for everybody?
It's definitely doable, but it's far from simple, and is going to further change the character of the city. And involve a lot of public spending which people object to.
We have oodles of room. Every human - not families, but individual humans, including children - can get their own massive house, with a big back yard.
Here's my math:
Back yard size: 15x40m = 600 sq m.
Public amenities per person = 300 sq m. (very generous)
Total space per human = 900 sq m. = 9e-4 sq km.
Number of humans = 8e9
Land required for this most ultimate of suburbs: 7.2e6 sq km
Surface area of Canada: 9.98e6 sq km. USA: 9.83e6 sq km.
In my absolutely absurdly overprovisioned scenario, we all fit in 72% of the admittedly very large Canada. ALL of us. Leaving plenty of room for every holiday-worthy place on earth to have all the AirBnBs and apartment-hotels needed.
> It's expensive
Investing public money to create amenities for tourism is going to be an economic no-brainer. Tourists, visitors, and locals will all benefit from it.
> Character will change
Everything changes all the time. The history of the world is a story of the character of things changing, whether happily or otherwise.
In a time of great change, desperately trying to slow it down isn't the way. Rolling with, and even initiating, the changes in an authentic way is much better.
There is room - in the hotels. Tourists aren't entitled to live in local houses. And I never said to not build more. I said it's only part of the answer.
You are 100% correct. The only solution is to completely ban them from operating in the country or make it economically unviable for landlords via the taxation system.
What you meant is there are 10x as many rooms available on AirBnB than are one-bed places to let. That's very different from:
> There's 10x more rooms on AirBnB than there are long-term rents in Dublin;
AirBnB places would have high turnover, probably an order of magnitude higher than long term rentals. It makes perfect sense that more of the former would be vacant at any given time.
Yea, but when there are single digit numbers of family house rentals in Meath on done deal, something is wrong.
When there’s 100 people applying for rentals. Or people moving from Blanch to South Wexford or Carlow because that’s the closest they can afford. Rents have doubled or tripled in the last 10 years.
We bought 5 years back when we couldn’t find a rental, rents were 1400 for a 3/4 be then, we got 1600 3 years ago when we were away for a year, and comps now are 2500+, in a place with a 1.5 hr commute to Dublin.
It doesn't change the underlying issue. The issue is every single one of those rooms available on AirBnB is a room/house not available for long-term rent. And that's the problem. It's just as big an issue that there's 10x more one-bed rooms on AirBnB than there are one-bed places to let.
Imagine if new construction was allowed. Then you could build more, and have both one home for AirBnB and another for long term rent. Have your cake and eat it, too.
1% of housing stock is misleading. Generally speaking, a 3% rental vacancy rate is considered healthy. Effectively, AirBnB is consuming 1/3 of the total available rental pool if it consumes 1% of housing stock.
I just visited Venice. The old city does not really have any economy outside tourism. There is a naval academy at one of the outer islands, but that is it. The rest of the old city is just one big tourist trap, end of story. All everyday activity moved to the mainland (Mestre). What an end to an ancient merchant republic - selling themselves.
Maybe this is an unescapable consequence of globalization and specialization. We have grown accustomed to the facts that the best microchips are made in Taiwan and the most influential software corporations reside in Silicon Valley. Perhaps some cities are destined to be tourist traps and nothing else. Many people want to visit Prague, Florence or Mecca; no one wants to go to Gary, Indiana.
Remember: the global tourist class is destined to grow. As numerous Asian nations are slowly (or faster) climbing towards the developed status (India, Bangladesh, Indonesia etc.), the # of people who want to travel and have the means to do so will rise enormously.
15 million people visit Rome yearly - now. It might be 50 million in 2050.
Edit: this comment attracted at least two downvotes. I am not too salty about it, but I would like to know why you think I am misinformed/wrong. Don't just downvote - argue, please.
I don't particularly like human mobs in tiny medieval streets either, but I believe the global trend does not depend on what I like or not.
> I just visited Venice. The old city does not really have any economy outside tourism.
That's just not true. My brother went to university in Venice a few years ago and the tourists and their traps concentrate in a few hotspots. It's true that some parts have completely been eaten up by tourism, but tourists hardly wander away from the few streets that connect the main sights.
> 15 million people visit Rome yearly - now. It might be 50 million in 2050.
I think by 2050 we will have to reckon with the true costs of flying, large swaths of the global South will not be livable anymore and a lot of people will be forced to move to cooler climates.
I wandered quite far from the main connecting streets and I never encountered: a school, a dentist's, a lawyer office etc. Come to think of it, I never saw a local child there, or a mother with a pram.
What I encountered, even far from the main thoroughfares, were AirBnBs and restaurants with multilingual menus.
The only object that I saw and that was unambiguously not-touristy was a naval academy.
>large swaths of the global South will not be livable anymore and a lot of people will be forced to move to cooler climates.
The global North is unlivable for most of the year. Winter as a phenomena is a form of natural disaster, making it impossible to grow food and energy intensive for humans to survive.
Venice is particularly difficult because of the lack of any in-between. Rome on the other hand can easily fit those millions into an authentic self, because there's so much local life around the tourist hotspots, with a natural blend in between. And tourism is authentic Rome anyways, it would not be Rome without. In Rome tourism is not even a modern invention, back when it was still called "pilgrimage" English and Welsh kings have made that trip between battling Vikings, it's that old.
In smaller Italian towns I have seen AirBnBs that I'd want to grant a "maybe it's not all bad" exception: old town flats that are basically museums to live in. A permanent resident would likely want modernize quite drastically, but tourists interested in the past can be the perfect solution to keep the legacy setup maintained. But that should be easy enough to regulate, plenty of existing cultural heritage protection schemes to tie in with.
This fucks over both tourists and locals. The legit stuff is being killed and people come to see outer shell at best. And be ripped off.
What's the point of traveling when all you see around is other tourists and it's just a collective ripoff experience?
It's sort of like F1. Best experience is at home watching on TV. Or really really really expensive. Going cheap route is just cargo cult for the sake of a worthless picture. Going to a tiny local event is likely to be so much better on many fronts. Aside from bragging rights to other cargoculters.
I had similar thoughts on my way. I tried to compensate by visiting not-so-wellknown locations such as Ostia Antica, the ancient port of Rome, which is most of the time reasonably empty.
And yet, there is something magical about walking around the ruins in Forum Romanum or seeing the Dome of Florence towering over you, all the people notwithstanding. The touch of ancient marble, the smell in the air, the heat of the early May Italian sun, the reverbation of ambient sounds in an ancient amphitheatre, all this cannot really be "tasted" in the virtual space.
I am personally torn on this, seeing both the good and the bad things.
I get your point. But, to be honest, what portion of the crowd take it in this way? Instead if taking a selfie and moving on to the next hotspot? Somehow from this crowd I usually hear reviews of restaurants and hotels rather than out-of-body transcendental experiences like yours.
I agree such experiences are awesome. But IMO 1) you've to prepare yourself for such trip and get yourself immersed in that context (be it historical or cultural) 2) have a proper setting to get into mood. Which is quite a task in peak season in many hotspots... At the same time, you don't need top-tier hotspots for that. Once you're prepared, there're lots and lots of places off the beaten path that are likely to offer better overall experience than top-tier places.
IMO there're the good parts for immersive experiences. But, unfortunately, the crowds seem to apply very consumerist fast travel approach. It just became too cheap (frequently by externalising the costs) and many people don't take it seriously.
Doesn't matter, the market still drives towards the brand names, even if they're a shell of their former selves. Lamenting the lost authentic past is for DFW wannabees. The Nouveau Riche masses will flock to the neolib Meccas to christen their legitimacy.
while that's true - you can't increase the number of tourists indefinitely. There are limits to infrastructure (airports, trains, hotels, restaurants). Therefore travelling long distance or to popular destinations will get way more expensive, and people will explore more outside of the popular destination or will travel closer to home.
Absolutely, yes. Medieval cities have an upper limit to them, and that upper limit is fairly close. (Already exceeded in Dubrovnik.)
We will see high tourist taxes introduced all over.
I wonder if the cities blessed/cursed with an enormous influx of people willing to pay high tourist taxes just to see them will develop something akin to "Dutch disease" = basically stagnation and corruption based on certain income regardless of quality of governance, which disincentizives competition, learning, investment etc.
The original concept of Dutch disease is based on resource-rich states, but being touristically attractive is a kind of "natural" resource too. As long as places like Rome can prevent street crime and keep the monuments from falling apart, the crowds will come, even if the local town hall consisted of mediocre politicians.
Mafia is also known to prey on tourist establishment. If the main lucrative attribute of your pizzeria is that the guests can see Colosseum from its windows, you cannot move your business and are forced to pay whatever protection money they want from you.
From an economic point of view, the situation is very inefficient - holiday homes lie empty while locals struggle to find vacant places to live. Anyone care to propose an "economist's" solution to the problem?
Holidays homes exists because owners are speculating that tourists will pay a premium that compensates for the time that the rooms stay unoccupied and that overall it will be more profitable than renting it out for ‘100% occupancy’ to a local tenant at a lower daily rate (or equivalent monthly rent)
If a town gets popular among rich tourists and supply remains limited, the tourists will price out the locals (as is already apparent)
Zoning/limiting the number of airbnbs in proportion to the the total housing stock can be one solution to stop the tourist industry from gobbling everything else up (at the expense of the tourist economy)
Not an economist, but an extreme solution to achieve 100% efficiency, i.e occupancy would be for everyone (including locals) to become nomads and be willing to move homes everyday based on daily spot rates for housing and take up any unoccupied house that day based on what they can afford. (I.e a combined market where tourists and locals both live the hotel/Airbnb lifestyle). Sounds horrible though.
The apparent inefficiency (in terms of unnoccupied rooms/houses) IMO arises from the very real inconvenience and costs involved in moving houses too frequently. Contrast that with tourists who want to definitely want to stay in a city only for a few days. The two classes will always compete without intervention that favors one over the other - or tries to find some arbitrary balance
An economists point of view would say there is nothing wrong with empty houses; and in fact its a good thing because short-term low-barrier agreements allow the optimal price for housing in an area to be determined.
They would then say that the local wages will eventually increase to the point where a worker can live close enough to make the job in the high cost town worth the commute.
Maximum of 2-3 months that a residence can be rented short term in any one year. This allows owners to rent their homes while they are on holiday (and demand for the short term rentals is highest).
Anyone wanting to do short term rentals all year must abide by the same regulations that traditional accommodation providers do - paying commercial rates, not running their business in a strictly residential area, etc.
The classic solution to high prices is to increase supply. But in this instance the supply for long-term dwellings is used up by another sector (vacation stays), and that would happen to most new supply too. Eventually the profits of the two home uses would converge if you increase supply enough, but many tourist hotspots might run out of space to build long before that.
I think segmenting the space, as mentioned by matsemann, is a good solution here. If you allocate half the town (including half the areas for future development) to long-term housing and the other to short-term stays, you prevent the markets from sharing a single supply. In the first years it will still be much more profitable to invest and build in the short-term half of town, but as long as there's profit to be made in building in either half of town this will sort itself out.
The (free market) economist would say it is efficient: the value of vacation housing exceeds the value of permanent residency.
If the concern is truly that the usage is overall extremely low (not just vacation vs resident), due to property value speculation...there is the idea that property taxes should be higher.[1] This will force productive use of the land.
However, raising property taxes tends to hurt residents more. So...it depends what objective you actually want to achieve.
The "Economists" solution is always just that whatever rich people are already doing / getting away with, is obviously the optimal solution, so we should let them do as much of it as they want. Economics as a field was entirely created by the wealthy elites to further their agenda of oppressing the lower classes.
Even as these are tourist destinations with natural or historical beauty, the local decision makers should still allow for building new homes. Not necessary right at the historical town center, but within 30 minutes walking or biking distance. When demand is high, you should allow to build more supply.
Mainly current homeowners. A constrained supply almost guarantees that your home value will continue to go up, especially if you're in a lucrative area. So homeowners and well-connected people make sure that zoning laws and building regulations are very prohibitive to new construction housing.
I guess it's easier for local politicians to get poor people angry at "evil foreign tech giants" instead of actually solving the issue. That way they get to cash-in on votes from both groups!
Please everyone, not everyone travels as a tourist. I’m always traveling for work and yes, I do prefer living like a normal person in a normal apartment.
Popular opinion: I wanna live in a tourist hotspot! Nice weather, beautiful scenery, exciting sites, etc.
Unpopular opinion: A lot of other people want to experience that too! Perhaps the best thing is to rent/share those prime locations, so a lot of people can enjoy them.
Fighting against people visiting is rent-seeking of a different kind.
tourist hotspots often need a lot of service workers, who have to live somewhere too. Not to mention that higher rents/decreasing total stock in one part of a city can create more competition for other parts, raising prices everywhere to some extent.
And I truly expect the market to find an equilibrium such that those service workers will exist, whether through transportation, higher wages, people who highly value the location, etc.
Certainly without those service workers, it won't be much of a tourist attraction.
No, it'll rely on exploitation of workers. That's what's happening in Dublin -- they're exporting the English language students as in Ireland you can work (legally, many work more) 20 hours a week on a student visa and the English schools count. Then they're stuffed into rooms with five others somewhat nearby. It all relies on exploitation on the desperate.
It's high time communities start regulating the so-called 'app economy'. Monetizing everything into a global marketplace is great when your income is orders of magnitude greater than the global average. This is exploitation pure and simple.
Yet all common folk uses Airbnb for short rentals unless you are rich enough to afford a Hotel. Sure some regulation is required, but would you rather have a few Hotel chains corner the market on short stays and rentals?
Everyone wants to be paid a lot and have lots of cheap options to consume. This is untenable. I'd rather everyone have affordable homes than affordable holidays.
It hasn't solved the problem of affordability. Rent and condo and house prices are some the highest in the world. You end up just building housing for foreign investors to make money off the locals.
I don't really see why people are entitled to live in the most desirable places just because their parents happened to live there. Why should I be banned from visiting so that some rich lineage gets to continue to expand their portfolio?
This creates two markets with different prices. A similar sized "cabin property" is probably 3-4x as expensive as the same house on a boplikt-property. But this has kept locals from being prized out.
(I write "solved", as it's not easy to just move to the small city and find somewhere to live, but that's not really because of airbnb like situations. It's more that no one dares to build housing hoping someone will move here, and possibly have it unsold for ages)