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.
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.
And, as mentioned, it's worse in other cities.