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)
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.
Buildings that can’t be sold in a market with high demand for realestate.
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.
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.
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.
Economists of every school and political affiliation will tell you that rent controls are a terrible idea.
Just ban AirBnb and other short term rental schemes in residential buildings.
Tourists should stay in buildings designed as such (i.e.: Hotels)
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.
Maybe another symptom of wealth inequality.
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.
Destroy housing -> destroy people's future and family creation.
Air b&b is cancer for people trying to start families as it destroys all local affordable housing.
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.
Rather: they feel entitled as tourists to live in a Disneyland version what they imagine to be the locals' lifes.
Maybe we should just build enough housing for everyone.
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.
All the new building near where I live is high-priced apartments that no one can afford anyway (unless you airbnb them).
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.
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.
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)
[citation needed]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRE23YfSvc8
A bit extreme/coarse, but I can't imagine that it wouldn't be effective.
Was it in the first hours that the idea was conceived? When it started to take off? Not until they were projecting growth at those levels?
It was setup as live with a local who will show you around
It came to be because hotel stock sucked for elastic demand: big conferences and festivals
Who would benefit from people not building more? Who's pushing for regulations against building more supply?
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.
Certainly without those service workers, it won't be much of a tourist attraction.
Let me know what you think.
