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Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

theolivepress.es

181–190 of 375 posts

Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

#181
post #101
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elasticity of demand is the elephant in the room for build-more-housing advocates. Let's say NYC's mayor rubbed a genie's lamp and wished to double the city's housing supply overnight. Yes, rental and real estate prices would crash through the floor due to the glut of supply. But then millions of people would move to the city and buy up all that supply. This would rapidly double the population of the city which would…

The elephant in the room for people who are against building enough housing is that they're all convinced that everyone would move to their particular locale. I have heard that "everyone" would move to * San Francisco * Bend, Oregon * Boulder, Colorado * Seattle * Austin, Texas * New York City * Santa Barbara, California * Hawaii * Montana * and on and on and on You know what? No, not everyone is going to move to New…

What is different between building more housing and building more highway lanes?

Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

#182
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They recognize it exists. I'm even hearing podcast ads from Marriot or similar touting how much more reliable they are. AirBnBs I've stayed in the past few years have all been janky, weird, and not really any cheaper than hotels. I don't have to do chores at hotels, and I can always get (and return) the key promptly. I've also been told on several occasions not to let anyone else in the building know I was an AirBnB…

> AirBnBs I've stayed in the past few years have all been janky, weird, and not really any cheaper than hotels And yet, you stay in them.

How else would you make or reaffirm a first-hand impression?

Also, while I'm not OP, I gave up on Airbnbs a long time ago for the same reasons, and that impression is occasionally refreshed when I stay in an Airbnb that _someone else_ arranged. I will go out of my way to avoid them if it's all up to me.

Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

#183
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that the "airbnb" areas drive normal citizens out which during off-seasons drains foot traffic making local shops go out of business which further complicates the problem. Not to mention that most tourists don't even sit around the local area, but rather go to the city attractions. Airbnb and resident housing areas are just not compatible, they have different needs and require different infrastructure. H…

The problem with hotel rooms is that they’re more expensive, get much more expensive per additional person, and don’t have the amenities of an appartement. If I’m somewhere with a group for longer than three days, we want to be able to hang somewhere and cook our own food. The only other thing that offers this feature set is private rooms in hostels, and those are both rare and nearly always fully booked. I’m not say…

"we want to be able to hang somewhere" ...just saying because I'm sorry I can't contain myself: This is exactly the use case Airbnb doesn't solve. I fly half-way across the world to meet my parents on vacation and almost without fail the only Airbnb I can find (or all the ones I can find) have a strict rule against guests. Hence I can't have my parents over 10 minutes to drink tea because if the owner, big brother, finds out I'll lose my entire remaining month of rent and be forcibly expelled. In Europe this is not joke, often a loss of $2000+

I truly hate Airbnb. Luckily since my parents only stay a week they can afford to stay in a hotel. Invariable we "hang out" with me sitting at the foot of their bed.

These "rules" become extremely oppressive when your home most of the year is an Airbnb room like me. This is why I use Booking or local corporate owned platfroms instead whenever possible

Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

#184

People will do literally anything over building enough housing to make everyone happy

Helsinki is currently an interesting case, technically having oversupply of apartments. It's because the rising interest rates cratered the buyers' budgets -- the result is a mild downward trend in prices, definitely no crash. Building companies sit on a large supply on finished unsold apartments but steadfastly refuse to lower prices even a bit.

New construction has halted completely. Seems like the construction sector will rather hold their finished stock and wait for the demand side to pick up due to necessity (people still move in to the city), or due to interest rates eventually going down.

Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

#185

Honest question: does this work? It seems to me that this change will have unintended effects and will fail to produce the desired results. AFAIK rent in NYC hasn’t gone down since they changed their short-term rental regulations. I might be naive, but I’d assume that the solution is to build more housing to increase the supply instead of curbing the demand? Genuinely curious about others’ takes on this.

In Melbourne/Victoria, Australia, from 2025 they’re applying a government levy on vacation rentals and using it to fund new public and affordable housing projects [1]. They’ve also added a land tax on second homes to disincentivize hoarding of property (though this has had some perverse effects, notably, reducing long-term rental stock and moving into the owner-occupier segment). It’s too early to evaluate outcomes,…

Good idea: I was wondering if the AirBnB license prices in Barcelona could be made more expensive to fund social housing projects from it (no idea how much they are right now in €/year/m²).

Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

#186

Barcelona has a population of ~1.7 million. The metro area surrounding is ~5.7 million. The metro area grew by ~100k in the past four years. They are freeing up ~10,000 houses over the next four years with this legislation. Barcelona built ~15,000 new properties between 2011 and 2020. The math don't math. It's a drop in the bucket. The entire impact of AirBnB + all housing built in the last decade does not offset the…

Also airbnbs aren't built/renovated to be family residences

Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it’s worth, it’s a little closer than your numbers imply. The city averages 2.51 people per household, so now they just need 75k more houses. https://www.barcelona.cat/infobarcelona/en/tema/city-council...

It still doesn't exactly look great that they "just" need ~45 years of house production to have happened yesterday.

Classic governments, failing to do the right thing for decades and then blaming something that makes up a tiny part of the problem to shift blame.

Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

#188

People will do literally anything over building enough housing to make everyone happy

That would be a paradox. It's not just housing-as-investment people who would be unhappy with increasingly dense housing/population - overdevelopment can sometimes ruin your home. The difficulty in developing in desirable areas isn't just due to a minority of rich assholes protecting their investments.

Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

#189
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barcelona has a 16,000 people per square km density - that’s already one of the highest in Europe. https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/barcelona-pop... .

It's 67th in the world and less dense than 11 French cities, though not a great comparison because most of those are small cities. But just because it's in the top 100 doesn't mean it's maxed out. It still has 5000/sqkm fewer people than Paris. Nor does it mean this trade off for a measly 10,000 flats is worth it in such a large city.

Please, the densities seen at the top of that list are really inhumane, more like prison camps than cities.

Also, increasing density might be easy if you demolish 100 single family homes to build 10 five-stories buildings, but replacing Barcelona's 5-6 stories blocks with 10-stories ones isn't going to be economically viable. And if some brave developer tries this, then the resulting apartments won't be cheap.

Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

#190
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Following your logic, why not ban hotels?

Hotels go through an approval process to be built, and are regulated (where as AirBnB exists to skirt lodging regulation). Hotels are not competing against residential housing, but AirBnB is.

Of course hotels are competing against residential housing. They take up land that could be used for residential housing instead.
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