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Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

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Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

#201

Post by chongli »

davidw wrote: post #101
chongli wrote: 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…

If you could get all cities to build more housing simultaneously then you’d be in great shape. The question is: how do you do that? Most of the biggest problems facing humanity are coordination problems. The answer to all these problems can’t be “everyone should just do X.”

In reality, your best hope is to get one city to build a lot of housing. Then everyone moves there and we’re all unhappy.

This, by the way, is the reason homelessness is so bad in San Francisco despite their government spending enormous amounts of money fighting homelessness. All the other cities in the US sent all their homeless people to SF!

Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

#202

Post by leononame »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #25

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…

Barcelona the metropolitan area has around 3.5 million IIRC. It's the province has 5.3M.

The 15k new properties were only built in Barcelona? How many were built in the metropolis area?

It's obvious that more housing is needed, but freeing up housing in the city, potentially close to the center, is still a move that might make the city more livable as opposed to building something new in the outskirts.

Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

#203

Post by happytoexplain »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #59
lbwtaylor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just basic urban planning and zoning. You can't run a factory in your apartment and you can't run a hotel. Plenty of cities restrict where hotels can operate. This is nothing special and certainly not authoritarian. These measures are quite popular because, shocking, people in residential neighborhoods like have real neighbors rather than hotel guests.

Yes, obviously everyone wants to be the last person allowed to move in somewhere, that's why they support these sorts of policies that foment resentment. NIMBYism also stifles most development in the US. But I don't see how it's not authoritarian. Giving these 10k flats to locals isn't going to put a dent in the housing economy.

> everyone wants to be the last person allowed to move in

This is uncharitable. What everybody wants is for the place they call home, either by inheritance or hard work, to not be harmed by overdevelopment. People will have varyingly (un)reasonable opinions on what "over" means, but even a place with zero development has new residents - people do not live in one place forever, nor do they live forever.

Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

#205

Post by JoshTriplett »

dmurray wrote: post #150
JoshTriplett wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who own a home, and don't have plans to move, would benefit from housing prices falling everywhere : property taxes go down, and other prices correlated with housing go down. Two categories where people don't want pricing to go down: If you have plans to move and prices aren't falling everywhere , the proceeds of a sale aren't enough to buy elsewhere. And if your bank owns the home rather than you, falling pri…

Also, people who own multiple homes, and people who are in the biggest house they are likely to own and expect to downsize.

> people who are in the biggest house they are likely to own and expect to downsize

That's covered by the case of "property values go down everywhere"; you only have a problem if your property value goes down but the value of property you want to buy doesn't.

Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

#206

Post by ilikeitdark »

I've been living in Barcelona for a long time. The mayor is very, very cozy with the hotel industry, which is very much effected by tourist apartments and Airbnb. And he will most likely be out of power in 3 years, so won't actually have to see this through and is just doing this to make himself look good with the many citizens who believe we have too many tourist.

Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

#207

Post by oyashirochama »

kranke155 wrote: post #180
jll29 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only hope this does not replace one problem with another: Because Spain's high unemployment, in particular youth unemployment and the construction sector, actions that reduce tourism lead to fewer jobs and less income flowing into the city. I'm not against the measure (last time in Barcelona I was in a hotel and my friends rented an AirBnB apartment instead; they had fun and I had to move hotel rooms because the gu…

Tourism is a shit industry. You could mostly annihilate it and replace it with productive things most of the time.

Tourism has its uses, and is a service industry like most modern country industries including most "productive" ones.

Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

#208

Post by JoshTriplett »

coryrc wrote: post #85
JoshTriplett wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who own a home, and don't have plans to move, would benefit from housing prices falling everywhere : property taxes go down, and other prices correlated with housing go down. Two categories where people don't want pricing to go down: If you have plans to move and prices aren't falling everywhere , the proceeds of a sale aren't enough to buy elsewhere. And if your bank owns the home rather than you, falling pri…

That's not how property taxes work.

That depends on the region. In many places they're based on property value, and in many of those places if your property value goes down you can apply to have your home re-assessed and get taxed according to the new value. (Conversely, if your property values go up your property taxes may go up accordingly, which can in some cases take people's homes from affordable to not affordable.)

Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

#209

Post by zrn900 »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #25

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…

> 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 last half decade of population growth.

The population growth is largely due to rich foreigners moving into the city:

"I was born and raised in Barcelona, no longer live there however. I didn't remember how bad it was until I went to visit my family last summer. Me and some friends went to walk around the center and the girl that took our orders at a Pans&Company didn't even know Spanish or Catalan, only English. It was honestly quite depressing. She was surprised we didn't open the conversation with English."

https://www.reddit.com/r/askspain/comments/1833ub1/comment/k...

https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/travel/2023/10/09/fed-u...

People say that it has become difficult to hear Catalan or Spanish being spoken in the city center and there are waitresses who don't know Spanish. Some started to say that this is not a case of gentrification, but a colonization.

Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments

#210

Post by davidw »

chongli wrote: post #201
davidw wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you could get all cities to build more housing simultaneously then you’d be in great shape. The question is: how do you do that? Most of the biggest problems facing humanity are coordination problems. The answer to all these problems can’t be “everyone should just do X.” In reality, your best hope is to get one city to build a lot of housing. Then everyone moves there and we’re all unhappy. This, by the way, is th…

It's going to happen in fits and starts and not all at once everywhere. But there's also something of a ratchet effect as places copy what's working in other places. And no one reforming because they're all waiting would be catastrophic.

And really, not everyone is going to move somewhere. You could not pay me enough to live in NYC or San Francisco. People who love NYC would probably be bored in my small city.

Burdensome parking mandates are being eliminated or reduced across the country, as one example.

One way to try to get more places to reform on a similar timeline is to join a nationwide group, like https://new.yimbyaction.org/ or https://welcomingneighbors.us/

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