You could, you know, just build more housing. But that would be far too sensible. A 30% social housing requirement seems equally nuts. Who is going to want to build anything with those margins. If you want social housing, that’s great: raise taxes and pay for it. Throwing a massive wrench in the market machinery helps nobody apart from the politician who wants to create the impression that they are “doing something.” The unaffordability crisis is just going to worsen, until you end up with an S.F. situation, where the middle is hollowed out and only the extremes remain.
Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments
131–140 of 375 posts
Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments
#132Barcelona 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…
5.8 million is actually the population of the entire province of Barcelona, the metro area is 3.3 million, and the city 1.6 million:
https://www.amb.cat/en/web/area-metropolitana/coneixer-l-are...
Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments
#133What could possibly go wrong ?
My money is on what happens every time governments stick their hairy knuckles in the delicate mechanics of the free market: the economy works around them.
IMO, in this case, it will foster a huge black market (because there's strong demand for the stuff) and make a stream of taxable income disappear underground altogether.
Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alternatively, the population practicing birth control could solve the crisis. Don't have kids if you don't own at least one home :)
We should at least stop treating population growth as an economic necessity (mostly because of corporations and the need to service a debt bubble). Where it ends up in the extreme case is people living on top of each other.
The end result will be mass, society-wide indentured servitude. I say give it one century without any major paradigm shift (e.g. Industrial Revolution/geopolitical unrest).
Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments
#135Barcelona 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…
Pricing moves at margins, not necessarily driven by totals. Ie. Pricing is primarily driven by the immediate demand and supply situation at a given time. Small changes in availability can have a dramatic effect. Good ways to understand this is to look at underlying data of auctions (richest in data) but pretty much any demand supply granular transaction data will show rhis. For eg. this is why small hoarding locally in emerging markets (where giant supermarkets will not immediately or easily truck in containers of products running short) also generates massive profits for traders.
Housing is of course a bit more complex - pricing is more sticky on the upside than downside (as home owners don't like to rent for less than before and may let units sit idle etc) and "instant" usually windows over weeks but fundamentally similar mechanics work. As an example, in Singapore, the government raised excise duty for non Singaporeans to purchase housing to 65% when housing became overheated. The number of rich foreigners buying property has always been small in absolute but was growing fast in rate as rich family money and bankers from Hong Kong started flowing to Singapore. Prices and also rentals across all classes of housing, not just the super premium properties favoured by the wealthy came down and people who had been pushed down at the margins into less than their preferred value housing (including ourselves) moved back up.
Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hotels suck. I want a hotel with no staff. Thats airbnb
Nice kitchens, laundry machines in the apartment, comfortable living rooms, access to attached outdoor space, and accommodations for larger parties traveling together are very difficult for hotels to compete with.
A suite hotel like a Residence Inn has a lot of that. Doesn't replace a whole house rental at the beach and probably doesn't have as many bedrooms. But it's pretty reasonable for a lot of purposes.
Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments
#137Honest 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.
> Genuinely curious about others’ takes on this My take is that real estate sold to foreigners is the best kind of export. You sell the good to the foreign investor, but the good stays in place. From time to time that investor visits and drops money in the local economy. Most of the time the guy is not there, but pays taxes. Pays taxes but does not consume government services.
This completely neglects the opportunity cost of the real estate being used for something else (like housing citizens) instead. Housing is also not fungible - so if you "export" your most desirable real-estate you can't just make more of it.
Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here in Europe building denser housing is extremely frowned upon by cultural conservatives, who unfortunately are in charge everywhere. That's why there's hardly any high-rises in Europe. Extreme height restrictions combined with extreme regulatory costs is what has lead to this issue. Show a European politician, especially a local one in charge of urban development, an image from Tokyo and they will recoil in horror…
Spain is the one the de densest countries if not the densest country in Europe. Most people live in flats in dense cities.
No, it’s not, it’s number 27.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Area_and_population_of_Europ...
Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments
#139being a tourist destination seems to me almost like a resource curse, like oil wealth can be in certain countries. tourism can be so lucrative that it is actually profitable to force out normal people and completely reorient the economy away from all other productive activities. eventually large parts of the city will become totally stagnant, but this doesn't seem to stop tourists from coming. there's often a constit…
I grew up and live in a city that's often top of the list for tourist destinations and where people are moving to. It is a great city, but it's also a curse with so many people here and more every day. Many of the things I used to do for fun are no longer feasible/easy to do. But, more jobs also came and property values have gone way up - both items are/were good for me.
Re: Barcelona will eliminate tourist apartments
#140One of my most distinct memories of visiting Barcelona in 2018 was going to a hip hang out spot with a few cousins who live there, turning a corner and seeing the words "TOURISTS FUCK OFF" graffiti'd in large letters along the side of the building. I remember thinking "oh they're talking about me."