221–230 of 375 posts
People will do literally anything over building enough housing to make everyone happy
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Where in Barcelona would you increase density? https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/barcelona-pop... from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40752920 ("Barcelona has a 16,000 people per square km density - that’s already one of the highest in Europe.") Capital moves faster than meat space. To defend the human (affordable housing), you have to regulate. The whole "just build more, I want my AirBnB" argumen…
> Where in Barcelona would you increase density? It would make sense to increase density around existing rail infrastructure. Barcelona has 7700 km2 of space, that's a lot. They have only 750 persons per km2 on average. Especially the outskirts of the province have really bad density. For example, Sant Joan de Vilatorrada has only 660 inhabitants per km^2 and it is only 3 km from the railway station, 80 min from the…
The article, submission and discussions are about Barcelona city, not some far off town like Sant Joan de Vilatorrada (population: ~10k). No one who lives there would say they live in Barcelona, at most they'd say Manresa as that's the closest city.
But yes, if you're willing to live in the Catalan country-side, then of course Barcelona doesn't suffer from the density for you, but it's not a solution for us who live in Barcelona city.
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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, f…
being 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…
The reality of the matter is that what's happening in Barcelona ended up resembling more a colonization when tourism got combined with golden visas that allow rich foreigners and investment funds to scoop up local housing and the recent digital nomad wave. There are now more foreigners in the city center than locals and you are hard pressed to hear Spanish or Catalan being spoken around the place.
"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...
People will do literally anything over building enough housing to make everyone happy
So the alternative is to build vertically, but that also comes with trade-offs as the streets get less sun and city dwellers will be able to see less sky.
People on the internet will do anything but read before spouting their obvious solutions on the internet.
Oh The Urbanity! - Vacation Rentals vs. Affordable Living: The AirBnB Dilemma: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1VeEGCzqn4
1) The effects of tourism on housing prices: applying a difference-indifferences methodology to the Portuguese market. https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/IJHMA-04...
> Following the liberalization [allowing more AirBNBs], for each one percentage point increase in the share of STR as a percentage of the housing stock, housing prices increased 27.4% and 16.1% in the Lisbon and Porto MSA municipalities most exposed to STR, respectively. These results represent a much higher impact than that estimated in previous studies (Franco and Santos, 2021)
2) The impact of Airbnb on residential property values and rents: Evidence from Portugal https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01660...
> This article quantifies the impact of Airbnb’s short-term rentals on housing affordability in Portugal.
> We find that on average a 1pp increase in a municipality Airbnb share results in a 3.7% increase in house prices.
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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.
Well maybe you will just tell Spanish government how to replace that?
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 sec…
The builders can hold out for a while, but the shoe has to drop eventually. Builders only make profit when building, and if your credit is extended on old projects you can’t start new ones, hence why construction has halted.
The problem is covid. Pretty much everyone in any developed economy believes the inflation+interest rate increases will be temporary. So they’re betting inflation will go back to what it was, interest rate policy will loosen again, and people’s budgets will increase again.
I think they might be in for a very rude awakening. And not only that, housing preferences for the highest income professionals have fundamentally changed due to WFH. They could all get stuck dumping the wrong stock on a weak market all at the same time in a year or so.
Thus, I don't think the city will really suffer from shrinking of the cheap tourism segment. Barcelona is already overcrowded, so making this crowd less dense and more rich at the same time is a net positive scenario. Also, the city needs long-term housing for those who work and study there.
There are lots of beautiful hotels in Barcelona. I visited the city about 10 times and never stayed in the same hotel twice, the choice is wild.