I was in Spain this past summer and it certainly seems they are experiencing tourist burnout. I saw anti tourist messages on banners hung on buildings, graffiti, posters and stickers in Madrid and Barcelona. Some of it was a bit threatening but I had zero issues.
The issue of airbnb is a sticky one. On one hand, being able to temporarily live in an apartment greatly enhances the immersiveness when your travel - you get to feel like a local and experience life in another place. Hotels suck as they cut corners to the point where an article posted here complaining about the lack of bathroom doors in hotels. On the other hand, these rentals drive up real estate prices and drives out locals. And often these rentals are in run-down low-income turning affordable yet poor quality housing into high quality temporary rentals. This drives out low income residents deepening income inequality issues while subjecting them to the threat of homelessness.
As long as we tolerate a society that only values ROI while ignoring the value of investing in humanity we won't resolve any of these issues. In a better world we would think about others and realize that easy access to shelter is foundational to stabilizing people to enable them to succeed in life. It's not hard, we have an abundance of materials and labor yet we have built a culture where helping others is some form of weakness for both parties.
> On one hand, being able to temporarily live in an apartment greatly enhances the immersiveness when your travel - you get to feel like a local and experience life in another place.
Yes, if your local life is being inconsiderate and having parties till 3 because you're on holidays. Having an airbnb in your building is terrible as you don't know the people and they don't care about getting to know you.
> Hotels suck as they cut corners to the point where an article posted here complaining about the lack of bathroom doors in hotels.
The great thing about hotels is that they can be planned for and zoned correctly for. Even so, I've had a hotel go up 100m from my apartment and had to invest in blackout blinds since they chose for a modern design with glass all over (and the lights are bright at night).
The biggest problem here in Barcelona is that most airbnbs / short term rentals are companies buying housing as an investment and so are stealing the opportunity from actual people and families trying to live.
> The biggest problem here in Barcelona is that most airbnbs / short term rentals are companies buying housing as an investment and so are stealing the opportunity from actual people and families trying to live.
This problem exists regardless of who does the buying. Where I live the locals got into the market first. Still, it's a zero-sum game, every short-term rental is a house a family cannot live in and probably cannot afford to buy.
On my street 30% of the houses are short-term rentals. Some rent out for $10k/week just 8 weeks a year and are closed up the rest of the time. My daughter is currently the only kid on the street, which has over 100 houses.
Not only are all the houses now priced as income-producing investments, they are killing the community that used to exist here.
It is maybe a bit cannibalistic to NIMBY politics though.. I have to wonder if we won't actually get the massive housing development we need as owners consolidate and have fewer votes and little social or political clout. Hotels and smaller community landlords had their arguments to sway many around them.
> if your local life is being inconsiderate and having parties till 3 because you're on holidays
I would expect that to be the minority of visitors.
I certainly don't do that when I stay in Airbnbs.
> The biggest problem here in Barcelona is that most airbnbs / short term rentals are companies buying housing as an investment and so are stealing the opportunity from actual people and families trying to live.
Sure, the problem is balancing that with the desire of tourists that want something better than a hotel.
Tourists don't vote, residents do, and even if short term rentals were outlawed, Barcelona and Madrid would remain tourist hotspots (as they were before short term rentals).
Certainly, there is a tug of war between tourist dollars vs negative tourist impact, but this math is a function of how impactful tourist decline (if any) would occur by pushing out short term rentals. Hotels always remain an option. Real estate and politics are local, as the sayings go. AirBnB pushed negative externalities on local jurisdictions to achieve their valuation and economic success ("socialize the losses, privatize the gains"), and these efforts are just pushing them back in some form. Tourists should remember that they are guests in the places that host them, and it is a privilege to be hosted.
> I would expect that to be the minority of visitors.
If you live next to one the "minority" is at least once a week, usually on a workday because they're in vacation while you're not.
You get extra trash everywhere, puke in the staircase, empty bottles in front of the building, condoms thrown out of windows, &c. it's a never ending nightmare
What does this mean or are you just communist coding your speech?
Personally I find Spain et al very easily marginalized, especially towards socialism/communism, yet it's extremely dirty, suffering with alcoholism and smoking. Go figure.
The weird thing is that in many cities there is a persistent and ongoing market failure where legitimate hotels in tourist areas often don't offer accommodations suitable for families with multiple children. There are often no hotel rooms with 3+ beds and kitchenette: it's not that they're more expensive, they simply don't exist at any price. So despite the social problems that Airbnb causes they do address a real market demand. Why aren't the hotel chains doing more to compete? What am I missing here?
> you get to feel like a local and experience life in another place.
Like a local with your fellow thousands of other tourists doing the same things, going to the same places, taking the same pictures? Traveling became the most abject consumeristic activity, there is nothing "local" left in these holiday hubs
> As long as we tolerate a society that only values ROI while ignoring the value of investing in humanity we won't resolve any of these issues.
That's exactly what we're not tolerating here in Spain. We have guaranteed right to "decent and adequate housing" enshrined in the constitution, which is why you're seeing these aggressive moves against companies that actively work against us having that.
I guess we in Spain are a bit of guinea pigs regarding this, as we've been hit hard by Airbnb et al, but we also have strong social movements trying to fight back, and right now being a bit successful. Gonna be interesting to see how it looks like in 5-10 years again, once we start to see the effect of the new laws passed these last few years.
The people profiting from the situation aren't the people dealing with the side effects, it really isn't that hard to understand... if you own a club or a building it's a gold mine. If you're just an average citizen everything is now more expensive, it's harder to find a place, you have to deal with rude people every fucking day, &c.
I’ve always thought a solution would be to allow Airbnb but cap the amount you can earn per property to the equivalent of an average annual rent.
This wouldn’t outright ban short-term rentals, but it would reduce the largest financial incentive.
I say this selfishly, as someone who wants to use the platform while still occupying my own place. Something that offering it as a full-time rental doesn’t allow.
Spains problem is that their economy is terrible. Tourism is almost 15% of barcelona's economy so the tourism sector has political power but all the people who dont benefit from it are pissed. They cant afford to piss off the tourists but tourism has a lot of negative externalities.
I live in Spain. I'll give you an interesting example I've witnessed.
Two of my neighbors rent seasonally on airbnb. Middle class women, one of them a widow. I assume they used to make a tidy profit. I believe they worked quite hard on making those houses pretty, and I've seen they had good reviews.
Just now their license to operate has been denied, apparently without much explanation (I believe the Property Registry is making the decision, this is a bureaucratic body of state employees, not democratically elected).
Across the street lies a hotel, a true tourist trap. They have a 6/10 rating on booking and rely on scamming British tourists, whom you can see balancing drunk on their balconies daily. It's owned by a national conglomerate.
As you may guess, as of now the airbnbs are closed and the hotel is thriving despite only bringing the worst kind of tourist to the community.
An astute observer will note that the hotel industry is one of the biggest lobbyists supporting the current government at a national level.
I am not one to defend big companies, but for some people here Airbnb was freedom. Now they have to go work cleaning rooms or just collect retirement checks, as obtaining a license to run a hotel is impossible without political connections / corruption.
My point is, not everywhere are laws as fair as in the United States.
Before someone talks about housing pressure, this is a relatively out of the way area where 40% of houses sit empty most of the year.
The Airbnbs mentioned rented throughout the year in monthly periods, so they fill a different niche. The new law kills not only short term stays but everything that goes through an online provider (except multi-year contracts).
When I first arrived here I relied on these long stay airbnbs until I could find a way through the byzantine Spanish rental process. Now this option will no longer exist.
Again, you are not familiar with Spanish politics if you think this is by accident. I have myself given up on any attempts of doing business here after I spent 1 year waiting for a certain business license and could only obtain it (in a week) after a chance friendship with a local notary. :)
The main issue with going after airbnb is that its a true bandaid fix: the gains in supply are often offset by just a few years or months progression of the underbuilding of supply
If the economics work out for landlords, a city can lose a lot of apartments to short term rentals way faster than it could increase supply. Especially in central districts where significant new construction is barely possible.
If there is a high-demand tourist location (like many parts of Spain) and tourists are more wealthy than locals (like many parts of Spain) then new housing stock will also be soaked up by AirBnBs. In this situation the "just build" argument means you have to build enough housing to house every single wealthy tourist that wants to come before you start seeing any relief to local housing issues. Not only does that mean locals have to wait thought, say, 10 years of construction before their issues are addressed, but in the mean time the tourism sector will have dominated the economy, which is not healty either.
Sure, but the article is specifically about that subject, while the government been working and continues to work on many other fixes too. Limiting rent increases, among other things, is constantly being talked and enacted right now, so at least it's going in the right direction.
Airbnb is one of many problems, and all of them require something done about it. But one does not exclude the other, if you look up the "Spain" tag on your favorite international news source I'm sure you can dig out the other measures being taken currently.
How does limiting rent increases help the issue? all that does is reduce the incentive to build more housing. It’s also a bandaid fix that sounds good today but in the end makes things worse.
Because now people aren't priced out of their current place where they live simply because the landlord wants more money each month, now it's limited to increases by an index. And landlords can also not just kick out a tenant, raise the rent price and find someone else.
Again, many small streams make a big river. Not one single action or new law will instantly fix the issue, you patch what you can and incrementally work towards something better.
But it ruins the future market. People with a rent controlled unit will not leave even when they should, because they have it so good. Thus turnover never happens, which is why most programs have a waiting lists easily more than a decade.
Like it helps those who have one at a greater expense to renters without one
Limiting rent increase does not mean "Rent can never change", it just means the rate of change is limited. Owners can still raise the prices each year, it's just limited based on a lot of factors, the main one being a local index. But renovating the property for example lets owners raise the rent higher, as just one exception.
> People with a rent controlled unit will not leave even when they should, because they have it so good.
... What do you mean "when they should"? If they don't want to leave because the rent is OK and they like living there, why should they move?
I guess one fundamental difference with Spain VS US or probably many other countries, is that here in Spain we have "the right to housing" enshrined in our constitution. This makes it so it's more important for residents and citizens to be able to find housing, than it is for owners to be able to make profits on owning properties/land.
The laws in the country should reflect this, and thankfully, they're starting to, albeit slowly.
The "problem" is that a rent controlled apartment is some weird chimera of ownership and renting.
You could take the difference between the market rent and contract rent to calculate a subsidy. Then you could calculate the net present value of the future subsidy payments. This is often a very significant amount of money that you just lose if you move.
Another way of looking at it. Let's say you need 40sqm of space. You rent an apartment of 100sqm. These square meters don't bring you any joy of quality of life at all. If you owned you would move. If you rented at market rate you would move. But if you rent it at a controlled rent you must hold onto it for dear life because maybe you will need it when you start a family in the far future. Getting another contract this good could be very uncertain.
People with high incomes living alone in multi bedroom units objectively should leave.
The “right to housing” is a joke when the US essentially makes it illegal to build new units in most areas.
Because of that restriction, rent control causes the small number of limited units to be subsided by everyone else paying more, as basic supply and demand dictates
> People with high incomes living alone in multi bedroom units objectively should leave.
Who cares how high their income is or how big the property is? If they pay the rent and want to continue living there, they should be able to continue living there. Taking someone's home away from them because "now you earn more money" or "now you're less people" sounds very inhumane, and I'm glad Spain wouldn't allow such discrimination.
I don't know why you bring up US laws, utterly irrelevant in this submission.
It is possible to change multiple laws if we want to. We made them up at a certain point, and we we can make them up differently at another.
You are applying a viewpoint which is not universally applicable, nor is it static where it does apply.
If you accept that housing is not market in which all parties have equal leverage to bargain, then you should also accept that regulating it to be more fair is not bad by definition.
We happened to regulate it in ways that were counterproductive previously, but the regulation itself is not guaranteed to always be counterproductive, unless you believe that discrepancies in leverage cannot be mitigated by regulation while the lack of leverage itself is being created partially by other regulation.
When I first moved to NYC, my neighbor was a 70 year old single man who absolutely hated living in NY at that point in his life, but couldn't leave because his rent was so cheap(I was paying $1500 for a studio and he was paying $300 for a 1BR) - he literally could not afford to move even to a cheap area. It certainly would have been better for him if he could just swap apartments with someone living outside the city who wanted to move in, but that would be illegal.
I think rent control advocates focus on people who might be lucky enough to get a rent controlled apartment, but it is much harder to think about what happens to all the people who want to move to a city but can't because no housing stock is available.
in this case tourist-driven demand is a completely different beast than local housing needs, and no city can (or should) build enough to satisfy global tourism. Regulation may be the only realistic lever
Georgism is the only long-term solution to this problem. It's not like there is even disagreement on that; any economist would tell you so.
However, the Landed gentry have no interest in solutions.
You can definitely find household named economists that don't agree with Land Value Taxes. Hell there's a grassroots push in the US to eliminate property taxes.
I do like Georgism, but taxing wealth and not a transaction is just going to transfer wealth from poor to government. Similarly how capital gains tax has 0 effect on billionaires and just rip off investors (aka the poorest).
I distincly recall many articles stating that for ridiculous EUR like 50k you could buy housing in spain right after 2007 the crisis, for many years afterward. Because it was so overbuilt , at least outside of the big metros) that the builders and sellers were desperate to move.
I wonder if they all wiped out by the crisis (subprime really hit spain hard), and what we are seeing now is the consequence of that wipeout, and bankruptcies.
In large parts of Spain, that is still true. Entire rural villages for sale in some cases even.
Problem is that it's in areas where people don't want to live. In the areas people want to live, the problem is the opposite, there isn't nearly enough housing, so you end up with some of the highest population densities in EU (#2 and #3 are both in Spain at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_Union_cities_... in "density per km2" for example, 50% of top 10 on that list is in Spain!) and prices keep going up.
Add in that salaries are pretty low so cost of living is subsequently low, so you end up with a ton of "expats" and other fun folks like "foreign investors" who purchase up all the livable/rentable properties with their "higher value" money, because everything is so cheap for them.
Owners realize this, and while the government is (now at least) trying to put a stop to all of this with limiting rent increases and more, owners still try to take advantage of it as much as they can.
Personally, I think we need to temporarily put a complete halt to non-residents buying any sort of properties or even land here, at least for a short period of time so the people who actually live and work here can recover from the situation.
For the average person with a normal job here and not working for foreign companies with a higher salary, it's short of impossible to be able to afford to eventually buy a house.
More fundamentally, the trend of the world economy is toward turning everything anywhere in the world into either a resource to be exploited or a playground for the rich.
This is a big generalization but I think it's broadly true.
If you are in a "resource" area you'll get pollution and often instability and war.
If you are in a "playground" area you get massive cost increases and are eventually forced out.
As the trend is toward concentrating more and more wealth at the top, the slice of rich who can afford to enjoy the playgrounds becomes smaller and the number of refugees, homeless, and poor becomes larger and poorer.
That list does not make much sense, because it mostly consists of small municipalities that have been engulfed by growing metropolitan areas. Four of the five Spanish entries are like that, three in Valencia and one in Barcelona; and most other entries in the top 20 are suburbs of Paris, Athens or Naples.
> A city proper is the geographical area contained within city limits
I'm not sure about the others, but the one from Barcelona is a city actually, with their own local government and all, separate from Barcelona, exactly like Badalona on the other end of Barcelona. It is within the city-limits of Barcelona (region, not city) though.
It is, but my point is that these entries are more historical oddities than a sign of particularly high population density of Spanish cities. There are similarly dense suburbs in most cities/countries, they just happen not to have a local government.
I got myself a pretty little condo in Asturias for a steal, at least compared to US prices. I tried first just outside Madrid but it’s crazy expensive there, I saw a small and modern condo and they wanted more of what I paid for a brand new large home in the US very close to a big city, massive in size by European standards. If you want a modern tiny condo in Madrid city center you are looking at over a million euros for sure. Almost NYC prices. But Asturias is so freaking beautiful, and people are sooo laid back and kind, the best! There’s also a train that takes just over 3 hours to Madrid.
You can get houses even cheaper now. The two things are not related though. Huge areas of Spain are barren empty places, with no jobs, transport, or anything. Nobody really can or want to live these places. Thats why the houses are so cheap.
I was recently evicted from my apartment in a city in Norway experiencing similar growth in short-term rentals. The rental on that apartment was around €750 (same for my roommate). Apparently, during high season in the winter similar apartments goes for ~€830 a night. High season is 3 months in the winter, but seemingly that is enough to outcompete longterm tenants.
I have legal holiday rentals on two properties in Spain, but they are managed by an specialized company:
* The regional administration handed out licenses without problems until a year ago, even when everyone was complaining already about these rentals. It was just paperwork + fee to get the license. They did for years and now they wonder why there are so many flats: they allowed it.
* The main issue these rentals cause to the neighbors is people partying, being noisy, inconsiderate. Rentals have rules against these behaviors yet they happen frequently. I wish we or the police had tools to legally kick people out in the middle of the night for this behavior.
* Apart from legal rentals, which are being limited now, there are a lot of illegal rentals. They are only starting to crack down on them. AirBNB and others have not complied with the law and this should not come as surprise. They have actively enabled illegal businesses for years. People go to jail for that and they should shut them down.
* There is no affordable housing in the city-center. Rental flats make it worse but in many places the issue will not be fixed if they disappeared. The causes are deeper and a nice flat is not going to become "cheap" to rent in any case.
* Holiday rentals are a bit more profitable that long-term rentals, but not crazy unless you are doing it at scale and they come with their own problems. Many are switching now to "seasonal" rentals, which are rentals for a period less than a year and the tenants need to go then. They forgot to handle these in the new regulations. Long-term rental is problematic because you can't use your flat when you need it. i.e. if you have a flat that you come to spend your own holidays. So people in that situation have limited alternatives.
* I am personally not against switching to long term rentals, but the current situation wrt. licenses etc. puts me in a "wait and see" mode. My flat is legal, so they might make it more profitable by cracking down on illegal ones. Once I put a long-term rental I cannot ever go back to vacation rental either. There is little incentive to switch right now, but I will of course do it if I'm legally required to do so. For all the talk, they haven't taken that step, which is a testament to how politicians can say one thing and then do close to nothing in the end.
As far as I understand this is the latest shot in the conflict between Spain and its lack of affordable housing. I'd put the symbolic start around 2004-2006 [1] with the movement called "you won't have a house in your fucking life" where people all over Spain started demonstrating against high apartment prices.
I don't like AirBnB and I'm glad they got fined, but the Spanish government also needs to accept that they have been sitting around doing nothing for roughly 20 years. Looks like politicians all over will do everything in their power except actually building more apartments.
> I don't like AirBnB and I'm glad they got fined, but the Spanish government also needs to accept that they have been sitting around doing nothing for roughly 20 years. Looks like politicians all over will do everything in their power except actually building more apartments.
I am totally unfamiliar with Spain, but wondering what would government have to do to improve the situation? They wouldn’t build government owned and operated houses? Or is it that they do not issue permits for builders, or tax incentives are all wrong?
Typically, government can step in by changing zoning ordinances that would allow for larger multi-family buildings. At least from my US perspective and assuming other countries would have something similar. There's a city near me that has an ordinance stating no buildings taller than four stories are allowed. If that was modified to allow up to ten story buildings, you could drastically increase number of units available.
The Spanish financial crisis in 2009 was an overabundance of private debt. Developers used that debt to build lots of flats, too many in all the wrong places. Those developers then went out of business and construction has been moribund since then.
A lot of other European governments took on too much public debt and had to enforce austerity measures. This proved very unpopular.
Unlike the US, the Spanish government did not bail out private industry debt. And so 15 years later here we are. Not enough housing stock and not enough private builders to carryon building more.
All of that probably. Also not that familiar with Spain. But the same issue is visible all over Europe. Basically apartments in nice areas are rented out to tourists for much more than would be affordable for locals. The advantage for the property owner is that these are short term rentals that are very lucrative. With long term renters, they basically the rental prices are highly regulated and in many countries it's very hard to terminate rental contracts. In some places renting out property is now so unattractive that landlords just sell off the property which removes it from the market entirely. That's what happened in the Netherlands in recent years.
And meanwhile, getting any kind of building permits is super hard so there's only a trickle of new property being built that lags behind demand.
There's a real estate bubble where real estate value outgrows inflation structurally. So housing is getting more and more expensive. To the point where a normal person with a normal income has basically no chance at all at finding anything decent on the market.
The solution of building more housing and making it easier for property owners to rent out their property are consistently not happening. The Netherlands actually has large amounts of empty property where the owners prefer to not rent it out and keep their investment liquid because it's such a PITA to get out of an agreement. There's also a history of privatized housing corporations selling off their property to make some quick money for the share holders. The net result is a huge mess of private property that is either not rented out or rented out at extortion prices. At the same time there's also growing amount of empty commercial real estate. Because people work from home now. Converting that for housing is another regulation challenge.
The problem isn't greed but broken policy. The reflex of "protecting" renters has had the opposite negative effects on the rental market. Things like Airbnb are more like a symptom than the cause of this.
The way I see it, house construction should not be expensive. It's artificial scarcity. A 50K camper can be pretty comfortable. But forget about having the right to use that as a place to live. You are instead expected to pay extortion rents or buy your own 500K piece of shit tiny apartment that is actually smaller and less comfortable than the bloody camper. A camper is just a house with wheels. Those are mass produced in factories. Houses without wheels should be much simpler to make. This never was a technical problem. Prefab housing is kind of a solved problem. It's not that hard. Any idiot can construct a garden shed in an afternoon. If the rules were different, most big cities would have huge slums with campers and other improvised housing. Regulation is what keeps this under control. But when policy breaks down, slums like that become the next logical level of this crisis.
A good example of exemptions in the Netherlands are so-called holiday homes where people live permanently; despite this clearly being illegal. Evicting people would create an unsolvable problem for bureaucrats. So, a lot of people that live like that got their situation legalized. And of course recreational units tend to be in nice places too. So, it's a popular thing. If tens of thousands of people start parking their campers on the edge of town bureaucrats would struggle to address the issue without creating a bigger crisis.
Probably something like this will force a solution eventually.
They've been expanding their airports over those 20 years; Barcelona's passenger air arrivals has doubled in that time and there is another expansion being planned. Barcelona is not a large city and they should really be coupling every airport capacity increase with an equal increase in tourist accommodations or they end up in an even worse situation.
Spain's airports are quite interesting. They're all owned by a monopoly which sets the same landing fee to land at any airport. So high volume airports are effectively cross subsiding building very good airports in the smaller regional areas.
Not great for prices (Ryanair is complaining about high landing fees) but it does mean tourists have a good job being dispersed into the countryside and having a good experience.
By what measure? Granted, I now live outside of Barcelona after moving here from an island with ~700 people on it, so for me pretty much any city is big, but I'm fairly sure Barcelona is within top 100 worldwide in terms of population living in it, so I'm guessing you're saying "not a large city" by some other metric?
Did Airbnb really affect house market that much? Hotels got wayyy more expensive now there so I expect less tourism in the future, wonder if it was a good trade off.
> Looks like politicians all over will do everything in their power except actually building more apartments.
This is the wrong way to frame this issue. A lot of cities like Paris and Amsterdam have this issue with short-term renting. "Build moar" is just not really an option for these type of city.
Firstly, the constructible area of the city is limited. So build, but build where ? You can expand horizontally, but this creates challenges with public transportation and other public services. And it can be slow since it means having to expel industry and agriculture further to rezone area into constructible home/office area.
So the other option is to build up, which means destroying potentially historic building, changing the skyline and viewpoint. This would be bad for tourism (and people who live here might not like it either), since this is a big reason why people even come to visit.
In the past, cities had simple way to deal with this. With zoning and hotel licences, the city could have a real urban plan on how it wanted to evolve and how much space it wanted to dedicate to tourism vs industry vs offices vs homes.
But AirBnb came and just said "fuck that" and bypass complitely the licence système and or building and operating permit usually needed for tourism. Greed and capitalism took advantage of that and the number of place to rent or buy descreased significantly in favour of short term tourism rental, making living in the city slowly unaffordable.
Building more is not that simple. AirBnb respecting the law is a simple solution. It won't complitely solve the issue of the availaibility of affordable home, but it sures as hell help.
> means destroying potentially historic building, changing the skyline and viewpoint
Get over it! Seriously, most buildings are not historic. By trying to make them all historic you ensure they are all lost and the few that really are historic can't stand out for the history they represent. Save what is really history, but not everything.
Similarly, the skyline will change. That is life. Accept it. You do not own the view, it is the combination of everyone, and not everyone agrees with you so why are you forcing your preferred view on others?
if building up is bad for tourism, it kills two birds with one stone: more housing and less tourists who want airbnbs. so slowly build up until you stabilise the tourism at the level you want!
Locals in cities do not necessarily like high rise neither. And tourism brings a lot of money and jobs. People won't really like making their city uglier and losing their jobs just to have more housing.
> Locals in cities do not necessarily like high rise neither
It's a lot more selfish and malicious than that. They want to remain housed affordably, so they support rent control, but they don't care about the city being affordable in general or for anyone not already living there. Often they outright oppose it (because those moving in would be ethnic minorities or poorer, with concerns about crime), but they disguise their racism with ridiculous aesthetic preferences about "skylines" and "shadows" and "neighborhood character", block highrises, block most construction, and you end up with rent controls for current residents but years long wait lists. Working 100% as designed.
What locals in attractive locations really want is to restrict supply, because the majority are homeowners and want to preserve their paper net worth. They caused the problem, benefit from it and don't want it fixed.
The Netherlands has lots of land dedicated to meat production that could be repurposed for housing. It’s also surprisingly low-rise, with rowhouses the norm.
except your argument as to why "build moar" isn't an option is basically "we acknowledge the population is booming, however, the vibes are more important than providing housing."
Sure, everyone wants their particular city to be frozen in time for cuteness and nostalgia reasons. However, it sort of assumes that the sociopolitical environment is also frozen (it isn't).
so instead you end up with voters voting against densification because, essentially, "I got mine."
p.s. i'm not sure that places that banned/heavily restricted airbnb experienced a meaningful decline in rental prices (e.g. new york, san francisco, vancouver, etc). it's basically a distraction from failed policy.
p.p.s. new york is one of the most popular tourist destinations and incredibly built up, and doesn't seem to have issues with tourists wanting to visit. tokyo too. and these also still have their quintessential historic/preserved areas, too.
> The fine is equal to six times the profits Airbnb made while the properties were still listed despite being in breach of the rules.
As long as it wasn't profitable for them to do bad stuff (which it wasn't, since the fine is 6 times the size of their profits from that period of time), I'm happy enough about. You win some, you lose some, this is closer to winning than loosing so thank you Ministerio de Consumo.
This is not just a problem in Spain. Affordable housing is a problem in almost every Western metro, both in the US and in Europe. The problem is caused by the financialization of real estate.
I know it's always been a bit of a financial asset, but the past 40 years have really seen this accelerate to pretty crazy levels. The issue, when you boil it down to the basics is: wealthy folks, development companies, overseas oligarchs, hedge funds, etc. owning many properties where they try to extract as much value as possible. This means that rents go up and short-term-rentals become more viable. This also means that young middle-class families can't afford to purchase or to live there, so it pushes out locals (this is especially bad in Lisbon).
The solution seems to be government telling you what you can or you can't do with your private property, which does not sit well with me, but it's becoming more and more clear that this can't go on forever.
That is not the issue. The issue is supply. People keep blocking construction of new housing and so prices go up and therefore it becomes an investments. increase the supply and it would no longer be an investment and you could not charge high rents
This is a very "Econ 101" way of looking at the problem. If you've ever been to Paris, Amsterdam, Lisbon, London, Barcelona, you quickly realize you can't "build more," as the desirable city locations are saturated.
The problem is that the supply/demand curves are being manipulated by, as mentioned, property owners which are destroying the fabric of their respective city via short-term rentals (or, by just owning an appreciating empty property), which, in turn, increases rents and prices for housing en masse. All of a sudden, a "boring" property becomes an investment that generates revenue. All of a sudden, hedge funds, banks, etc. want in on the action. There's money to be made, after all!
While this used to be the case in the past (if you bought, for example, farmland, or a factory, or something), the financialization of housing is a relatively new phenomenon.
Expats and global financial markets further complicate this: how can an average Spaniard that makes $50k compete with a California "digital nomad" that makes $150k? Obviously, we need to have some sensible rules that protect the citizens with heritage and history there.
Taxes, too. At the end of 2024 I had ~€200k or so saved up and was renting, so I got hit with box 3 tax. Now in 2025 that money is in my house which I just bought, and taxes are close to nothing. So my incentive is for house prices to go up.
I like what Singapore is doing - having a government built “base level” of housing that is both abundant and readily available - it can anchor the price where deep excesses are harder to end up with.
It’s like a market where a very significant player keeps the price law, because of its own reasons.
In such a scenario the price will not go up as sharply, so there would be less incentive for people to buy real estate just as a financial vehicle.
And the government can also prioritise who it sells the units it builds to - e.g. not investors.
I honestly am surprised why western governments are not trying this.
Yes - in the UK we had a strong social housing sector, with award winning architecture (and some terrible mistakes too).
Then along came 'right-to-buy', allowing tenants to buy their social housing for knock down prices (and so become a natural Tory [right of centre party] voter).
If councils had been allowed to use the money to build more social housing, then maybe this was fine. But they were not. So now we have affordability issues in the UK too.
Also, are you aware your personal site has a malicious captcha? It looks like cloudflare but has instructions to press windows-R and paste the auto-copied text which runs a malicious msi.
I was surprised since you are such a prolific commentator. Almost fell for it. Hope it’s not social engineering.
Almost everywhere the issues with housing boil down to 1) location constitute a large part of the value and desirability, 2) substitutability between houses in different locations is limited, 3) the most desirable locations will have the strongest opposition from local residents to increase supply.
It's not that more houses are needed, its that more houses are needed at specific location and the people in that specific location don't like the idea of demolishing houses and make them taller or turn a city park into housing.
There are so many empty and decaying homes all over Europe, in Italy they sell houses for 1 Euro. Yes there's a catch but that catch is that you are supposed to renovate the house for a cost that ranges from 20K euros to 100K euros and this is still quite cheap considering that you end up with a proper house at a picturesque location.
More supply is crucial but efforts to reduce demand in the mean time probably won't hurt either. If tourists can stay in hotels and hostels that take up less housing that seems good?
But you still need to build more housing obviously
I don't think dramatically, because the issue right now is that residential housing can be used for short-term commercial accomodation. It feels like the connection between these supply & demand curves is limited.
Also, some places physically cannot grow outwards anymore, either because other cities are in the way or because of geographical elements like mountains being in the way. Barcelona is one such city, with one of the highest population density per km2. Only way is to build taller buildings, but no one wants to live in a city where you can't see the sky (ya ya, except Hong Kong and other places, don't ask me how they do it).
Yes, I know, I was there again very recently and it's still mostly as nice as I remembered, lovely city all around and fascinating buildings, infrastructure and overall city :) It's quite different than other metropolitan cities, and I didn't mean it as a jab or anything, was just trying to "paint a picture", no offense meant :)
I’d argue it’s not as simple as that. A city like Lisbon with a sudden influx of expats risks moving to a very unhealthy economic environment.
Expats come, locals are pushed out, existing business is replaced by business catering towards expats. But an economy built on being a trendy expat location is not sustainable. Expats will leave to a new place eventually, and then the city is dead. This dynamic is accelerated by the fact that locals are forced out when expacts come, but the city was attractive in the first place because of how charming locals made it.
If you run the city - and imagine it’s a company, and you’re the CEO - you can see that your city is falling for a hype train that will eventually kill it. The smart thing is to not let that hype train happen.
Because expat purchase power is a mutliple of your locals, you need to find other levers. Every company would do the same thing.
The problem is people don't "just" want cheap housing - they want the character of the area to remain the same. But, those two things are frequently incompatible.
Good. How could these "disruptive" american companies get away with violating local laws that long remains a mystery to me. If I started running an illegal hotel in Barcelona, or a website advertising for illegal rentals in the same city, myself, from Spain, I'd be quickly arrested and thrown in jail as an individual...
I am not smart- is this good? It feels like the government blaming airbnb and smalltime landlords for a housing issue. I know this is not a unique issue to Spain. Perhaps this is me being an ignorant American, but the idea of the government telling people how to use private property doesn't sit well. Yes, I understand the government has say in many faucets of our lives. But this feels like punishment on the middle class. I suppose one could say the middle class is punishing the poor by not renting to them... But isn't this the capitalist/entrepreneur structure that many governments have agreed upon.
Housing used to be relatively cheap in Spain which has resulted in huge swathes of the main cities and tourist resorts becoming almost entirely airbnbs.
The social/economic implications could have been predicted long ago.
> Perhaps this is me being an ignorant American, but the idea of the government telling people how to use private property doesn't sit well.
Yes, it's you being both ignorant and american. This argument quite directly, without any slopes (slippery or not), extends to for example acquiring a piece of land, building some housing at premium costs and then slapping a factory (and waste landifill, for a good measure) on the rest of the lot.
Housing regulations exists for many abundant reasons. Living quarters vs short-time rentals drastically change requirements for and load on surrounding infrastructure, which is built out based on established zoning.
> the idea of the government telling people how to use private property doesn't sit well
Between zoning, easements, nuisance laws, government has a lot of say in how you use your private property. Owners even stepped it up a notch and invited HOAs, a quasi-government that has even more say about your property.
Unfortunately, people love telling their neighbors how they should live.
AirBnB should be banned, and I say that as a very pro-capitalist guy.
In an economy where there is a housing shortage local population needs affordable and long-term (6-months+) rental contracts or they don't have stability.
Capitalism is great in general, but some things, such as healthcare, housing, electricity,... needs to have a stronger regulatory framework then eg TVs since the collapse of basic human necessities creates chaos and eventually becomes the foothold of extreme socialist/communist political parties which then finish the job of destroying the economy.
Cities that have almost completely banned Airbnb (e.g.: NYC) have not seen any improvement on affordability. What's next?
Housing and rent are already heavily regulated in Spain. Some regulations and side effects of those regulations:
* Minimum contract length of 5 years.
* Maximum increase of rental per year regulated to 2/3% (even during high inflation years).
* It can take years to evict a non-paying tenant. If there are children in the apartment, it's even harder.
* Even if the tenant is not paying, you, the landlord, have to keep paying the utilities, because if you stop paying, you'll be charged with "coacciones".
* If the landlord is not a person but a company, regulation is even harder.
* In some cities like Barcelona, regulation goes beyond. Maximum prices set by the local government, seasonal contracts banned, and even room rentals regulated.
* And all that is not going into detail of the "Okupa" problem.
The main issue with Airbnb is that a few companies own a huge percentage of the flats. It's a big, unregulated, industry without any responsibility that is driving regular hotels out of business and locals out of their neighbouhoods. Of course it has to end at some point.
See my other comment. When 30% of the housing stock is short-term rentals that families cannot buy, it doesn't matter at all who owns them. Where I live, they are all owned by locals, but that doesn't remediate any of the issues short-term rentals cause.
Local, middle class owners can own how many empty flats? 1%? 10%? Of course I don't have a number, but I'd bet that if you remove the mega-owners, that 30% would drop significantly.
Airbnb was not a bad idea, but it has been perverted. It's time to regulate it and probably break it too.
no it does not have to end. I mean to say, it is foolish to think you know how systems will play out over time. If the game rules are imbalanced then no one knows.
I was in Spain this past summer and it certainly seems they are experiencing tourist burnout. I saw anti tourist messages on banners hung on buildings, graffiti, posters and stickers in Madrid and Barcelona. Some of it was a bit threatening but I had zero issues.
The issue of airbnb is a sticky one. On one hand, being able to temporarily live in an apartment greatly enhances the immersiveness when your travel - you get to feel like a local and experience life in another place. Hotels suck as they cut corners to the point where an article posted here complaining about the lack of bathroom doors in hotels. On the other hand, these rentals drive up real estate prices and drives out locals. And often these rentals are in run-down low-income turning affordable yet poor quality housing into high quality temporary rentals. This drives out low income residents deepening income inequality issues while subjecting them to the threat of homelessness.
As long as we tolerate a society that only values ROI while ignoring the value of investing in humanity we won't resolve any of these issues. In a better world we would think about others and realize that easy access to shelter is foundational to stabilizing people to enable them to succeed in life. It's not hard, we have an abundance of materials and labor yet we have built a culture where helping others is some form of weakness for both parties.
> On one hand, being able to temporarily live in an apartment greatly enhances the immersiveness when your travel - you get to feel like a local and experience life in another place.
Yes, if your local life is being inconsiderate and having parties till 3 because you're on holidays. Having an airbnb in your building is terrible as you don't know the people and they don't care about getting to know you.
> Hotels suck as they cut corners to the point where an article posted here complaining about the lack of bathroom doors in hotels.
The great thing about hotels is that they can be planned for and zoned correctly for. Even so, I've had a hotel go up 100m from my apartment and had to invest in blackout blinds since they chose for a modern design with glass all over (and the lights are bright at night).
The biggest problem here in Barcelona is that most airbnbs / short term rentals are companies buying housing as an investment and so are stealing the opportunity from actual people and families trying to live.
> The biggest problem here in Barcelona is that most airbnbs / short term rentals are companies buying housing as an investment and so are stealing the opportunity from actual people and families trying to live.
This problem exists regardless of who does the buying. Where I live the locals got into the market first. Still, it's a zero-sum game, every short-term rental is a house a family cannot live in and probably cannot afford to buy.
On my street 30% of the houses are short-term rentals. Some rent out for $10k/week just 8 weeks a year and are closed up the rest of the time. My daughter is currently the only kid on the street, which has over 100 houses.
Not only are all the houses now priced as income-producing investments, they are killing the community that used to exist here.
It is maybe a bit cannibalistic to NIMBY politics though.. I have to wonder if we won't actually get the massive housing development we need as owners consolidate and have fewer votes and little social or political clout. Hotels and smaller community landlords had their arguments to sway many around them.
> if your local life is being inconsiderate and having parties till 3 because you're on holidays
I would expect that to be the minority of visitors.
I certainly don't do that when I stay in Airbnbs.
> The biggest problem here in Barcelona is that most airbnbs / short term rentals are companies buying housing as an investment and so are stealing the opportunity from actual people and families trying to live.
Sure, the problem is balancing that with the desire of tourists that want something better than a hotel.
Tourists don't vote, residents do, and even if short term rentals were outlawed, Barcelona and Madrid would remain tourist hotspots (as they were before short term rentals).
Certainly, there is a tug of war between tourist dollars vs negative tourist impact, but this math is a function of how impactful tourist decline (if any) would occur by pushing out short term rentals. Hotels always remain an option. Real estate and politics are local, as the sayings go. AirBnB pushed negative externalities on local jurisdictions to achieve their valuation and economic success ("socialize the losses, privatize the gains"), and these efforts are just pushing them back in some form. Tourists should remember that they are guests in the places that host them, and it is a privilege to be hosted.
> I would expect that to be the minority of visitors.
If you live next to one the "minority" is at least once a week, usually on a workday because they're in vacation while you're not.
You get extra trash everywhere, puke in the staircase, empty bottles in front of the building, condoms thrown out of windows, &c. it's a never ending nightmare
>I would expect that to be the minority of visitors.
If you share a wall or ceiling or are next door to one, how small would the minority have to be to keep you from being annoyed?
> stealing the opportunity
What does this mean or are you just communist coding your speech?
Personally I find Spain et al very easily marginalized, especially towards socialism/communism, yet it's extremely dirty, suffering with alcoholism and smoking. Go figure.
The weird thing is that in many cities there is a persistent and ongoing market failure where legitimate hotels in tourist areas often don't offer accommodations suitable for families with multiple children. There are often no hotel rooms with 3+ beds and kitchenette: it's not that they're more expensive, they simply don't exist at any price. So despite the social problems that Airbnb causes they do address a real market demand. Why aren't the hotel chains doing more to compete? What am I missing here?
> you get to feel like a local and experience life in another place.
Like a local with your fellow thousands of other tourists doing the same things, going to the same places, taking the same pictures? Traveling became the most abject consumeristic activity, there is nothing "local" left in these holiday hubs
> As long as we tolerate a society that only values ROI while ignoring the value of investing in humanity we won't resolve any of these issues.
That's exactly what we're not tolerating here in Spain. We have guaranteed right to "decent and adequate housing" enshrined in the constitution, which is why you're seeing these aggressive moves against companies that actively work against us having that.
I guess we in Spain are a bit of guinea pigs regarding this, as we've been hit hard by Airbnb et al, but we also have strong social movements trying to fight back, and right now being a bit successful. Gonna be interesting to see how it looks like in 5-10 years again, once we start to see the effect of the new laws passed these last few years.
If there is such a burnout, then why doesn’t the government just stop letting so many people in? This feels more like a scapegoat situation.
The people profiting from the situation aren't the people dealing with the side effects, it really isn't that hard to understand... if you own a club or a building it's a gold mine. If you're just an average citizen everything is now more expensive, it's harder to find a place, you have to deal with rude people every fucking day, &c.
Since Spain is in Schengen they won't be able to easily block tourists getting visas. Plus the visa waiver programs are usually reciprocal.
Best way to reduce tourism is to levy taxes on tourist activities.
“just” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here.
Tourists don’t travel illegally. What am I missing?
You’re reducing a very complex problem to a meaningless slogan.
> travel illegally
What does this even mean? It's not illegal to travel
Whenever you use the phrase "why don't you just", you're almost certainly about to say something utterly dumb and poorly thought out.
Stop and think a bit more instead.
I’ve always thought a solution would be to allow Airbnb but cap the amount you can earn per property to the equivalent of an average annual rent.
This wouldn’t outright ban short-term rentals, but it would reduce the largest financial incentive.
I say this selfishly, as someone who wants to use the platform while still occupying my own place. Something that offering it as a full-time rental doesn’t allow.
Spains problem is that their economy is terrible. Tourism is almost 15% of barcelona's economy so the tourism sector has political power but all the people who dont benefit from it are pissed. They cant afford to piss off the tourists but tourism has a lot of negative externalities.
I live in Spain. I'll give you an interesting example I've witnessed. Two of my neighbors rent seasonally on airbnb. Middle class women, one of them a widow. I assume they used to make a tidy profit. I believe they worked quite hard on making those houses pretty, and I've seen they had good reviews. Just now their license to operate has been denied, apparently without much explanation (I believe the Property Registry is making the decision, this is a bureaucratic body of state employees, not democratically elected).
Across the street lies a hotel, a true tourist trap. They have a 6/10 rating on booking and rely on scamming British tourists, whom you can see balancing drunk on their balconies daily. It's owned by a national conglomerate. As you may guess, as of now the airbnbs are closed and the hotel is thriving despite only bringing the worst kind of tourist to the community. An astute observer will note that the hotel industry is one of the biggest lobbyists supporting the current government at a national level. I am not one to defend big companies, but for some people here Airbnb was freedom. Now they have to go work cleaning rooms or just collect retirement checks, as obtaining a license to run a hotel is impossible without political connections / corruption. My point is, not everywhere are laws as fair as in the United States. Before someone talks about housing pressure, this is a relatively out of the way area where 40% of houses sit empty most of the year.
Can those drunk tourists not rent Airbnb's too ?
How is it not better for them to stay across the street at the hotel than on a flat next to a family home ?
The Airbnbs mentioned rented throughout the year in monthly periods, so they fill a different niche. The new law kills not only short term stays but everything that goes through an online provider (except multi-year contracts).
When I first arrived here I relied on these long stay airbnbs until I could find a way through the byzantine Spanish rental process. Now this option will no longer exist.
Again, you are not familiar with Spanish politics if you think this is by accident. I have myself given up on any attempts of doing business here after I spent 1 year waiting for a certain business license and could only obtain it (in a week) after a chance friendship with a local notary. :)
The main issue with going after airbnb is that its a true bandaid fix: the gains in supply are often offset by just a few years or months progression of the underbuilding of supply
Still necessary though.
If the economics work out for landlords, a city can lose a lot of apartments to short term rentals way faster than it could increase supply. Especially in central districts where significant new construction is barely possible.
If there is a high-demand tourist location (like many parts of Spain) and tourists are more wealthy than locals (like many parts of Spain) then new housing stock will also be soaked up by AirBnBs. In this situation the "just build" argument means you have to build enough housing to house every single wealthy tourist that wants to come before you start seeing any relief to local housing issues. Not only does that mean locals have to wait thought, say, 10 years of construction before their issues are addressed, but in the mean time the tourism sector will have dominated the economy, which is not healty either.
Sure, but the article is specifically about that subject, while the government been working and continues to work on many other fixes too. Limiting rent increases, among other things, is constantly being talked and enacted right now, so at least it's going in the right direction.
Airbnb is one of many problems, and all of them require something done about it. But one does not exclude the other, if you look up the "Spain" tag on your favorite international news source I'm sure you can dig out the other measures being taken currently.
How does limiting rent increases help the issue? all that does is reduce the incentive to build more housing. It’s also a bandaid fix that sounds good today but in the end makes things worse.
Because now people aren't priced out of their current place where they live simply because the landlord wants more money each month, now it's limited to increases by an index. And landlords can also not just kick out a tenant, raise the rent price and find someone else.
Again, many small streams make a big river. Not one single action or new law will instantly fix the issue, you patch what you can and incrementally work towards something better.
But it ruins the future market. People with a rent controlled unit will not leave even when they should, because they have it so good. Thus turnover never happens, which is why most programs have a waiting lists easily more than a decade.
Like it helps those who have one at a greater expense to renters without one
Limiting rent increase does not mean "Rent can never change", it just means the rate of change is limited. Owners can still raise the prices each year, it's just limited based on a lot of factors, the main one being a local index. But renovating the property for example lets owners raise the rent higher, as just one exception.
> People with a rent controlled unit will not leave even when they should, because they have it so good.
... What do you mean "when they should"? If they don't want to leave because the rent is OK and they like living there, why should they move?
I guess one fundamental difference with Spain VS US or probably many other countries, is that here in Spain we have "the right to housing" enshrined in our constitution. This makes it so it's more important for residents and citizens to be able to find housing, than it is for owners to be able to make profits on owning properties/land.
The laws in the country should reflect this, and thankfully, they're starting to, albeit slowly.
The "problem" is that a rent controlled apartment is some weird chimera of ownership and renting.
You could take the difference between the market rent and contract rent to calculate a subsidy. Then you could calculate the net present value of the future subsidy payments. This is often a very significant amount of money that you just lose if you move.
Another way of looking at it. Let's say you need 40sqm of space. You rent an apartment of 100sqm. These square meters don't bring you any joy of quality of life at all. If you owned you would move. If you rented at market rate you would move. But if you rent it at a controlled rent you must hold onto it for dear life because maybe you will need it when you start a family in the far future. Getting another contract this good could be very uncertain.
People with high incomes living alone in multi bedroom units objectively should leave.
The “right to housing” is a joke when the US essentially makes it illegal to build new units in most areas.
Because of that restriction, rent control causes the small number of limited units to be subsided by everyone else paying more, as basic supply and demand dictates
> People with high incomes living alone in multi bedroom units objectively should leave.
Who cares how high their income is or how big the property is? If they pay the rent and want to continue living there, they should be able to continue living there. Taking someone's home away from them because "now you earn more money" or "now you're less people" sounds very inhumane, and I'm glad Spain wouldn't allow such discrimination.
I don't know why you bring up US laws, utterly irrelevant in this submission.
It is possible to change multiple laws if we want to. We made them up at a certain point, and we we can make them up differently at another.
You are applying a viewpoint which is not universally applicable, nor is it static where it does apply.
If you accept that housing is not market in which all parties have equal leverage to bargain, then you should also accept that regulating it to be more fair is not bad by definition.
We happened to regulate it in ways that were counterproductive previously, but the regulation itself is not guaranteed to always be counterproductive, unless you believe that discrepancies in leverage cannot be mitigated by regulation while the lack of leverage itself is being created partially by other regulation.
When I first moved to NYC, my neighbor was a 70 year old single man who absolutely hated living in NY at that point in his life, but couldn't leave because his rent was so cheap(I was paying $1500 for a studio and he was paying $300 for a 1BR) - he literally could not afford to move even to a cheap area. It certainly would have been better for him if he could just swap apartments with someone living outside the city who wanted to move in, but that would be illegal.
I think rent control advocates focus on people who might be lucky enough to get a rent controlled apartment, but it is much harder to think about what happens to all the people who want to move to a city but can't because no housing stock is available.
in this case tourist-driven demand is a completely different beast than local housing needs, and no city can (or should) build enough to satisfy global tourism. Regulation may be the only realistic lever
Georgism is the only long-term solution to this problem. It's not like there is even disagreement on that; any economist would tell you so. However, the Landed gentry have no interest in solutions.
Which problem and which economists?
You can definitely find household named economists that don't agree with Land Value Taxes. Hell there's a grassroots push in the US to eliminate property taxes.
For 150 years they sat in their universities teaching land value taxes are the optimal form of taxation.
I do like Georgism, but taxing wealth and not a transaction is just going to transfer wealth from poor to government. Similarly how capital gains tax has 0 effect on billionaires and just rip off investors (aka the poorest).
I distincly recall many articles stating that for ridiculous EUR like 50k you could buy housing in spain right after 2007 the crisis, for many years afterward. Because it was so overbuilt , at least outside of the big metros) that the builders and sellers were desperate to move.
I wonder if they all wiped out by the crisis (subprime really hit spain hard), and what we are seeing now is the consequence of that wipeout, and bankruptcies.
In large parts of Spain, that is still true. Entire rural villages for sale in some cases even.
Problem is that it's in areas where people don't want to live. In the areas people want to live, the problem is the opposite, there isn't nearly enough housing, so you end up with some of the highest population densities in EU (#2 and #3 are both in Spain at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_Union_cities_... in "density per km2" for example, 50% of top 10 on that list is in Spain!) and prices keep going up.
Add in that salaries are pretty low so cost of living is subsequently low, so you end up with a ton of "expats" and other fun folks like "foreign investors" who purchase up all the livable/rentable properties with their "higher value" money, because everything is so cheap for them.
Owners realize this, and while the government is (now at least) trying to put a stop to all of this with limiting rent increases and more, owners still try to take advantage of it as much as they can.
Personally, I think we need to temporarily put a complete halt to non-residents buying any sort of properties or even land here, at least for a short period of time so the people who actually live and work here can recover from the situation.
For the average person with a normal job here and not working for foreign companies with a higher salary, it's short of impossible to be able to afford to eventually buy a house.
More fundamentally, the trend of the world economy is toward turning everything anywhere in the world into either a resource to be exploited or a playground for the rich.
This is a big generalization but I think it's broadly true.
If you are in a "resource" area you'll get pollution and often instability and war.
If you are in a "playground" area you get massive cost increases and are eventually forced out.
As the trend is toward concentrating more and more wealth at the top, the slice of rich who can afford to enjoy the playgrounds becomes smaller and the number of refugees, homeless, and poor becomes larger and poorer.
> (#2 and #3 are both in Spain at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_Union_cities_... in "density per km2" for example, 50% of top 10 on that list is in Spain!)
That list does not make much sense, because it mostly consists of small municipalities that have been engulfed by growing metropolitan areas. Four of the five Spanish entries are like that, three in Valencia and one in Barcelona; and most other entries in the top 20 are suburbs of Paris, Athens or Naples.
It's a list of cities proper, not just "cities".
> A city proper is the geographical area contained within city limits
I'm not sure about the others, but the one from Barcelona is a city actually, with their own local government and all, separate from Barcelona, exactly like Badalona on the other end of Barcelona. It is within the city-limits of Barcelona (region, not city) though.
It is, but my point is that these entries are more historical oddities than a sign of particularly high population density of Spanish cities. There are similarly dense suburbs in most cities/countries, they just happen not to have a local government.
I got myself a pretty little condo in Asturias for a steal, at least compared to US prices. I tried first just outside Madrid but it’s crazy expensive there, I saw a small and modern condo and they wanted more of what I paid for a brand new large home in the US very close to a big city, massive in size by European standards. If you want a modern tiny condo in Madrid city center you are looking at over a million euros for sure. Almost NYC prices. But Asturias is so freaking beautiful, and people are sooo laid back and kind, the best! There’s also a train that takes just over 3 hours to Madrid.
Where did you find it? Any website you can recommend?
Major population center rent trends will tell this story (STRs crowding out long term rentals), look at rent pricing in Barcelona for example.
(own property in Spain)
You can get houses even cheaper now. The two things are not related though. Huge areas of Spain are barren empty places, with no jobs, transport, or anything. Nobody really can or want to live these places. Thats why the houses are so cheap.
I was recently evicted from my apartment in a city in Norway experiencing similar growth in short-term rentals. The rental on that apartment was around €750 (same for my roommate). Apparently, during high season in the winter similar apartments goes for ~€830 a night. High season is 3 months in the winter, but seemingly that is enough to outcompete longterm tenants.
There is 12 months in a year. So that can be covered in 12 days... So even half a month would be more... Seems broken...
I have nothing against short or medium term rentals. If they are limited percentage of housing as total. This percentage is rather low.
You have no protections against this where you live? That would be near impossible where I live (Ontario).
Unfortunately not due to co-living with the landlord.
I have legal holiday rentals on two properties in Spain, but they are managed by an specialized company:
* The regional administration handed out licenses without problems until a year ago, even when everyone was complaining already about these rentals. It was just paperwork + fee to get the license. They did for years and now they wonder why there are so many flats: they allowed it.
* The main issue these rentals cause to the neighbors is people partying, being noisy, inconsiderate. Rentals have rules against these behaviors yet they happen frequently. I wish we or the police had tools to legally kick people out in the middle of the night for this behavior.
* Apart from legal rentals, which are being limited now, there are a lot of illegal rentals. They are only starting to crack down on them. AirBNB and others have not complied with the law and this should not come as surprise. They have actively enabled illegal businesses for years. People go to jail for that and they should shut them down.
* There is no affordable housing in the city-center. Rental flats make it worse but in many places the issue will not be fixed if they disappeared. The causes are deeper and a nice flat is not going to become "cheap" to rent in any case.
* Holiday rentals are a bit more profitable that long-term rentals, but not crazy unless you are doing it at scale and they come with their own problems. Many are switching now to "seasonal" rentals, which are rentals for a period less than a year and the tenants need to go then. They forgot to handle these in the new regulations. Long-term rental is problematic because you can't use your flat when you need it. i.e. if you have a flat that you come to spend your own holidays. So people in that situation have limited alternatives.
* I am personally not against switching to long term rentals, but the current situation wrt. licenses etc. puts me in a "wait and see" mode. My flat is legal, so they might make it more profitable by cracking down on illegal ones. Once I put a long-term rental I cannot ever go back to vacation rental either. There is little incentive to switch right now, but I will of course do it if I'm legally required to do so. For all the talk, they haven't taken that step, which is a testament to how politicians can say one thing and then do close to nothing in the end.
As far as I understand this is the latest shot in the conflict between Spain and its lack of affordable housing. I'd put the symbolic start around 2004-2006 [1] with the movement called "you won't have a house in your fucking life" where people all over Spain started demonstrating against high apartment prices.
I don't like AirBnB and I'm glad they got fined, but the Spanish government also needs to accept that they have been sitting around doing nothing for roughly 20 years. Looks like politicians all over will do everything in their power except actually building more apartments.
[1] https://www.leonidasmartin.net/artes/no-vas-a-tener-una-casa... (in Spanish)
They don't want to upset the high number of middle-class Spaniards who have all of their money invested in airbnbs.
> I don't like AirBnB and I'm glad they got fined, but the Spanish government also needs to accept that they have been sitting around doing nothing for roughly 20 years. Looks like politicians all over will do everything in their power except actually building more apartments.
I am totally unfamiliar with Spain, but wondering what would government have to do to improve the situation? They wouldn’t build government owned and operated houses? Or is it that they do not issue permits for builders, or tax incentives are all wrong?
Typically, government can step in by changing zoning ordinances that would allow for larger multi-family buildings. At least from my US perspective and assuming other countries would have something similar. There's a city near me that has an ordinance stating no buildings taller than four stories are allowed. If that was modified to allow up to ten story buildings, you could drastically increase number of units available.
The Spanish financial crisis in 2009 was an overabundance of private debt. Developers used that debt to build lots of flats, too many in all the wrong places. Those developers then went out of business and construction has been moribund since then.
A lot of other European governments took on too much public debt and had to enforce austerity measures. This proved very unpopular.
Unlike the US, the Spanish government did not bail out private industry debt. And so 15 years later here we are. Not enough housing stock and not enough private builders to carryon building more.
https://i.imgur.com/UcmNiWf.jpeg
How much effect will 65000 flats have on this?
Everyone likes the warmth of Spain in winter
Those coming overwhelmingly come from places that are hotter than Spain.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/445784/foreign-populatio...
Not really true, Romania, Italy, UK, Ukraine, Peru, Germany, France and more are not hotter than Spain.
Is there something else you're trying to hint at that you don't dare to say out loud perhaps?
All of that probably. Also not that familiar with Spain. But the same issue is visible all over Europe. Basically apartments in nice areas are rented out to tourists for much more than would be affordable for locals. The advantage for the property owner is that these are short term rentals that are very lucrative. With long term renters, they basically the rental prices are highly regulated and in many countries it's very hard to terminate rental contracts. In some places renting out property is now so unattractive that landlords just sell off the property which removes it from the market entirely. That's what happened in the Netherlands in recent years.
And meanwhile, getting any kind of building permits is super hard so there's only a trickle of new property being built that lags behind demand.
There's a real estate bubble where real estate value outgrows inflation structurally. So housing is getting more and more expensive. To the point where a normal person with a normal income has basically no chance at all at finding anything decent on the market.
The solution of building more housing and making it easier for property owners to rent out their property are consistently not happening. The Netherlands actually has large amounts of empty property where the owners prefer to not rent it out and keep their investment liquid because it's such a PITA to get out of an agreement. There's also a history of privatized housing corporations selling off their property to make some quick money for the share holders. The net result is a huge mess of private property that is either not rented out or rented out at extortion prices. At the same time there's also growing amount of empty commercial real estate. Because people work from home now. Converting that for housing is another regulation challenge.
The problem isn't greed but broken policy. The reflex of "protecting" renters has had the opposite negative effects on the rental market. Things like Airbnb are more like a symptom than the cause of this.
The way I see it, house construction should not be expensive. It's artificial scarcity. A 50K camper can be pretty comfortable. But forget about having the right to use that as a place to live. You are instead expected to pay extortion rents or buy your own 500K piece of shit tiny apartment that is actually smaller and less comfortable than the bloody camper. A camper is just a house with wheels. Those are mass produced in factories. Houses without wheels should be much simpler to make. This never was a technical problem. Prefab housing is kind of a solved problem. It's not that hard. Any idiot can construct a garden shed in an afternoon. If the rules were different, most big cities would have huge slums with campers and other improvised housing. Regulation is what keeps this under control. But when policy breaks down, slums like that become the next logical level of this crisis.
A good example of exemptions in the Netherlands are so-called holiday homes where people live permanently; despite this clearly being illegal. Evicting people would create an unsolvable problem for bureaucrats. So, a lot of people that live like that got their situation legalized. And of course recreational units tend to be in nice places too. So, it's a popular thing. If tens of thousands of people start parking their campers on the edge of town bureaucrats would struggle to address the issue without creating a bigger crisis.
Probably something like this will force a solution eventually.
They've been expanding their airports over those 20 years; Barcelona's passenger air arrivals has doubled in that time and there is another expansion being planned. Barcelona is not a large city and they should really be coupling every airport capacity increase with an equal increase in tourist accommodations or they end up in an even worse situation.
Spain's airports are quite interesting. They're all owned by a monopoly which sets the same landing fee to land at any airport. So high volume airports are effectively cross subsiding building very good airports in the smaller regional areas.
Not great for prices (Ryanair is complaining about high landing fees) but it does mean tourists have a good job being dispersed into the countryside and having a good experience.
> Barcelona is not a large city
By what measure? Granted, I now live outside of Barcelona after moving here from an island with ~700 people on it, so for me pretty much any city is big, but I'm fairly sure Barcelona is within top 100 worldwide in terms of population living in it, so I'm guessing you're saying "not a large city" by some other metric?
Did Airbnb really affect house market that much? Hotels got wayyy more expensive now there so I expect less tourism in the future, wonder if it was a good trade off.
> Looks like politicians all over will do everything in their power except actually building more apartments.
This is the wrong way to frame this issue. A lot of cities like Paris and Amsterdam have this issue with short-term renting. "Build moar" is just not really an option for these type of city.
Firstly, the constructible area of the city is limited. So build, but build where ? You can expand horizontally, but this creates challenges with public transportation and other public services. And it can be slow since it means having to expel industry and agriculture further to rezone area into constructible home/office area. So the other option is to build up, which means destroying potentially historic building, changing the skyline and viewpoint. This would be bad for tourism (and people who live here might not like it either), since this is a big reason why people even come to visit.
In the past, cities had simple way to deal with this. With zoning and hotel licences, the city could have a real urban plan on how it wanted to evolve and how much space it wanted to dedicate to tourism vs industry vs offices vs homes. But AirBnb came and just said "fuck that" and bypass complitely the licence système and or building and operating permit usually needed for tourism. Greed and capitalism took advantage of that and the number of place to rent or buy descreased significantly in favour of short term tourism rental, making living in the city slowly unaffordable.
Building more is not that simple. AirBnb respecting the law is a simple solution. It won't complitely solve the issue of the availaibility of affordable home, but it sures as hell help.
> means destroying potentially historic building, changing the skyline and viewpoint
Get over it! Seriously, most buildings are not historic. By trying to make them all historic you ensure they are all lost and the few that really are historic can't stand out for the history they represent. Save what is really history, but not everything.
Similarly, the skyline will change. That is life. Accept it. You do not own the view, it is the combination of everyone, and not everyone agrees with you so why are you forcing your preferred view on others?
if building up is bad for tourism, it kills two birds with one stone: more housing and less tourists who want airbnbs. so slowly build up until you stabilise the tourism at the level you want!
Locals in cities do not necessarily like high rise neither. And tourism brings a lot of money and jobs. People won't really like making their city uglier and losing their jobs just to have more housing.
> Locals in cities do not necessarily like high rise neither
It's a lot more selfish and malicious than that. They want to remain housed affordably, so they support rent control, but they don't care about the city being affordable in general or for anyone not already living there. Often they outright oppose it (because those moving in would be ethnic minorities or poorer, with concerns about crime), but they disguise their racism with ridiculous aesthetic preferences about "skylines" and "shadows" and "neighborhood character", block highrises, block most construction, and you end up with rent controls for current residents but years long wait lists. Working 100% as designed.
What locals in attractive locations really want is to restrict supply, because the majority are homeowners and want to preserve their paper net worth. They caused the problem, benefit from it and don't want it fixed.
The Netherlands has lots of land dedicated to meat production that could be repurposed for housing. It’s also surprisingly low-rise, with rowhouses the norm.
except your argument as to why "build moar" isn't an option is basically "we acknowledge the population is booming, however, the vibes are more important than providing housing."
Sure, everyone wants their particular city to be frozen in time for cuteness and nostalgia reasons. However, it sort of assumes that the sociopolitical environment is also frozen (it isn't).
so instead you end up with voters voting against densification because, essentially, "I got mine."
p.s. i'm not sure that places that banned/heavily restricted airbnb experienced a meaningful decline in rental prices (e.g. new york, san francisco, vancouver, etc). it's basically a distraction from failed policy.
p.p.s. new york is one of the most popular tourist destinations and incredibly built up, and doesn't seem to have issues with tourists wanting to visit. tokyo too. and these also still have their quintessential historic/preserved areas, too.
__thats it__??? it's missing like 5 zeros on the righthand side of that number.
> The fine is equal to six times the profits Airbnb made while the properties were still listed despite being in breach of the rules.
As long as it wasn't profitable for them to do bad stuff (which it wasn't, since the fine is 6 times the size of their profits from that period of time), I'm happy enough about. You win some, you lose some, this is closer to winning than loosing so thank you Ministerio de Consumo.
They should fine them 6.5 trillion? I’m in favour of the fine but that seems a bit much
65,000,000.00000
that's delusional: 65M * 10,000 = 100 times ABNB's market cap
This is not just a problem in Spain. Affordable housing is a problem in almost every Western metro, both in the US and in Europe. The problem is caused by the financialization of real estate.
I know it's always been a bit of a financial asset, but the past 40 years have really seen this accelerate to pretty crazy levels. The issue, when you boil it down to the basics is: wealthy folks, development companies, overseas oligarchs, hedge funds, etc. owning many properties where they try to extract as much value as possible. This means that rents go up and short-term-rentals become more viable. This also means that young middle-class families can't afford to purchase or to live there, so it pushes out locals (this is especially bad in Lisbon).
The solution seems to be government telling you what you can or you can't do with your private property, which does not sit well with me, but it's becoming more and more clear that this can't go on forever.
That is not the issue. The issue is supply. People keep blocking construction of new housing and so prices go up and therefore it becomes an investments. increase the supply and it would no longer be an investment and you could not charge high rents
This is a very "Econ 101" way of looking at the problem. If you've ever been to Paris, Amsterdam, Lisbon, London, Barcelona, you quickly realize you can't "build more," as the desirable city locations are saturated.
The problem is that the supply/demand curves are being manipulated by, as mentioned, property owners which are destroying the fabric of their respective city via short-term rentals (or, by just owning an appreciating empty property), which, in turn, increases rents and prices for housing en masse. All of a sudden, a "boring" property becomes an investment that generates revenue. All of a sudden, hedge funds, banks, etc. want in on the action. There's money to be made, after all!
While this used to be the case in the past (if you bought, for example, farmland, or a factory, or something), the financialization of housing is a relatively new phenomenon.
Expats and global financial markets further complicate this: how can an average Spaniard that makes $50k compete with a California "digital nomad" that makes $150k? Obviously, we need to have some sensible rules that protect the citizens with heritage and history there.
Taxes, too. At the end of 2024 I had ~€200k or so saved up and was renting, so I got hit with box 3 tax. Now in 2025 that money is in my house which I just bought, and taxes are close to nothing. So my incentive is for house prices to go up.
I don’t think that is the only solution.
I like what Singapore is doing - having a government built “base level” of housing that is both abundant and readily available - it can anchor the price where deep excesses are harder to end up with.
It’s like a market where a very significant player keeps the price law, because of its own reasons.
In such a scenario the price will not go up as sharply, so there would be less incentive for people to buy real estate just as a financial vehicle.
And the government can also prioritise who it sells the units it builds to - e.g. not investors.
I honestly am surprised why western governments are not trying this.
Singapore is very special in that 80% of the population lives in "public" housing.
Yes - in the UK we had a strong social housing sector, with award winning architecture (and some terrible mistakes too).
Then along came 'right-to-buy', allowing tenants to buy their social housing for knock down prices (and so become a natural Tory [right of centre party] voter).
If councils had been allowed to use the money to build more social housing, then maybe this was fine. But they were not. So now we have affordability issues in the UK too.
Also, are you aware your personal site has a malicious captcha? It looks like cloudflare but has instructions to press windows-R and paste the auto-copied text which runs a malicious msi.
I was surprised since you are such a prolific commentator. Almost fell for it. Hope it’s not social engineering.
Thanks for the heads up, I think my WP got hacked somehow. Will take it offline and investigate.
For sure. Sorry that happened to you
Is it not a supply and demand problem? Then the only rational solution to get prices down is to build more housing.
Almost everywhere the issues with housing boil down to 1) location constitute a large part of the value and desirability, 2) substitutability between houses in different locations is limited, 3) the most desirable locations will have the strongest opposition from local residents to increase supply.
It's not that more houses are needed, its that more houses are needed at specific location and the people in that specific location don't like the idea of demolishing houses and make them taller or turn a city park into housing.
There are so many empty and decaying homes all over Europe, in Italy they sell houses for 1 Euro. Yes there's a catch but that catch is that you are supposed to renovate the house for a cost that ranges from 20K euros to 100K euros and this is still quite cheap considering that you end up with a proper house at a picturesque location.
More supply is crucial but efforts to reduce demand in the mean time probably won't hurt either. If tourists can stay in hotels and hostels that take up less housing that seems good?
But you still need to build more housing obviously
Wouldn’t that cause an artificial pressure against construction?
I don't think dramatically, because the issue right now is that residential housing can be used for short-term commercial accomodation. It feels like the connection between these supply & demand curves is limited.
Some places derive their identity and tourism income largely from how they look. Building could be slaying the goose that lays the golden egg.
Also, some places physically cannot grow outwards anymore, either because other cities are in the way or because of geographical elements like mountains being in the way. Barcelona is one such city, with one of the highest population density per km2. Only way is to build taller buildings, but no one wants to live in a city where you can't see the sky (ya ya, except Hong Kong and other places, don't ask me how they do it).
Quality of life in HK is quite high, btw, plenty of green, parks, and sky. (However, no cycling in the centre, only the outer areas or islands.)
Yes, I know, I was there again very recently and it's still mostly as nice as I remembered, lovely city all around and fascinating buildings, infrastructure and overall city :) It's quite different than other metropolitan cities, and I didn't mean it as a jab or anything, was just trying to "paint a picture", no offense meant :)
I’d argue it’s not as simple as that. A city like Lisbon with a sudden influx of expats risks moving to a very unhealthy economic environment.
Expats come, locals are pushed out, existing business is replaced by business catering towards expats. But an economy built on being a trendy expat location is not sustainable. Expats will leave to a new place eventually, and then the city is dead. This dynamic is accelerated by the fact that locals are forced out when expacts come, but the city was attractive in the first place because of how charming locals made it.
If you run the city - and imagine it’s a company, and you’re the CEO - you can see that your city is falling for a hype train that will eventually kill it. The smart thing is to not let that hype train happen.
Because expat purchase power is a mutliple of your locals, you need to find other levers. Every company would do the same thing.
The problem is people don't "just" want cheap housing - they want the character of the area to remain the same. But, those two things are frequently incompatible.
Good. How could these "disruptive" american companies get away with violating local laws that long remains a mystery to me. If I started running an illegal hotel in Barcelona, or a website advertising for illegal rentals in the same city, myself, from Spain, I'd be quickly arrested and thrown in jail as an individual...
I am not smart- is this good? It feels like the government blaming airbnb and smalltime landlords for a housing issue. I know this is not a unique issue to Spain. Perhaps this is me being an ignorant American, but the idea of the government telling people how to use private property doesn't sit well. Yes, I understand the government has say in many faucets of our lives. But this feels like punishment on the middle class. I suppose one could say the middle class is punishing the poor by not renting to them... But isn't this the capitalist/entrepreneur structure that many governments have agreed upon.
Housing used to be relatively cheap in Spain which has resulted in huge swathes of the main cities and tourist resorts becoming almost entirely airbnbs. The social/economic implications could have been predicted long ago.
> Perhaps this is me being an ignorant American, but the idea of the government telling people how to use private property doesn't sit well.
Yes, it's you being both ignorant and american. This argument quite directly, without any slopes (slippery or not), extends to for example acquiring a piece of land, building some housing at premium costs and then slapping a factory (and waste landifill, for a good measure) on the rest of the lot.
Housing regulations exists for many abundant reasons. Living quarters vs short-time rentals drastically change requirements for and load on surrounding infrastructure, which is built out based on established zoning.
> the idea of the government telling people how to use private property doesn't sit well
Between zoning, easements, nuisance laws, government has a lot of say in how you use your private property. Owners even stepped it up a notch and invited HOAs, a quasi-government that has even more say about your property.
Unfortunately, people love telling their neighbors how they should live.
AirBnB should be banned, and I say that as a very pro-capitalist guy.
In an economy where there is a housing shortage local population needs affordable and long-term (6-months+) rental contracts or they don't have stability.
Capitalism is great in general, but some things, such as healthcare, housing, electricity,... needs to have a stronger regulatory framework then eg TVs since the collapse of basic human necessities creates chaos and eventually becomes the foothold of extreme socialist/communist political parties which then finish the job of destroying the economy.
Cities that have almost completely banned Airbnb (e.g.: NYC) have not seen any improvement on affordability. What's next?
Housing and rent are already heavily regulated in Spain. Some regulations and side effects of those regulations:
Another senseless EU attack on the greatest nation on earth (/s?)
The main issue with Airbnb is that a few companies own a huge percentage of the flats. It's a big, unregulated, industry without any responsibility that is driving regular hotels out of business and locals out of their neighbouhoods. Of course it has to end at some point.
See my other comment. When 30% of the housing stock is short-term rentals that families cannot buy, it doesn't matter at all who owns them. Where I live, they are all owned by locals, but that doesn't remediate any of the issues short-term rentals cause.
Local, middle class owners can own how many empty flats? 1%? 10%? Of course I don't have a number, but I'd bet that if you remove the mega-owners, that 30% would drop significantly.
Airbnb was not a bad idea, but it has been perverted. It's time to regulate it and probably break it too.
no it does not have to end. I mean to say, it is foolish to think you know how systems will play out over time. If the game rules are imbalanced then no one knows.
Sure, let it expand infinitely until it owns all real estate on earth