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We used to have a good way to regulate the amount of tourists in specific areas, called city planning. Maybe it’s a well known fact, but I didn’t personally kn
by moksly 7y ago
We used to have a good way to regulate the amount of tourists in specific areas, called city planning.
Maybe it’s a well known fact, but I didn’t personally know this before I started working at a municipality, but there are entire departments who do nothing but plan. The best description of what they do, is that they play really complicated real world sim city, and at some level they draw “residential area”, “industry”, “commercial area”, “hotel” on a map, and those plans determine what we’re allowed to build on those locations.
If they plan correctly, there is a finite amount of hotels or holiday homes available in an area, and once those are full, the town or city can house no more tourists. This means that you could actually regulate how many people could physically visit London at any given time by limiting the amount of hotels and the amount of rooms a hotel was allowed to house with city planning.
Private rentals and popular apps to handle it, broke this system. At least until regulation catches up.
- leppr 7y agoWell Airbnb may have merged some % of the "residential" and "hotel" zones, but until tourists decide to sleep in tents they still have some way of approximately controlling the number of people in the city.
- WarDores 7y ago"Number of people in the city", yes. But the relative percentages of tourists to locals, no. Which tends to be the problem. Tourists spend money differently and create different logistical issues than residents.
- WillPostForFood 7y agoTourist destinations being overrun predates Airbnb by several decades. Take Venice, it was operating at maximum hotel capacity for at least 30 years. What happened is people stay in neighboring cities and take the train or bus in, or arrive and sleep on cruise ships. It has much more to do with the increased number of people who can afford to travel. Take China alone. In 1990, the number of Chinese citizens who could afford to travel to Europe for vacation was probable in the tens of thousands. Now it is in the hundreds of millions. Add in low cost airfare, things like Ryan Air, and it is simply that more people are able to afford travel.
- jacquesm 7y agoBeing capped at maximum hotel capacity isn't a bad thing per-se because it gives some measure of control. AirBNB blew that up.
- WillPostForFood 7y agoYes, but being maxed at hotel capacity wasn't solving the the overcrowding problem. It was just pushing tourists further out of the city. It would be like trying to solve traffic in San Francisco by freezing housing construction - it just spreads the problem out over a larger area. Here is a NY Times article from 1987 talking about the overcrowding problem and limiting the number of tourists in Venice. https://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/08/world/venice-moves-to-limit-entrance-of-tourists.html?searchResultPosition=1 https://www.nytimes.com/1987/05/08/world/venice-moves-to-lim...
- datenhorst 7y agoI can only speak of Salzburg but at least there the issue that the city faces is the opposite, namely that a huge % of visitors are just in town for a couple of hours congesting the city while not consuming anything.
- WillPostForFood 7y agoIs that because of Airbnb rentals, or just more tourists that are also chasing a more shallow experience? Snap a few photos and take the bus to the next stop. If I had to pick a tech product to blame, it would be Instagram, not Airbnb.
- wasdfff 7y agoThats just an untapped opportunity. How do they get there? It’s either bus, car, train, or plane. Raise fares or tax rentals so you can build to ease the burden from their traffic.
- maxsilver 7y agoIs that what city planners do in tourist cities? Maybe this is just an American thing, but city planners in the US generally do not do any of that -- they exist solely to help property developers and landowners generate as much wealth as possible, as quickly as possible, so that the city can capture as much of the tax-base growth as possible. Effectively zero thought is given to people, how they could live, work, transport themselves, utility infrastructure, schools, or anything of that nature. Affordability especially -- how real people are supposed to afford any of this -- is never ever planned for. Planners talk about this all the time, of course, and love the illusion that their work somehow solves these problems. But in truth, they don't. And usually, the results of their effort are slightly worse than prior. The only things planners routinely accomplish, are things that privatize urban core's wealth for the wealthy and/or increase taxable value of acreage -- things that make cities more expensive and less hospitable to human life. > If they plan correctly, there is a finite amount of hotels or holiday homes available in an area, and once those are full, the town or city can house no more tourists Is there any city that actually follows this? In the US, any idea of capping growth like this would get you labeled "anti-business", "NIMBY", and "economically illiterate". Capitalism demands infinite growth forever indefinitely (literally every facet of the whole world is just a commodity to be 'supply vs demand-ed', dontcha-know?), and any plan that limits that in any way would be immediately be rejected by every professional planner in the nation.
- moksly 7y ago> Is there any city that actually follows this? Yes? Many European cities are quite busy banning private rentals and requiring owners to actually live in their apartments. In my country it’s even illegal for foreigners to buy vacation homes. Legislation moves a lot slower than the market though.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoCould you please name a few such cities/countries? Or, better yet, link to some sources? I'm very interested in planning best practices and not sure how to google this.