5 ms·

So I've heard this argument before, but I'm not sure I entirely get it. Wouldn't people coming to Lisbon just stay somewhere else if short-term rentals didn't e

So I've heard this argument before, but I'm not sure I entirely get it. Wouldn't people coming to Lisbon just stay somewhere else if short-term rentals didn't exist - like a hotel that is likely owned by a massive corporation? How would that be better? I guess that way I look at it is that people want to visit cities for a variety of reasons. Those people need to stay somewhere. Wherever they stay will take up space, thus driving up rents through land scarcity. I am not really sure how people staying in someone's apartment is much worse than staying in a hotel. If rents are going up, it's because there is more demand than supply. Unless Airbnb is actually increasing demand (perhaps?), I don't see how it is really affecting this equation.

fnordian_slip 6y ago
Of course they are increasing demand by being cheaper (because they can ignore fire safety regulations and a ton of others that hotels have to follow, therefore having an unfair advantage). They are increasing demand in the same way more and bigger roads do not reduce but instead increase traffic. This paradox is well-known among city planners (but often ignored by those who make the decisions because it is counterintuitive). In addition to that they can ignore zoning laws and therefore move rent prices up in areas where hotels are not allowed to be.
- AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > Of course they are increasing demand by being cheaper (because they can ignore fire safety regulations and a ton of others that hotels have to follow, therefore having an unfair advantage). This seems like a regulatory arbitrage that shouldn't exist to begin with. Why should the fire safety regulations for a hotel be dramatically different in expense than the ones for the equivalent apartment complex? > They are increasing demand in the same way more and bigger roads do not reduce but instead increase traffic. People consistently get this wrong. Bigger roads don't increase traffic. Congestion suppresses traffic. If there is a congested two lane road because it's carrying traffic that would require a four lane road, so then you build a four lane road, you then discover that the four lane road is still congested. Because once you remove some of the congestion, the demand it had been suppressing comes back and you still don't have enough capacity. The distinction is important because there is a point at which you actually have enough road capacity to satisfy the demand that exists when it isn't being suppressed by traffic congestion. It's just more than you might have expected based on the amount of traffic observed when the road was congested. > In addition to that they can ignore zoning laws and therefore move rent prices up in areas where hotels are not allowed to be. The solution to which is to eliminate restrictive zoning like that, so that supply can respond to demand. The primary reason that short-term rentals are zoned differently is local regulatory capture by hotels to limit competition and keep prices high. Without restrictive zoning, short-term rentals don't have to come at the expense of long-term housing because you can build more housing and have both.
  - bildung 6y ago
    The idea that if 4 lanes are not enough we just have to add more lanes, ad infinitum, until we eventually hit the upper limit were traffic won't increase anymore, has, to my knowledge, no empirical foundation. Current knowledge says that "on average, a 10 percent increase in lane miles induces an immediate 4 percent increase in vehicle miles traveled, which climbs to 10 percent – the entire new capacity – in a few years." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      On the other hand, taking existing empirical data and extrapolating linearly from it seems like a bad idea in this case. There are obvious limits to how much latent demand is there. IIRC, we never did a proper experiment of suddenly e.g. quintupling the capacity of some major congested road. That said, I think the source of this paradox is ultimately not in the road one is thinking of expanding, but in all the connections between it and other roads. It buys you little to turn one lane into five if all the exits are still the same capacity.
      - bildung 6y ago
        While there obviously has to be an upper limit somewhere, this isn't (only) about latent demand, but induced demand: People actually drive more because they have to. More lanes have more consequences than wider streets alone, they enable sprawl, funnel funding away from other transport options etc. That has consequences for the housing market, average distances between work and home etc. This paper explains this quite well: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00166218 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00166218 - I've heard it is available on sci-hub. Your second point is very important though, and IIRC is the main reason why so many city planners are so critical of the boring company idea of underground car tunnels: It tries to solve an aspect of traffic that isn't the problem.
        AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        > People actually drive more because they have to. More lanes have more consequences than wider streets alone, they enable sprawl, funnel funding away from other transport options etc. That has consequences for the housing market, average distances between work and home etc. You're really just saying the same thing as I did -- congestion suppresses demand. Suppose you have an uncongested two lane road. Making that a four lane road is not going to induce anything, because the widened road has more capacity than the original one, but you weren't even using the full capacity of the original one. It doesn't encourage anyone to do anything they hadn't already been able to. The reason it "enables sprawl" is that if the original road was congested, people wouldn't want to travel it to commute, so buying a house in the suburbs and commuting via that road is suppressed. Congestion suppresses demand. If you reduce the congestion by widening the road, some of the demand comes back. And notice that the same thing happens if you alleviate congestion in some other way -- if you somehow make it more attractive to take the subway and then more people do, there is less traffic on the roads and it becomes more attractive to drive. But you don't actually want the congestion. Traffic congestion sucks. You want to get rid of it somehow. Part of the solution could be expanding the road, but you could have to expand the road a lot to satisfy all of the demand that would exist with uncongested roads, if you want to use that as the only solution. Which is why you shouldn't. There are other things that reduce congestion. Like building higher density housing, so that more people can live closer to where they work and have a shorter commute, which in turn makes mass transit more viable. Then that in combination with widening some roads relieves the congestion. The real problem here is the politics of it. Increasing the housing stock sufficiently to satisfy the demand would tend to reduce housing costs, which existing property owners don't want. So they fight high density construction with restrictive zoning rules and then the high cost and low supply of housing in the city pushes people into the suburbs, which increases the demand for roads.
squiggy22 6y ago
I have market knowledge in this sector and can confirm the impact. Once the pandemic hit, Airbnb's from private landlords flooded the market due to travel nosediving. see: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/world/europe/airbnb-dublin-rent.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/world/europe/airbnb-dubli...
skewart 6y ago
Without AirBnB you would need to convert a house into a hotel in order to use residential real estate to tap into hotel demand. And regulations typically make that hard and expensive. Plus you would need to do some construction work, which also adds to the expense. So strong hotel demand certainly does push up land value overall over time, but it happens much more slowly and to a lesser extent than with AirBnB. AirBnB gives investors a way around hotel regulations and construction costs. You can buy an existing house and with very little friction or cost start generating revenue from tourism demand.
jitbit 6y ago
> Wouldn't people coming to Lisbon just stay somewhere else No. They just wouldn't come. AirBnb and discounter-airlines has turned the tourism industry upside down. Now, I do believe, that it's NOT AirBnb "fault" - AirBnb just accelerates the inevitable (like most technologies do) but the impact is still huge. I have friends who live in Lisbon and Barcelona and from their eyes: tourism, that used to be a profitable "fancy" industry - with middle class people bringing their money to spend it - has turned into something different. These days "tourists" can be a group of 12 football fans, who've spent £18 on a RyanAir ticket and all stay in the same Airbnb room (as a group), getting drunk and vomiting on the streets. I'm not saying that's definitely a bad thing (everyone deserves the right to experience travel) I'm just saying I can relate to (many) EU cities opposing this, claiming they're not getting any value from these crowds.

fnordian_slip 6y ago

Of course they are increasing demand by being cheaper (because they can ignore fire safety regulations and a ton of others that hotels have to follow, therefore having an unfair advantage). They are increasing demand in the same way more and bigger roads do not reduce but instead increase traffic. This paradox is well-known among city planners (but often ignored by those who make the decisions because it is counterintuitive). In addition to that they can ignore zoning laws and therefore move rent prices up in areas where hotels are not allowed to be.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> Of course they are increasing demand by being cheaper (because they can ignore fire safety regulations and a ton of others that hotels have to follow, therefore having an unfair advantage). This seems like a regulatory arbitrage that shouldn't exist to begin with. Why should the fire safety regulations for a hotel be dramatically different in expense than the ones for the equivalent apartment complex? > They are increasing demand in the same way more and bigger roads do not reduce but instead increase traffic. People consistently get this wrong. Bigger roads don't increase traffic. Congestion suppresses traffic. If there is a congested two lane road because it's carrying traffic that would require a four lane road, so then you build a four lane road, you then discover that the four lane road is still congested. Because once you remove some of the congestion, the demand it had been suppressing comes back and you still don't have enough capacity. The distinction is important because there is a point at which you actually have enough road capacity to satisfy the demand that exists when it isn't being suppressed by traffic congestion. It's just more than you might have expected based on the amount of traffic observed when the road was congested. > In addition to that they can ignore zoning laws and therefore move rent prices up in areas where hotels are not allowed to be. The solution to which is to eliminate restrictive zoning like that, so that supply can respond to demand. The primary reason that short-term rentals are zoned differently is local regulatory capture by hotels to limit competition and keep prices high. Without restrictive zoning, short-term rentals don't have to come at the expense of long-term housing because you can build more housing and have both.
- bildung 6y ago
  The idea that if 4 lanes are not enough we just have to add more lanes, ad infinitum, until we eventually hit the upper limit were traffic won't increase anymore, has, to my knowledge, no empirical foundation. Current knowledge says that "on average, a 10 percent increase in lane miles induces an immediate 4 percent increase in vehicle miles traveled, which climbs to 10 percent – the entire new capacity – in a few years." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    On the other hand, taking existing empirical data and extrapolating linearly from it seems like a bad idea in this case. There are obvious limits to how much latent demand is there. IIRC, we never did a proper experiment of suddenly e.g. quintupling the capacity of some major congested road. That said, I think the source of this paradox is ultimately not in the road one is thinking of expanding, but in all the connections between it and other roads. It buys you little to turn one lane into five if all the exits are still the same capacity.
    - bildung 6y ago
      While there obviously has to be an upper limit somewhere, this isn't (only) about latent demand, but induced demand: People actually drive more because they have to. More lanes have more consequences than wider streets alone, they enable sprawl, funnel funding away from other transport options etc. That has consequences for the housing market, average distances between work and home etc. This paper explains this quite well: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00166218 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00166218 - I've heard it is available on sci-hub. Your second point is very important though, and IIRC is the main reason why so many city planners are so critical of the boring company idea of underground car tunnels: It tries to solve an aspect of traffic that isn't the problem.
      - AnthonyMouse 6y ago
        > People actually drive more because they have to. More lanes have more consequences than wider streets alone, they enable sprawl, funnel funding away from other transport options etc. That has consequences for the housing market, average distances between work and home etc. You're really just saying the same thing as I did -- congestion suppresses demand. Suppose you have an uncongested two lane road. Making that a four lane road is not going to induce anything, because the widened road has more capacity than the original one, but you weren't even using the full capacity of the original one. It doesn't encourage anyone to do anything they hadn't already been able to. The reason it "enables sprawl" is that if the original road was congested, people wouldn't want to travel it to commute, so buying a house in the suburbs and commuting via that road is suppressed. Congestion suppresses demand. If you reduce the congestion by widening the road, some of the demand comes back. And notice that the same thing happens if you alleviate congestion in some other way -- if you somehow make it more attractive to take the subway and then more people do, there is less traffic on the roads and it becomes more attractive to drive. But you don't actually want the congestion. Traffic congestion sucks. You want to get rid of it somehow. Part of the solution could be expanding the road, but you could have to expand the road a lot to satisfy all of the demand that would exist with uncongested roads, if you want to use that as the only solution. Which is why you shouldn't. There are other things that reduce congestion. Like building higher density housing, so that more people can live closer to where they work and have a shorter commute, which in turn makes mass transit more viable. Then that in combination with widening some roads relieves the congestion. The real problem here is the politics of it. Increasing the housing stock sufficiently to satisfy the demand would tend to reduce housing costs, which existing property owners don't want. So they fight high density construction with restrictive zoning rules and then the high cost and low supply of housing in the city pushes people into the suburbs, which increases the demand for roads.

squiggy22 6y ago

I have market knowledge in this sector and can confirm the impact. Once the pandemic hit, Airbnb's from private landlords flooded the market due to travel nosediving. see: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/world/europe/airbnb-dublin-rent.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/world/europe/airbnb-dubli...

skewart 6y ago

Without AirBnB you would need to convert a house into a hotel in order to use residential real estate to tap into hotel demand. And regulations typically make that hard and expensive. Plus you would need to do some construction work, which also adds to the expense. So strong hotel demand certainly does push up land value overall over time, but it happens much more slowly and to a lesser extent than with AirBnB. AirBnB gives investors a way around hotel regulations and construction costs. You can buy an existing house and with very little friction or cost start generating revenue from tourism demand.

jitbit 6y ago

> Wouldn't people coming to Lisbon just stay somewhere else No. They just wouldn't come. AirBnb and discounter-airlines has turned the tourism industry upside down. Now, I do believe, that it's NOT AirBnb "fault" - AirBnb just accelerates the inevitable (like most technologies do) but the impact is still huge. I have friends who live in Lisbon and Barcelona and from their eyes: tourism, that used to be a profitable "fancy" industry - with middle class people bringing their money to spend it - has turned into something different. These days "tourists" can be a group of 12 football fans, who've spent £18 on a RyanAir ticket and all stay in the same Airbnb room (as a group), getting drunk and vomiting on the streets. I'm not saying that's definitely a bad thing (everyone deserves the right to experience travel) I'm just saying I can relate to (many) EU cities opposing this, claiming they're not getting any value from these crowds.