4 ms·

Airbnb and uber for all their benefits have taken away a lot of urban planning capabilities of local govts. At the same time, they expose the general unwillingn

by screye 4y ago

Airbnb and uber for all their benefits have taken away a lot of urban planning capabilities of local govts. At the same time, they expose the general unwillingness of local govts to accomodate the need of the population or those who bring in economic value (tourists, transplants). If you are becoming a tourist hub, then create an off-town tourist area and add a convenient transit line/people mover to the central parts of town. Tourists get reasonable housing, locals don't get displaced and the influx of population does not destroy the cultural vibe of your town. Prohibition never works, and piracy is a reflection of an unmet need. Banning things merely airs out open wounds, and leads to grey-markets such as shady uber/airbnb equivalents within the city. If you want to reduce abortions, banning merely leads to riskier abortions. Examples of this are dime a dozen. When demand arrives, the cities MUST adjust to incoming demand. Couple examples of working uncomfortable compromises are: 1. Paris - Choose a small district and allow it to go full skyscraper. The rest of the town maintains its architectural identity. 2. Barcelona - Go full superblock. Means that tourist activity gets neatly distributed across the city (removing bottlenecks) and tourists do not lead to increase in car traffic. I could go on and on, but 1 fundamental truth stays. Bottlenecks only help those who control access to it. The key is to eliminate the bottleneck (more housing). Band-aids (rent-control) or equitable distribution of bottleneck gains (no-renters->only-homeowners/ more single-family-housing) never works. It only leads to the situation festering (see Bay Area / SF), and makes for an even harder problem in the future. I'm not sure if my comment conveys any cohesive point, but I hope folks get something out of it. p.s: fuck NIMBYs

nextos 4y ago
I truly agree with most of what you say. This famous article discusses why housing is becoming a huge problem everywhere and why that's super bad for the economy: https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-e.... It's been discussed here a few times, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28531025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28531025. The compromise Barcelona made is not enough. Sadly, that beautiful city is IMHO the prototypical case of getting ruined by too much tourism. In their defense, I think it's safe to state all mid-to-large cities in EU are quite crowded and unaffordable. For example, Copenhagen used to be a place where citizens enjoyed great purchasing power. Despite rent control and sale taxes, a single person in a well-paying job can hardly afford a mortgage for a decent flat right now. The same can be said of Munich, Madrid, London and many, many other places.
- daemoens 4y ago
  Rent control usually causes rents to go up in the non-rent controlled areas. It just accelerates the unaffordability of all housing.
  - finikytou 4y ago
    not only that. rent control also causes less properties to be for rent. if its not making enough money renting my property with bother? ill just keep it empty until price climbs and ill sell it. in paris they pushed rent control + they forbid you to rent your appartement is the apartment is not energy efficient enough. guess what? people that should renovate for becoming energy efficient have no real incentive to do it because anyway renovating an apartment will not allow them to rent it at higher price. they'll just hold onto it or sell it.
  - nextos 4y ago
    Rent control in Copenhagen is perhaps different than in other places, as there is just a very light control to avoid crazy prices and scams. In practice, it's a free market and landlords have by no means been discouraged to offer flats.
bobthepanda 4y ago
Not all additional tourist revenue is worth the marginal costs. And cities have no obligation to host visitors they don’t want. Hotels are usually limited because they are unpleasant neighbors for actual residents. It’s not really a surprise that’s the main issue people have with AirBnB rentals.
Hermitian909 4y ago
> Prohibition never works, and piracy is a reflection of an unmet need. Banning things merely airs out open wounds, and leads to grey-markets such as shady uber/airbnb equivalents within the city. What do you mean by "works"? Yes, grey markets will pop up, but if Portugal banned AirBnB style renting that the market for that housing wouldn't shrink? It seems to me that prohibition might be a useful tool in a more comprehensive set of policies to address the problem.
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Nowadays people offering AirBnB rentals have to register themselves or they will be fined. How much control is happening, no idea, probably none as usual.
  - jhugo 4y ago
    This is the type of thing that controlling is very difficult and thus expensive. As a result it's done at a pretty minimal level everywhere.
    - intothemild 4y ago
      The thing is... it's not actually. If you made a law to force AirBnB to share data on who is making the listing with the government, you have your register of who to tax/etc. You could also make laws to limit the number of properties per person, and if you're even smarter, you could use that in conjunction with a map of relationships between people, so you could limit the number of people putting listings in their family members names to get around any limitations. AirBnB has the data to assist governments.
      - jhugo 4y ago
        > If you made a law to force AirBnB to share data on who is making the listing with the government, you have your register of who to tax/etc. Airbnb will probably follow your law, but other platforms that do not will flourish. They will be difficult to regulate, given that they won't be in your jurisdiction. > You could also make laws to limit the number of properties per person. Many laws already exist that give unfavourable tax treatment to second and subsequent properties. They are widely avoided through family members and legal entity structures and a hand-wavy "map of relationships between people" isn't going to magically fix that. This would also have a fairly obvious negative effect: it would artificially limit supply in the rental market, driving up prices. A person who could have invested in multiple properties and supplied them to the rental market will instead supply at most one, and invest the rest of their money elsewhere. There isn't some nefarious conspiracy preventing effective regulation in this area. It's just a legitimately hard problem.
wikfwikf 4y ago
I'm generally a YIMBY and in favor of housing, but are we really so sure that new housing will solve the problems in cities like Barcelona or Lisbon (where tourists and people coming in attracted by the good quality of life generally have higher disposable incomes than most locals). If you just add housing, isn't it possible that the effect is like adding roads to prevent traffic congestion? The number of people coming in just increases even more until the marginal attractiveness is the same. From the point of view of locals this means that there are even more outsiders, and the affordability is just as bad.
pipodeclown 4y ago
Sure, but why on earth would any tourist choose to stay at some off site tourist hub? The whole point of visiting a historic city like say Lisbon, is that you get the stay in an historic city, not some modern off site tourist hub where you get to take a crammed full tourist bus to the centre.. Or would you propose strict accompanying zoning laws with strict enforcement? I think that would meet stiff resistance from property owners but would be feasible. I do think all of this would make the destination much less attractive to visit though so it really comes down to how much you want/need the tourists.
- merry_flame 4y ago
  I sympathize with your first point, but I believe only around 10% of tourists visiting Venice sleep there. Off-site tourist hubs are a real thing…
jbirer 4y ago
In Bucharest, the city started cracking on AirBNB, the problem is that the landlords are greedy and will risk legal action to get that sweet foreigner money. Not sure how much we can blame the local governments on this one.

by screye 4y ago

nextos 4y ago

I truly agree with most of what you say. This famous article discusses why housing is becoming a huge problem everywhere and why that's super bad for the economy: https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-e.... It's been discussed here a few times, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28531025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28531025. The compromise Barcelona made is not enough. Sadly, that beautiful city is IMHO the prototypical case of getting ruined by too much tourism. In their defense, I think it's safe to state all mid-to-large cities in EU are quite crowded and unaffordable. For example, Copenhagen used to be a place where citizens enjoyed great purchasing power. Despite rent control and sale taxes, a single person in a well-paying job can hardly afford a mortgage for a decent flat right now. The same can be said of Munich, Madrid, London and many, many other places.

daemoens 4y ago
Rent control usually causes rents to go up in the non-rent controlled areas. It just accelerates the unaffordability of all housing.
- finikytou 4y ago
  not only that. rent control also causes less properties to be for rent. if its not making enough money renting my property with bother? ill just keep it empty until price climbs and ill sell it. in paris they pushed rent control + they forbid you to rent your appartement is the apartment is not energy efficient enough. guess what? people that should renovate for becoming energy efficient have no real incentive to do it because anyway renovating an apartment will not allow them to rent it at higher price. they'll just hold onto it or sell it.
- nextos 4y ago
  Rent control in Copenhagen is perhaps different than in other places, as there is just a very light control to avoid crazy prices and scams. In practice, it's a free market and landlords have by no means been discouraged to offer flats.

bobthepanda 4y ago

Not all additional tourist revenue is worth the marginal costs. And cities have no obligation to host visitors they don’t want. Hotels are usually limited because they are unpleasant neighbors for actual residents. It’s not really a surprise that’s the main issue people have with AirBnB rentals.

Hermitian909 4y ago

> Prohibition never works, and piracy is a reflection of an unmet need. Banning things merely airs out open wounds, and leads to grey-markets such as shady uber/airbnb equivalents within the city. What do you mean by "works"? Yes, grey markets will pop up, but if Portugal banned AirBnB style renting that the market for that housing wouldn't shrink? It seems to me that prohibition might be a useful tool in a more comprehensive set of policies to address the problem.

pjmlp 4y ago
Nowadays people offering AirBnB rentals have to register themselves or they will be fined. How much control is happening, no idea, probably none as usual.
- jhugo 4y ago
  This is the type of thing that controlling is very difficult and thus expensive. As a result it's done at a pretty minimal level everywhere.
  - intothemild 4y ago
    The thing is... it's not actually. If you made a law to force AirBnB to share data on who is making the listing with the government, you have your register of who to tax/etc. You could also make laws to limit the number of properties per person, and if you're even smarter, you could use that in conjunction with a map of relationships between people, so you could limit the number of people putting listings in their family members names to get around any limitations. AirBnB has the data to assist governments.
    - jhugo 4y ago
      > If you made a law to force AirBnB to share data on who is making the listing with the government, you have your register of who to tax/etc. Airbnb will probably follow your law, but other platforms that do not will flourish. They will be difficult to regulate, given that they won't be in your jurisdiction. > You could also make laws to limit the number of properties per person. Many laws already exist that give unfavourable tax treatment to second and subsequent properties. They are widely avoided through family members and legal entity structures and a hand-wavy "map of relationships between people" isn't going to magically fix that. This would also have a fairly obvious negative effect: it would artificially limit supply in the rental market, driving up prices. A person who could have invested in multiple properties and supplied them to the rental market will instead supply at most one, and invest the rest of their money elsewhere. There isn't some nefarious conspiracy preventing effective regulation in this area. It's just a legitimately hard problem.

wikfwikf 4y ago

I'm generally a YIMBY and in favor of housing, but are we really so sure that new housing will solve the problems in cities like Barcelona or Lisbon (where tourists and people coming in attracted by the good quality of life generally have higher disposable incomes than most locals). If you just add housing, isn't it possible that the effect is like adding roads to prevent traffic congestion? The number of people coming in just increases even more until the marginal attractiveness is the same. From the point of view of locals this means that there are even more outsiders, and the affordability is just as bad.

pipodeclown 4y ago

Sure, but why on earth would any tourist choose to stay at some off site tourist hub? The whole point of visiting a historic city like say Lisbon, is that you get the stay in an historic city, not some modern off site tourist hub where you get to take a crammed full tourist bus to the centre.. Or would you propose strict accompanying zoning laws with strict enforcement? I think that would meet stiff resistance from property owners but would be feasible. I do think all of this would make the destination much less attractive to visit though so it really comes down to how much you want/need the tourists.

merry_flame 4y ago
I sympathize with your first point, but I believe only around 10% of tourists visiting Venice sleep there. Off-site tourist hubs are a real thing…

jbirer 4y ago

In Bucharest, the city started cracking on AirBNB, the problem is that the landlords are greedy and will risk legal action to get that sweet foreigner money. Not sure how much we can blame the local governments on this one.