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> According to Goodman, the Airbnb Effect is stronger in small communities, like mountain towns or beach towns, which tend to have limited housing stock, high h

• jddj 2y ago
  The current top comment is from a former mountain-town resident who says that most of the houses are kept empty outside of the peak season.
  • toast0 2y ago
    It's hard to rent a house to a local during off-peak and then rent to tourists during the peak season. And it doesn't address the problem of not enough capacity at peak. You've got to either increase housing or limit population (including seasonal workers and tourists). Traditionally, short term rentals are served by hotels, and you can limit the short term population by limiting the number of hotel rooms. That doesn't really work anymore, if there's insufficient hotel space, it's now very easy to book short term rentals everywhere else. If it was just that people don't want to stay in hotels anymore, no big deal --- locals could sublet their places to tourists and stay in the hotels during the season. But I think you'll find hotels are full during the season as well. Mountain-towns often have a real need to limit population, as they don't have the infrastructure to support metro level population density. And it wouldn't be the mountain town people want to visit if you built it up to metro level.
  • davidw 2y ago
    That indicates that they are not rented out. Perhaps more AirBnB's would be preferable to people just leaving housing empty? The overall solution is 'more housing', but perhaps a vacancy tax would create some incentives to not let it just sit there.
• tony_cannistra 2y ago
  Take a minute to consider what a small mountain or beach community that you appreciate would be like if development became more flexible in the ways you're considering. Would you actually want to go there anymore? Exactly.
  • Solvency 2y ago
    while i agree because i hate people and crowds and love small isolated beach towns... Miami FL sort of proves that you can have absolutely insane amounts of development in a beach area and get massive tourist traffic.
    • digging 2y ago
      So... those are two completely different things.
  • lukas099 2y ago
    Would it become so crowded that nobody goes there anymore?
    • clutchdude 2y ago
      "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." - Yogism.
    • function_seven 2y ago
      "It" would become so crowded that it's not "it" anymore. A quaint mountain town is no longer that once you double capacity and build dense housing. Which, depending on who you are, might be fine or it might not be. There's no neutral right answer here. But if someone grew up in a small town—and is now lamenting that it's nothing but tourists—building more accommodations won't return it to its former status. It'll transform it into something else.
      • lukas099 2y ago
        I agree with you, but we've overweighted the desires of the "haves" too much and for too long. Communities change and they need to get over it.
• carlosjobim 2y ago
  Every old person demands lottery jackpot money to ever sell any real estate they hold, whether that is a house or just land that can be developed. That means there is very little return on investment for building new hotels and holiday stays. This is the reason why AirBnB became a thing in the first place. With the larger global middle class there is more demand for touristic stays than hotels can supply in beach towns and such, while at the same time not being worth it to build a new hotel for extra capacity.
  • tgv 2y ago
    And younger people are so well known for selling way below the market price. Right.
    • carlosjobim 2y ago
      Younger people do not own real estate to sell. At most they own their own dwelling. Unless you're looking at outliers.
      • carlosjobim 2y ago
        Edit: Actually, younger people are well known for selling below market value. They're selling their labour for far below what it's worth, if we are to compare the price of labour with the housing that you are supposed to purchase with your wages. If wages were proportional to the cost of shelter, then $50 per hour would be the minimum for any person to work any job. If you're reading this and think that's absurd, then why is it not absurd for real estate owners to demand lottery jackpot prices to sell any real estate, or demand a working persons complete salary in rent?
• digging 2y ago
  > Absolutely no option to build more houses under any circumstances, of course. This is the US we're talking about, so yeah it's basically illegal to increase supply in a useful way, since the vast majority of the US is zoned for car-dependent single-family housing, which adds sprawls more than community. As for adaptability, they're talking about fluctuations, not sustained increase. A smaller town can't absorb large fluctuations without draining resources for unused housing once those fluctuations recede.
• toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Sometimes building more is simply not feasible, in which case, you must destroy demand and have flavors of central planning (with housing prioritized for workers and existing residents, vs newcomers and tourists). The free market and fast moving capital is a paperclip maximizer, without controls and guardrails. There is nothing wrong with destroying demand. Life isn't fair, and we can't all live where we want. If certain jurisdictions want to prioritize some flavor of affordable or stable housing for certain cohorts, that is their right.
  • twobitshifter 2y ago
    Why isn’t it feasible?
    • toomuchtodo 2y ago
      Usually either zoning (legit zoning concerns, not NIMBY) or actual land constraints, but there can be other factors. My experience was trying to find a buildable lot years ago during COVID in Asheville, NC, and there just isn't much buildable land left (in the opinion of multiple builders and surveyors I spoke with, and I was willing to consider exotic building techniques to accommodate suboptimal lots, real "side of the mountain" sort of stuff). In some circumstances, I was told I could build but it would be uninsurable and to proceed at my own peril. If your beach town is only so many sq miles/km and you can only build so high, that is your limit. How much could you build in say, St Pete Beach, which is only 2.2 square miles of land. Now, I am incredibly mindful this does not apply everywhere, and "buildable land" has a lot of nuance, but supply is not infinite and it is important to note that if you cannot encourage more supply (for whatever reason) you are left to twiddle the demand side of the equation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Pete_Beach,_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Pete_Beach,_Florida
• Terr_ 2y ago
  To wander a little bit "meta" here: Property rights--and therefore zoning--are about managing collective expectations or lack-thereof. For example, the expectation that when I buy a house, the sunny lawn will continue to be in the path of sunlight, the clean air will not start smelling like a paper-mill. It also refuses to cover some unreasonable expectations, such as "my neighbor's house will continue to be a color I find pleasing." So to some extent, these kinds of problems represent a failure of our systems to capture and model that space.
• somewhereoutth 2y ago
  And how would you stop all these new houses being turned into AirBnBs? As soon as the extra supply dips the tourist price, a whole swath more tourists can afford to come and stay. Locals will remain in their cars/tents/parents' basements.
  • anon84873628 2y ago
    That would seem to imply that the tourist value of the place is still hugely under appreciated. That may suck for some people, but other locals will be making a killing as they exploit a new resource.
• twobitshifter 2y ago
  I really felt for the Santa Monica beach town of 90,000 mentioned in the article.
• afavour 2y ago
  I absolutely believe big urban areas like NYC should be building wherever they can. But somewhere reliant on tourism like a small beach town has a much more delicate dance to do. If you mindlessly build up you will alter the “product” you are offering your tourist customers and could easily wreck that balance of livable for locals and desirable for tourists. Before the boom in short term rentals a lot of these places simply had a set capacity. Only so many hotel rooms available on any given night and when the town’s capacity for tourism is full, it’s full. The locals lived in properties that weren’t suitable for tourists, the local businesses made enough money to thrive. There’s not actually anything inherently wrong with that. A tourist town doesn’t have to keep expanding to meet demand.
• Tiktaalik 2y ago
  "Just build more homes" is indeed the obvious solution, but from my experience trying to build things in a very small (sub 4000) remote and rural town, I have witnessed some things that I think are reasons why it's not this simple. In major cities the reason that housing isn't getting built isn't due to shortage of demand, but rather often exclusionary zoning, so "build more homes" is a good and easy solution here. In contrast, in small towns it's less zoning and more often that buildings aren't profitable and viable to build. I think many of these towns are stuck in a situation of low vacancy and shortage of housing, while also at the same time not being a positive environment for real investment in creating new housing. As the costs of construction continue to spike and interest rates have risen it has only become worse. These are towns where there can often literally be no trades, no plumbers, nothing. So everything must be brought in at great expense. So what happens here is that because construction is so expensive and difficult, the low hanging fruit of buying something existing and renovating is dramatically more appealing and so that is the only real housing investment we see. Stricter Airbnb regulations could create more balance and force housing investment into building hotels and new homes. Other than that I'm not really sure I see a solution other than some government incentives or direct action in creating more housing for regular people in places where housing is needed but is rarely profitable to create.
  • ryandrake 2y ago
    Also, if you carelessly chuck more homes into a quaint, remote, small town, you run the risk of turning that town into Yet Another Boring Suburb, and now maybe fewer people want to visit there anymore. The solution isn't always just density and cramming more homes.