7 ms·

Honest question: does this work? It seems to me that this change will have unintended effects and will fail to produce the desired results. AFAIK rent in NYC

• kachapopopow 2y ago
  The problem is that residents leave entire areas of the city since they become empty. Foot traffic drops, local shops close - a non ending cycle of death.
• cheeze 2y ago
  I'm far from an expert but I'd think it would drive tourism prices up due to less supply of STR housing (which could harm a local economy, although a behemoth like Barcelona probably isn't super concerned here) Prices may not go down on rents, but if it means that more folks who actually _want to live in the city_ can, I see that as a positive. I can see in NY the case where decrease in housing leads to folks being priced out and moving elsewhere (NJ, etc.) Obviously not speaking with any data here.
  • doctorpangloss 2y ago
    Everyone wants lower housing prices, except for the house they currently own.
    • JoshTriplett 2y ago
      People who own a home, and don't have plans to move, would benefit from housing prices falling everywhere: property taxes go down, and other prices correlated with housing go down. Two categories where people don't want pricing to go down: If you have plans to move and prices aren't falling everywhere, the proceeds of a sale aren't enough to buy elsewhere. And if your bank owns the home rather than you, falling prices screw you over because you owe far more to the bank than you could make by selling.
      • km3r 2y ago
        Too bad prop 13 means prices would have to drop significantly before any longterm CA homeowner would see any drop. And the valuation dropping that much wiping out so much of their "on paper" wealth would be very unpopular.
      • coryrc 2y ago
        That's not how property taxes work.
        • ghaff 2y ago
          The cost/student doesn't go down just because local housing prices go down--which is where a lot of local taxes go to--and, in fact, the cost/student often goes up if you increase the population density.
        • JoshTriplett 2y ago
          That depends on the region. In many places they're based on property value, and in many of those places if your property value goes down you can apply to have your home re-assessed and get taxed according to the new value. (Conversely, if your property values go up your property taxes may go up accordingly, which can in some cases take people's homes from affordable to not affordable.)
          • coryrc 2y ago
            Not if everybody's goes up or down.
      • dubcanada 2y ago
        > And if your bank owns the home rather than you, falling prices screw you over because you owe far more to the bank than you could make by selling. So like what 99% of homes? If you rent you don't own it, if you own a condo you don't own it, if you own a house outright you are probably close to 1%. Most of Barcelona is rent/condos. There is not a ton of 250m2 mansions in downtown Barcelona.
      • dmurray 2y ago
• toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Where in Barcelona would you increase density? https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/barcelona-population https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/barcelona-pop... from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40752920 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40752920 ("Barcelona has a 16,000 people per square km density - that’s already one of the highest in Europe.") Capital moves faster than meat space. To defend the human (affordable housing), you have to regulate. The whole "just build more, I want my AirBnB" argument boggles the mind considering the physical system constraints in play. Easier to just ban AirBnB.
  • pupperino 2y ago
    That being said, in the US you can and should absolutely should build more, and basically get rid of most zoning regulations. You'd have a hard time finding anything as touristic and dense as Barcelona in the US.
    • toomuchtodo 2y ago
      I argue AirBnB should be banned anywhere building cannot be done at a rate which ensures affordable housing can exist for locals. Whether that is due to construction labor shortages, density, zoning, whatever, it does not matter. AirBnB can exist where there is surplus housing capacity, but should be banned anywhere else. Locals get votes, tourists and AirBnB do not. The harm of not being able to afford housing is far worse than harm incurred by not being able to book a vacation rental you prefer.
      • jupp0r 2y ago
        Following your logic, why not ban hotels?
        • toomuchtodo 2y ago
          Hotels go through an approval process to be built, and are regulated (where as AirBnB exists to skirt lodging regulation). Hotels are not competing against residential housing, but AirBnB is.
• walterbell 2y ago
  > rent in NYC hasn’t gone down NYC hotel and housing prices have been artificially inflated by government buying accommodations for homeless during 2020/2021, then migrants.
  • lostlogin 2y ago
    So prices have been inflated by people living in them? Is that artificial?
    • readthenotes1 2y ago
      It is when the government, not the tenants, pay the rent
      • dubcanada 2y ago
        How so? What about if the government pays 50% and the tenant pays 50%? Where exactly is this line drawn?
        • walterbell 2y ago
          In this specific instance, city government bought out entire hotels, reducing room inventory.
        • HDThoreaun 2y ago
          Yep, that would be artificial inflation too.
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• CPLX 2y ago
  Why would rent go down? There's a lot of factors at work. Since the default is rent spiraling upwards, a decrease in that rate would be a success by any standards.
• tomhoward 2y ago
  In Melbourne/Victoria, Australia, from 2025 they’re applying a government levy on vacation rentals and using it to fund new public and affordable housing projects [1]. They’ve also added a land tax on second homes to disincentivize hoarding of property (though this has had some perverse effects, notably, reducing long-term rental stock and moving into the owner-occupier segment). It’s too early to evaluate outcomes, but this general approach seems more sensible than an outright ban. Tax the activity to reduce it somewhat whilst generating state revenue to fund programs to mitigate the negative effects. [1] https://amp.abc.net.au/article/102878180 https://amp.abc.net.au/article/102878180
  • jll29 2y ago
    Good idea: I was wondering if the AirBnB license prices in Barcelona could be made more expensive to fund social housing projects from it (no idea how much they are right now in €/year/m²).
• davidw 2y ago
  > I’d assume that the solution is to build more housing to increase the supply Demand for tourist housing is probably a bit more elastic than for residential housing, so it'll probably help a bit, but in general, I agree that growing the pie is better than bitter fights over how to cut the pie up.
  • chongli 2y ago
    Elasticity of demand is the elephant in the room for build-more-housing advocates. Let's say NYC's mayor rubbed a genie's lamp and wished to double the city's housing supply overnight. Yes, rental and real estate prices would crash through the floor due to the glut of supply. But then millions of people would move to the city and buy up all that supply. This would rapidly double the population of the city which would cause tons of businesses to move there to hire everyone and then commercial real estate would skyrocket. At the end of the day, the city would be twice as large and more overcrowded than ever. Sure, they'd be more efficient in terms of infrastructure (plumbing, electricity, transit) but rents would skyrocket to capture that extra efficiency for landlords.
    • davidw 2y ago
      The elephant in the room for people who are against building enough housing is that they're all convinced that everyone would move to their particular locale. I have heard that "everyone" would move to * San Francisco * Bend, Oregon * Boulder, Colorado * Seattle * Austin, Texas * New York City * Santa Barbara, California * Hawaii * Montana * and on and on and on You know what? No, not everyone is going to move to New York or Bend or San Francisco. Building more housing keeps rents in check. And if some more people get to live in a place they want to be, that is a good thing.
      • trifurcate 2y ago
        What is different between building more housing and building more highway lanes?
      • chongli 2y ago
• francisofascii 2y ago
  Less housing for tourists, prices of remaining hotels goes up, less people visit, tourism economy takes a hit, existing residents not tied to tourism benefit.
  • shermantanktop 2y ago
    Having seen what excess tourism can do - yeah, sounds right. But the tourism economy is very likely much more elastic than the non-tourist businesses that have already left town. Reversing the damage may take a long time or may never happen.
• _2d30 2y ago
  You need to compare against the alternative, not just look at whether or not prices reduce YoY. Objectively, this policy should be good for what it purports to do: reduce housing prices for permanent residents. This policy actually impacts both supply, forcing these 10k units to either languish unproductive or return to market as rental units or for sale, and demand, reducing sales demand for conversion to short term rentals. Now, will this actually make a huge difference? Probably not. It’s only 10k units at most that return to the market in a city of 1.6M that likely has a lot of demand.
• credit_guy 2y ago
  > Genuinely curious about others’ takes on this My take is that real estate sold to foreigners is the best kind of export. You sell the good to the foreign investor, but the good stays in place. From time to time that investor visits and drops money in the local economy. Most of the time the guy is not there, but pays taxes. Pays taxes but does not consume government services.
  • AlexandrB 2y ago
    This completely neglects the opportunity cost of the real estate being used for something else (like housing citizens) instead. Housing is also not fungible - so if you "export" your most desirable real-estate you can't just make more of it.
    • credit_guy 2y ago
      > you can't just make more of it. Actually you can. It's called building. Take NYC for example. My guess is that at least half of the housing stock in NYC is "pre-war". The "war" in that expression is World War 2. No washer-driers, no elevators, but a good number of mice and rats. You could absolutely take these buildings down and build back something better. And that better could have more apartment units. I live in one of the most densely populated neighborhoods in NYC and in the world. All buildings are new (post 2000). If you replace the rest of the city with such buildings, you can certainly have enough housing for 30 million people. But the foreign investors don't buy to come and live here. You can just build, sell, and not deal with the crowding. And that could result in lower construction costs too. Why are new apartments so expensive? Because we don't know how to build anymore. We don't know because we don't build.
  • FactKnower69 2y ago
    Absolutely baffling that you could come to the conclusion that houses being kept empty for the benefit of speculators while citizens sleep on the street is somehow the best outcome
• standardUser 2y ago
  It certainly works, depending on what your goals are. Locals may appreciate fewer apartments in their building/neighborhood occupied by a rotating assortment of tourists, for example.
• seydor 2y ago
  its not as simple , it's a catch-22, if you build a lot of housing the city will lose its appeal , either because of traffic/walkability, because of sprawl, or because of the people it attracts (high housing prices act as a sort of filter to attract more ambitious/adventurous residents). At its current size the city seems to have hit a sweet spot of desirability which caused prices to skyrocket, and it brings a lot of tourist money to the same residents who are protesting. I think we need to shift from simplistic housing availability calculations to more broadly considering the motivations of people
• zrn900 2y ago
  It would work, but it also requires curbing the extra demand that is generated by foreigners moving into the city and scooping up the housing from the locals. > I might be naive, but I’d assume that the solution is to build more housing to increase the supply instead of curbing the demand? Spain is not the US. Neither Spain nor any other Mediterranean country has large surface area that could accommodate housing demand at such high levels - there is already scarce land that you can build on across the Mediterranean as there are limited shorelines and deltas that were created by rivers etc, and the rest is immediately mountainous or hilly landscape that is very difficult to build on. These countries could easily cope with their local demand, but allowing foreigners to buy housing caused a large influx of foreigners exacerbating the demand for housing and crowding out these places way beyond their capacity. The investment funds that scoop up housing to profit worsen the situation. Maybe the US could handle such a demand with its gigantic surface area - solely Texas is larger than ENTIRE Western Europe, mind that. Or Russia. Or China. But other countries in the world, especially the Mediterranean ones, don't have the space to even start comparing with those. The only solution is to limit the demand to the carrying capacity of each locale, province and country.
  • gield 2y ago
    >solely Texas is larger than ENTIRE Western Europe Definitely not, Texas is ~700,000 km2 while Spain is ~500,000 km2.
• doctorpangloss 2y ago
  No. If you want cheaper housing for yourself, live somewhere with cheap housing. If you are sincere and worried that the lack of cheap housing hurts your community: great. All the more reason to leave.
• smsm42 2y ago
  Would it reduce the number of tourists? Not likely, they'd just pay more to hotels (and thus have less money to spend on other things - vacation budget is usually limited, but it's distribution between various types of expense is not predetermined). Would it make Barcelona a less popular destination for non-natives? Not likely, unless it objectively becomes worse place for natives too. NYC, Barcelona and any major city that hasn't gone the way of SF and Portland, have the same problem - a lot of people like to be there, either temporarily or permanently, but the number of accommodations, both temporary and permanent, is not infinitely scalable and runs out pretty fast, especially if the city managers aren't actively working on fixing that problem by increasing the supply - which they often don't. Increasing the supply is hard and leads to a tangle of its own challenges. Blaming somebody else - especially somebody that doesn't even vote in the local elections - is much easier, and by the time it turns out it doesn't help - which will be some 10 years ago from now - the managers could fail upwards, retire or think about some other scapegoat to blame.