5 ms·

> The math don't math. It's a drop in the bucket. Since this is HN, I was expecting a little more rigor in proving the math not mathing: how many people can be

> The math don't math. It's a drop in the bucket. Since this is HN, I was expecting a little more rigor in proving the math not mathing: how many people can be housed in 15 000[1] + 10 000 houses? How small is the drop and how big is the bucket? From sibling comment, average density is 2.51 people per home * 25k houses which works out to 62 750 housed people out of the 100 000 population growth. If my math is correct, that is significantly more than a drop in the bucket, considering the Airbnb component is 40% of that number, or just over 25k people - which is a big drop indeed for a 100k bucket [1] Edit: I later realized your comment has numbers from multiple time windows. Substitute "15 000" with whatever number of houses were built/added in the past 4 years.

SeanAnderson 2y ago
The 15k houses were built over 10 years, but the 100k growth is over 4 years. So 4/10ths of 15k ~= 9k/47k housed. I think it's fair to say I'm being dramatic by saying it's a drop in the bucket. The action frees up more housing than Barcelona built over the same time period. This is good. However, it's still not a long-term solution. This is a one-time action that when taken, and combined with the housing being built, fails to provide for even 50% of the people moving to the city. Voters want a solution that makes living more affordable not just one that makes it less affordable less quickly. As an aside, I think people can become complacent when a one-time solution to a problem lessens the pain momentarily. Suddenly the issue isn't as high of a priority and so the underlying situation continues to exacerbate the problem. What will voters do in a few more years when this lever doesn't exist to pull? Ban all foreigners?
- jll29 2y ago
  I only hope this does not replace one problem with another: Because Spain's high unemployment, in particular youth unemployment and the construction sector, actions that reduce tourism lead to fewer jobs and less income flowing into the city. I'm not against the measure (last time in Barcelona I was in a hotel and my friends rented an AirBnB apartment instead; they had fun and I had to move hotel rooms because the guy above me flooded the bathtub), and excessive tourism (Barcelona, Edinburgh, Amsterdam all suffer from it) is annoying even putting housing prices and lack of availability to the side, but I just wonder.
  - kranke155 2y ago
    Tourism is a shit industry. You could mostly annihilate it and replace it with productive things most of the time.
    - oyashirochama 2y ago
      Tourism has its uses, and is a service industry like most modern country industries including most "productive" ones.
      - kranke155 2y ago
        Absolutely. I just don’t think that it should be more than 10% or so of an economy. Any time I’ve visited a place where tourism was a larger industry, it felt the place had became a parody, a Disneyland type version of what once was there.
    - syspec 2y ago
      I know your comment is a "hot take", but the thing is about Tourism as an industry, is that the places where that /is/ the industry end up not gaining any other industries. So they become stuck as a "tourism" industry place
      - phatfish 2y ago
        Similar to a country sitting on a large amount of natural resources like oil/gas. You don't have to bother about making your population productive. Allowed all your productive jobs to be offshored? Mine the natural resource of tourists, as long as there was a golden age that left something interesting for them to visit.
        kranke155 2y ago
        That’s exactly right. It is exactly like oil and “resource curse”, for many poor countries. The pay is generally minimum wage and the only ones who see big returns are the owners of capital. It’s not a distributive industry. If you have too much of your country’s economy invested, I’d say you’re almost always looking at an unhealthy economy.
- Retric 2y ago
  They don’t need a long term solution. The larger context is Spain’s population is flat with declines in the last 24 months and trend likely to continue in the coming decades. Barcelona’s population peaked in 1979 and only recently recovered to the level seen in 1990. So they likely don’t actually need to add significant housing long term. Freeing up AirBnB apartments in the short term looks like a reasonable solution until population decline kicks in and removes the need for extra housing. https://datacommons.org/place/wikidataId/Q1492?utm_medium=explore&mprop=count&popt=Person&hl=en https://datacommons.org/place/wikidataId/Q1492?utm_medium=ex...
- chipdart 2y ago
  > I think it's fair to say I'm being dramatic by saying it's a drop in the bucket. I don't think it's dramatic. The whole anti-tourist arguments are based on, to put it charitably, politically-motivated specious reasoning. In this particular example, this whole argument is based on these assumptions: * making available each and every single one of those 15k houses for long-term rentals or sales instead of making them available for short-term rentals would prevent or significantly attenuate the existing housing crisis, * Demand for short-term rentals has no positive impact on the housing market by creating demand for real estate investments and urban renewal programmes, * Regulating away short-term rentals would not shift demand to classic HORECA offerings, which results in replacing whole residential buildings or even city blocks right in the city center. See for example Hotel Arts Barcelona or W Barcelona. The whole anti-tourist sentiment is based on nonsense, like assuming that just because a luxury suite is on AirBnB it would otherwise be made available as affordable housing for working-class family. And should I point out the "tourists go home, refugees welcomed" self-defeating propaganda piece?
  - diggan 2y ago
    > * making available each and every single one of those 15k houses for long-term rentals or sales instead of making them available for short-term rentals would prevent or significantly attenuate the existing housing crisis, We can maybe both agree that doing something is better than doing nothing? Hopefully this is just one of the steps in a larger plan. Not a single thing will solve the current issues, but a combination of steps just might. At least someone is trying, which is a step in the right direction. > Regulating away short-term rentals would not shift demand to classic HORECA offerings, which results in replacing whole residential buildings or even city blocks right in the city center. See for example Hotel Arts Barcelona or W Barcelona. How is Hotel Arts or Hotel W examples of replacing whole residential buildings or city blocks? Both of them were built on previous undeveloped land (or sea in the case of Hotel W) and were new constructions when built, not reformations of existing buildings. > The whole anti-tourist sentiment is based on nonsense People's feelings are always "nonsense" if seen from a scientific/engineering perspective. People are hurt in numerous ways, and try to put the blame somewhere. They're being priced out of their homes, they see AirBnbs all over the place and you cannot walk outside without hearing loud tourists screaming in English and being awful, hard to blame people from drawing the lines between these things.

SeanAnderson 2y ago

The 15k houses were built over 10 years, but the 100k growth is over 4 years. So 4/10ths of 15k ~= 9k/47k housed. I think it's fair to say I'm being dramatic by saying it's a drop in the bucket. The action frees up more housing than Barcelona built over the same time period. This is good. However, it's still not a long-term solution. This is a one-time action that when taken, and combined with the housing being built, fails to provide for even 50% of the people moving to the city. Voters want a solution that makes living more affordable not just one that makes it less affordable less quickly. As an aside, I think people can become complacent when a one-time solution to a problem lessens the pain momentarily. Suddenly the issue isn't as high of a priority and so the underlying situation continues to exacerbate the problem. What will voters do in a few more years when this lever doesn't exist to pull? Ban all foreigners?

jll29 2y ago
I only hope this does not replace one problem with another: Because Spain's high unemployment, in particular youth unemployment and the construction sector, actions that reduce tourism lead to fewer jobs and less income flowing into the city. I'm not against the measure (last time in Barcelona I was in a hotel and my friends rented an AirBnB apartment instead; they had fun and I had to move hotel rooms because the guy above me flooded the bathtub), and excessive tourism (Barcelona, Edinburgh, Amsterdam all suffer from it) is annoying even putting housing prices and lack of availability to the side, but I just wonder.
- kranke155 2y ago
  Tourism is a shit industry. You could mostly annihilate it and replace it with productive things most of the time.
  - oyashirochama 2y ago
    Tourism has its uses, and is a service industry like most modern country industries including most "productive" ones.
    - kranke155 2y ago
      Absolutely. I just don’t think that it should be more than 10% or so of an economy. Any time I’ve visited a place where tourism was a larger industry, it felt the place had became a parody, a Disneyland type version of what once was there.
  - syspec 2y ago
    I know your comment is a "hot take", but the thing is about Tourism as an industry, is that the places where that /is/ the industry end up not gaining any other industries. So they become stuck as a "tourism" industry place
    - phatfish 2y ago
      Similar to a country sitting on a large amount of natural resources like oil/gas. You don't have to bother about making your population productive. Allowed all your productive jobs to be offshored? Mine the natural resource of tourists, as long as there was a golden age that left something interesting for them to visit.
      - kranke155 2y ago
        That’s exactly right. It is exactly like oil and “resource curse”, for many poor countries. The pay is generally minimum wage and the only ones who see big returns are the owners of capital. It’s not a distributive industry. If you have too much of your country’s economy invested, I’d say you’re almost always looking at an unhealthy economy.
Retric 2y ago
They don’t need a long term solution. The larger context is Spain’s population is flat with declines in the last 24 months and trend likely to continue in the coming decades. Barcelona’s population peaked in 1979 and only recently recovered to the level seen in 1990. So they likely don’t actually need to add significant housing long term. Freeing up AirBnB apartments in the short term looks like a reasonable solution until population decline kicks in and removes the need for extra housing. https://datacommons.org/place/wikidataId/Q1492?utm_medium=explore&mprop=count&popt=Person&hl=en https://datacommons.org/place/wikidataId/Q1492?utm_medium=ex...
chipdart 2y ago
> I think it's fair to say I'm being dramatic by saying it's a drop in the bucket. I don't think it's dramatic. The whole anti-tourist arguments are based on, to put it charitably, politically-motivated specious reasoning. In this particular example, this whole argument is based on these assumptions: * making available each and every single one of those 15k houses for long-term rentals or sales instead of making them available for short-term rentals would prevent or significantly attenuate the existing housing crisis, * Demand for short-term rentals has no positive impact on the housing market by creating demand for real estate investments and urban renewal programmes, * Regulating away short-term rentals would not shift demand to classic HORECA offerings, which results in replacing whole residential buildings or even city blocks right in the city center. See for example Hotel Arts Barcelona or W Barcelona. The whole anti-tourist sentiment is based on nonsense, like assuming that just because a luxury suite is on AirBnB it would otherwise be made available as affordable housing for working-class family. And should I point out the "tourists go home, refugees welcomed" self-defeating propaganda piece?
- diggan 2y ago
  > * making available each and every single one of those 15k houses for long-term rentals or sales instead of making them available for short-term rentals would prevent or significantly attenuate the existing housing crisis, We can maybe both agree that doing something is better than doing nothing? Hopefully this is just one of the steps in a larger plan. Not a single thing will solve the current issues, but a combination of steps just might. At least someone is trying, which is a step in the right direction. > Regulating away short-term rentals would not shift demand to classic HORECA offerings, which results in replacing whole residential buildings or even city blocks right in the city center. See for example Hotel Arts Barcelona or W Barcelona. How is Hotel Arts or Hotel W examples of replacing whole residential buildings or city blocks? Both of them were built on previous undeveloped land (or sea in the case of Hotel W) and were new constructions when built, not reformations of existing buildings. > The whole anti-tourist sentiment is based on nonsense People's feelings are always "nonsense" if seen from a scientific/engineering perspective. People are hurt in numerous ways, and try to put the blame somewhere. They're being priced out of their homes, they see AirBnbs all over the place and you cannot walk outside without hearing loud tourists screaming in English and being awful, hard to blame people from drawing the lines between these things.