They are freeing up ~10,000 houses over the next four years with this legislation. Barcelona built ~15,000 new properties between 2011 and 2020.
The math don't math. It's a drop in the bucket. The entire impact of AirBnB + all housing built in the last decade does not offset the last half decade of population growth.
Housing must be built more quickly than your population is growing to keep prices down, or you must concede that you live in a nice area where people wealthier than you wish to be and that those people are going to gentrify the area and displace locals. It's an unpleasant reality of the world.
EDIT: some good feedback in the responses. thanks! I'm being a bit dramatic by saying it's just a drop in the bucket, this action frees up more housing than was built over the same timespan, and it's possible to have effects on pricing greater than what would be inferred by the raw numbers because economics is tricky. cheers.
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.
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?
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.
As a share of the total number of people employed in New Zealand, direct tourism employment was 6.7 percent.
I think the main problem with tourism is that it is a luxury service and tourism income shrinks when the world economy stinks. The other issue is that many tourists are rude and unthankful, so it can be unpleasant working in a service industry, being a servant to well-off tourists.
New Zealand needs export income. Some of our product exports are worse for New Zealand than tourism (some farming particularly has negative effects and can have poor profits).
I wonder if part of the reason why Barcelona has population growth is because it has tourism income and jobs? Remove tourism and what happens next?
And it sucks in New Zealand that some of the most beautiful places are crowded and almost owned by tourists. Literally owned by tourists when we let foreigners buy property here and our current government wants to allow that again.
Yep, I'm considering buying a vacation home to Airbnb for this reason. I have mixed feelings about it though, because I don't want to be part of the problem. But I live in NYC and I can't move (shared custody), nor can I buy a suitable home in the city, meanwhile the national housing market is exploding. I need some way to hedge for real estate inflation, and vacation rentals have better ROI.