It seems to me that this change will have unintended effects and will fail to produce the desired results.
AFAIK rent in NYC hasn’t gone down since they changed their short-term rental regulations.
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?
Genuinely curious about others’ takes on this.
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.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/barcelona-pop...
from >>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.
NYC hotel and housing prices have been artificially inflated by government buying accommodations for homeless during 2020/2021, then migrants.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"most" is doing a lot of work here. don't forget you probably don't want to live next to an airport, railroad, chemical plant
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.
It would make sense to increase density around existing rail infrastructure. Barcelona has 7700 km2 of space, that's a lot. They have only 750 persons per km2 on average. Especially the outskirts of the province have really bad density. For example, Sant Joan de Vilatorrada has only 660 inhabitants per km^2 and it is only 3 km from the railway station, 80 min from the Sants station. That density is worse than Phoenix, Arizona, which has 1198/km2. So there is lots of available space.
Note that these numbers are of the Province of Barcelona. I don't know why you'd restrain yourself to the city proper. Here is a dense map of rail: https://www.urbanrail.net/eu/es/bcn/bcn-region-map.htm
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.
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.
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.
Now, that's the way you do it.
You play the market with a BnB.
That ain't workin': that's the way you do it.
Money for nothin' and your rent for free.
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
In reality, your best hope is to get one city to build a lot of housing. Then everyone moves there and we’re all unhappy.
This, by the way, is the reason homelessness is so bad in San Francisco despite their government spending enormous amounts of money fighting homelessness. All the other cities in the US sent all their homeless people to SF!
That's covered by the case of "property values go down everywhere"; you only have a problem if your property value goes down but the value of property you want to buy doesn't.
And really, not everyone is going to move somewhere. You could not pay me enough to live in NYC or San Francisco. People who love NYC would probably be bored in my small city.
Burdensome parking mandates are being eliminated or reduced across the country, as one example.
One way to try to get more places to reform on a similar timeline is to join a nationwide group, like https://new.yimbyaction.org/ or https://welcomingneighbors.us/
> 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.
The article, submission and discussions are about Barcelona city, not some far off town like Sant Joan de Vilatorrada (population: ~10k). No one who lives there would say they live in Barcelona, at most they'd say Manresa as that's the closest city.
But yes, if you're willing to live in the Catalan country-side, then of course Barcelona doesn't suffer from the density for you, but it's not a solution for us who live in Barcelona city.
Sant Joan de Vilatorrada is nowhere near Barcelona city, it's 15 hours walk away.
Normally hotels are built near either business or tourist areas. Very few people want their residences in the suburban office park areas. Tourist areas tend to be older areas that have strong restrictions on new development--hotels there have to go through long permitting processes.
https://www.google.com/maps/search/barcelona+hotels/@41.3806...
Not sure what you’re implying here but in the US homes in the suburbs back up to office parks all the time.
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.
Right… you go and make that pitch. Run for mayor with 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.
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.
Of course they do.
I was just observing yesterday a big condo development right across from a recently-vacated office complex in an ex-urban area where I used to work.
In Yonghe (a suburb of Taipei), the population density is over 38,000/sqkm.
They don't ban AirBnB apartments and renting a normal lease there, I was paying about $300 USD/month for rent until 2022, when I moved to LA.
Definitely not, Texas is ~700,000 km2 while Spain is ~500,000 km2.