Barcelona has a population of ~1.7 million. The metro area surrounding is ~5.7 million. The metro area grew by ~100k in the past four years.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The pay in tourism is terrible, usually minimum wage, except for the owners of capital, who gain enormous returns on investing in hotels / airbnbs / tourist aimed businesses.
That means it has an awful return for the ones most in need which are the poor. It’s not a distributive industry.
On top of that, it can cause a “resource curse” type phenomenon where great beaches or some other attraction causes enormous amounts of investment in tourist infrastructure leading to a lack of opportunity for other businesses which could thrive with investment. Tourist gives you such great returns on investment it doesn’t make sense to do anything else if you have capital
Tourist gives you such great returns on investment it doesn’t make sense to do anything else if you have capital
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.
> The tourism industry has a significant impact on Spain’s economy, generating over 70 billion euros in gross value added (GVA) in 2019. This represents a substantial contribution to the country’s GDP and employment, with over 2.5 million people employed in the tourism sector
Well maybe you will just tell Spanish government how to replace that?
Having lived in two tourism-heavy cities over my life, I don't think most cites are fundamentally opposed to tourism per se. But — and that is a big "But" it is a question of the amount and the kind of tourism. Too much of the wrong tourism in the wrong area of the city can be a negative thing for living quality, for life outside touristic seasons, for the general development of neighborhoods etc.
So it is within a cities interest to have some degree of control ofer the amount and kind of tourism. And controlling the number of accommodations is a pretty good lever.
> Too much of the wrong tourism in the wrong area of the city can be a negative thing for living quality, for life outside touristic seasons, for the general development of neighborhoods etc.
If that was really a concern, cities like Barcelona would be railing against hostels and would impose a higher baseline for tourist taxes to eliminate the economic feasibility of projects catering to low-cost party tourism.
Well yes and no. Cities do have hostels and hotels under control by their ability to give or deny permits. If everybody can turn their private flat into an tourist rental just by signing up to an online platform that is no longer the case. Suddenly what was zoned as residental turns into tourism.
Surely there are multiple ways ro tackle that, e.g. one could require permits for those as well, but I didn't defend the measures taken by Barcelona, I defended the fact that unregulated AirBnB can turn into a problem for a city and the people living there.
Im not saying one should ignore it. Just that it’s not a particularly good industry for a country, particularly poor countries.
The pay in tourism is terrible, usually minimum wage, except for the owners of capital, who gain enormous returns on investing in hotels / airbnbs / tourist aimed businesses.
That means it has an awful return for the ones most in need which are the poor. It’s not a distributive industry.
On top of that, it can cause a “resource curse” type phenomenon where great beaches or some other attraction causes enormous amounts of investment in tourist infrastructure leading to a lack of opportunity for other businesses which could thrive with investment. Tourist gives you such great returns on investment it doesn’t make sense to do anything else if you have capital.
Can tourism be A PART of a healthy economy ? Sure. But it shouldn’t be in charge of that economy, in which case I’d say you’re looking at a “resource curse” type economy where only the rich prosper.
Tourism has widely distorted market prices for housing and accommodation in Barcelona however. Proving it can have very nefarious effects even in relatively diverse economies.
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.
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
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.
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.
I would argue that while there are some similarities, there are also many differences, and that claiming it's not distributive is incorrect. The number of workers I interact with (and to whom the money I spend flows) as a tourist is quite large compared to the number of people who benefit from use of an extracted natural resource.
> 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.
This discussion is about Barcelona.
Barcelona is one of the richest regions in Europe. It's hardly a third-world hellhole or a banana republic.
> Tourism is a shit industry. You could mostly annihilate it and replace it with productive things most of the time.
That's a bold statement, as if the whole world invests in tourism because they don't know better.
Spain's tourism sector represents a double-digit chunk of their GDP and is one of the rare sectors which has a direct effect in reducing unemployment, specially in the low-skilled, NEET cohort which is extremely problematic in countries such as Spain. Claiming that a country like Spain could simply annihilate it and replace it with something else is an extraordinary thing to say, specially as it lacks any support.
The world once had very little to no tourism and it worked just fine. It’s not essential to civilisation, and conceivably you could ban it with no major effects.
I’m not saying it’s a good idea to ban it. But tourism is anything but essential.
Sure the Spanish economy benefits from it right now but over reliance on it, as I explained above, can be a bad thing.
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.
> 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?
> * 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.
> We can maybe both agree that doing something is better than doing nothing?
Yes, that's the whole point. Doing something clearly better than doing nothing.
Railing against short-term rentals does absolutely nothing to fix the problem.
That does not grant anyone the right of fabricating scapegoats that do nothing to solve the actual problem. This is exactly what's happening regarding short-term rentals.
Blaming short-term rentals for the lack of affordable housing is one of the stupidest and miopoc scapegoats that can ever be put together. Airbnb is not the reason why your neighbor rents the apartment. Airbnb is not attracting new tourists. Worst-case scenario, Airbnb eats away at the profit margins of industrial-grade hotels.
The lack of affordable housing is caused by the lack of real estate investment, urban renewal programs, and even social housing. If most want to buy an apartment but they can't afford one, that's a telltale sign of short supply. You only fix this problem by significantly increasing supply.
It's also a politically motivated scapegoat. Barcelona's previous mayor built her whole platform on that scapegoat. She could have implemented urban renewal programs to actually increase the number of homes available in the market, she could have implemented public transportation programs to bring mass transit to low-density areas to attract private investment, she could have created a municipal tax on short-term rental to finance social housing programs or even subsidized low-income rental programs, etc.
But no. She did absolutely nothing even though the railed frequently against short-term rentals. Because that's the point: fabricate a convenient scapegoat to direct and focus the anger of the electorate. But that same electorate is only mobilized as long as the housing problem prevails, and thus they do absolutely nothing to fix it.
> How is Hotel Arts or Hotel W examples of replacing whole residential buildings or city blocks?
They aren't. They are however massive real estate investment in prime locations in Barcelona which could just as easily be residential buildings that easily provided hundreds of homes.
The issue is that the "airbnb" areas drive normal citizens out which during off-seasons drains foot traffic making local shops go out of business which further complicates the problem.
Not to mention that most tourists don't even sit around the local area, but rather go to the city attractions.
Airbnb and resident housing areas are just not compatible, they have different needs and require different infrastructure. Hotels are built around infrastructure supporting tourism and are much healthier for cities.
AirBnBs charge international prices, which creates a property market skewed by international investment.
I live in a tourist area, and prices here have gone up by between 100% at the low end to over 500% at the high end.
These are mostly holiday homes and holiday rentals, and the locals can't afford to live here any more - either renting or buying.
One of the results has been a huge political shift rightwards, with increasing hostility to tourists and immigrants. Of course the far right cynically take advantage of this issue, and of course they have no intention whatsoever of fixing anything.
But the fact that it's an issue at all is causing huge problems.
> charge international prices, which creates a property market skewed by international investment.
That ship has looong sailed. Especially in the days of full-time remote work jobs. Especially in the EU.
I wish a big barrel of industrial-grade luck to the good people of Barcelona! They definitely need it, because the changes they implemented so far (introducing rent control) did not help.
The problem with hotel rooms is that they’re more expensive, get much more expensive per additional person, and don’t have the amenities of an appartement.
If I’m somewhere with a group for longer than three days, we want to be able to hang somewhere and cook our own food. The only other thing that offers this feature set is private rooms in hostels, and those are both rare and nearly always fully booked.
I’m not saying having a good base for vacationing is anywhere near as important as residential housing supply, but saying “just book hotels lol” takes a very dim view on AirBnBs.
There are "apartments" (bedroom and living room with a mini-kitchen) built for short stays, I've stayed in on in Toronto (Vaughan area), but they seem to be more common in Berlin and other European cities where i have stayed in them as well.
The Toronto one was likely more expensive than an AirBnb, but in Berlin i don't remember it being that expensive.
Finding these places is a pain however, there is no universal name. Ive seen "Aparthotel" used a few times in Europe. Other times it is just "XXX Apartments" or "Residence" and you have to guess if they are for short-stay.
Sites like booking.com mix in people renting out their own property with these purpose built short stay locations which doesn't help discovery.
> The problem with hotel rooms is that they’re more expensive,
Maybe they are more expensive than the displayed rate for an AirBnB, but by the time you add in the cleaning fees and other non-sense things it turns out to be more expensive. Also, when I'm in a hotel, I'm not asked to wash the sheets, wash the dishes, or any of that nonsense as well as paying the cleaning fees.
No, it really is cheaper to rent Airbnb instead of hotel.
We are a family of four and I did the math several times. A couple years ago we were five, it was more difficult to find a suiting place.
You also have the added convenience of making food when you want without waiting a specific time, which is great when visiting a city.
AirBnBs have also started increasing rates based on extra people.
Maybe it's just me, but when I'm on vacation the last thing I want to spend my time doing is dishes. I'd also rather explore where I'm visiting than sitting in some random person's house.
Give me a hotel room with turn down service over an AirBnB every time.
I do like that when Airbnb, while there's no room cleaning or room service, you do often get a kitchen which is nice. You can also often stay in a "neighborhood" vs a commercial area.
It does feel like Airbnb is just reinventing hotels tho. (Just like streaming is re-inventing cable and Uber is re-inventing taxis)
I’ve moved back to hotels exclusively after using airbnb for a long time.
Between the hosts and the platform itself, they just got too greedy with fees and extras. It ended up at the stage that hotels are both cheaper and provide a better experience.
They also provide you with a lot of hidden features that you will take advantage of if something bad happens. None of that is offered by airbnb.
The reason why hotels are expensive is because they're properly regulated and are forced to be a net positive which is passed down to the customer. airbnbs had none of that until recently and all the negative impact was pocketed by the landlords.
"we want to be able to hang somewhere" ...just saying because I'm sorry I can't contain myself: This is exactly the use case Airbnb doesn't solve. I fly half-way across the world to meet my parents on vacation and almost without fail the only Airbnb I can find (or all the ones I can find) have a strict rule against guests. Hence I can't have my parents over 10 minutes to drink tea because if the owner, big brother, finds out I'll lose my entire remaining month of rent and be forcibly expelled. In Europe this is not joke, often a loss of $2000+
I truly hate Airbnb. Luckily since my parents only stay a week they can afford to stay in a hotel. Invariable we "hang out" with me sitting at the foot of their bed.
These "rules" become extremely oppressive when your home most of the year is an Airbnb room like me. This is why I use Booking or local corporate owned platfroms instead whenever possible
Camera's don't have to be hidden to prevent guests. It is allowed and becoming very common to have cameras at entrances and becoming common to restrict guests during the day as well as overnight.
I have never run into this alleged issue. In fact, we have several times booked AirBnB homes in the town of my youth and hosted Thanksgiving Dinner for my elderly mom and siblings who are themselves visiting and staying in AirBnB's. Yes, we asked the hosts before booking if we could cook and host a Thanksgiving Dinner and received their OK.
I truly love AirBnB and have stayed in them in most all my business and pleasure travels to Europe, Canada, Israel and across the USA.
Businesses are unable to plan around seasonality? What's up with that? In the US, businesses in touristy areas often will shut down for the slow season.
When I think of places dominated by tourism its not the tourism that did it. Its that the tourism is what is left after little other job growth in any other sector after whatever impetus that triggered building the town in the first places ceased to exist.
My personal example would be the old Turner Field in Atlanta.
Major sports team, but the area was a wasteland, because everything was developed around the 50,000 people flooding in for one afternoon. Parking lots, traffic flow, food stands.
The actual neighborhood was pretty dead.
Braves move up to a new stadium in Cobb county, some redevelopment, and now the old neighborhood is flourishing.
Saw the same as a (briefly) Florida resident.
I think it's difficult to establish "normal" development in an area subject to tourism tides, because many of the decisions are mutually exclusive.
Either {support tourism} or {support long term residential development}. And money intersects with politics, so eventually one set of interests win out.
Atlanta is a diversified economy though. When I think tourist dominated I think tourism is the main industry. Places like in the Caribbean that had to turn to that industry after the economics of whatever former niche cash crop the imperialists grew was obviated due to globalism.
Pricing moves at margins, not necessarily driven by totals. Ie. Pricing is primarily driven by the immediate demand and supply situation at a given time. Small changes in availability can have a dramatic effect. Good ways to understand this is to look at underlying data of auctions (richest in data) but pretty much any demand supply granular transaction data will show rhis. For eg. this is why small hoarding locally in emerging markets (where giant supermarkets will not immediately or easily truck in containers of products running short) also generates massive profits for traders.
Housing is of course a bit more complex - pricing is more sticky on the upside than downside (as home owners don't like to rent for less than before and may let units sit idle etc) and "instant" usually windows over weeks but fundamentally similar mechanics work. As an example, in Singapore, the government raised excise duty for non Singaporeans to purchase housing to 65% when housing became overheated. The number of rich foreigners buying property has always been small in absolute but was growing fast in rate as rich family money and bankers from Hong Kong started flowing to Singapore. Prices and also rentals across all classes of housing, not just the super premium properties favoured by the wealthy came down and people who had been pushed down at the margins into less than their preferred value housing (including ourselves) moved back up.
It should have helped its constituents by ensuring homebuilding meets population growth over periods of time, rather than allowing it to be constrained for decades and then point at AirBNB as the source.
True, and I agree this is nowhere near enough. But wouldn't a "defense in depth" approach be wise? There are no all or nothing solutions, especially when it comes to policy in a large city. Any bit of relief will no doubt likely be welcome.
Yeah, I agree. I think the change is a step in the right direction to address this specific concern. I think there will be some unintended consequences like loss of tourism dollars which will impact small business, but those concerns seem less important to voters.
Still, I fear that people generally look to politics for simple, one sentence solutions to problems which take decades to manifest.
Barcelona is the 68th densest city in the world. You look at a satellite map and you can see they have a very well planned city layout. It's dense and filled with tall buildings.
At some point the only lever left to pull is outright banning of foreigners. I'm not condoning that policy - just trying to highlight the futility of attempting to protect a desirable area from overpopulation.
> At some point the only lever left to pull is outright banning of foreigners.
That does not follow at all. If you look at the actual densities Barcelona is 1/3 as dense as the densest city in the world. There is plenty of room to accommodate more housing, they just need to build higher.
Barcelona the metropolitan area has around 3.5 million IIRC. It's the province has 5.3M.
The 15k new properties were only built in Barcelona? How many were built in the metropolis area?
It's obvious that more housing is needed, but freeing up housing in the city, potentially close to the center, is still a move that might make the city more livable as opposed to building something new in the outskirts.
But it's not just supply. The market rate for holiday letting has driven all lets up. Investors jump at a quick 10%.
This should depress prices, release rentals and sales. You're right, it's probably not enough, but like many urban centres, central Barcelona isn't that flexible.
Will this move solve the problem? No, but what alternative are you comparing it to where it fares so poorly?
I suspect even the staunchest proponents of unregulated construction of denser housing would only claim that it mitigates the problems of housing affordability, not that it solves them. This new STR policy could be one of many pieces of the puzzle.
Also, of course tourism is the first scapegoat. It’s visible, disliked, and inherently not going to stand up for itself. Take it away and people will be forced to confront that it wasn’t the primary problem. Regardless of how effective it is it’s a necessary first step.
That said cities across the developed world are struggling with housing, even ones that are not popular with tourists. Why it seems no one can build anymore is what is interesting.
Unregulated construction of denser housing solves housing affordability. It doesnt make housing free, but if we built china style mega towers with minimal regulation housing would be affordable for most people working full time.
Yes, let's replicate the model that was a famous disaster for China. Why do people feel the need to pontificate on issues they never bothered to learn about?
10,000 houses on 100k people is actually a substantial portion. I think its totally reasonable. And Airbnb houses that are permanent temp rentals have no special status in law when there's a housing shortage. Building more houses is important, but not incentivizing rental houses and even eliminating them is a good direction, and a significant step towards housing people.
The entire impact of AirBnB + all housing built in the last decade does not offset the last half decade of population growth.
Your retort here simply isn't logical.
10k doesn't fully offset 100k but it's a significant chunk of it, and when supply gets so compressed as to become inelastic, a 10k amelioration (that is also prevented from creeping up to 15k or 20k within a few years) can be quite significant. Plus certain districts are obviously impacted disproportionately compared to others by not just the reduction in housing available but the sheer foot traffic and other blight that comes along with a lopsided rise in tourist accommodations.
> 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.
The population growth is largely due to rich foreigners moving into the city:
"I was born and raised in Barcelona, no longer live there however. I didn't remember how bad it was until I went to visit my family last summer. Me and some friends went to walk around the center and the girl that took our orders at a Pans&Company didn't even know Spanish or Catalan, only English. It was honestly quite depressing. She was surprised we didn't open the conversation with English."
People say that it has become difficult to hear Catalan or Spanish being spoken in the city center and there are waitresses who don't know Spanish. Some started to say that this is not a case of gentrification, but a colonization.
Assuming your stats hold up then it would seem like politicians are being politicians and blaming someone else for a housing shortage rather than actually directly addressing the issue. It’s easy to distract regular folks by making them angry at Air BnB instead of just working on real solutions.
That will more than double the housing production (1500/yr construction, 2500/yr freed up) during the years it's implemented. This is a finite change that will run out, and more housing will definitely be needed, but imagine the opposite: no new construction for 7 years.
I think your comment is still fair. 100k population growth isn't the metric I think to focus on as if it's the a measure of total 'new demand', to be compared to 15k new homes as 'new supply'. After all, population growth in cities that are in high-demand like Barcelona is very much also a function of supply.
If you magically create 100k affordable homes, you'll find population growth to fill up those homes within a relatively short period (<10y). If you magically remove 100k homes, you'll see population drop. So population growth isn't a complete measure of demand. Rather it just says something about how much the housing stock reasonably can accommodate. If you build nothing, population growth will be minimal, but it doesn't mean all possible demand has been accommodated. It just means there's lots of latent demand that have no homes to move into.
It's more sensible to look at the growth of the housing stock verus existing housing stock. I read in this thread: 15k properties built over 10 years (1.5k per year), a metro that has houses 5.7 million people, 2.5 people per home, means there are 2.3 million homes. 1.5k homes per year on 2.3m existing homes means they're adding 0.06% housing stock per year.
That simply IS a drop in the bucket. It's peanuts. Most in-demand (capital/a-tier) cities aim to construct at least 1% a year. For example, Amsterdam grew by 15% in the last 10 years, despite very stringent building requirements, green zones that can't be built, height restrictions to protect the character of the inner city, swamp land foundations and various environmental, water & electricity capacity challenges NL is facing right now.
So yes, if you're constructing at a fraction of the rate of other in-demand cities, then I would agree that eliminating tourist apartments is a band-aid solution, not a root-cause solution that works in the long term.
As for the balance of tourism vs locals, it's a tricky one. I think one thing we shouldn't forget is that 1 tourist apartment creates a lot of meaningful experiences within a year. An average tourist say of about 5 days in a city means that across a 10 year period an apartment can accommodate either one family living there full-time, or 700 different families having a holiday experience in Barcelona.
Put differently, these 10 thousand tourist homes that will come on the market, will house 10 thousand households more, and will prevent 700 thousand households from renting them on a 5 day trip to Barcelona, adding only 0.04% to the housing stock (one-time) and changing very little about the economics of housing in Barcelona for (new) locals.
It's easy to hate on tourists, but being a tourist can be a wonderful experience, that is meaningful and valuable, and shouldn't just be dismissed as some annoyance to locals. Of course all should be in balance. To speak on a personal note: I live in a city that takes in 20 million tourists a year on a population of less than 1 million, I don't work in tourism and for me it's mostly an annoyance. I definitely think we shouldn't grow the number of tourists anymore in my city, I think the same for Barcelona is true. But I also think it's worthwhile to maintain a big chunk of current tourism, even if it's annoying to me as a local, because I have no monopoly on enjoying my city. We've restricted tourist apartments to renting 30 days a year (the number of days a local is on holiday himself, and rents out his apartment), and I think that's fine. No need to eliminate it altogether though.
They are aware it is not a complete solution. As the article quotes him:
> “The measures we have taken will not change the situation in one day. These things take time. But with these measures we are reaching a turning point”
While some of the chosen phrasing in the article does read rather ideological, as you quoted, that could just as easily be the bent of the writer.
Your comment itself is actually more ideological and unfactual than anything in the article…
> In this case, facts and logic, being so inconvenient to ideological and political forces, likely had nothing to do with the decision.
Neither OP nor you nor any other commenter thus far has pointed out any factual inaccuracies. And nothing about the measure is illogical since incremental changes are still a step in their desired direction. And how did you determine their “likely” reasoning from a single article alone? Again, as quoted, they are aware their concerns are not fully addressed by this action alone.
One can be a political actor and still be factual and logical. Claiming otherwise is illogical and untrue. And doing so to diminish a policy you do not like …well that’s ideological and political.
This is red-baiting. Every politician is politically motivated and doesn't actually say anything about why it's bad to ensure people have housing and keep out obnoxious airbnb tourists from residential areas.
Spooky scary socialists, send shivers down your spine. Free healthcare will shock your soul, seal your deed tonight.
Here in Europe building denser housing is extremely frowned upon by cultural conservatives, who unfortunately are in charge everywhere. That's why there's hardly any high-rises in Europe.
Extreme height restrictions combined with extreme regulatory costs is what has lead to this issue.
Show a European politician, especially a local one in charge of urban development, an image from Tokyo and they will recoil in horror.
Here in Europe everything must be flat and look cultural.
The first of those 12 is Emperador, a city of 692 people, so you have 692 people living very densely. Meanwhile, Paris, two ranks down, has more than 2 million people living at basically the same density. You'd need to account for that. The arbitrary nature of municipal and regional boundaries has always been the bane of comparisons of population density.
You could weigh the density by population (effectively giving you population²/area?! I'm not saying this is a good idea), and you'd get a top10 of Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Bucharest, Berlin, Athens, Milan, Brussels, Vienna, Naples, which despite the slightly bizarre metric seems a more sensible ranking (Emperador is at the bottom rank), and which, to be fair, also features two Spanish cities.
But again, it's kind of a pointless endeavor, because of the arbitrary nature of the boundaries chosen -- why Paris and not Paris metro? etc. I guess ideally you'd have a function density(person) giving you the population density of any given person and you'd want to look at the distribution of that function, specifically the average per country of that function.
It's plain as day once you actually visit Spainish towns and cities (try a motorcycle tour, you can hit a dozen or more a day, I've toured Spain several times) and compare it with the UK (I lived in the UK for 15 years).
German towns and cities feel a bit denser than the UK (I live in Switzerland and visit Germany every month).
Spain seems to have planning laws that force density. Small agricultural towns in the middle of nowhere have people living cheek by jowl in apartments and townhouses, with an abrupt cutoff once you hit the town boundary.
As an Spanish guy living in Japan, let me tell you that Japanese urban planning and development is an utter disaster that we should not copy. Please find a better example.
Politicians being politicians. Seems like each Mayor recently likes to distract everyone and blame the city's housing problem mostly on tourism. Which is easy to do as the city gets a huge number of visitors
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.