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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.