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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
That being said, in the US you can and should absolutely should build more, and basically get rid of most zoning regulations. You'd have a hard time finding anything as touristic and dense as Barcelona in the US.
Except there don’t appear to be anywhere near enough airbnbs to put a dent in the rent increase. I’m not saying it won’t do anything; I’m just saying it won’t do much. If you want to lower rents, you’re going to need to find a place to build, and if you can’t find any place, then prices will continue to go up and who will you find to scape goat then?
The problem is that residents leave entire areas of the city since they become empty. Foot traffic drops, local shops close - a non ending cycle of death.
In Melbourne/Victoria, Australia, from 2025 they’re applying a government levy on vacation rentals and using it to fund new public and affordable housing projects [1].
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.
Good idea: I was wondering if the AirBnB license prices in Barcelona could be made more expensive to fund social housing projects from it (no idea how much they are right now in €/year/m²).
You need to compare against the alternative, not just look at whether or not prices reduce YoY.
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.
> I’d assume that the solution is to build more housing to increase the supply
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.
Elasticity of demand is the elephant in the room for build-more-housing advocates. Let's say NYC's mayor rubbed a genie's lamp and wished to double the city's housing supply overnight. Yes, rental and real estate prices would crash through the floor due to the glut of supply. But then millions of people would move to the city and buy up all that supply.
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 work, but it also requires curbing the extra demand that is generated by foreigners moving into the city and scooping up the housing from the locals.
> 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.
I'm far from an expert but I'd think it would drive tourism prices up due to less supply of STR housing (which could harm a local economy, although a behemoth like Barcelona probably isn't super concerned here)
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.)
Would it reduce the number of tourists? Not likely, they'd just pay more to hotels (and thus have less money to spend on other things - vacation budget is usually limited, but it's distribution between various types of expense is not predetermined). Would it make Barcelona a less popular destination for non-natives? Not likely, unless it objectively becomes worse place for natives too.
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.
Why would rent go down? There's a lot of factors at work. Since the default is rent spiraling upwards, a decrease in that rate would be a success by any standards.
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.
This completely neglects the opportunity cost of the real estate being used for something else (like housing citizens) instead. Housing is also not fungible - so if you "export" your most desirable real-estate you can't just make more of it.
Absolutely baffling that you could come to the conclusion that houses being kept empty for the benefit of speculators while citizens sleep on the street is somehow the best outcome
Less housing for tourists, prices of remaining hotels goes up, less people visit, tourism economy takes a hit, existing residents not tied to tourism benefit.
Having seen what excess tourism can do - yeah, sounds right. But the tourism economy is very likely much more elastic than the non-tourist businesses that have already left town. Reversing the damage may take a long time or may never happen.
its not as simple , it's a catch-22, if you build a lot of housing the city will lose its appeal , either because of traffic/walkability, because of sprawl, or because of the people it attracts (high housing prices act as a sort of filter to attract more ambitious/adventurous residents).
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
It certainly works, depending on what your goals are. Locals may appreciate fewer apartments in their building/neighborhood occupied by a rotating assortment of tourists, for example.
I've been living in Barcelona for a long time. The mayor is very, very cozy with the hotel industry, which is very much effected by tourist apartments and Airbnb. And he will most likely be out of power in 3 years, so won't actually have to see this through and is just doing this to make himself look good with the many citizens who believe we have too many tourist.
Helsinki is currently an interesting case, technically having oversupply of apartments. It's because the rising interest rates cratered the buyers' budgets -- the result is a mild downward trend in prices, definitely no crash. Building companies sit on a large supply on finished unsold apartments but steadfastly refuse to lower prices even a bit.
New construction has halted completely. Seems like the construction sector will rather hold their finished stock and wait for the demand side to pick up due to necessity (people still move in to the city), or due to interest rates eventually going down.
“Oversupply” is in the eye of the beholder. There’s a market clearing price for everything.
The builders can hold out for a while, but the shoe has to drop eventually. Builders only make profit when building, and if your credit is extended on old projects you can’t start new ones, hence why construction has halted.
The problem is covid. Pretty much everyone in any developed economy believes the inflation+interest rate increases will be temporary. So they’re betting inflation will go back to what it was, interest rate policy will loosen again, and people’s budgets will increase again.
I think they might be in for a very rude awakening. And not only that, housing preferences for the highest income professionals have fundamentally changed due to WFH. They could all get stuck dumping the wrong stock on a weak market all at the same time in a year or so.
Government should build housing and sell it at a modest loss. The markets are overheated and can do with some cooling. Too bad for anyone using property values as collateral for arcane financial schemes, should have managed your risk better.
They want cheap housing in a popular place to live, but they don't want to change the character of where they live to support housing actually being cheap.
The best they can actually get is locking the city down so the current residents are effectively lottery winners, but no one from the outside can move there.
building more devalues their assets. we are creating artificial scarcity of a basic human need because we turned it into a financial investment vehicle.
That would be a paradox. It's not just housing-as-investment people who would be unhappy with increasingly dense housing/population - overdevelopment can sometimes ruin your home. The difficulty in developing in desirable areas isn't just due to a minority of rich assholes protecting their investments.
Spain is not the US. Barcelona had been building a lot of housing. Its not enough as they get converted to airbnbs or get scooped up by rich foreigners or foreign investment funds.
Real estate is only a good investment vehicle because the western world refuses to build shit. why on earth would you expect investors be enticed to buy a fundamentally depreciating asset instead of equities?
Lol what? Maybe back in 2007 before the crash that ruined tons of Spanish construction companies and investment in real estate. Otherwise the US builds a lot, and apparently Barcelona still doesn't build enough.
Barcelona can basically not grow horizontally anymore, being blocked in from all sides and all the ground is already covered by something.
So the alternative is to build vertically, but that also comes with trade-offs as the streets get less sun and city dwellers will be able to see less sky.
People on the internet will do anything but read before spouting their obvious solutions on the internet.
A lot of People in “colder” countries with higher purchasing power (specially in Europe) still want to move to Barcelona now that they can work remotely. I wonder how this fact affects the prices compared to tourism apartments.
> A lot of People in “colder” countries with higher purchasing power (specially in Europe) still want to move to Barcelona now that they can work remotely.
That's less and less true. And of those who actually moved to Barcelona, some already left (and companies too) when the independentists started being openly hostile to anything non-catalan.
Why someone with the means to do what is called "geographical arbitrage" would pick Barcelona is totally beyond me.
That sounds a lot like all the homeowners in California that have sold their significantly overvalued homes for 7 figures to move to states where real estate is a fraction of the cost. Generally it’s considered to be a factor in home price inflation in those cheaper states.
being a tourist destination seems to me almost like a resource curse, like oil wealth can be in certain countries.
tourism can be so lucrative that it is actually profitable to force out normal people and completely reorient the economy away from all other productive activities. eventually large parts of the city will become totally stagnant, but this doesn't seem to stop tourists from coming. there's often a constituency of people who are really benefiting from tourism (property owners, tour operators, restaurants) and who form a powerful bloc opposed to any restrictions or taxes.
it really seems quite similar to an economy where natural resource profits drive everything, it's impossible to get any other industries off the ground or make enough money to live in any other way.
I grew up and live in a city that's often top of the list for tourist destinations and where people are moving to. It is a great city, but it's also a curse with so many people here and more every day. Many of the things I used to do for fun are no longer feasible/easy to do. But, more jobs also came and property values have gone way up - both items are/were good for me.
Tourism is lucrative only for a handful of major tourism corporations/agencies, a few local businesses/shops that can cater to locals, and a few among the locals who can use their real estate for things like airbnb. Only 6% of Spaniards have more than one house. So only 6% of them could actually benefit from this situation even if airbnb was a good thing.
The reality of the matter is that what's happening in Barcelona ended up resembling more a colonization when tourism got combined with golden visas that allow rich foreigners and investment funds to scoop up local housing and the recent digital nomad wave. There are now more foreigners in the city center than locals and you are hard pressed to hear Spanish or Catalan being spoken around the place.
"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."
I like AirBNB especially for housing me in a regular apartment with more local vibe, won't travel to Barcelona again because I hate hotels for being too impersonal, there are other places that don't close up to visit. I respect their choice, I also prefer tourism on my own terms.
Taxing short term rentals to build affordable housing seems like a good idea to me.
It's a short term authoritarian bandaid that doesn't even help that many people, all the while fostering resentment and opening up increasingly authoritarian measures in the future.
We should go the asian route of increasing density and size. It's not like Barcelona is fully developed border to border.
It's 67th in the world and less dense than 11 French cities, though not a great comparison because most of those are small cities. But just because it's in the top 100 doesn't mean it's maxed out. It still has 5000/sqkm fewer people than Paris.
Nor does it mean this trade off for a measly 10,000 flats is worth it in such a large city.
It's just basic urban planning and zoning. You can't run a factory in your apartment and you can't run a hotel. Plenty of cities restrict where hotels can operate. This is nothing special and certainly not authoritarian. These measures are quite popular because, shocking, people in residential neighborhoods like have real neighbors rather than hotel guests.
Yes, obviously everyone wants to be the last person allowed to move in somewhere, that's why they support these sorts of policies that foment resentment. NIMBYism also stifles most development in the US. But I don't see how it's not authoritarian.
Giving these 10k flats to locals isn't going to put a dent in the housing economy.
And yes, the locals want more authoritarianism to keep away the overcrowding tourists, rich foreigners, and people who think like you. That's what the problem needs and what people like you understand.
We have to ban accounts that keep doing this, so please stop doing this, and please make sure you're not using HN primarily for political or ideological battle.
(I suppose I should add the standard disclaimer that no, we don't care about your views. We care about your following the rules and using the site as intended, same as with any other user.)
Readit News
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?
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.
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.
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.
https://www.barcelona.cat/infobarcelona/en/tema/city-council...
https://www.amb.cat/en/web/area-metropolitana/coneixer-l-are...
https://www.ine.es/jaxiT3/Datos.htm?t=2861
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.
Small marginal improvements in tight supply can result in noticeable price drops.
Which would certainly be welcome, even if greater supply still needs to be created.
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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy
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.
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 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."
https://www.reddit.com/r/askspain/comments/1833ub1/comment/k...
https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/travel/2023/10/09/fed-u...
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.
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.
See LightHugger's comment and my response below:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40753303]
> “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.
Spooky scary socialists, send shivers down your spine. Free healthcare will shock your soul, seal your deed tonight.
prices are set on the margin
this will have an effect on them (and thank you for apparently admitting that possibility after the replies)
Dead Comment
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.
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.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/barcelona-pop...
from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=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.
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
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://amp.abc.net.au/article/102878180
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Definitely not, Texas is ~700,000 km2 while Spain is ~500,000 km2.
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.
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.
NYC hotel and housing prices have been artificially inflated by government buying accommodations for homeless during 2020/2021, then migrants.
Is that artificial?
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.
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.
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
Deleted Comment
New construction has halted completely. Seems like the construction sector will rather hold their finished stock and wait for the demand side to pick up due to necessity (people still move in to the city), or due to interest rates eventually going down.
The builders can hold out for a while, but the shoe has to drop eventually. Builders only make profit when building, and if your credit is extended on old projects you can’t start new ones, hence why construction has halted.
The problem is covid. Pretty much everyone in any developed economy believes the inflation+interest rate increases will be temporary. So they’re betting inflation will go back to what it was, interest rate policy will loosen again, and people’s budgets will increase again.
I think they might be in for a very rude awakening. And not only that, housing preferences for the highest income professionals have fundamentally changed due to WFH. They could all get stuck dumping the wrong stock on a weak market all at the same time in a year or so.
They want cheap housing in a popular place to live, but they don't want to change the character of where they live to support housing actually being cheap.
The best they can actually get is locking the city down so the current residents are effectively lottery winners, but no one from the outside can move there.
So the alternative is to build vertically, but that also comes with trade-offs as the streets get less sun and city dwellers will be able to see less sky.
People on the internet will do anything but read before spouting their obvious solutions on the internet.
And the superblocks in Barcelona are already quite high and suffocating.
That's less and less true. And of those who actually moved to Barcelona, some already left (and companies too) when the independentists started being openly hostile to anything non-catalan.
Why someone with the means to do what is called "geographical arbitrage" would pick Barcelona is totally beyond me.
tourism can be so lucrative that it is actually profitable to force out normal people and completely reorient the economy away from all other productive activities. eventually large parts of the city will become totally stagnant, but this doesn't seem to stop tourists from coming. there's often a constituency of people who are really benefiting from tourism (property owners, tour operators, restaurants) and who form a powerful bloc opposed to any restrictions or taxes.
it really seems quite similar to an economy where natural resource profits drive everything, it's impossible to get any other industries off the ground or make enough money to live in any other way.
The reality of the matter is that what's happening in Barcelona ended up resembling more a colonization when tourism got combined with golden visas that allow rich foreigners and investment funds to scoop up local housing and the recent digital nomad wave. There are now more foreigners in the city center than locals and you are hard pressed to hear Spanish or Catalan being spoken around the place.
"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."
https://www.reddit.com/r/askspain/comments/1833ub1/comment/k...
Taxing short term rentals to build affordable housing seems like a good idea to me.
We should go the asian route of increasing density and size. It's not like Barcelona is fully developed border to border.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/barcelona-pop....
Nor does it mean this trade off for a measly 10,000 flats is worth it in such a large city.
Giving these 10k flats to locals isn't going to put a dent in the housing economy.
I think this working as it should.
The city of Barcelona quite literally is fully developed border to border. Or where are you suggesting these new developments are gonna be made?
That's unintelligible. With that logic, every law and regulation is authoritarian.
> all the while fostering resentment and opening up increasingly authoritarian measures in the future
Here's the resentment:
https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/travel/2023/10/09/fed-u...
And yes, the locals want more authoritarianism to keep away the overcrowding tourists, rich foreigners, and people who think like you. That's what the problem needs and what people like you understand.
This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Edit: yikes, you've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines repeatedly and badly—examples:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40743149
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40743095
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40743048
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40675193
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40673804
We have to ban accounts that keep doing this, so please stop doing this, and please make sure you're not using HN primarily for political or ideological battle.
(I suppose I should add the standard disclaimer that no, we don't care about your views. We care about your following the rules and using the site as intended, same as with any other user.)