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I live in Spain. I'll give you an interesting example I've witnessed. Two of my neighbors rent seasonally on airbnb. Middle class women, one of them a widow. I assume they used to make a tidy profit. I believe they worked quite hard on making those houses pretty, and I've seen they had good reviews. Just now their license to operate has been denied, apparently without much explanation (I believe the Property Registry is making the decision, this is a bureaucratic body of state employees, not democratically elected).

Across the street lies a hotel, a true tourist trap. They have a 6/10 rating on booking and rely on scamming British tourists, whom you can see balancing drunk on their balconies daily. It's owned by a national conglomerate. As you may guess, as of now the airbnbs are closed and the hotel is thriving despite only bringing the worst kind of tourist to the community. An astute observer will note that the hotel industry is one of the biggest lobbyists supporting the current government at a national level. I am not one to defend big companies, but for some people here Airbnb was freedom. Now they have to go work cleaning rooms or just collect retirement checks, as obtaining a license to run a hotel is impossible without political connections / corruption. My point is, not everywhere are laws as fair as in the United States. Before someone talks about housing pressure, this is a relatively out of the way area where 40% of houses sit empty most of the year.

Can those drunk tourists not rent Airbnb's too ?

How is it not better for them to stay across the street at the hotel than on a flat next to a family home ?

I was in Spain this past summer and it certainly seems they are experiencing tourist burnout. I saw anti tourist messages on banners hung on buildings, graffiti, posters and stickers in Madrid and Barcelona. Some of it was a bit threatening but I had zero issues.

The issue of airbnb is a sticky one. On one hand, being able to temporarily live in an apartment greatly enhances the immersiveness when your travel - you get to feel like a local and experience life in another place. Hotels suck as they cut corners to the point where an article posted here complaining about the lack of bathroom doors in hotels. On the other hand, these rentals drive up real estate prices and drives out locals. And often these rentals are in run-down low-income turning affordable yet poor quality housing into high quality temporary rentals. This drives out low income residents deepening income inequality issues while subjecting them to the threat of homelessness.

As long as we tolerate a society that only values ROI while ignoring the value of investing in humanity we won't resolve any of these issues. In a better world we would think about others and realize that easy access to shelter is foundational to stabilizing people to enable them to succeed in life. It's not hard, we have an abundance of materials and labor yet we have built a culture where helping others is some form of weakness for both parties.

> On one hand, being able to temporarily live in an apartment greatly enhances the immersiveness when your travel - you get to feel like a local and experience life in another place.

Yes, if your local life is being inconsiderate and having parties till 3 because you're on holidays. Having an airbnb in your building is terrible as you don't know the people and they don't care about getting to know you.

> Hotels suck as they cut corners to the point where an article posted here complaining about the lack of bathroom doors in hotels.

The great thing about hotels is that they can be planned for and zoned correctly for. Even so, I've had a hotel go up 100m from my apartment and had to invest in blackout blinds since they chose for a modern design with glass all over (and the lights are bright at night).

The biggest problem here in Barcelona is that most airbnbs / short term rentals are companies buying housing as an investment and so are stealing the opportunity from actual people and families trying to live.

> As long as we tolerate a society that only values ROI while ignoring the value of investing in humanity we won't resolve any of these issues.

That's exactly what we're not tolerating here in Spain. We have guaranteed right to "decent and adequate housing" enshrined in the constitution, which is why you're seeing these aggressive moves against companies that actively work against us having that.

I guess we in Spain are a bit of guinea pigs regarding this, as we've been hit hard by Airbnb et al, but we also have strong social movements trying to fight back, and right now being a bit successful. Gonna be interesting to see how it looks like in 5-10 years again, once we start to see the effect of the new laws passed these last few years.

> you get to feel like a local and experience life in another place.

Like a local with your fellow thousands of other tourists doing the same things, going to the same places, taking the same pictures? Traveling became the most abject consumeristic activity, there is nothing "local" left in these holiday hubs

The weird thing is that in many cities there is a persistent and ongoing market failure where legitimate hotels in tourist areas often don't offer accommodations suitable for families with multiple children. There are often no hotel rooms with 3+ beds and kitchenette: it's not that they're more expensive, they simply don't exist at any price. So despite the social problems that Airbnb causes they do address a real market demand. Why aren't the hotel chains doing more to compete? What am I missing here?
Spains problem is that their economy is terrible. Tourism is almost 15% of barcelona's economy so the tourism sector has political power but all the people who dont benefit from it are pissed. They cant afford to piss off the tourists but tourism has a lot of negative externalities.
This burden is on politicians. If you can extract enough value from tourism you both lessen the tourism and get people more happy about tourists.

The monetary value has to match the damage it does to have people caring less about the “environment” they are in (gossip puts pressure on people to behave, just like renting puts less pressure on people to take care of their apartment).

I’ve always thought a solution would be to allow Airbnb but cap the amount you can earn per property to the equivalent of an average annual rent.

This wouldn’t outright ban short-term rentals, but it would reduce the largest financial incentive.

I say this selfishly, as someone who wants to use the platform while still occupying my own place. Something that offering it as a full-time rental doesn’t allow.

If there is such a burnout, then why doesn’t the government just stop letting so many people in? This feels more like a scapegoat situation.
> As long as we tolerate a society that only values ROI while ignoring the value of investing in humanity

Wow, it looks like unbridled capitalism isn't the answer after all.

I distincly recall many articles stating that for ridiculous EUR like 50k you could buy housing in spain right after 2007 the crisis, for many years afterward. Because it was so overbuilt , at least outside of the big metros) that the builders and sellers were desperate to move.

I wonder if they all wiped out by the crisis (subprime really hit spain hard), and what we are seeing now is the consequence of that wipeout, and bankruptcies.

In large parts of Spain, that is still true. Entire rural villages for sale in some cases even.

Problem is that it's in areas where people don't want to live. In the areas people want to live, the problem is the opposite, there isn't nearly enough housing, so you end up with some of the highest population densities in EU (#2 and #3 are both in Spain at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_Union_cities_... in "density per km2" for example, 50% of top 10 on that list is in Spain!) and prices keep going up.

Add in that salaries are pretty low so cost of living is subsequently low, so you end up with a ton of "expats" and other fun folks like "foreign investors" who purchase up all the livable/rentable properties with their "higher value" money, because everything is so cheap for them.

Owners realize this, and while the government is (now at least) trying to put a stop to all of this with limiting rent increases and more, owners still try to take advantage of it as much as they can.

Personally, I think we need to temporarily put a complete halt to non-residents buying any sort of properties or even land here, at least for a short period of time so the people who actually live and work here can recover from the situation.

For the average person with a normal job here and not working for foreign companies with a higher salary, it's short of impossible to be able to afford to eventually buy a house.

I got myself a pretty little condo in Asturias for a steal, at least compared to US prices. I tried first just outside Madrid but it’s crazy expensive there, I saw a small and modern condo and they wanted more of what I paid for a brand new large home in the US very close to a big city, massive in size by European standards. If you want a modern tiny condo in Madrid city center you are looking at over a million euros for sure. Almost NYC prices. But Asturias is so freaking beautiful, and people are sooo laid back and kind, the best! There’s also a train that takes just over 3 hours to Madrid.
You can get houses even cheaper now. The two things are not related though. Huge areas of Spain are barren empty places, with no jobs, transport, or anything. Nobody really can or want to live these places. Thats why the houses are so cheap.
Major population center rent trends will tell this story (STRs crowding out long term rentals), look at rent pricing in Barcelona for example.

(own property in Spain)

Georgism is the only long-term solution to this problem. It's not like there is even disagreement on that; any economist would tell you so. However, the Landed gentry have no interest in solutions.
Which problem and which economists?
The main issue with going after airbnb is that its a true bandaid fix: the gains in supply are often offset by just a few years or months progression of the underbuilding of supply
If there is a high-demand tourist location (like many parts of Spain) and tourists are more wealthy than locals (like many parts of Spain) then new housing stock will also be soaked up by AirBnBs. In this situation the "just build" argument means you have to build enough housing to house every single wealthy tourist that wants to come before you start seeing any relief to local housing issues. Not only does that mean locals have to wait thought, say, 10 years of construction before their issues are addressed, but in the mean time the tourism sector will have dominated the economy, which is not healty either.
Still necessary though.

If the economics work out for landlords, a city can lose a lot of apartments to short term rentals way faster than it could increase supply. Especially in central districts where significant new construction is barely possible.

Sure, but the article is specifically about that subject, while the government been working and continues to work on many other fixes too. Limiting rent increases, among other things, is constantly being talked and enacted right now, so at least it's going in the right direction.

Airbnb is one of many problems, and all of them require something done about it. But one does not exclude the other, if you look up the "Spain" tag on your favorite international news source I'm sure you can dig out the other measures being taken currently.

in this case tourist-driven demand is a completely different beast than local housing needs, and no city can (or should) build enough to satisfy global tourism. Regulation may be the only realistic lever
I was recently evicted from my apartment in a city in Norway experiencing similar growth in short-term rentals. The rental on that apartment was around €750 (same for my roommate). Apparently, during high season in the winter similar apartments goes for ~€830 a night. High season is 3 months in the winter, but seemingly that is enough to outcompete longterm tenants.
There is 12 months in a year. So that can be covered in 12 days... So even half a month would be more... Seems broken...

I have nothing against short or medium term rentals. If they are limited percentage of housing as total. This percentage is rather low.

You have no protections against this where you live? That would be near impossible where I live (Ontario).
Good. How could these "disruptive" american companies get away with violating local laws that long remains a mystery to me. If I started running an illegal hotel in Barcelona, or a website advertising for illegal rentals in the same city, myself, from Spain, I'd be quickly arrested and thrown in jail as an individual...
As far as I understand this is the latest shot in the conflict between Spain and its lack of affordable housing. I'd put the symbolic start around 2004-2006 [1] with the movement called "you won't have a house in your fucking life" where people all over Spain started demonstrating against high apartment prices.

I don't like AirBnB and I'm glad they got fined, but the Spanish government also needs to accept that they have been sitting around doing nothing for roughly 20 years. Looks like politicians all over will do everything in their power except actually building more apartments.

[1] https://www.leonidasmartin.net/artes/no-vas-a-tener-una-casa... (in Spanish)

> I don't like AirBnB and I'm glad they got fined, but the Spanish government also needs to accept that they have been sitting around doing nothing for roughly 20 years. Looks like politicians all over will do everything in their power except actually building more apartments.

I am totally unfamiliar with Spain, but wondering what would government have to do to improve the situation? They wouldn’t build government owned and operated houses? Or is it that they do not issue permits for builders, or tax incentives are all wrong?

They don't want to upset the high number of middle-class Spaniards who have all of their money invested in airbnbs.
They've been expanding their airports over those 20 years; Barcelona's passenger air arrivals has doubled in that time and there is another expansion being planned. Barcelona is not a large city and they should really be coupling every airport capacity increase with an equal increase in tourist accommodations or they end up in an even worse situation.
Did Airbnb really affect house market that much? Hotels got wayyy more expensive now there so I expect less tourism in the future, wonder if it was a good trade off.
> Looks like politicians all over will do everything in their power except actually building more apartments.

This is the wrong way to frame this issue. A lot of cities like Paris and Amsterdam have this issue with short-term renting. "Build moar" is just not really an option for these type of city.

Firstly, the constructible area of the city is limited. So build, but build where ? You can expand horizontally, but this creates challenges with public transportation and other public services. And it can be slow since it means having to expel industry and agriculture further to rezone area into constructible home/office area. So the other option is to build up, which means destroying potentially historic building, changing the skyline and viewpoint. This would be bad for tourism (and people who live here might not like it either), since this is a big reason why people even come to visit.

In the past, cities had simple way to deal with this. With zoning and hotel licences, the city could have a real urban plan on how it wanted to evolve and how much space it wanted to dedicate to tourism vs industry vs offices vs homes. But AirBnb came and just said "fuck that" and bypass complitely the licence système and or building and operating permit usually needed for tourism. Greed and capitalism took advantage of that and the number of place to rent or buy descreased significantly in favour of short term tourism rental, making living in the city slowly unaffordable.

Building more is not that simple. AirBnb respecting the law is a simple solution. It won't complitely solve the issue of the availaibility of affordable home, but it sures as hell help.

__thats it__??? it's missing like 5 zeros on the righthand side of that number.
> The fine is equal to six times the profits Airbnb made while the properties were still listed despite being in breach of the rules.

As long as it wasn't profitable for them to do bad stuff (which it wasn't, since the fine is 6 times the size of their profits from that period of time), I'm happy enough about. You win some, you lose some, this is closer to winning than loosing so thank you Ministerio de Consumo.

65,000,000.00000
They should fine them 6.5 trillion? I’m in favour of the fine but that seems a bit much
This is not just a problem in Spain. Affordable housing is a problem in almost every Western metro, both in the US and in Europe. The problem is caused by the financialization of real estate.

I know it's always been a bit of a financial asset, but the past 40 years have really seen this accelerate to pretty crazy levels. The issue, when you boil it down to the basics is: wealthy folks, development companies, overseas oligarchs, hedge funds, etc. owning many properties where they try to extract as much value as possible. This means that rents go up and short-term-rentals become more viable. This also means that young middle-class families can't afford to purchase or to live there, so it pushes out locals (this is especially bad in Lisbon).

The solution seems to be government telling you what you can or you can't do with your private property, which does not sit well with me, but it's becoming more and more clear that this can't go on forever.

... because the government is in the pocket of the big hotel chains, which are ruining the country.

Airbnb: World travelers who try to blend in. Hotel: Drunk Brits who puke all over the place.

We have 3 Airbnb flats in our house for 2 years now. Never had an issue with any of the renters; But, the lights in the stairwell are working now, the door locks work, electricity is stable, and I haven't seen a cockroach in a long time.

Meanwhile the guests from the hotel across the street keep us awake every freakin' night.

Bonus: Those 3 flats had been sitting empty for nearly 10 years, just like the other ~30 thousand flats sitting empty in the city.

AirBnB should be banned, and I say that as a very pro-capitalist guy.

In an economy where there is a housing shortage local population needs affordable and long-term (6-months+) rental contracts or they don't have stability.

Capitalism is great in general, but some things, such as healthcare, housing, electricity,... needs to have a stronger regulatory framework then eg TVs since the collapse of basic human necessities creates chaos and eventually becomes the foothold of extreme socialist/communist political parties which then finish the job of destroying the economy.

Another senseless EU attack on the greatest nation on earth (/s?)
I have legal holiday rentals on two properties in Spain, but they are managed by an specialized company:

* The regional administration handed out licenses without problems until a year ago, even when everyone was complaining already about these rentals. It was just paperwork + fee to get the license. They did for years and now they wonder why there are so many flats: they allowed it.

* The main issue these rentals cause to the neighbors is people partying, being noisy, inconsiderate. Rentals have rules against these behaviors yet they happen frequently. I wish we or the police had tools to legally kick people out in the middle of the night for this behavior.

* Apart from legal rentals, which are being limited now, there are a lot of illegal rentals. They are only starting to crack down on them. AirBNB and others have not complied with the law and this should not come as surprise. They have actively enabled illegal businesses for years. People go to jail for that and they should shut them down.

* There is no affordable housing in the city-center. Rental flats make it worse but in many places the issue will not be fixed if they disappeared. The causes are deeper and a nice flat is not going to become "cheap" to rent in any case.

* Holiday rentals are a bit more profitable that long-term rentals, but not crazy unless you are doing it at scale and they come with their own problems. Many are switching now to "seasonal" rentals, which are rentals for a period less than a year and the tenants need to go then. They forgot to handle these in the new regulations. Long-term rental is problematic because you can't use your flat when you need it. i.e. if you have a flat that you come to spend your own holidays. So people in that situation have limited alternatives.

* I am personally not against switching to long term rentals, but the current situation wrt. licenses etc. puts me in a "wait and see" mode. My flat is legal, so they might make it more profitable by cracking down on illegal ones. Once I put a long-term rental I cannot ever go back to vacation rental either. There is little incentive to switch right now, but I will of course do it if I'm legally required to do so. For all the talk, they haven't taken that step, which is a testament to how politicians can say one thing and then do close to nothing in the end.

The main issue with Airbnb is that a few companies own a huge percentage of the flats. It's a big, unregulated, industry without any responsibility that is driving regular hotels out of business and locals out of their neighbouhoods. Of course it has to end at some point.