> “There are a lot of cities asking themselves this question,” says Goodman. “Are we a city anymore or are we just Disneyland?”
This really resonates with me. I grew up in a ski town in Colorado. My family still lives there, but every time I visit I feel how soulless and fake the area has become. It has abandoned any sense of being an actual town in favor of becoming a de facto amusement park. Something like 80% of the houses in the area are empty for most of the year and large numbers of workers either live in their cars, are packed like sardines into employee housing, or commute long distances. Development is inevitable, but the decline really picked up after the arrival of short-term rentals. Consequently, I refuse to use services like AirBnB when I travel anywhere.
It's also very visible in central Lisbon, even in a short period of time from the first time I visited friends there (around 2010) to now the whole centre has been hollowed out and mainly inhabited by tourists, or digital nomads/rich foreigners. You can see a clear divide where the AirBnBs end and the real city begins between the neighbourhoods of Alfama (touristic) - Penha França, when you look at buildings and notice new sets of double glazed windows all around you know those are STRs, then walk a few more blocks into Penha França's area and there are almost no new windows on buildings.
It's actually sad to see it transformed, I'm not against tourism at all because of course I'm a tourist as well but this kind of tourism just seems to hollow out entire neighbourhoods and instead of a lively and vibrant city life you just see tons of tourists looking at their maps at every corner, rolling luggage up and down onto these apartments.
The good news is that when we throw the tourists out, we get to keep the double glazing!
Unfortunately STRs have put lots of money into the pockets of the otherwise not very cash rich middle classes in Portugal, so it is hard to get them to vote to turn the money taps off, even if it means their children can no longer get rooms above their favorite downtown coffee shop while studying. Much easier to blame digital nomads / rich foreigners / poor immigrants, and vote for Chega.
At the risk of sounding insensitive, I know Lisbon is going through a big change at the moment, but this isn’t a short term rental problem. This is a big city developing to the next stage problem and this is Lisbon’s version of it.
London, New York, Paris, Madrid, LA, etc all became too expensive for locals at some point in their history. Lisbon is next up and in a few years there will be other cities this happens to.
I’m not saying it’s right but it seems, inevitable?
Its not inevitable. In Lisbon's case, could have been preventing with legislation controlling airbnb saturation. Which is now in place, and will likely save Porto from the same dystopia.
Sure, this version of the problem could have been avoided with legislation but something else would cause it. Let’s take Porto as the example, automotive industry in the region grows suddenly, people move to the area, buy and rent property in Porto which drives up prices and drives out locals.
Which is basically what happened in all those other cities I listed and whatever the requisite industry is.
Theres a quantum leap difference between growing industries and tourism. Tourism is an inequality industry, where the owners of the hotels/homes for rent make everything, and the staff makes very little to nothing. It is almost the worst industry you can have in a developing country.
Perhaps Lisbon (and PT in general) should focus its efforts on levelling up its economic activity in to higher value areas. The time I’ve spent in PT all people talk about is the negative impacts of tourism and not improving the wider economy. There seems to be a very conservative mindset.
But that’s probably from a thin slice of exposure.
The country de industrialised way too early (I would argue no country should ever de industrialise to begin with, but that's another cup of tea entirely) And now has created lots of low quality jobs in the tourism sector through mass tourism and benevolent expat laws to people from richer countries.
The whole thing is a tragedy, but it helps those with capital already (homeowners in central Porto and Lisbon have likely seen their capital 3x to 10x) so the government let it happen.
The whole 2nd tier of the eurozone is completely in tatters anyway. Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. The eurozone doesn't work when there are two tiers of countries in it. Joseph Stiglitz had a great book about it.
Nah, I don't behave like the other asshole tourists, I don't use AirBnB, usually go to cities and towns where I know people so I can stay with a local and enjoy the underground, get lost in the cities without checking maps in the middle of where people pass by going to work.
You don't know me, don't assume, you're just being an asshole.
You don't get it. It's worth destroying these towns to get as much tourism money as possible, because with all that money, the rental owners can finally retire to a nice quiet ski town somewhere.
From ca. 1976 I remember an article in the Straight Creek Journal, beefing about what the writer called "candy-ass towns", the archetypes probably being Aspen and Vail.
> My family still lives there, but every time I visit I feel how soulless and fake the area has become. It has abandoned any sense of being an actual town in favor of becoming a de facto amusement park.
Anytime someone would complain about Hollywood, I would just mirror the same sentiments. It is an amusement park now, and most Angelenos (and probably Southern Californians, in general) rarely go there unless an out-of-state friend insists on seeing the Walk of Fame.
When was Hollywood not an amusement park? The 1923 Hollywood Land sign, advertising a housing tract feels like a sign that it was already an amusement park by then. I grew up in Orange County and had no desire to ever go to Hollywood; Disneyland was just as fake, and much closer. :P
But that industry is soooo massive, and such a huge economic force, and is kind of built on the idea of Constructing Fantasy, so it _makes sense_ that the Hollywood neighborhood is like this.
I have no numbers to back this up, so feel how you will about this comment, but I’m sure the STR economy does not create much more than income for the single homeowner, and makes it _harder_ for these sudden AirBnB boom towns to build an economy beyond more than renting rooms.
See, it should be the reverse. The employees and locals should own homes and the visitors should be packed into hotels or other purpose build facilities.
There would be tremendous pressure for any given town in the world to defect from that strategy and capture a lot of the high-end skiing visitors. That makes it virtually certain that one will and capture the disproportionate revenue and meals/lodging/services tax revenue as a reward.
Thus, laws and regulations, as per TFA. Limiting competitive options is the point. Anyway it's a suicide pact so if there are no state-level regulations and a town decides to try to take a bigger share of the tourism dollars, the town dies and is eaten from the inside-out by tourism. It will still exist, but it will become a less and less desirable tourism location for many.
State-wide laws don't help you much when Jackson Hole, Tahoe, Deer Valley, and Aspen are all in different states (and Whistler and Mont Tremblant are nearby in another country).
Are skiers visiting Aspen primarily from within Colorado or outside? The ones who have to fly in anyway, they can pretty easily fly into a different resort that gives them the resort experience rather than the "packed into hotels" experience.
hasn't this been the nature of ski towns for decades? they've always been tiny communities with transients and tourist booms and lots of rentals, resorts, cabins, etc.
Sure, ski towns have always been dependent on tourism. And the 5000 sq ft mountainside mansions have always been unaffordable for most people living there. But the difference is that there used to be affordable housing for the people who live and work there full time. Short-term rentals have massively changed the financial calculus.
Yep, there was the South Park episode from 2002 (Asspen) that does a shot of the housing development, and the sign for it says, "A time-share community." -- even then it was a long-recognized trend of how the ski towns turned out.
> The city also extended its 14-percent hotel tax to STR operators and made it illegal to operate them without a valid business license. According to one estimate, the ordinance has since dropped the city’s number of Airbnb listings by 61 percent, potentially returning more than 1,000 homes to the long-term rental or purchasing markets.
This change actually just seems like it's just slightly leveling the playing field. Why _wouldn't_ STRs have to pay a hotel tax if they're addressing the same market? Why shouldn't full-time STRs need business licenses?
Does this really fix corporate real estate holders hoarding property? Seems it just hits the individuals renting a room out etc, which is not the housing problem with AirBNB.
No, it does not -- but it fixes at least one aspect of short-term rentals having a structural advantage supporting them undercutting hotels. Back when it seemed that AirBnBs were pretty consistently cheaper than hotels (esp when accounting for space), part of that comes from service differences (self-check-in, no onsite staff), but part came from "unfair" legal and regulatory differences -- your AirBnB could be in place where zoning wouldn't allow a hotel, your AirBnB wasn't paying this 2-digit tax, etc.
> According to Goodman, the Airbnb Effect is stronger in small communities, like mountain towns or beach towns, which tend to have limited housing stock, high home prices and little flexibility to adapt to fluctuations in housing availability.
Absolutely no option to build more houses under any circumstances, of course. Just a law of nature that there's no adaptability. Boneheaded.
If you assume the total housing stock is constant, then it makes sense to want to fight displacement by lowering demand
"Just build more homes" is indeed the obvious solution, but from my experience trying to build things in a very small (sub 4000) remote and rural town, I have witnessed some things that I think are reasons why it's not this simple.
In major cities the reason that housing isn't getting built isn't due to shortage of demand, but rather often exclusionary zoning, so "build more homes" is a good and easy solution here. In contrast, in small towns it's less zoning and more often that buildings aren't profitable and viable to build.
I think many of these towns are stuck in a situation of low vacancy and shortage of housing, while also at the same time not being a positive environment for real investment in creating new housing. As the costs of construction continue to spike and interest rates have risen it has only become worse.
These are towns where there can often literally be no trades, no plumbers, nothing. So everything must be brought in at great expense.
So what happens here is that because construction is so expensive and difficult, the low hanging fruit of buying something existing and renovating is dramatically more appealing and so that is the only real housing investment we see.
Stricter Airbnb regulations could create more balance and force housing investment into building hotels and new homes.
Other than that I'm not really sure I see a solution other than some government incentives or direct action in creating more housing for regular people in places where housing is needed but is rarely profitable to create.
Also, if you carelessly chuck more homes into a quaint, remote, small town, you run the risk of turning that town into Yet Another Boring Suburb, and now maybe fewer people want to visit there anymore. The solution isn't always just density and cramming more homes.
Sometimes building more is simply not feasible, in which case, you must destroy demand and have flavors of central planning (with housing prioritized for workers and existing residents, vs newcomers and tourists). The free market and fast moving capital is a paperclip maximizer, without controls and guardrails.
There is nothing wrong with destroying demand. Life isn't fair, and we can't all live where we want. If certain jurisdictions want to prioritize some flavor of affordable or stable housing for certain cohorts, that is their right.
Usually either zoning (legit zoning concerns, not NIMBY) or actual land constraints, but there can be other factors. My experience was trying to find a buildable lot years ago during COVID in Asheville, NC, and there just isn't much buildable land left (in the opinion of multiple builders and surveyors I spoke with, and I was willing to consider exotic building techniques to accommodate suboptimal lots, real "side of the mountain" sort of stuff). In some circumstances, I was told I could build but it would be uninsurable and to proceed at my own peril.
If your beach town is only so many sq miles/km and you can only build so high, that is your limit. How much could you build in say, St Pete Beach, which is only 2.2 square miles of land. Now, I am incredibly mindful this does not apply everywhere, and "buildable land" has a lot of nuance, but supply is not infinite and it is important to note that if you cannot encourage more supply (for whatever reason) you are left to twiddle the demand side of the equation.
I absolutely believe big urban areas like NYC should be building wherever they can. But somewhere reliant on tourism like a small beach town has a much more delicate dance to do. If you mindlessly build up you will alter the “product” you are offering your tourist customers and could easily wreck that balance of livable for locals and desirable for tourists.
Before the boom in short term rentals a lot of these places simply had a set capacity. Only so many hotel rooms available on any given night and when the town’s capacity for tourism is full, it’s full. The locals lived in properties that weren’t suitable for tourists, the local businesses made enough money to thrive. There’s not actually anything inherently wrong with that. A tourist town doesn’t have to keep expanding to meet demand.
And how would you stop all these new houses being turned into AirBnBs? As soon as the extra supply dips the tourist price, a whole swath more tourists can afford to come and stay. Locals will remain in their cars/tents/parents' basements.
That would seem to imply that the tourist value of the place is still hugely under appreciated. That may suck for some people, but other locals will be making a killing as they exploit a new resource.
To wander a little bit "meta" here: Property rights--and therefore zoning--are about managing collective expectations or lack-thereof. For example, the expectation that when I buy a house, the sunny lawn will continue to be in the path of sunlight, the clean air will not start smelling like a paper-mill. It also refuses to cover some unreasonable expectations, such as "my neighbor's house will continue to be a color I find pleasing."
So to some extent, these kinds of problems represent a failure of our systems to capture and model that space.
Every old person demands lottery jackpot money to ever sell any real estate they hold, whether that is a house or just land that can be developed. That means there is very little return on investment for building new hotels and holiday stays. This is the reason why AirBnB became a thing in the first place. With the larger global middle class there is more demand for touristic stays than hotels can supply in beach towns and such, while at the same time not being worth it to build a new hotel for extra capacity.
Edit: Actually, younger people are well known for selling below market value. They're selling their labour for far below what it's worth, if we are to compare the price of labour with the housing that you are supposed to purchase with your wages. If wages were proportional to the cost of shelter, then $50 per hour would be the minimum for any person to work any job. If you're reading this and think that's absurd, then why is it not absurd for real estate owners to demand lottery jackpot prices to sell any real estate, or demand a working persons complete salary in rent?
Take a minute to consider what a small mountain or beach community that you appreciate would be like if development became more flexible in the ways you're considering.
Personally I go to mountain and beach towns as a place to stay while I go to the mountains (hiking or skiing) or the beach. I don't see how more development would get in the way of those activities. Especially not if it's denser development.
"It" would become so crowded that it's not "it" anymore.
A quaint mountain town is no longer that once you double capacity and build dense housing. Which, depending on who you are, might be fine or it might not be. There's no neutral right answer here.
But if someone grew up in a small town—and is now lamenting that it's nothing but tourists—building more accommodations won't return it to its former status. It'll transform it into something else.
This is an important dimension missing from other comments. AirBnB is just one inevitable manifestation of the underlying revolution in communication technology. That, plus shifting cultural factors has allowed "the market" to decide that some physical places have a fundamentally different core value prop than they once did.
And for some residents that's a huge windfall. Let's remember that the AirBnB hosts, or the people who sold out to investment corporations, were all those small town locals at one point. They helped decided what was going to happen to the town. (Though we can acknowledge the game theory traps involved).
I'm not saying it's right on wrong, but it's strange to "blame" AirBnB. The content of article amounts to "towns are finally deciding how they want to evolve in the face of changing culture and market forces". Good for them.
It's hard to rent a house to a local during off-peak and then rent to tourists during the peak season. And it doesn't address the problem of not enough capacity at peak.
You've got to either increase housing or limit population (including seasonal workers and tourists). Traditionally, short term rentals are served by hotels, and you can limit the short term population by limiting the number of hotel rooms. That doesn't really work anymore, if there's insufficient hotel space, it's now very easy to book short term rentals everywhere else.
If it was just that people don't want to stay in hotels anymore, no big deal --- locals could sublet their places to tourists and stay in the hotels during the season. But I think you'll find hotels are full during the season as well.
Mountain-towns often have a real need to limit population, as they don't have the infrastructure to support metro level population density. And it wouldn't be the mountain town people want to visit if you built it up to metro level.
Perhaps more AirBnB's would be preferable to people just leaving housing empty? The overall solution is 'more housing', but perhaps a vacancy tax would create some incentives to not let it just sit there.
> Absolutely no option to build more houses under any circumstances, of course.
This is the US we're talking about, so yeah it's basically illegal to increase supply in a useful way, since the vast majority of the US is zoned for car-dependent single-family housing, which adds sprawls more than community.
As for adaptability, they're talking about fluctuations, not sustained increase. A smaller town can't absorb large fluctuations without draining resources for unused housing once those fluctuations recede.
Blaming Airbnb and other short term rental systems for lack of stock is nothing more than a bandaid to the real problem: not building enough housing. Small towns could easily make this a non issue by allowing slight densification, but scapegoats are easier to deal with than root causes.
If only we could build some really dense buildings just for tourists to rent with just individual rooms (with bathrooms), a little fridge maybe, and some amenities like pools and gyms. Imagine how much of this problem that would solve.
That's a revolutionary idea! But unfortunately it's not good enough.
I am using Airbnb purposefully to avoid hotels and enjoy the authentic locations. I like to experience for a week how it feels to be part of that neighborhood. Hotels are all alike, no matter where you go. I would use hotels when I travel for work, but when I am with my wife I prefer a cozy AirBnb with a terrace and view.
At one point I was in Amsterdam and rented an apartment in one of those 3-window wide tall houses, they had a flight of stairs going straight up for 3 floors in a line at 45% angle. Interesting experience pulling my suitcase to the attic.
Another time I was in Tokyo in the Roppongi district. My flat was at ground level. An old lady (the proverbial "obaasan") was watering the flowers from the outside and took care to splash us with some water while we were sitting in the balcony. I also had to learn their garbage sorting rules.
That's what I am looking for, and I am not turning back to using hotels.
I am not imagining myself part of the local population. Of course I am just a tourist staying there for a few days, I am talking about how it "feels to me". If you want all your travel to be based on hotels, your choice, I prefer homes. Hotels are cold, impersonal places. Anyway, I never rented AirBnb in US, only in large cities in other countries across EU and in Japan.
What you imagine or feel is irrelevant - if the housing you were in wasn't an Airbnb, it'd likely be occupied by a permanent resident.
That person, for better or worse, would be part of a community and contribute to it.
At some point, a community resembles swiss-cheese because so many people who would otherwise be in the community are absent because the housing they'd live in is absent. AirBNB's are just one part of this equation though.
(more?) hotel rooms need kitchenettes, or at least an option for rooms with them. That's something you typically get in an AirBNB and typically don't get in a hotel, and it makes a big difference if you're not planning to eat out for every meal.
This is a good point. When we travelled in Europe last summer 2 out of our 4 hotels (one in France and one in Switzerland) had kitchens in them, and it made a huge difference for a 5-6 day stay..
I've only seen this on rare occasions in North America
I like this idea, break up and segment demand. We build 55+ communities with rules about who can buy and live there. Why can't we build housing that only available to people with on-site local jobs? Or housing that you can only buy into if you have children (so families can live near other families)?
If only we could build anything at all! Texas is going to grow to be the largest population state in the Union because every other one in contention decided they didn't want to build anything at all!
I'm not going to argue the point that housing supply is woefully inadequate - you're right about that.
But, at the same time, these city and town governments have an obligation to sustain a reasonable amount of housing for their residents.
AirBNB is of course not itself the issue (though one might argue that their aggressive anti-community lobbying is).
I believe that town administrators have a duty to severely curtail the presence of STR businesses like AirBNB in their towns as one of the several paths to maintaining a healthy community with adequate housing.
I don't think this is seeing the issue the right way. Building sufficient housing to reduce the pure free-market price of temporary / hotel stays to a level where housing is still accessible to locals is likely to permanently change the character of many locations. Perhaps from a quiet mountain town to Disney World. IMO, the residents of such towns, and other potentially attractive locations, have the right to keep their community the way it is rather than be swamped by tourists and high-rises to house them.
It is likely better to regulate the short-term housing volume instead, such that the free-market price of that housing goes high enough to reduce the demand to a level that the community feels is consistent with maintaining its character.
Pricing everyone out 'changes the character' of it too, and quite radically. It's just different from the physical characteristics that are easy to see.
Change is a constant, you just have to figure out what form it takes.
There also appears to be some sort of market failure or structural inefficiency in the hotel industry. AirBnB is clearly meeting a demand for larger units to accommodate groups or families travelling together. But in many areas the only hotel room options are a single room with 1 king size or 2 queen size beds. You can't get a suite or even guaranteed connecting rooms at any price! Could someone explain why the hotel industry often doesn't even try to compete?
Because it’s cheaper to lobby for stuff like this and pretend it’s a grassroots endeavour?
I agree, better hotels is the solution, but we couldn’t force a private company to build actually good hotels that cater to modern expectations now could we? /s
100%. It's at least nice to see places realize that "supply and demand" are real for housing, but at the end of the day if you're in a tourist oriented area, you need tourist housing too. Build some more hotels, build a lot more housing for residents. Build SRO's, shrink lot sizes and fix condo liability laws for ownership opportunities, legalize small 4/6/8plexes everywhere. Remove parking minimums. There are a lot of levers to pull...
So basically allow shitty dwellings to be thrown together for the 'servant classes', while making sure the itinerant wealthy have the pick of the nicer places.
That's not what I wrote. New housing tends to be nicer than older housing, and right now the option for people working in these place is often to commute in over long distances or basically 'hot bunk' in some cramped housing. Things are bad right now and more housing, especially housing dedicated to people living and working in an area, would help some people. At least it's an option they have rather than just getting priced out completely.
I'm all for 'right-sized' housing, of good quality, and without nonsense like parking minimums - but you did mention SROs (fine for students, but otherwise far from a good way to live).
The easiest way to fix housing right now is to ban STRs. The supply available to long term renters / home buyers would increase dramatically, quite literally over night.
Enforcement really is the big issue here. When I lived in Edinburgh airbnbs were everywhere. You would see 8 lock boxes on a building with 12 flats. I hear they city council is trying to do something about it, but it doesn't really work.
Moving the enforcement onto the platform is better. It's easier to sue one large entity instead of thousands of rent seekers.
Not just cities and towns. British Columbia's new Province wide mandatory regulations that cities must adopt come into force May 1st (Though cities may choose to exempt themselves if their vacancy rate exceeds 3%). Will impact 65 cities. They limit rentals to primary residences and attached basement suites.
> In 2015, one study found that STRs had sucked at least 10 percent of New York’s available housing off the market… In Barcelona, the effect is even more severe, with rents rising by seven percent and housing costs rising by up to 17 percent in popular neighborhoods.
Article uses unrelated stats from two cities to imply the same root problem in each place. The best estimate for Barcelona is that about 2.5% of housing is on Airbnb.
The problem with Barcelona is its geography and tech boom, not STR housing.
It’s all well and good banning Airbnb but the reason there is such market demand for rental units from tourists is that the modern hotel offering is so much worse unless you can afford a suite.
I like to have a base to go back to when I travel, a hotel room ain’t that. Tiny box room, no sofa, no kettle, uncomfortable balcony furniture even in the better brands. For the same price I can get a 1 or 2 bed flat with a full kitchen, decent living room and often access to a private roof terrace.
That's 1.7% of the total of rental housing units in NYC.
NYC builds roughly 22k units per year.
In comparison, Austin, which has actually seen rents become more affordable, also built around 22k units in 2023. That's 9% of the number of rental units in Austin. So Austin builds 4.5 as much per year.
Having some level playing field for Airbnb is fine (the business license thing seems odd though) – but you won't solve the issue with this trick.
At best you get a one-shot gain that you should get every year. That's not going to affect the S/D curve that much in the next 5 years.
This feels like attacking a symptom, not the cause. Housing and real estate across the board have been bought up by private corporations -- including housing that they then turn around and Airbnb. This has plagued the housing market in general, and of course, Airbnb.
Airbnb itself is/was still great when you can find a private owner leasing out their extra/summer/whatever home.
Why is it bad when corporations do it, but not bad when individuals do it? Both ways means there is a young person from the community not being able to find a humble place to buy or rent.
Totally agree that individuals buying houses just for the sake of renting them out is also a problem. Renting out your legitimate 2nd home, I don't have a problem with.
yeah, i don't want to sound like a communist but there really is something wrong with allowing corporate and foreign investments to flood local housing markets. individuals and families can't compete with them and their continued competition makes that even worse. plus downstream its affecting the birthrate, people want to have families.
I think it's more of a symptom than a problem itself. It's too difficult for mom & pop developers to build things anymore, but the large companies have the resources and scale to do it. And investors know that localities are intent on making housing a good investment, so they invest in it.
This effects small businesses as well: These large mega corps buy up huge chunks of land and plan the entire thing from housing (which of course comes with their tight and pretty unregulated HSA) as well as slots pre-planned for particular businesses.
Here in Utah you can drive across the entire Wasatch valley and see a repeat "stamp" of this crap every 10 miles.
Is it zoned for anything but large swathes of housing? Is it legal to build corner stores or is it impossible for those places to adapt once they've been built?
Airbnb should've stayed a tiny startup geared to finding YC applicants temporary housing in the Bay Area. Some things just don't scale or remain cool, especially with they facilitate gentrification and harm locals.
100% on board. I really enjoyed using Airbnb but have boycotted them due to the damage they are wrecking on the real estate market. Now whenever I'm nomading I try to stay in coliving spaces rather than Airbnbs.
This really resonates with me. I grew up in a ski town in Colorado. My family still lives there, but every time I visit I feel how soulless and fake the area has become. It has abandoned any sense of being an actual town in favor of becoming a de facto amusement park. Something like 80% of the houses in the area are empty for most of the year and large numbers of workers either live in their cars, are packed like sardines into employee housing, or commute long distances. Development is inevitable, but the decline really picked up after the arrival of short-term rentals. Consequently, I refuse to use services like AirBnB when I travel anywhere.