On 21 June, Barcelona mayor Jaume Collboni announced plans to ban short term rentals in the city starting in November 2028. The decision is designed to solve what Collboni described as “Barcelona’s biggest problem” – the housing crisis that has seen residents and workers priced out of the market – by returning the 10,000 apartments currently listed as short-term rentals on Airbnb and other platforms into the housing market.
Barcelona is not the only city to be strongly regulating – or even banning – short-term rentals outright. It has been illegal since September 2023 to rent out an apartment as a short-term let in New York City unless you are registered with the city and you are present in the apartment when someone is staying – a change also made to assuage the city’s housing crisis. Berlin banned Airbnbs and short-term rentals back in 2014, bringing them back under tight restrictions in 2018; and in many of California’s coastal cities, including Santa Monica, short-term rentals are either banned or highly restricted.
In British Columbia, Canada, Premier David Eby put the issue succinctly as he clarified new short-term rental rules: “If you’re flipping homes, if you’re buying places to do short-term rental, if you’re buying a home to leave it vacant, we have consistently, publicly, repeatedly sent the message: Do not compete with families and individuals that are looking for a place to live with your investment dollars.”
You must log in or register to comment.
It hasn’t even been in existence for 15 years, literally any adult with an income can imagine what life without Airbnb is like.
They aren’t banning Airbnb. They are banning short term rentals. Huge difference. You can do long term rentals on Airbnb, and you can do 2 day rentals on other websites like VRBO. Those other sites have been around for a very long time.
Agreed.
I see people posting questions about life in the 1970s and wonder, “Don’t you know any one who was around then?”
While that’s true, short term (vacation) rentals existed well before airbnb, they just weren’t so prevalent.
Yes, rentals existed before Aibnb but they were not monopolized by a foreign multinational company that is causing housing crises across the planet and that operates outside of legality
If you are poor, stay at home. Nobody cares
I do not use AirBNB anymore. I just use hotels or actual BNBs.
I stayed at an Airbnb last weekend. Instead of paying over five hundred a night for a tiny non luxurious hotel room, I paid 300 a night (total, after splitting was 150) a night for a massive two bedroom apartment two blocks from the hotel room. Parking, everything included.
It was cheaper and better than a hotel. Are you somehow gonna make the hotel lower their price? For that to happen, they would need competition.
You are not entitled to cheap lodging. While locals need homes to live. Cities can only absorb so much tourism before it becomes unlivable and unaffordable for people to live in. Just look at Venice. It’s not only that homes become unaffordable, amenities that serve the locals start to disappear since everything starts to cater tourists.
I used to live in Amsterdam and in a some streets there are just way too many souvenir, stroopwafel and Nutella shops while local grocers are pushed out because of rising rent.
And poor people aren’t entitled to live in deseriable areas. There is a balance to be struck. If locals can’t serve the tourists(due to long commutes, unaffordable housing whatever), there will be no one to serve the tourists so the balance will swing in the other direction.
Hotels and airbnb killed mom and pop bnbs.
How so, and why should I care?
Airbnb offered an unfair advantage (venture capital and centralized) in cornering the market on a streamlined platform, vs decentralized bnbs. Then when covid came, the individual bnbs operating on a tight margin shuttered, while airbnb prevailed (with massive layoffs). Both the hotel industry and airbnb were able to jack up prices due to loss of competition from mom&pops.
I can’t answer your second question.
Airbnb competes with itself, due to the individual hosts putting up their own listings. Or are you accusing them of being a cartel?
Airbnbs are not actually bnbs. They don’t have free breakfast. They are just a room.
Businesses fail all the time. As long as they continue to have what I want at a price I want with the convenience I want, I’ll keep using it. Just like ubers and DoorDash.
Who cares if VCs waste their money on an unprofitable business as long as the hosts don’t create a cartel?
That is far on the norm these days. Many AirBnBs add on a ton of fees like a massive cleaning fee but still require you to clean up so the cost comes out to be more than a hotel and you still have to clean up and there are a ton of house rules. It has only been recently that AirBnB gave you the option of seeing the extra fees while searching but it’s still not the default option. Their customer service kind of sucks too. I stayed in a place in LA that had sewage backing up into the sinks and the place itself was pretty gross. They offered a slight discount on the night we stayed and allowed us to cancel the second night. A hotel would have probably comped us a night and given us a decent room.
There are still diamonds in the rough though which are generally people who genuinely have a mother in law unit or room spare and they live in the rest of the place. Most of them are done by corporations though who are simply looking for lower taxation.
Maybe hotels should cost less money and they wouldn’t have as much competition from clearly inferior products.
Airbnb is yet another monstrosity created by neoliberalism that is completely amoral and aims for profit above all things
created by tech bros
Neo liberalism is a Boogeyman that means literally nothing thanks to everyone calling everyone else it. The real issue (with Airbnb) is that tech bros decided to create a business solution to something that in all honesty wasn’t a problem and now we’re here. The same can be said for Uber, and all the other “gig economy” companies.
Neo liberalism is a Boogeyman
that tech bros
Pot, meet kettle.
Techbros are a very real and rather well defined term and collection of people.
Neoliberals not so much.
update:
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Neo-Liberal
vs
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Techbro
notice how the definitions are much more consistent for a techbro.
Can you tell us more about these techbros? Are they with us now in this room? Do they sometimes tell you to do things, bad things?
I invite you to read my updated comment asshole :)
Nah I’m good, kettle.
presents information that would lead to a meaningful discussion even though it contradictions your point
nah I’m good
You’re exactly as bad as the people you complain about.
Like literally every business
Short term rentals would be fine if companies like Airbnb weren’t getting a cut. Like they existed on Craigslist and as actual bead-and-breakfasts way before airbnb et al existed.
The problem isn’t that AirBnB gets a cut, the problem is that they make such a process more efficient and accessible. Property is a finite resource, especially when talking about a specific area like a city. We don’t want to turn cities into amusement parks that the workers have to commute an hour to get to, even if that’s what is the most profitable. Housing should be affordable and available for the people who actually use and make the city run daily.
I imagine people are willing to give a cut to Airbnb because they perceive, rightly or wrongly, that Aribnb is taking care of all the details. Insurance, liability, blocking troublemakers, data and time coordination etc.
AirBnB was founded in 2007.
So almost everyone who is an adult knows what things were like before AirBnB.
Personally, despite having taken advantage of them (others have paid), I would like to go back to how things used to be.
For one thing, making sure I clean up is not what I should be worrying about when traveling.
