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 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.