In the US, the question of whether the "center" of the city is a tourist trap or a place where people live is irrelavent. Everyone goes everywhere by car, and the real center can move. However, in Europe, where we have REAL infrustructure, train stations, subways, tram lines. And we, the citizens, have invested TWO CENTURIES of tax money to build that incredible infrustructure, taking that center and saying "this part of the city is going to be too expensive for normal people to live there, is nothing short of theft. Normal people paid, with real money, taken out of their sallaries, which they earned with real work in order to build that subway system that they can no longer effectively use, because they live on the outskirts now. So any new zoning has to take that into account.

As for who is rich. Young, healthy, students who can afford to take time off and travel ARE RICH! You can say what you want about Ryan air being cheep and only €50 a flight. But the minimum wage in the Czech Republic is 11 000CZK or just €400 a month! Poor people have trouble paying for rent, and there is no chance they will be taking time off to take that ryan air flight to Brussels to spend the weekend in an AirBNB.

And those people don't benefit from AirBNB at all, given that they have no assets to invest in real estate.

   this part of the city is going 
   to be too expensive for normal
   people to live there, is nothing 
   short of theft.

I'd recommend not using terms like "theft" here, as it is factually inaccurate, and goes back to the unfortunate tradition of Leninist agitation which gave the world Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot ... and despite all the violence, didn't even manage to produce housing of a quality that came close to anything the modern western democracies had to offer to their masses. And in case of the Soviet Union didn't even manage to feed its own population.

Anyway, let me remind you that I don't believe your claim that Airbnb has a substantial influence on property prices. As far as I can see, the dominant factor in property prices is distance from center, and proximity to amenities, in particular public transport -- all that regardless of Airbnb.

   because they live on the outskirts

The main purpose of public transport is to enable those living in the outskirts to get to the center in the morning, and go back in the evening. The drive to separate out work from living quarters goes back to the industrial revolution when work suddenly became noisy, dangerous and polluting, so the old model (working and living in the same place) had to go. This required mass transport, be it cars or public transport Anyway, there is nothing wrong with living in the outskirts. Many prefer it, especially those with children. There is no human right to live in Manhattan or in Mayfair or in Charlottenburg in a 150 m^2 loft that costs only €200 per month. That would be an extremely inefficient use of dense urban space. Second, tourists use public transport more than the normal population, because the latter spends most of their day working, while tourists explore and move around. If you are interested in the utilisation of public transport, attracting more tourism is a god-sent. Note also that increased tourism generates additional local employment, because tourists spend quite a bit of money.

   students who can afford to take 
   time off and travel ARE RICH!

This is deeply misleading. In any given country, students are near the bottom in terms of average spending power, and that's because they typically live on their parents money and / or government grants. Their peers who dropped out of school at 16 and learned a trade (e.g. welding or carpentry or plumbing) will out-earn the average student at that age (a few years after graduation this will change). Note also that in most western countries, nowadays the majority of the population goes to university (for some definition of university). Another way of seeing that students are essentially at the bottom of each society in terms of spending power is to look how they live (eg. sharing), and to look at the population's average income trajectory: just about anyone's overall available income increases considerably after graduation.

Of course you can compare the average student in Denmark with the average worker in Malawi, and find that the former is wealthy vis-a-vis the latter, but this is not an interesting comparison.

   Czech Republic is 11 000CZK

Yes, and why is this interesting? The minimum wage in Malawi is ... what $1 per year? The cost of accomodation always correlates strongly with the average income

   Poor people have trouble paying for rent

Not in a meaningful sense in the western world. For essentially everybody by the richest, say for 98% of the population, rent/mortgage is the single biggest cost they have in life. The average person spends between 25% and 50% of their income (after taxes) on accomodation. This feels painful for everybody, but is managable in practise. Another way of looking at this is to see who is homeless, and why. In practise in Wester Europe, there is little/no homelessness apart from those with serious drugs problems and / or mental illness. This is a pretty strong indication that housing is affordable for everybody. Yes, it would be better if there was no homelessness, but the problem is one of drug-addition and mental illness, and that's something that as of 2017 we don't really know how to solve.

   And those people don't benefit 
   from AirBNB 

They benefit in several ways: I already mentioned the economic boost that cities get from additional tourism. But they also benefit from the economies of scale that you get from streamlined tourism, like cheaper flights, cheaper holidays, more interesting cities. Easier travelling because large companies like Airbnb can develop apps that make booking easier.

You warn me not to claim that taxes are theft by using examples of failed socialist utopias. My argument was that once people have paid their taxes, they deserve something in return, like the ability to take advantage of the infrastructure that they paid to build. If you simply take peoples money, and use it to subsidize the rich, then that is theft. This is a very different argument than that of Proudhon, who says that "property is theft", or of Thomas Paine who claims that:

>Every proprietor, therefore, of cultivated lands, owes to the community ground-rent (for I know of no better term to express the idea) for the land which he holds; and it is from this ground-rent that the fund prod in this plan is to issue.

http://rationalrevolution0.tripod.com/articles/capital_distr...

Though I agree with both authors in general, my claim of theft was not the same as theirs at all.

> The main purpose of public transport is to enable those living in the outskirts to get to the center in the morning, and go back in the evening. The drive to separate out work from living quarters goes back to the industrial revolution when work suddenly became noisy, dangerous and polluting, so the old model (working and living in the same place) had to go. This required mass transport, be it cars or public transport Anyway, there is nothing wrong with living in the outskirts. Many prefer it, especially those with children.

In Prague, most people don't work in the center, so the commuting to the center argument is a mute point. The center is literally only for tourists.

> Yes, and why is this interesting? The minimum wage in Malawi is ... what $1 per year? The cost of accomodation always correlates strongly with the average income

The reason why it is interesting, is that a €50 flight to Brussels, and a €8O AirBnB stay for two nights, would be a third of a months salary at Czech minimum wage. So it is totally unrealistic for people on the east who make that kind of money to travel west. However, westerners have no trouble traveling east. (Some eastern students are able to travel west, but they are among the wealthy).

> economies of scale

Economies of scale do not exist in the urban housing market, because supply is pretty much fixed. The more demand, the higher the price.

I'm not %100 against AirBnB. But I feel that the use of AirBnB to rent out whole apartments is unfair in cities where taxpayers heavily subsidize infrastructure and common spaces. Especially when the investor is a foreign one. Then the money from the west flows east and then flows right back out again.

   Economies of scale do not exist in 
   the urban housing market, because 
   supply is pretty much fixed. The 
   more demand, the higher the price.

This is not the case, and the issue has been discussed many times here on HN with respect to San Francisco.

There is no technical reason that prevent increase of supply. You could flatten the old town and build Dubai-style 100 floor skyscrapers, creating >20k new flats. The only reason why this doesn't happen is legislation, zoning laws, building codes etc, which in turn reflect the will of the majority of the population who don't want radical change of cities.

In Prague it would suffice to start walking around throwing paint at tourists and smashing 14th century statues. That would get the demand down enough that normal people could move back to the center.

Edit: My point being, that buldozing the center and building high rises would solve the problem, not due to incresed supply, but due to decreased demand. There's a reason why Frankfurt and London are the only cities in Europe with high rise centers and its not the price of steel. There are pleanty of sky scrapers in Europe, but they always end up being some dead part of town that nobody visits for any reason other than work or sleep. I guess that just returns to my point about "real infrustructure". I think that in the US, you can't even really talk about the "center of the city" because people don't "go to the center" as a thing to do. People stay at home, or drive to the gym, or go to the movies. They don't "go to the center, stop to watch a movie, get out, walk around a bit, have dinner in the center." While all the time thinking of their activity as "spending time in the center" rather than "going somewhere".