I truly agree with most of what you say.

This famous article discusses why housing is becoming a huge problem everywhere and why that's super bad for the economy: https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-e.... It's been discussed here a few times, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28531025.

The compromise Barcelona made is not enough. Sadly, that beautiful city is IMHO the prototypical case of getting ruined by too much tourism.

In their defense, I think it's safe to state all mid-to-large cities in EU are quite crowded and unaffordable. For example, Copenhagen used to be a place where citizens enjoyed great purchasing power. Despite rent control and sale taxes, a single person in a well-paying job can hardly afford a mortgage for a decent flat right now. The same can be said of Munich, Madrid, London and many, many other places.

Rent control usually causes rents to go up in the non-rent controlled areas. It just accelerates the unaffordability of all housing.

not only that. rent control also causes less properties to be for rent. if its not making enough money renting my property with bother? ill just keep it empty until price climbs and ill sell it. in paris they pushed rent control + they forbid you to rent your appartement is the apartment is not energy efficient enough. guess what? people that should renovate for becoming energy efficient have no real incentive to do it because anyway renovating an apartment will not allow them to rent it at higher price. they'll just hold onto it or sell it.

Rent control in Copenhagen is perhaps different than in other places, as there is just a very light control to avoid crazy prices and scams.

In practice, it's a free market and landlords have by no means been discouraged to offer flats.

Sure, but why on earth would any tourist choose to stay at some off site tourist hub? The whole point of visiting a historic city like say Lisbon, is that you get the stay in an historic city, not some modern off site tourist hub where you get to take a crammed full tourist bus to the centre..

Or would you propose strict accompanying zoning laws with strict enforcement? I think that would meet stiff resistance from property owners but would be feasible. I do think all of this would make the destination much less attractive to visit though so it really comes down to how much you want/need the tourists.

I sympathize with your first point, but I believe only around 10% of tourists visiting Venice sleep there. Off-site tourist hubs are a real thing…

> Prohibition never works, and piracy is a reflection of an unmet need. Banning things merely airs out open wounds, and leads to grey-markets such as shady uber/airbnb equivalents within the city.

What do you mean by "works"? Yes, grey markets will pop up, but if Portugal banned AirBnB style renting that the market for that housing wouldn't shrink?

It seems to me that prohibition might be a useful tool in a more comprehensive set of policies to address the problem.

I wish more cities would ban or limit AirBnB.

Take Amsterdam for example.

A good decade ago, it was crowded in the tourism months (summer), but not too bad. Now it's crowded in the off season too, and during the summer months even more so, to the point where walking around is really hard.

The mayor seems to constantly want to get rid of cannabis, which won't solve the problem, the issue isn't the weed tourism... it's the unfettered tourism.

These things can be controlled, you can control how much tourists you have by limiting the amount of hotels you have in your city. But with AirBnB you lose all control on how many tourists.

AirBnB already is limited in Amsterdam: "According to Dutch regulations, you can only rent out your entire home in Amsterdam for a maximum of 30 nights per year, unless you have a specific permit that allows you to rent out your home for more nights, such as a short term stay license."

https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/860/amsterdam

Lived in Amsterdam a few years back, the AirBNBs made it freaking torture during summer.

The old wooden buildings where one could hear everything, people arriving and talking loudly in the stairwells then banging their suitcases up the stairs etc.

We left, couldn't deal wit it.

I feel your pain, it's definitely a big problem in many places in Europe. Bad construction + overcrowded = Noisy. That said I grew up in a concrete high-rise 'high density' building in Eastern Europe, and I can't recall that I ever heard any neighbor.

But still the problems are not solved, it is not only airbnb, like many places we are in the endgame of neoliberalism which is the wholesale of other peoples property to rich people by the corrupt political class.

Nowadays people offering AirBnB rentals have to register themselves or they will be fined.

How much control is happening, no idea, probably none as usual.

This is the type of thing that controlling is very difficult and thus expensive. As a result it's done at a pretty minimal level everywhere.

The thing is... it's not actually. If you made a law to force AirBnB to share data on who is making the listing with the government, you have your register of who to tax/etc.

You could also make laws to limit the number of properties per person, and if you're even smarter, you could use that in conjunction with a map of relationships between people, so you could limit the number of people putting listings in their family members names to get around any limitations.

AirBnB has the data to assist governments.

> If you made a law to force AirBnB to share data on who is making the listing with the government, you have your register of who to tax/etc.

Airbnb will probably follow your law, but other platforms that do not will flourish. They will be difficult to regulate, given that they won't be in your jurisdiction.

> You could also make laws to limit the number of properties per person.

Many laws already exist that give unfavourable tax treatment to second and subsequent properties. They are widely avoided through family members and legal entity structures and a hand-wavy "map of relationships between people" isn't going to magically fix that. This would also have a fairly obvious negative effect: it would artificially limit supply in the rental market, driving up prices. A person who could have invested in multiple properties and supplied them to the rental market will instead supply at most one, and invest the rest of their money elsewhere.

There isn't some nefarious conspiracy preventing effective regulation in this area. It's just a legitimately hard problem.

Well, it doesn't help that many inspectors actually have to use public transports and be paid later from their travel expenses, so their control area is anyway minimal.

At least that is how remember how bad it used to be.

As much as your ideas would work, I don't want to live in the world that you are envisioning in your brain.

Not all additional tourist revenue is worth the marginal costs. And cities have no obligation to host visitors they don’t want.

Hotels are usually limited because they are unpleasant neighbors for actual residents. It’s not really a surprise that’s the main issue people have with AirBnB rentals.

I'm generally a YIMBY and in favor of housing, but are we really so sure that new housing will solve the problems in cities like Barcelona or Lisbon (where tourists and people coming in attracted by the good quality of life generally have higher disposable incomes than most locals).

If you just add housing, isn't it possible that the effect is like adding roads to prevent traffic congestion? The number of people coming in just increases even more until the marginal attractiveness is the same. From the point of view of locals this means that there are even more outsiders, and the affordability is just as bad.

In Bucharest, the city started cracking on AirBNB, the problem is that the landlords are greedy and will risk legal action to get that sweet foreigner money. Not sure how much we can blame the local governments on this one.