With so much pent up demand there must be new properties getting built all over these holiday spots, no?

I hope not. A lot of holiday locations are only attractive places because they don't have a load of cheaply built urban sprawl all around them.

Sounds like they were built to be expensive then, and never really an option for everyday people

They were an option for the regular people of the time, hundreds of years ago, before the population grew an order of magnitude or two.

Markets solve these problems and that remains true even when you disagree with the results. If people don't want to visit places with tall buildings and sprawl, then it won't get built and where it does it will fail.

What actually bothers you is that this is what people want and it will get built and it will be patronized.

> What actually bothers you is that this is what people want and it will get built and it will be patronized.

Yes. It does bother me that the utility function of "the market" does not align with what is good for me, and that therefore it frequently produces results that are worse for me.

In fact this applies not just to urban development, but also to many other things.

I'll bite the bullet and say sometimes "the people" are idiots and what they want is ugly and sucks.

Real estate has the disadvantage of there only being a fixed amount of land in those spots.

Multi-story luxury condos are a thing. Not a lot of land used, and it's something that many people want to live in. Why are they not being built in these places?

Even high-end condos cost less than a low-end house to build, since the land costs are amortized among many units.

> Why are they not being built in these places?

Perhaps because a tall residential building in a tourist spot is an eyesore.

People go there to see something scenic, not more of what they have at home, or worse.

If your urban planning is going to prioritize giving tourists scenic views rather than building affordable homes for the people that live and work in the city, then you shouldn't be surprised if the city turns into an giant museum/resort where only the wealthy can afford a decent QoL (because they're the only ones who can financially compete with the tourists).

Here's the thing: with the proliferation of AirBnB and real-estate-as-an-investment that's already the case regardless of density.

In my corner of the world people move out of large cities not because they enjoy driving so much, but because they don't have the credit score for anything within city limits

Space and access to sunlight are also components of quality of life and you have neither in very dense housing.

>but because they don't have the credit score for anything within city limits

That's because there's not enough housing in the city limits.

>Space and access to sunlight are also components of quality of life and you have neither in very dense housing.

That's not true, adding a few more sky scrapers increases the amount of space for people and does not impact the amount of sunlight people can enjoy.

Cities can also do things like add more rail lines, so people can commute from further away -- which also increases the amount of space for people.

Exactly. "Hey, let's build a dime-a-dozen twenty-story glassy tower next to all these centuries-old churches and open-air markets."

> Perhaps because a tall residential building in a tourist spot is an eyesore.

If you build it like an eyesore, it will be an eyesore, yes. Here is a multi-story building that I lived as a student in and it housed another 10k: https://www.ruseducation.in/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/LOMON...

But I agree that building glass+concrete rectangles is a not a great idea for tourist spots (or anywhere, really).

Your example has one thing that those condos don't have: glorious socialist realism waste of space - and I mean it in a good way.

When they were young, my grandparents moved into a whole district built from scratch for the purpose of housing workers from a nearby steelmill.

Communism notwithstanding, the district is amazingly well planned and - what's dearly missing in modern, hyper-optimized construction - sufficiently spread apart.

> Your example has one thing that those condos don't have: glorious socialist realism waste of space - and I mean it in a good way.

Exactly! If you rise up enough, it becomes possible to have green zones around these big buildings and make living actually enjoyable.

On the other end of the spectrum is Hong Kong and most of Manhattan - I don't look forward to living there, even if some condos are really nice inside.

One of the sisters is a great example for sure, and they were in my mind as I read your previous comment but I cant think of any others that come even close. Would love to see other examples.

"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."

Paris has one of the highest population densities of any city on earth even with buildings capped at 6 stories. What an eyesore!

They both suck.

A multi-billion dollar corporation that actively strategizes to benefit from no regulation or bad regulation. Likely they also lobby for favorable regulation that will actively harm locals.

A local government not properly regulating.

I'd compare it to PG&E or Comcast in the United States.

Edinburgh have attempted to regulate and have been sued by the short term let's association.

The owners of said AirBnBs, who would be eligible to vote for the local councilors (who must approve new developments), have an incentive to ensure that that would not be the case.

It's really too bad the laws in place put the power to build new housing in politicians hands

The UK housing market is at least as f'ed up as the US market, in terms of actual construction of housing (no matter how badly needed) being mostly forbidden.

As far as I understand it, the UK housing market suffers from an additional problem that is rare to non-existent in the US: builders who get planning permission for new housing but then sit on the land because they know with almost 100% certainty that built or not, it will be worth more in the future.

There are places in the USA where a builder could take this bet, but it would be much, much riskier.

The discussion I hear in the US side is that housing is a recent problem - like 5-10 years.

The U.K. has had a housing shortage for decades, and solving it becomes harder each year as the backlog increases.

England is full, there is no room for new holiday spots in the popular areas.

I'm curious about hotel capacity in Airbnb locations. If 1,000 people want to visit a city, they need a place to live. If Airbnb didn't exist, would hotels just be fully booked?

Or do hotels not have the capacity?

If there were more demand for hotels, then more hotels would open - in that part of the town designated for hotels.

Prices would increase, fewer people would visit, and we’d be back to the good old days where only the very wealthy could go on grand tours.

Tourists with no money are worthless for this town.

They just block up the pavement lining up photos of landmarks (and anything else) with their mobile phones, that they could certainly download from Insta and get a better photo. Every square foot of this town has already been snapped a million times.

The implication of your comment is that poor people should just stay at home and look at pictures on the internet instead of occasionally traveling and experiencing things for themselves.

If this is your perspective, you’re either incredibly privileged, jaded, or both. I don’t think that poor people are necessarily owed cheap accommodation or transportation in any sense, but I also don’t think that active steps should be taken to remove more affordable options simply because they can’t afford to patronize high-end restaurants and stores or do the more expensive tourist activities.

> If this is your perspective, you’re either incredibly privileged, jaded, or both.

My perspective on poor people and travel is that international air-travel is hopelessly underpriced; it isn't reasonable for all 6 billion people in the world to travel for holidays. I don't really care who travels; tourists don't better my bread, whether they're rich or poor. But the argument that tourists are good for the local enconomy depends on them being willing to spend money. Huge columns of overseas students don't spend much money.

My town is pretty, and world-famous. It is quite capable of sustaining itself without tourists; it has two universities, and several large hospitals. Housing is in short supply, and expensive. It's not a great shopping destination; tourists who want to shop shop elsewhere.

> but I also don’t think that active steps should be taken to remove more affordable options

Every housing unit devoted to tourists is a housing unit that isn't available for the local people. The Council is right to try to restrict residential housing to residential use.

In the 80s and early 90s we would alienate book our holiday cottage in Cornwall though a catalog. I’m not entirely sure how it worked, I guess my parents phoned up the company and asked for a given cottage for a given week.

How is airbnb and different?