MADRID (AP) — Spain has ordered Airbnb to block more than 65,000 holiday listings on its platform for having violated rules, the Consumer Rights Ministry said Monday.
The ministry said that many of the 65,935 Airbnb listings it had ordered to be withdrawn did not include their license number or specify whether the owner was an individual or a company. Others listed numbers that didn’t match what authorities had.
Spain is grappling with a housing affordability crisis that has spurred government action against short-term rental companies.
Just fucking tax them into unprofitability.
I saw this headline and just assumed it was an anti-tourist thing, but I was wrong.
On a Monday morning, it’s just nice to see that somewhere on this planet there are countries willing to take federal action to attack the hoarding and purposeful scarcity in housing created by a greedy few sons of bitches.
I expect housing scarcity to become the next problem that gets solved somewhere in the world while the US pretends it’s unsolvable. (Not unlike homelessness and gun violence.)
The Spanish prime minister-- Pedro Sanchez-- is a political animal. He managed to maul and contain the far-right in a snap election he called. He has also spurred the economy and is growing, because he integrated many migrants well into the labour force. And even baser is that his government is pro-Palestine. All he had done in the past years granted him the political and social capital to enact policies that might ruffle the feathers of monied and powerful interests.
I hope Sanchez’s government will survive any politicking against his progressive policies. The housing crisis is happening across the developed world, and oligarchs will propagandise the public into believing that the crisis is unsolvable, because resolving this will eat their bottomline.
My neighborhood i rent in is really expensive. I’m well off but not well off enough to ever be able to afford a house here. Especially not now with a one year old kid. My rent is $3500 but the cheapest house here would be at least $10000 (all expenses considered) a month on a 30 year mortgage.
Most of the people that live in the single family homes here are old with no kids. Most families with kids here rent.
Every so often I see one of the homes get all it’s landscaping cleaned up, the house painted and sometimes an extension added onto it. Those are all the Airbnb’s. Just a house that sits there empty for 3/4 weeks.
The other ones get torn down and turned into what I’d call a “box” house. Basically that ugly style of house that takes up the entire plot of land but still is only meant for one family. These are bought by the inherited wealth families that have a couple kids and want to get out of the main city but still don’t want to live in the deep car dependent suburbs.
All of this because housing is used as an investment vehicle. From large corporations to individuals in retirement.
I really wish we could treat it for what it is. Shelter.
You may be interested in Community Land Trusts.
I really wish we could treat it for what it is. Shelter.
Agreed.
$3500
Yowza. I was fortunate to get my condo two years ago before this stuff accelerated to the point of hopelessness, and now that the US is having its credit downgraded, that was an even luckier thing to do.
My city has a snitch email, which you can contact and ask if a certain rental place is licensed
Already used it on two apartments my landlord is renting out. Turns out only one of them was properly licensed
AirBnB inflates housing prices, any regulation against it is pretty much always good for the locals
Only if you live somewhere people actually wanna go to :taps_head:
No matter where you live, AirBnB/VRBO can only make housing prices go up, never down. At best it’ll be neutral. It’s always taking inventory that might otherwise go to a local.
Otoh, it also provides jobs for the community, either directly (cleaning, handyman work, management) or indirectly (additional tourist dollars in local establishments).
The reality is, in almost all places, short term rentals have an extremely negligible impact on the housing market. And in the few places where they have a measurable impact, we need to ask: why can’t that area just build more housing? And the answer, almost invariably, is restrictive zoning codes, coupled with land speculation. Solving the problem of lack of housing doesn’t require banning short term rentals, an action which would likely have a significant negative impact on local businesses who rely on the tourist dollars. Solving the problem involves liberalizing zoning ordinances to allow more housing to be built, and adopting Georgist Land Value Taxes which preclude investors’ ability to speculate on land value rather than only earning money via value they provide to other people.
Not all job creation is a net benefit to the public interest. Wars give lots of people jobs.
Dude the issue in Barcelona is that AirBNBs take up housing that’s supposed to be occupied by supercomputer researchers. The city also already has plenty of Hotels. Licensed ones.
If more tourists want to come than there are hotel rooms tough luck why should Barcelona tank its economy for them. Barcelona is a city, not a theme park. The reason it’s beautiful is not because it was built to attract tourists, but because it’s an economical powerhouse run and lived in by people who value things like architecture and urban planning.
Take your tourism dollars and spend them in Extremadura, Barcelona won’t mind. Great food there, nature, small places, little industry, Roman architecture, they can actually use that money.
Thanks for this link. It’s kind of amazing and I like it because it says what should be obvious to us all: public homes are a good idea.
I expect housing scarcity to become the next problem that gets solved somewhere in the world while the US pretends it’s unsolvable.
To solve that you need to antagonize NIMBYs so I’m not hopeful.
There is no federal government in Spain, but yes, you are right. And by the way, housing scarcity has been the underlying problem to most economical divides and class discrimination since decades now.
Spain’s government is more federal than federal governments like the German one. Spain’s Autonomous regions have way more leeway and freedom than regions in federal governments.
Still, I don’t think it is a federation. In Italy we got 5 indipendent statute regions as well, still not a federation.
By name it is not a federation (define federation…) Yet Spanish autonomies enjoy more autonomy than some federal states.
It is a nation including some regions given autonomy. I believe a federation by definition is comprised of exclusively equal member states forming common governmental organs.
Spains regions lack of their own police, tax collection (the German federal level doesn’t even have a tax office), only partial cultural autonomy. Also the powers they have are only devolved, they’re not guaranteed those rights.
German states are fully formed states in themselves, they have their own sovereignty, delegating the exercise of parts of it to the federal level just as EU member states delegate sovereignty to the EU. “Fully formed state” here meaning that they do not rely on the federal level for their administration, in fact living in Germany you generally don’t come into contact with federal bureaucracy at all, it’s all state or municipal level (district level is technically state level, they’re devolved public bodies).
I’ll grant you that among unitary states Spain is quite federal, but it’s not “more federal than federal countries”.
Spanish regions have their own police. These police forces are autonomous from the central ones. https://es.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Policía_autonómica Some even have a specific name: Mossos, Ertzaintza, policia foral, etc…
The Spanish regions have autonomy on both collecting taxes, and assigning their own budgets. They are autonomous in the case of emergencies, healthcare, education (which allows them to set their culture), cultural ministeries, with their own regional bodies that make their own decisions.
All this is more federal than the federal states of Germany. Signed, somebody from Spain that lives in Germany, and does come in contact with the federal government quite often.
All of that is things that German states have. Not sure what federal agency you’re in contact with but it certainly isn’t the Ausländeramt that’s state-level.
Exactly. All of that things that Germany has, meanwhile Spain is not even a federation. Yet it has the same level or more of autonomy on its regions than a federation.
Found a paper (a bit older, 2001, but should still be mostly accurate) comparing the two. Cliff notes:
- Despite legislative power going by default to the central state in Spain and to the states in Germany, distribution of power is overall comparable. Less uniform in Spain as every region gets its own autonomy statute instead of all German states pooling their sovereignty in a uniform way.
- Administration is practically completely state matter in Germany, while Spain retains central administration structures in all regions. Those largely delegate matters to the region’s administrations, though. So again overall not too dissimilar in practice.
- Regarding the judicature: The regions don’t have courts. They have some say when it comes to how court districts are drawn and that’s pretty much it. German states all have their own courts and appeals courts, the federal level only has cassation courts. In this area German states have way more autonomy. States elect judges for their own courts as well as 50% of federal judges, or 50% of the people who elect them are designated by the states, depending.
- Spanish regions have very limited means to influence central legislative. No right to initiative, no own legislative body, just a right to petition. German states can initiate federal law, have their own legislative body, and much federal law needs passing by both federal and state bodies because it tangentially affects state prerogatives.
- Interestingly, the federal level has larger powers of oversight over the German states than Spain does over the regions. In both cases the oversight isn’t large, though, in Germany it only exists in so far states are administering federal law on behalf of the federation, which isn’t often the case. E.g. (practically all) criminal law is federal law, but administered by the states on their own behalf.
- German states have more financial autonomy. I won’t get into details the distribution of taxes between federation and states in Germany is complex AF, also, has been renegotiated multiple times. Regarding administration, though, as said: The federation has no tax office, they couldn’t collect taxes if they wanted to.
- German states have much, much, much more power when it comes to asserting their power. Maybe that’s why they’re not as hell-bent on carving out power for themselves: Autonomous regions have to rely on public sentiment and the good will of the constitutional court, otherwise the central authority can just walk straight over them, so they take whatever they can get their hands on while German states are much more relaxed about it.
Ope, yeah. Forgot that Spain is a monarchy, but by federal I just mean ‘nationwide’. Thanks.
Being a consitutional monarchy or republic doesn’t have anything to do with federation.
Being a constitutional monarchy instead of a republic just means that they have a predesignated figurehead that represents the country, instead of electing that figurehead. The person is just a figurehead that rubberstamps things, but doesn’t take decisions at all. Be it the king (in a constitutional monarchy like Spain, Norway, UK, Denmark, Sweden, etc) or however you want to call it (in a republic like France, Germany, etc).
The government gets elected.
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You’re not far off. We don’t call it ‘federal government’ but in practice it’s exactly that, in the same line that we call the prime minister ‘presidente’.
Well it is an anti-tourist thing in the sense that regulations on AirBnBs and the like are meant to close the “hotel license” loophole. Touristy places generally don’t mind new short-term accommodation and give out licenses like candy, likewise small places with relaxed property markets, non-touristy places are much more restrictive because they don’t want to tank their economy.
For grandma in a village renting out some rooms to visitors getting delisted will result in her going to the municipality, asking for a license, getting one, and putting the listing up again. For an investor buying up apartments in big cities to illegally use as a hotel because renting long-term has lower ROI, well, they won’t get a hotel license, their listings are going to stay down. If you want to build only hotels and have no long-term accommodation may I suggest building a theme park somewhere.
Your downvotes make me wonder if I misunderstood your post, but you seem to be saying that Spain’s Airbnb regulations make it harder for people to buy flats with the intention of using them as short-term holiday lets, while not really stopping people who just want to rent a room in their own house for short periods. Which does sound good to me, given that those empty rooms in grandma’s house wouldn’t otherwise be on the market.
So is your point that this is “anti-tourist” in the sense that it does make things more difficult for tourists, but that should be expected given that tourists are generally indifferent to the long term negative effects of tourism on a city?
I’m not really acquainted with the details of how Spain does it but it’s common practice in Europe to need a license for short-term rentals, it’s usually municipal statute as an extension of zoning law. Details differ vastly depending on location because every municipality is different.
Before the days of AirBnB circumventing those municipal regulations was very hard as big hotels are kind of hard to hide, they’re rather obvious, and if you have small apartments where are you going to get your renters from. AirBnB made it possible to get renters for small properties that fall under the radar of authorities. So requiring AirBnB to, effectively, ensure that what they list is licensed is closing that loophole.
The “anti-tourist” thing only really comes into play when municipalities are actually limiting the number of licenses they give out: When licenses are abundant it doesn’t matter that you can skirt them with AirBnB. Cities like Barcelona do limit them, other places don’t, as such only places like Barcelona had an actual problem with AirBnB, as such cracking down on AirBnB is helping the anti-tourist “agenda” of places like Barcelona. With agenda I mean allow people to continue to live and work in their own city doing something else but wipe tourist asses.
those numbers are awfully close to 16 bit unsigned int max (65535). suspicious.
What does this mean
It means humans seek out patterns and similarities even when there are none going so far as to perceive was isn’t even there.
In this instance it’s simply that the number in this article/legal action is close by a few hundred to a number that is a common number found in computing due to how electronic computation works.
It’s not necessarily just a coincidence (but probably is).
Maybe they’re using a spreadsheet that counts row numbers in an unsigned int, so the maximum number of rows is 65,535.
Someone accidentally counted the number of rows instead of the number of non-empty rows, then added 400 because they think about 400 properties were omitted from their data for whatever reason. That’s 65935.
Maybe it is pareidolia, but it’s notable enough that you’d check your numbers again before passing it on.
I’m not a data scientist but in a semi related field. Sometimes numbers just trigger a feeling that you need to review your work / or “sanity check”.
I see mistakes several times a year caused by similar mishandling.
I’m not a “master” but it’s the type of thing you associate with mastery that comes from decades of experience (or debilitating anxiety).
Absolutely. Any time I see 65NNN, it triggers a sanity check.
Nice round numbers, like something taking exactly 10000 ms to return a result? Yeah I’ll bet thats not natural and theres a timeout set by a human doing that.
Pareidolia
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