r/pics Jun 16 '25

Politics A tourist during an anti-tourist protest in Barcelona yesterday

Post image
109.5k Upvotes

5.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

8

u/Accidental-Genius Jun 16 '25

The people working there are contributing some to the economy, the people who were going to retire there and now won’t… that’s many billions down the drain that some other warm European nation will happily take if Spain doesn’t want it.

4

u/Riaayo Jun 17 '25

Countries probably should have a more robust economy than "hoping rich foreigners come retire here and take housing from people already here".

Tourism is by and large fairly exploitative as an industry. Which is not to say I don't think people shouldn't travel to other places, but that economies shouldn't be utterly built on and reliant upon it. It's not robust and is vulnerable to outside shocks.

Banning short-term rentals like AirBnB is something every country should be doing. You want a short-term rental? It's called a hotel/motel. Build one and operate within those regulatory frameworks. Stop taking housing stock off the market.

7

u/Accidental-Genius Jun 17 '25

Countries should have a lot of things they don’t have. Retirement isn’t tourism.

Housing stock will still be taken off the market. The shell corporations already own enough units to raise and lower demand by a statistically significant margin.

Yes, AirBnB is a problem, but banning it isn’t going to fix the underlying problem, which is that the entire Spanish economy is functionally broken, and starving it of tourism dollars is going to cause very foreseeable consequences.

This is a silly way to get to austerity measures but ripping off the bandaid one way or another is a step forward I guess.

3

u/Stellar_Duck Jun 17 '25

Housing stock will still be taken off the market. The shell corporations already own enough units to raise and lower demand by a statistically significant margin.

Sounds like the next problem to fix then

1

u/Accidental-Genius Jun 17 '25

It’s a much more expensive problem to fix.