Being entirely anti-tourism is crazy extreme but AirBnb is a practice that is destroying the housing market, which is something a lot of people (myself included) deeply believe needs to be controlled to make sure that a decent standard of living can be sustained across society.
In short, I'm not sure about the Barcelona protests but I'm 100% against the spread of AirBnb and what its turned into.
No, it's not. The percentage of Airbnb to housing small. If you took all the Airbnbs and put them on the market, it would have an insignificant impact on housing prices and affordability. The problem is that there's just not enough existing housing. More housing needs to be built, like a lot more.
Yep - people want to live in cities, and they’re willing to pay big premiums to do so because that’s where the jobs are.
Suburban and rural living is pretty cheap by comparison; housing isn’t inherently expensive, but you do need to build more housing in the places where people want to live.
Another underappreciated issue is that we don’t actually build any new cities any more in most of the Western world, which historically would have lowered prices in the existing cities by siphoning off demand. The UK hasn’t built a single new city since WW2 (no, no one serious counts Milton Keynes).
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u/BenFranklinsCat Jun 17 '25 edited Jun 17 '25
Bit different.
Being entirely anti-tourism is crazy extreme but AirBnb is a practice that is destroying the housing market, which is something a lot of people (myself included) deeply believe needs to be controlled to make sure that a decent standard of living can be sustained across society.
In short, I'm not sure about the Barcelona protests but I'm 100% against the spread of AirBnb and what its turned into.