The market has a solution to this; it comes in the form of AirBnB. However, many municipalities are aggressively attempting to legislate this market mechanism away.
How in the world does a service that encourages turning residential housing into hotel rooms solve that problem exactly? Local wanna be residents are going to rent rooms in the homes of the wealthy absentee homeowners? Maybe some, but I suspect a vast majority are fine just letting them sit vacant. Even if they do, that's no way to build a healthy, thriving community. It's fast food housing. I, as well as many others, don't want to live in a building that's part residential, part hotel.
So your solution is "Let AirBnB enable the absentee owner to rent out their place to the local baker that is priced out of owning.", thereby giving the illusion of a solution but really not solving the problem because the fabric of the community becomes provisional at best.
Seems like a fairly poor solution to me. I hate red tape as much as anyone but I've come around to think that well crafted and executed policy that focuses on the common good is a better option to strive for than figuring out how to enable even more wealth concentration than we already have. The trick is "well crafted and executed" which I agree is rarely the case but we already know the end game with unbridled capitalism. Just ask the pope - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/10/poor-must-chan...
The problem in the article is that there is unused/abandoned housing. AirBnB fixes that. If you have a xenophobic fear of tourists or something, that's a different issue. AirBnB also decreases the profitability of large hotels, which means more building space allocated to residential housing.
Sure it's great as a tourist but as an owner, when you could rent your place for X € a month, on AirBnB you could probably rent it for 70% of that for a week. Bottom line is you're not looking for people to rent it all year long, now you want to make a quick buck and rent it on AirBnB.
There's an article in the HuffPost: http://www.huffingtonpost.fr/2016/03/30/airbnb-paris-locatio...
"In the 10 most touristy areas, 9 to 10 nights on AirBnB cover a whole month of 'regular' rent".
To get there, they analyzed 8000 places out of 35000 (studios and one bedroom).
Again it goes back to what you want to prioritize, a well knit community or a city of hotel rooms mixed with residential housing that encourages more rent seeking. You're willing to allow for a lower quality and further enriching an already rich upper class. So not only do renters have to pay high rents and never own, they now need to sacrifice any semblance of community as the incentives to AirBnB a place would displace all long term rentals.
Not everything that can be monetized and made efficient should be, but I realize that's super counter to the Ayn Rand HN crowd. I maybe would've agreed with you 10 years ago but I've since realized the flaws in libertarian thinking. Either that or I'm wrong and unbridled capitalism is the right solution to all the problems but I seriously doubt it.