So essentially 80% were not properly registered and paying taxes? I’m not that surprised, once a good double-digit number are cheating, cheating becomes the only viable way to remain competitive.
What we found surprised all of them. A handful of people were listing sometimes over a dozen properties and avoiding the larger, but not optional, hotel tax. The 80% figure doesn’t surprise me much now just knowing how a few individuals can flood the short-term rental market in an area.
And, if it's like some cities (Dublin, Galway), they do this at the expense of the long-term rental market.
A common strategy in Irish government is if there's a problem, and you don't really want to do anything but want to make it look like you're doing something, then you give it to local government to implement, as they won't have the resources to do it.
As a bonus, you get to point to the law, secure in the knowledge that it won't be implemented.
Is there any western city where there isn't a housing crisis?
I don't want to sound too radical, but this seems to be inextricably connected to capitalism. We won't ever solve it without structural changes.
What Amsterdam is doing is a decent start at least.
Given this, any "solution" to housing affordability is "solving" a problem that a sizable and highly influential segment of the population doesn't want solved. On the contrary, you see real government action whenever home prices fall.
Get rid of the coercion and you get rid of the problems.
In the US, our shortsightedness has begun threatening the lower-middle class. People with some cash in the bank are facing homelessness, due to a historic lack of housing. The housing shortage came following dozens of contributors including NIMBY, AirBnB, single-use zoning, tunnel-vision'd pols/voters, corp house buyers, etc. Pointing to a single factor delays solutions.
The mechanism they all use for that is restrictive zoning. To win that you have to defeat them all. That's why it's hard to do.
Having failed to actually solve the problem, some people have had the idea to foist it onto someone else. Restrict who you can rent to, so people can't buy a property and use it for vacation rentals, on the theory that it will shift supply to long-term rentals. Then that makes the problem worse for short-term rentals, creating an incentive for regulatory arbitrage by AirBNB. Then long-term renters condemn AirBNB for thwarting their attempt to shift costs onto people who can't vote in the jurisdiction with the zoning problem.
All of that is bike shedding and friendly fire. The only real solution is to increase the housing supply.
That would be why I made the point repeatedly that it isn't any one factor that got us here and cautioned against trying to frame it that way.
If housing prices are too high, landlords will want them to stay high. You can say that it's male landlords and female landlords and gay landlords and redneck landlords and atheist landlords and thin landlords and fat landlords and look how many factors there are. But you're just bisecting the group "existing property owners" along arbitrary lines that have nothing to do with anything.
Finish paying mortgage, use the equity to buy a house 20 years ago and rent it out. Rent income > mortgage interest (and capital too)
House price increases, use equity to buy a few more houses.
Fast forward to today, you have 3 million in equity and 10k/month coming in after costs.
Houses were the most commonly owned assets, so governments that increased the price of housing made most of the middle class richer, making those policies popular.
Re-formulating the above, making housing expensive is popular policy.
Doing that policy long enough causes new entrants into the market to not be able to afford housing. So yes, there is something wrong with our housing system. Part of that is that we marketed 'own your house' as a great way to earn money, and then made good on that promise at the expense of new entrants into the market.
[0]: https://www.supermoney.com/inflation-adjusted-home-prices/
You won't make SV money but cost of living is unreal. I pull well over the 6 figure mark while getting to put ~60% of my take-home pay straight into savings and investments. And I'm not even close to frugal.
Today its dealing with the crisis, tomorrow its something else. I don't know how prevalent this thinking is but it could be on peoples minds as they look at property.
Once you account for some states have terrible weather, dysfunctional state governments, higher property taxes, etc. it might not make sense to trade a a net 20% change in overall CoL if it means you have significantly less to do. If your first thoughts are kids, pets, and gardening than sure the midwest is pretty good. If your primary concerns are career advancement, educated social/dating pool, variety in food and music, niche/luxury hobbies like skiing or surfing, etc. then your options for places to live becomes essentially drastically smaller and more competitive.
That said there are certain midwest cities that might strike a good balance.
The benefits of not being a tourist destination
Yes, the rest of the country is like this too, but for whatever reason Galway seems to have it extra bad; I know families that have split up over it.
It's infuriating that we let companies like this be founded on completely illegal premises and continue operating.
Is that not always the case with these American marketplace apps? Now that the property owners have to follow the rules, they have the same burden as the real hotels, but none of the economy of scale.
Same with all the places where they make Uber drivers be actual taxi drivers in actual taxis. Then all of a sudden they are competing directly against some very large, established players who have the market pretty well figured out already.
In some cities, pre-Uber taxi companies have upped their game and got themselves apps that'll give you a price and wait time both of which are actually right, that let you see the taxi on its way to you, tip included in the price, and let you pay by card.
In other cities, taxi operators provide shitty service where their card machine "doesn't work" and they "don't have any change" either.
On the flipside, I've actually never had a taxi driver do any of those things to me, although they sure do lie through their teeth.
I think the problems wasn‘t that they were not paying taxes, but that they operated private apartments as hotels without permission.
Kinda counterproductive, no?
I'm generally not a fan of the word "sustainable" so I won't use the phrase "sustainable tourism", but it behooves cities (and countries) to find a balance between making themselves attractive to tourists and making sure that the costs of tourism don't exceed the benefits.
Tourism should allow tourists to experience a different place and everything that it's home to (the people, the food, the culture, etc.). When places fundamentally change in an effort to serve tourists, you basically have what I like to call "Disneyland syndrome". They become artificial destinations and the interests of the people who live there are sacrificed to create an optimal experience for the guests.
Airbnb is a parasite and one of the first things cities should look at when rethinking their tourism strategies.
I always said this. Italy is addicted to tourism, an addiction that so far has only benefitted a few, while impacting negatively the majority of the population.
As someone who has traveled extensively, I agree entirely about "disneyland syndrome", and I'm one of those travelers that tries to avoid such things. I generally don't travel to places which are tourist destinations, in the first place. Regardless, my mode of travel is to try to meet people, stay long enough that I can live normally as a local, mostly buy groceries and cook, and work during the week only going out in the evenings and weekends.
AirBnB is essential to the way I travel, because it allows me to rent an apartment for a month that has normal apartment amenities like a basic kitchen. Many of the places I've visited have few or no hotels. One place I actually did stay in a hotel... the only hotel in the entire town, which also had the only restaurant in the entire town in it. In communities like this, someone offering you a room in their home or letting you rent their apartment while they are away is a critical pathway to being able to travel there in the first place and I don't think attracts the sort of people expecting a packaged experience.
From my perspective, AirBnB has enabled me and others like me to connect to the world and experience things that would be impossible otherwise, and at the same time has provided opportunities for those we interacted with along the way (I leveraged my network while traveling to help many of the people I met, connecting a budding craft brewer with resources to help them succeed, introducing a very good local photographer to english-language resources online to let them sell their photography, connecting someone who wanted to come to the US as an SWE with the right people so they could get hired and have their H1B sponsored, etc).
It's not really AirBnB, or rather what AirBnB is in essence, that's the issue, it's that it creates and enables a pathway for individuals to skirt location regulations to make a profit. Many of the places I visited had no regulations against short-term rentals because the idea that someone might do such a thing wasn't really on the mind of local regulators, but in key tourist destinations this is very much on the mind of local regulators, not the least of which because they can tax tourism directly via stays.
The thing is that as a tourist/traveler, it's not all about you (or me). You need to consider and be respectful of the impact your experience can have on the very locals you want to live like.
Your desire to have a kitchen is reasonably not more important than a local's desire to not see the apartment next to them converted into a illegal short-term rental where random strangers routinely come and go, or to be priced out of the market because it's more profitable for landlords to convert properties into illegal short-term rentals.
Incidentally, "living like a local" is about more than having a kitchen and this is in my opinion one of the most overused terms among the nomad set, but that said, if you really want to stay somewhere longer term and have a visa that lets you do so, you can try to rent a property legitimately. In fact, finding a legitimate rental, meeting a landlord, signing a lease, etc. is a perfect opportunity to "live like a local".
> Many of the places I've visited have few or no hotels. One place I actually did stay in a hotel... the only hotel in the entire town, which also had the only restaurant in the entire town in it. In communities like this, someone offering you a room in their home or letting you rent their apartment while they are away is a critical pathway to being able to travel there in the first place and I don't think attracts the sort of people expecting a packaged experience.
As you said, some places don't even have regulations because they don't see many tourists. It's one thing to show up in a town that's off the beaten track and be introduced to someone who will rent you a room for a few nights. It's another to have property owners interested in maximizing their earnings advertising their property to every Tom, Dick and Harry using the internet.
How are you not Tom, Dick or Harry? When I first started traveling, I believed the "I'm different" thing too, but it's a bit hubristic. Tourists come in all shapes and sizes these days and there are a lot of location-independent folks ("nomads") who will move around every few weeks or months, not days.
In my experience, most "off the beaten path" places that have Airbnb listings almost always have at least one legitimate hotel, hostel, or homestay. In fact, I'd go so far as to suggest that most places that have Airbnbs aren't nearly as "off the beaten path" as you're telling yourself.
I think that's kind of my whole point, to some degree. In the Age of the Internet, the world is more connected than it has ever been before, which means the path is less beaten by roadways than it is by wires and signals from wireless towers. If a place has any form of reasonable Internet connectivity, it's probably not really that far "off the beaten path", but that's also essential as a basis for any reasonable accommodation. So, no, I'm not visiting remote tribes in the Amazonian jungle, but I also wouldn't for many reasons including ethical considerations. Visiting a rural village in the countryside of a country not known for tourism, but that nevertheless has broadband Internet, is not as far off the beaten path, but it is still outside the awareness of typical tourists.
The world being more connected is generally a good thing, and I'd say a net good, but it's not all roses and cherries, and in fact there are many negative externalities to this connectivity as well. AirBnB provides people a way to arbitrage those externalities, but it's not wholly evil either, it also has positive attributes that can benefit both parties.
On the whole, Airbnb is a parasite. Those "off the beaten track" places we're talking about (where, again, legitimate hotels, hostels and homestays are typically available as well) almost certainly account for a very small part of Airbnb's listings, bookings and revenue.
The high-volume locations (think cities like Barcelona and Amsterdam) have experienced significant damage as a result of Airbnb.
That's the stance I fully despise. My country (Russia) has suffered tremendously (and still does, 100 years later) because people sharing such ideas took power, killing dozens of millions in the process.
If the solution is that then why the rich oppose the increase of minimum wage? What should be the solution to making workers wealthier without touching the bosses? The stock market? After all the crashes and wealth theft of funds? Do you guys ever connect the brain before typing?
(My guess is based on the amount of a plundering socialist rhetoric in your comments)
Most of the time minimum wage increases just result in cost push inflation at the bottom of society. Yes, that means the middle class and above will have to pay more for services provided by minimum wage workers. The upper classes aren't hurting for money so they actually end up paying those wages anyway.
That’s completely false. While they were at one point two blocs in the same party, the dispute was never resolved, and it split into two different parties before the overthrow of the monarchy, and continued to have conflict through the revolutionary period culminating in the Mensheviks being banned by the Bolshevik-led regime in 1921, and a supposed attempt to restore the party was the notional basis for one of the earlier of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s.
Where is the 'battle' thing in all these events? Bolsheviks took power, and Mensheviks never had it, and were never a force in the subsequent civil war. They were just banned and later former members were mostly purged.
From this, we can logically conclude that poster would be most happy if rich people get plundered, deprived of their property and possessions, tortured, raped and killed, because these things are the worst that can happen to a person.
I can hardly interpret it as a call to introduce some fairness to the market.
And as far as I'm seeing, their bargaining power is only going up, workers can survive without their bosses, it's the bosses that get richer by thieving wealth from their workers
But we should stop thinking about the past and think about the current situation and how to fix it
I've read a bit and I think the problem with russia was not the communism, it is cultural, it sucked even before when the tsars were burning books and limiting the expression possibilities, including the fact that Russia and the eastern europe has never been through the renovation process of western europe and the liberal movements never took place there, I would hardly use russia as an example for anything, so please stop using russia as a background to don't add anything useful to principle exposed, we fought fascism which was on-par with the totalitarianism of tsarism and communism, and created a fair society that lasted for few decades, which now needs help in order to get better, if you guys decided to suppress a totalitarian government with a worse one, it's not the fault of ideas, it's just your culture and/or approach that is wrong
I'm sorry to come off as harsh but it's been all day that you wanted to use Russia as an example ignoring that you have had the same issues of lack of freedom, redistribution and fairness even before communism was even an idea
You've read the wrong bits. Before the WW1 Russia had a booming cultural and scientific spheres, was undergoing a rapid industrialization and had a lot of philosophical schools and movements. All was hampered by an ineffective and inadequate authoritarian rule, but the human capital was there and rapidly closing the gaps to leading economies. In fact, the seeds planted at that time allowed Russia to quickly rebuild and industrialize after the revolution, withstand Germany in WW2 and emerge as a leading world power on par with the USA, maintaining this status for many decades, doing all of this despite the ineffective socialistic rule.
Now, the reds came to power only after they have staged a successful coup late in 1917, toppling the interim government that was in power after the Tzar abdication. After the coup the Reds won the brutal civil war, chanting those very slogans you are repeating. I believe that if not for this unfortunate event, Russia would peacefully transition to democracy and by now would be one of the leading European economies, with twice the population it has now. The world could have learned a lesson from all of this, but the ideas of equality and justice are sounding so seductive to unlearned audience. If only they knew that equality means mediocrity.
Oh, and Tsars never burned books, that was what Nazis did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_Censorship_(Russian_...
But even seeing at what's happening now, you have a rogue state, made of oligarchs, killing journalists, and I guess it's hardly communism to be blamed, I think happening in Russia was the worst thing that could've happened to the communist ideas
It’s morally and intellectually equivalent to neo-Nazism.
I suppose the Nazis were defeated in 1945, and the bulk of the Communists in 1991, so maybe we just need a few more decades for the cancer to die out.
Why wouldn't we want to continue have mobs of drunken British yobbos throwing up in the streets? (Note: I'm British for a little bit longer, so I can say such things.)
And we're seriously thinking of banning cruise ships here in Amsterdam - against, too much hassle, not enough revenue, lot of pollution. If that happens, they will raise the bed of the river IJ 4 meters and put a bike tunnel underneath it!
Then, there's this permanent humiliation of feeling like a servant in your home-town, because the local upper class makes very clear to you peons, that you're less important than the tourists, and they also think this very clearly.
Any business not related to tourism is basically discouraged, because it could "change the character of our lovely paradise".
Basically, unless you're rich and have business in tourism, tourism is not that great. Yeah, it puts food on the table when you're poor, but so other jobs that you could have if it were not for the damned tourists that make you a second class citizen in your own place of living.
We see this happen in the US, too, when a handful of billionaires buy up small town property and turn it into a resort town, driving out the locals. Some of my friends in that situation got "servant" level jobs as teenagers and really think that, somehow, serving the rich for $12/hr will lead to them becoming "one of them."
> somehow, serving the rich for $12/hr will lead to them becoming "one of them."
Tourists are good for certain local business. Mostly low quality bars, restaurants, shops. Anything more upscale doesn't benefit from an endless stream of people who seem to have nothing better to do than just walk around.
Without tourists, buildings would quickly fill with residents. Bars, restaurants, and shops have to up their game to sell to local people.
Obviously, there is no reason to get rid of all tourists. But restricting the number of tourists to avoid an overcrowed center is a good idea.
Visitors here are always surprised that the locals don't all seem to be weed/cocaine/whatever using junkies. Pointing out that the bulk of the tourists does not come to Amsterdam for the architecture but for the dope and the red-light district usually doesn't go down well because they are not that kind of tourist.
The very last thing we should work hard to achieve is turning cities into major tourist destinations.
On one side, many tourist destinations are happy to share the beauty of their landscape, the clean beaches, historical areas and the likes. And they make lots of money from it.
On the other side, it's extremely easy to delve into over-tourism, particularly if local politics are bought out / otherwise influenced by tourism profiteers (e.g. large hotel owners in the whole Balkan area, or breweries in the case of Munich's Oktoberfest). Then, you have problems like hoteliers building out a massive over-supply of hotels in areas that could also be used for regular housing (which in turn drives the housing market mad, such as it is in Munich), or hotels built too close to protected habitats, forest fire lines etc., or - inarguably the worst result - hordes of tourists swarming natural beauty spots for Instagram photos and ruining them by sheer mass (trampling over plants, disturbing animals with noise, relieving themselves, ...).
The "heroin" aspect comes into play for the really big destinations, the likes of Venice or Amsterdam. Over the last decades, tourism only knew one direction - upwards, and steadily. That meant that often local economies shifted towards tourism, sometimes completely... and then corona hit, and suddenly there was nothing to do, no reserves to weather the storm. Cold turkey, and no methadone (aka, government assistance for affected people and businesses) in way too many countries.
Edit: and actually, now after almost two years of pandemic, the situation is now worse. Many people who worked in tourism (and hospitality in general) had to move off to new employment, hotels and other industry closed down / got sold or otherwise repurposed. Again, the heroin comparison comes into play... as the infrastructure for tourism has shrunk, even lower numbers of tourists than a decade pre-Corona will now make the system fall over. Just look at the chaos at the Berlin airport BER (https://www.rbb24.de/politik/Flughafen-BER/BER-Aktuelles/av7...)... that's a forewarning of what is to come.
Withdrawal syndrome is the only word I can find to describe the state Firenze was left in without tourists, during the initial lockdowns.
"Over-tourism" as you describe it is just one possible symptom of excessive capitalism.
There are many nice spots with tourists, and many ways to ruin a place without any tourists when regulations are lax or poorly enforced, e.g. privatization and massive price increases in the crucial infrastructure, or reckless industrial projects.
And some things are just dumb traditions. Of course Oktoberfest sucks for the locals, but so does new year's eve in Berlin if you dislike continuous explosions until dawn and rockets flying horizontally. Tourism doesn't change the nature of these events much, just the scale.
Many other big economical sectors are also highly dependent on a small set of factors that could quickly change and cause ripple effects when they go down. This is not unique to tourism. Think e.g. the decline of Detroit.
I don't care much about 2 weeks of drunkards. The problem is that the hotel supply is excessive as it's scaled to the peak demand times Oktoberfest and Bauma (construction fair) - the average occupancy is only 50% (https://www.welt.de/regionales/bayern/article172019924/Exper...).
Assuming a total of ~85k hotel rooms, that is room to house 40.000 people!
There's nothing wrong with being a cultural hot-ground, a travel destination, a mindshare icon... but turning a city into an intensive farming Disneyland is another thing.
This is especially designed around the distributed hotel business model, for which the previous tracking and enforcement infrastructure was not qualified for.
(Note I think we should not be as much of a tax haven)
(NOTE: I'm not intending to imply that it is the case here: I have no idea what the situation is in Amsterdam in this regard)
People do, and people get caught. Both have happened to people I knew.
Good point, but how little oversight does this country have of money being sent to peoples accounts from Airbnb etc? In my country (Norway), all transactions > 500 USD, (or multiple transactions from the same sender of lesser amounts), would register with the tax office. The receiver would have to disclose the source of these transactions to the tax office.
If money coming in or out of peoples accounts are governed by self-reporting, people must pay highly inaccurate taxes in the Netherlands.
If its the latter, that would be considered a massively over reaching collection drag-net here.
Besides that, this is a municipal tax, whereas the income information is only present at the national tax authority. Getting those to inter-operate is quite difficult. Especially since our national tax authority is known to be digitally incapable, and currently has some other much bigger issues to contend with.
There is not a big tourist tax here; the biggest tax evasions for private people is probably on their income tax level, but that's not solved by this.
The direct issue it addresses is the take over of many tourists of certain neighborhoods meant for living.
The favorite hobby of habitants of Amsterdam is complaining about tourists.
The fight against Airbnb is a symbolic fight for the left winged parties in the city. Airbnb stands for big bad capitalistic wolf that makes the city unlivable for the normal people.
The issue this bigger fight addresses is that Amsterdam is slowly becoming unaffordable for normal people and especially families. Tourist rentals are partly to blame, but there are many more causes (low interest rate, rich parents, students, limited space and more)
So there are a bunch of restrictive legislations trying to deal with this, this is just one of them. Another one for instance is that since last year it's required to have a permit if you want to live in a house with more then 2 adults.
Already for years it was required to register every night you rented out your appartment. Airbnb however refused to open the books so there was no way to check it for the city. Probably this way Amsterdam can check every registered appartment that's publically listed without the help of Airbnb.
Seriously? Numbers I just googled show like 10-20 million tourists vs a metro population of 2.5 million and you guys have some of the highest taxes in the world? Why are you taxing yourself so much when you can tax the tourists because it is pretty much the opposite in most tourist places in the US?
I moved to Amsterdam from NYC, and honestly the taxes are about the same, with NY city and state taxes taken into account.
As an example, a person making $100,000 would pay $22,754 in florida whereas someone in the netherlands making €86,176 would pay €32,989 in income taxes. Then you also need to factor in the 21% vat vs 6% sales tax. Also gas is $3.179 a gallon vs €7.158 a gallon. That's a pretty big tax difference!
That is just bullshit. The people complaining about their AirBnB neighbours are mostly in Zuid. Definitely in not Social housing.
Please don't start projecting left/right schoolyard tribe politics in an international context. You embarrass our country.
Usage of the phrase "left" and "right" is already dumb when Americans do it. But at least with their first past the pole democracy it is somewhat fitting.
We have many political parties that differ in more than one dimension. From immigration to taxation to gay rights.
Just go back to Dumpert already.
This confusion is understandable, but liberals never cared about the working middle class. Its just that in the US, the democratic party is a big tent of liberals, socialists and progressives, and the other side is a big tent of evangenicals, libertarians and conservative.
The ones that (claim to) care about the working class are the socialists. Liberalism comes from the French revolution, and is exported to the world through Amsterdam (appropiate in this topic!) and its value system is the foundation of modern day capitalism and enterpreneurship by free individuals (no matter how you pray or what you say) in a republic (every vote equal). So standard, you take it for granted.
You find the same disconnect between values in the other tent. Libertarians preaching small government for a republic ticket, even though every republican president has ended up spending more money than any president before.
One of the big downsides of first-past-the-pole is that a political world simplified to just two sides, doesn't do most people justice. Don't vote for the democrats if you want socialism. Don't vote for the republicans if you want libertarianism.
Evangelicals and progressives on the other hand, can do bussiness with the liberals and conservatives, since what they want isn't incompatible. Liberals hear progressives talk about 'inclusion' and they hear 'more customers' (hello, rich gay couples) or 'cheap labour' (hello, poor immigrants) and they get all wet in their stock portfolio.
Sidenote: If you ever wonder what America would look like when its just libertarians and socialists having to come together .. its called Burning Man, where autonomous libertarians feed socialist hippies, without liberal transactions or conservative judgment.
And indeed I wrote it in a way that complaining people led to the fight against Airbnb but I think there are many more reasons. GroenLinks ideology is definitely not caused by that to be sure.
And whether you agree with their policies or not. It's hard to argue against that they at least have made some symbolic political moves, for instance the removal of Iamsterdam because the I was to indivualistic.
If you must compete, you must avoid taxes, thus cheat.
Ceteris Paribus is a thing in economics. Basically what he means is that if you optimize everything in your business, all that remains is what is outside the bounds of the law, if you cheat, you'll win, basically forcing the other to cheat as well.
Also, all big businesses cheat tax, either by using creative licensing agreements between subsidiaries or by miscategorizing things. This isn't new.
Your proposition that to compete I must cheat doesn't stand up. Individuals chose airbnbs based on quite a few variables. The only time things are going to be equal is if the units for rent are identically positioned, decorated to same standard, have the same furniture and appliances.
I agree, I mentioned this in my previous comment. >[...] Basically what he means is that if you optimize everything in your business [...]
Ceteris Paribus is a theoretical exercise or tool, if you will, but it is useful in trying to understand one of the variables involved in a calculation.
We're not disagreeing here, you don't have to cheat, nor should you, but if both of you had clone apartments one in front of the other but your neighbor doesn't pay tax, he's going to get picked first, every time.