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79% of Airbnb Listings In Barcelona Are Illegal
dkatana writes: Barcelona has more than 16,000 Airbnb listings and, according to reports on Cities of the Future, 79% could be illegal. "In April, Airbnb's European General Manager Jeroen Merchiers confirmed, during the Student Tourism Congress in Barcelona, that the platform has more than 85,000 listings in Spain alone." But most Airbnb hosts do not apply for a permit, fail to pay insurance and tourist tax, and ignore Catalonian law that forbids short-term rentals of rooms in private homes. "Residents," says the article, "had been complaining about the rising number of tourist apartments and the conduct of the mostly student-age renters. The majority from Italy, Germany and the UK were partying all night, some running around naked, and generally trashing their neighborhoods."
Not sure how the tourist tax works in Catalonia, but here is how it works in Switzerland.
A typical example is a ski resort, where in the non touristic seasons (winter, autumn) there are 500 permanent residents, while in the high seasons (winter, a bit less in summer), there are up to 5'000 residents. The 500 permanent residents have to provide, through their local taxes, the infrastructure (roads, energy, garbage collection, etc.) required for the 5'000 people in the high seasons, which is not fair. So the tourist tax is meant to correct this, a tax is due for each day a tourist spends at the resort, to finance the overall infrastructure. The hotels and rented flat owners have to collect this tax from their customers. Some include this tax in their overall prices, some others, to look cheaper, do not and charge the tax extra.
I am an spaniard and I used to visit Barcelona regularly, is less than two hours by train from where I live.
I can say without a doubt that AirBNB and the other “home-sharing” sites like Homeaway or Niumba are turning Barcelona into shit. Like a virus that eats its own host.
Barcelona used to be a culturally vibrant city, but every day it resembles more and more a theme park. The city is simply not designed to accommodate this huge influx of tourism. Until 3-4 years ago, the city could more or less control the amount of tourism it received by limiting the number of hotel beds and private accommodations (“hostales” or “pensiones”). That way, the effects of tourism were limited to the massification of tourist attractions, and the effect was limited to the city center. And the negative effects of this floating population (strain on infrastructures, etc) was offset by a tax on each bed.
If you were a resident, you could carry on with your life with only minor inconveniences, like increased traffic jams due to the high number of tourist buses.
AirBNB has changed all that. By enabling an unlimited number of unregulated beds, spread everywhere, the number of tourists has boomed, and the quality of such tourism has plummeted. Long gone are the Japanese and european middle-aged families looking for a pleasant stay; all hail the drunken pissing, screaming, vomiting english and german kids and manchildren. It’s now a real problem.
You have to remember that, unlike in America, everyone in Barcelona (even the very rich) live in flats. You have one key to your building, and one key to your flat. Now, if one of your neighbours decides to illegally rent one of these flats, that means that the keys to your building are being handed to random foreigners, and nothing can stop these ‘guests’ from pissing in your stairs, vomiting in your doorstep, and so on. And when you have to carry on with your 8-5 day job and have to support a family, is very difficult to do so when you have teenage dickheads screaming and drinking all night, seven nights a week, right below/over you, and you wake up to the smell of vomit and urine every day. You can’t sleep, you underperform in your work and your family suffers.
Regulations exist for a reason. Tourism in a living city cannot self-regulate; this a Tragedy of the commons. AirBNB its hurting residents, its hurting legitimate and well-behaving tourists, and its replacing high-income tourism with the lowest of the low.
For some reason , american companies operating outside America like to ignore local laws. In Barcelona, AirBNB has made a business plan of ignoring Barcelona city regulations. AirBNB is not breaking any law directly, but by refusing to hand out renters and hosts data to the city, its enabling this widespread problem.
Residents are pissed for a reason. Recently they elected a new mayor that had vowed during the campaign to “crack down on the burden of tourism” That was three weeks ago so we'll see if that promise materializes or not.
Some real, concrete changes that I have noticed as a long-time visitor of Barcelona:
-Public parks like Parc Guell are no longer public, you have to pay to enter.
-Huge queues for everything.
-Overcrowding in all the main pedestrian streets, its not safe to walk anymore. Overcrowding in the beach also.
-Public space taken by shitty street performers and shitty “manteros” selling chinese shit to tourists.
-Pickpockets preying on drunk tourists everywhere.
-Street violence, drunk english kids looking to pick a fight, clashes between police and drunkards
-Prostitution in broad daylight in the city centre (!) As a mediterranean port city, prostitution has always been present, but not to these levels.
-Drug traffickers posing as illegal alcohol street vendors ("lateros")
-Old shops and commerces being replaced by shitty international chains
So your business is causing a disturbance that extends to my property. The noise and drunks are basically waste products of your business; you don't get to dump them on my lawn.
Sure they do, and when they do, the police comes to take the criminal scum away. But that doesn't work when you have a whole new customer lined up for the next night, and another one for the next, and another one...
Hotels are subject to zoning laws which generally put them into commercial districts, precisely for this reason.
No, I'm simply defending my property rights. The hotels are defending their right to equality before law. The only one full of shit here is you, even by your own standards.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.