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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."
...get used to it, that's fully normal here in germany, italy and UK.
Words have meanings — some times, they even have consequences. The title says:
The write-up says:
The former is a statement of fact and a serious allegation. The latter is just as non-committal and devoid of information as the (in)famous promise of Geico's advertising.
Which is it?
Phew... Malum prohibitum crimes: it is only wrong because it is illegal. Screw you, Statists, get back to enforcing the malum in se — you know, the kind of thing, that is illegal because it is wrong.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Most (if not *all*) major cities in Western countries have laws regulating room/house rental. By going through Airbnb or similar services you just ignore those laws, allowing hosts not to pay any taxes, not to have any insurances, and so on. Where's the news in that? Why do they think so many people offer housing through it?
I'm not happy with the amount of bureaucracy that one has to go through just to rent out a room for a couple of weeks, but on the other hand unreported/untaxed income for the host or lack of insurance for the guest is just *wrong*. Like with Uber, countries should move towards a simplified and more effective jurisdiction (as owning an hotel and renting a room for a week are pretty much different things), and then they can force Airbnb to give out the names of the hosts and start enforcing such laws.
Bloody lazy editors.
Screw you, Statists, get back to enforcing the malum in se — you know, the kind of thing, that is illegal because it is wrong.
For a modern state to function, you need both kinds of law. Failure to pay taxes is malum prohibitum (bad because it is prohibited), but without paying taxes you don't have cops.
AirBnB will reimburse up to $50k in loss or damage from a guest. Read that in a recent article about AirBnB...
But you mitigate that as a host by not taking every single offer that comes along.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Ignore laws and make money by connecting "clients" and "providers", but pretending that this isn't a business. Also screwing the local people along the way, just like Uber...
"That is not a sharing-economy. It is running a business and it needs to be regulated, taxed and made accountable." Right!!! actually tax'em more, since this "companies" don't produce nothing but trouble.
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
e.g. they disproportionately harm the working poor. I know, it's counter intuitive because when we think poor we think no property. That's why I said the _working_ poor. In America if you're just scraping by virtually all of your wealth is tied up in property, specifically your primary domicile (aka your house). About 20-30% of your income goes to this one investment. It's generally not worth very much, and at times it even loses value. But it's the only investment you can afford.
We fund services with property taxes because a) The rich get out of paying them because most of their wealth is tied up with the stock market and other forms of property with much lower taxes (or many, many more loopholes) and b) for the few taxes the rich pay it's easy for them to keep that money in their neighborhoods and ensure that it's not spent on the lower castes. This is why we fund our schools with property taxes while more decent folks (the Netherlands IIRC) mandate equal funding for all schools...
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Let's go ask the church to preach paying taxes as a commandment
A congregation that follows the Bible already does. As Jesus put it: "By all means, then, pay back Caesar's things to Caesar, but God's things to God."--Luke 20:25.
you're thinking about the upper middle class, not the rich. The 1%. They mostly horde their wealth. They don't have a lot of options. No human being could possibly spend the kinds of wealthy they've claimed. It's not even money any more, it's raw power. The ability to decide who lives and who dies. Guys like you and me can't even begin to understand what that's like. It's like trying to understand what a billion is. You can write the digits down on paper but you don't really understand what they mean the way you do for the number 10...
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But this was about Roman coins with Caesar's likeness on them. I don't see a picture of Obama on the dollar bill.
The ministry of Jesus of Nazareth (29-33 CE) took place during the Tiberius administration (14-37 CE). I imagine that coins in circulation when Tiberius took office would have had a portrait of a past Roman head of state, such as Augustus Caesar. I'm no expert on the history of Roman coinage, and thus I don't know whether Rome recalled old coins after a new emperor took office or whether they were still usable after 20 years. But given the use of the generic "Caesar" rather than "Augustus" or "Tiberius", we can suppose for the moment that the portrait and the scripture refer to the office, not necessarily the person.
All current Federal Reserve Notes carry an engraving of a Founding Father or past President of the United States as well as the signature of the Secretary of the Treasury, who oversees the department that includes the Internal Revenue Service, who had been most recently appointed by the President at the time of printing. The office represented by the portrait of President George Washington is currently occupied by Washington's successor Barack Obama, and these two 1 USD notes in my wallet carry signatures of John W. Snow and Timothy F. Geithner. Together, they represent the U.S. Treasury, and thus a follower of Jesus ought to pay the Treasury's things to the Treasury.
As long as it's disruptive it must be cool, right?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Calling shitty business ventures like Airbnb and Uber part of the underground economy is an insult to the hard work done by pimps and drug dealers to make the world a happier place.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it