Não! Medina e Costa não leêm ‘estas coisas’!
OVOODOCORVO
Airbnb can’t go on unregulated – it does too much damage to
cities
Steven Poole
Barcelona is an extreme case, but certainly the law needs to
catch up so Airbnb doesn’t price locals out of their community
Barcelona … ‘Airbnb is a parasitic monster that squats over
cities and hoovers up vast sums of money through its slimy proboscis.’
Wed 24 Oct 2018 09.30 BST Last modified on Wed 24 Oct 2018
13.18 BST
Remember the “sharing economy”? That rhetoric looks more
comically disingenuous than ever in light of the news that a single Airbnb user
in Barcelona is managing a portfolio of properties that brings in an
eye-watering £33,000 a day in high season. Old neighbourhoods are being overrun
with short-term tourists and shops selling souvenir tat. Rents for residents
are being driven up, in Barcelona as well as Berlin, New York and elsewhere.
Airbnb is a parasitic monster that squats over cities and hoovers up vast sums
of money through its slimy proboscis. So what can be done?
Airbnb, short for “airbed and breakfast”, originally sold
itself as a way for travellers to stay in people’s spare rooms and get an
authentic feel of a foreign culture. This friendly idea is still present in the
company’s vocabulary – “hosts”, not landlords, and “hospitality” in place of
“business” – even though the vast majority of its listings are now for
self-contained apartments or houses. In Barcelona, it used to cost €250 (£221)
for a short-term rental permit. Now that such permits are no longer being
issued, they change hands for up to €80,000. It’s “sharing” for the rich,
maybe, but not for the rest of us.
During their early rapid growth, sharing economy companies
started operations around the world without regard to local laws on the basis
that existing regulations had not envisaged the radical and disruptive new
ideas they embodied. But the tide slowly turned as the whizzy tech rhetoric
wore off and it became clear that Uber was in fact a taxi company and Airbnb
was in effect a hotel business.
So should we just ban them? No, as they can be useful
services and more attractive than the alternatives. The question is how can
they be made to behave better. Consumer boycotts, however well intentioned,
don’t have the desired effect. The law, however, can. Uber is playing
super-nice after Transport for London shocked it last year by refusing at first
to renew its licence. So here comes its clean-air plan, involving a
15p-per-mile surcharge on trips to enable its driver to buy electric cars.
Regulation works.
The first thing potential regulators need to know, though,
is what is actually happening, which is surprisingly difficult since Airbnb
keeps its data secret. But enterprising sleuthing can uncover some interesting
facts. Tom Slee, the author of What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing
Economy, found that the most expensive Airbnb listing in Rome was one of
several luxury rentals bought for the purpose by an American tech entrepreneur.
Meanwhile, the Spanish scholars Albert Arias Sans and Alan
Quaglieri in 2016 tested Airbnb’s claims against data from Barcelona to
illuminating effect. Airbnb claims its business “revitalises neighbourhoods” –
so it is perhaps surprising that “the neighbourhoods with the highest presence
of Airbnb are the ones losing population to a larger degree”, which you might
think looks like residents being forced out by higher rents.
One answer, some suggest, is for local authorities to be
more responsive and fluid in their decision-making. A team of four researchers
conducted a close study of Airbnb’s impact on London in 2016, and suggested
that every property owner could have the “right to engage in a short-term
rental for a given period of time”. These rights could be traded on a market
operated by the local council, which would split revenues between local
neighbourhood groups and itself. Councils could thus respond to real-time activity
to avoid turning areas into hotspots.
In extreme cases such as Barcelona, the only answer might be
a clampdown. (It would certainly help if Airbnb could be bothered to pay the
€600,000 fine the city levied on it in 2016.) In other places, a more nuanced
approach might be appropriate. Many cities now put a cap on how many nights per
year a property can be rented short-term and it may be a good idea, too, to cap
the number of properties a single owner can list, or limit the number of
permits enabling owners to list property in a particular area. The lesson
should be that no company is above the law.
In Airbnb’s case, the key to changing its behaviour will be
forcing it to be more transparent about its operations. In a 2018 analysis of
Airbnb in Australia, the researcher Laura Crommelin and her colleagues argued
that the company should make its data about who is listing homes where
available to city authorities so they can make informed decisions. After all,
if the company really is all about being “open” and “sharing”, what has it got
to hide?
• Steven Poole is the author of Rethink: The Surprising
History of New Ideas
Airbnb and the so-called sharing economy is hollowing out
our cities
Gaby Hinsliff
The plight of Barcelona shows the damage Airbnb can do,
exacerbating urban inequality and freezing out young locals
Fri 31 Aug 2018 08.06 BST
The banner hung from a third-floor balcony, unfurling itself
almost all the way down to the cobbles of the square. Barcelona no està en
venda, it read, in large hand-painted letters: the city is not for sale. It
wasn’t the first such slogan we’d seen in only an hour or so strolling around
the narrow, winding streets of Barcelona’s beautiful old quarter last week, and
naturally our curiosity was piqued. Something to do with gentrification, or
developers maybe? Well, partly. But, disconcertingly, it turned out to have
quite a lot to do with people like us, and possibly you too.
Or to be more precise, with the multibillion-pound global
phenomenon that is Airbnb. As it happens, I’m boringly old school enough to
have stayed in a hotel this time, but the airport bus was full of young
families chattering about picking up their flat keys via the site that is
famous for letting people rent their houses out to strangers. And Barcelona is
far from the only place in which Airbnb is accused of turning summer sour.
Amsterdam is heavily restricting short-term lets by
residents after street protests against the swamping of the city by tourists
last year. It’s the same story from Paris to Berlin, Venice to Lisbon. Even in
Cornwall, at the height of this summer’s heatwave, tourist chiefs took the
unusual step of asking holidaymakers to avoid some popular beaches after
coastal roads became gridlocked, leaving locals struggling to get on with their
daily lives. People in Cornwall are more than used to being overrun in August,
but lately something seems to be upsetting the eternally delicate balance
between grockle and local, and chief suspect seems to be an unplanned, somewhat
unpredictable explosion in Airbnb lets on top of the longstanding hotel and
holiday cottage trade.
At least in the West Country things tend to calm down in
September. Barcelona is a city-break destination practically all year round,
which means it’s struggling with more than just a surfeit of drunken stag
parties and queues outside tapas bars. Landlords have realised they can make
more money out of short lets to well-off Airbnb users than from renting to
conventional tenants who live and work in the city year round, so when
contracts come up for renewal it’s not uncommon to find the rent suddenly shooting
up to levels that young Spaniards can’t pay. Once they’re forced out of the
neighbourhood, the empty flat promptly disappears into what’s still sometimes
euphemistically known as the “sharing economy”, although what happens next
sounds like the antithesis of sharing. Those lucky enough to own a desirable
property get steadily luckier, by pimping it out to the highest bidders.
Meanwhile, those who don’t have such an asset become ever less likely to get
one, as property prices are pushed up across the city. Thus does inequality
harden, and resentment deepen, while the failure of mainstream parties to solve
the problem drives the young and frustrated ever closer to the political
fringes.
The young woman in a Barcelona barber’s shop who matter-of-factly
explained what the slogans were about, while running her scissors over my
husband, had long ago given up on buying in the city where she grew up. But now
she’s not even sure how long she’ll be able to rent. The tourist’s dilemma has
always been that descending on idyllic places tends to ruin them for people who
live there, but what’s unusual in this case is that the effects run so deep.
So much for the earnestly hippyish vibe of the original
Airbnb model, which was supposed to be all about creating a cosy-sounding
“global community” by linking up adventurous strangers in search of more
authentic, home-from-home travel experiences. And so much, too, for the idea of
democratising the travel industry by letting the little guy make a buck on the
side. In some tourist hotspots Airbnb is now morphing from an amateur operation
into a slick professional one, with landlords amassing multiple properties just
as they once did with buy-to-let, and using agencies to manage their burgeoning
empires.
The romantic, if sometimes risky, fantasy of swapping lives
with a local for a few nights and seeing the city through their eyes is being
replaced with a more corporate, impersonal experience. Sign here for the keys;
check out promptly in time for the next guest to arrive. Too bad that what
could have been a young couple’s starter flat is now just another asset to be
sweated, and one that probably stands empty half the time.
‘Along with other Spanish cities, Barcelona has moved to
limit the Airbnb effect, with licensing schemes and curbs on new rentals in the
old town.’ Photograph: Alamy
And if it’s uncomfortable knowing that your cheap getaway
comes at such a hidden cost, guilt seems unlikely to put many travellers off.
After all, pangs of conscience about climate change didn’t stop millions of us
taking cheap no-frills flights back in the days when it was easyJet that was
disrupting the holiday market. But this is about more than what individuals
choose to do with their summers. It’s about how modern markets function, and
what happens when governments either won’t intervene or can’t quite work out
how to do so quickly enough. Along with other Spanish cities, Barcelona has
moved to limit the Airbnb effect with licensing schemes and curbs on new
rentals in the old town. But if we’ve learned anything from the Ubers and the
Amazons and the Facebooks, it’s that by the time the unwanted human
consequences of digital disruption become obvious, much of the damage is often
already done.
What really struck the Barcelona hairdresser, however, was
that when she travelled she heard similar stories. Cities all over the globe
seem to be eating themselves, squeezing out the young and the skint and the
creative, who are all too often the people who made them achingly hip in the
first place. It manifests itself differently in different places, of course:
London had a housing affordability crisis before Airbnb was even invented.
Soaring prices from Berlin to Vancouver to Sydney have been blamed on
everything from cheap borrowing and foreign speculation to changing
demographics and government failure to build enough social housing, none of
which are remotely the fault of second-home owners turning a quick profit.
But the common thread is a sense that, for whatever reason,
markets are not delivering for the young in a post-crash world; that digital
disruption only makes things more unpredictable; and that years of politicians
earnestly promising to do something about it have come to pitifully little. All
of which is a statement of the bleeding obvious now, a truth so universally accepted
that it’s almost completely lost its power to shock – until seen from a
slightly fresh perspective. But then that’s the thing about travel. Sometimes
you go halfway round the world only to notice what was under your nose all
along.
• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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