MADRID (AP) — Spain has ordered Airbnb to block more than 65,000 holiday listings on its platform for having violated rules, the Consumer Rights Ministry said Monday.
The ministry said that many of the 65,935 Airbnb listings it had ordered to be withdrawn did not include their license number or specify whether the owner was an individual or a company. Others listed numbers that didn’t match what authorities had.
Spain is grappling with a housing affordability crisis that has spurred government action against short-term rental companies.
I saw this headline and just assumed it was an anti-tourist thing, but I was wrong.
On a Monday morning, it’s just nice to see that somewhere on this planet there are countries willing to take federal action to attack the hoarding and purposeful scarcity in housing created by a greedy few sons of bitches.
I expect housing scarcity to become the next problem that gets solved somewhere in the world while the US pretends it’s unsolvable. (Not unlike homelessness and gun violence.)
AirBnB inflates housing prices, any regulation against it is pretty much always good for the locals
Only if you live somewhere people actually wanna go to :taps_head:
No matter where you live, AirBnB/VRBO can only make housing prices go up, never down. At best it’ll be neutral. It’s always taking inventory that might otherwise go to a local.
Otoh, it also provides jobs for the community, either directly (cleaning, handyman work, management) or indirectly (additional tourist dollars in local establishments).
The reality is, in almost all places, short term rentals have an extremely negligible impact on the housing market. And in the few places where they have a measurable impact, we need to ask: why can’t that area just build more housing? And the answer, almost invariably, is restrictive zoning codes, coupled with land speculation. Solving the problem of lack of housing doesn’t require banning short term rentals, an action which would likely have a significant negative impact on local businesses who rely on the tourist dollars. Solving the problem involves liberalizing zoning ordinances to allow more housing to be built, and adopting Georgist Land Value Taxes which preclude investors’ ability to speculate on land value rather than only earning money via value they provide to other people.
There is no federal government in Spain, but yes, you are right. And by the way, housing scarcity has been the underlying problem to most economical divides and class discrimination since decades now.
Spain’s government is more federal than federal governments like the German one. Spain’s Autonomous regions have way more leeway and freedom than regions in federal governments.
Spains regions lack of their own police, tax collection (the German federal level doesn’t even have a tax office), only partial cultural autonomy. Also the powers they have are only devolved, they’re not guaranteed those rights.
German states are fully formed states in themselves, they have their own sovereignty, delegating the exercise of parts of it to the federal level just as EU member states delegate sovereignty to the EU. “Fully formed state” here meaning that they do not rely on the federal level for their administration, in fact living in Germany you generally don’t come into contact with federal bureaucracy at all, it’s all state or municipal level (district level is technically state level, they’re devolved public bodies).
I’ll grant you that among unitary states Spain is quite federal, but it’s not “more federal than federal countries”.
