A core problem is that an influx of tourists hits the housing supply. Short-term tourism incentivises conversion of local housing to accommodate them (AirBnB, etc.) and long-term tourism results in foreigners buying local housing as their permanent or long-term holiday home.
The result is obviously a relative shortage of housing and rising prices, both of which make it harder for locals (who are often relatively poorer) to live where they need to. This pattern has been repeated from small villages in scenic areas, to big cities (e.g. Barcelona), to whole islands (e.g. Mallorca).
I’m probably one of the people that has contributed to this to some extent over time; and yet I fully understand the frustration of the locals.
It may result in apparent xenophobia in some, but its roots are rational and economic.
This is the explanation these activists rely on and it’s cribbed directly from posts I was reading on /pol/ ten years ago. While it sounds plausible, I’ve never found it to have any basis in empirical reality. Tourist accommodation represents a negligible proportion of dwellings outside of resort towns, and in resort towns the whole economy is based around tourism. Some people might object to tourism changing the character of the cities they live in, but their primary objection is cultural, not economic.
If you look at the signs you see in Latin America (“Expat? No! You are an immigrant!” and “Speak my language!”) or the graffiti in Barcelona (“Tourists go home, refugees welcome.”) it becomes fairly apparent that most of these people don’t have coherent objections at all, they just resent people they perceive to be wealthier than themselves; this is why the refugees are not targeted, despite their having had far greater impacts on housing markets in Latin America and cultural cohesion in Europe.
Estimates of course vary, but there are estimates that 60% of the total housing stock is owned by foreigners [0] and in 2024, >40% of all houses sold were bought by foreigners. [1] (It's also worth noting that [1] suggests foreigners purchased >20% of houses sold in Valencia, the Canary Islands, Murcia, and Catalonia, so this isn't limited to Mallorca.)
If these numbers are even close to accurate, this would be your empirical reality, and such numbers would certainly by sufficient to drive demand, shortage, and price increases.
[0] https://www.falcrealestate.com/en/magazine/property-market-t...
[1] https://humansofmallorca.com/balearics-lead-spain-for-homes-...
Tourism comprises 45% of the economy, which is what I was characterizing as a resort town. If you look at cities that have anything else going on for them, you’re looking at figures of less than 2% of housing stock. London is around 2.5%, New York City was around 2% before the ban, Los Angeles is around 2.1%.
One can have zero racist sentiments, but if you suddenly get kicked out of your rental, because it’s more profitable for your landlord to make money from tourists, you will be outraged. (And it’s not an insignificant number if inner city apartments impacted by this). Obviously other cost of living factors have led to increased rents, but this is still a big factor in some cities.
“Sydney has 18,000 Airbnb listings, of which 80% are whole homes. This equates to around 3.2 Airbnb listings per 1,000 residents or 0.9% of Sydney’s private homes.” [0]
This is about half of the usual 2% figure I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, which is what the numbers are for London, Los Angeles, and New York City (before the ban).
> Barcelona
Barcelona has 19,410 listings, of which 11,828 are whole-house-apartment listings.[1]
[0]: https://matusik.substack.com/p/airbnbs
Note that the author is pulling his data from here:
This is just anger about the insane double standard at play - if I as a European move to Latin America, I’m a sophisticated expat and they should be happy that my rich ass is living there - whereas when it’s the other way around they are immigrants and treated like actual scum, working the lowest of low jobs. The double standard at play makes me sad and angry even if I’m the one on the surface benefitting from it.
> Speak my language
This one i can also understand - I know American “expats” who lived in my country 15+ years but never bothered to learn the language, not even a little tiny bit. I don’t expect you to write a doctors thesis but if you can’t even order food in the local language or have some smalltalk it’s pretty pathetic and disrespectful. Meanwhile non-English speaking “immigrants” get yelled at if they don’t speak the local language perfectly.
Not everything is as easily explained away by “progressives training to be xenophobic”
> Some people might object to tourism changing the character of the cities they live in, but their primary objection is cultural
Is that not a valid objection? I know places in Greecethat have been utterly RUINED by the (mostly Anglo-Saxon) tourists, for example Santorini or Mykonos. These used to be really beautiful and chill places in the 70/80s, now they are horrid
> This one i can also understand - I know American “expats” who lived in my country 15+ years but never bothered to learn the language, not even a little tiny bit.
It is obnoxious. My point was that the objection these people have to tourists is not rooted in their actual economic impact, but cultural anxiety that they are being left behind or disrespected. These anxieties are warranted, the issue I take with it is that cosmopolitans will chastise Cletus for not wanting to be replaced by Mexicans who refuse to learn English but celebrate Jose for saying the same thing but in Spanish.
I've heard that Norman invasion dealt with them long before Santorini became a tourist hotspot. You probably should decrease consumption of content created by russia today.
Isn’t this a bit of gatekeeping? What do you propose the solution is? Ban tourists? Take it another incremental step and now you’re banning immigrants too. “Don’t visit! Stay in your country!” “Go home tourists/immigrants”, it’s the same song and dance. It’s the same sentiment.
There is a solution to the tourist “problem” though, which is to just charge a shitload of money to visit. But then you’ll be accused of being inequitable or hating poor people or something.
You also saw it through covid when all those units flooded the rental market when international borders closed.
Such as?
> You also saw it through covid when all those units flooded the rental market when international borders closed.
Toronto had an average of 12,270 daily active listings in 2019 [0]. Toronto had a population of around 2.7 million in 2019. The majority of this impact was caused by people leaving the cities to buy in the suburbs, move in with family, or return to their country of origin.
[0]: Page 7 https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2021/ph/bgrd/backgroundf...
