You are disregarding supply and demand because it's not a 100% bullet-proof model that can predict all price movements in all markets, times, places, or any combination of factors, and at the same time are introducing your own imperfect models and formulations:
> For example: more supply can generate more demand. Demand can be inflexible with respect to supply. Supply and demand are unstable and can change unpredictably. In a monopoly situation price can be manipulated. Short term large supply can hamper long term.
Any model that tries to predict human behaviour will be imperfect, we all know that.
There is hardly a monopoly of housing in Spain, if we keep the current disconnection between supply and demand, prices will for sure keep increasing. There is evidence that building more reduces prices. It's not the only condition needed to reduce prices, but it's an important one:
> You are disregarding supply and demand because it's not a 100% bullet-proof model
I didn't any suggestion to "disregard" the "law of supply and demand". I saw a suggestion that whatever kind of "law" this is, it is a very different kind of thing than a law of physics, to which a comparison was being made.
> Any model that tries to predict human behaviour will be imperfect, we all know that.
Yet we can rarely even bound the actual scale of the imperfection, so discussing "laws" of economics as if they are in some way similar to the law of gravity seems a little silly.
> You are disregarding supply and demand because it's not a 100% bullet-proof model
OK. Can you provide me just one example of a large city that reduced the housing sale prices by building more dense units? Not by crashing its economy or otherwise decreasing the population.
If your model is correct, there should be at least _some_ examples.
> There is evidence that building more reduces prices.
There is none. Your studies are basically nonsense. Here's the strongest result:
> One study cited in her report found that the average new apartment building lowers nearby rents by 5 percent to 7 percent “relative to the trend rent growth otherwise would have followed”
Translation: the prices grew, but we managed to P-hack a small subset of data that shows at least _some_ effect. They could not find actual _decreases_ and had to resort to "would have beens".
Nope. Rents dropped because the _population_ in Austin dropped. It has recovered to 2019 level only the last year and is still below the peak 2020 level (stats are taken at Jan 1).
Hard banning Airbnbs will for sure push long-term rent prices down, but not by an amount enough to make them affordable. We already have evidence from cities with active bans. Prices in NYC or Lisbon have not come down significantly.
We still have to wait a few years to see the real effect that bans have on prices. Lowering prices at most 3-5% by banning Airbnb won't make anybody happy and will come with some negative effects like reduced tourism (and other economic activity), which is a very important part of Spain's GDP.
Regarding tourism, I think airbnb encourages mainly poorer tourists, who just eat food, drink mostly water and take pictures.
If you want $$$ from tourism, you have to find ways to attract the rich.
D'oh!
The rich don't necessarily like their destinations touristy. They don't like to elbow their ways through crowds, stand in lineups, or have stranger "extras" in their pictures.
Another problem is AirBnB almost by definition are less dense than hotels.
If there were no AirBnB, the economics for a new high-rise hotel would be much better.
But it all comes down to increasing desirable supply (which may be density dwellings at the end of an express train) or building entire new cities (or rejuvenating others).
At some point, if supply outstrips demand, prices will start to stabilize - maybe fall.
Tourism is by definition a small fraction of overall global economic activity. Basically the only places which can really run on tourism have major geographical (Barbados, Andorra) or extraordinary historical (Venice, Kyoto) advantages, or both (San Francisco, Cusco).
My recommendation is that if you want to encourage tourism, change your mind. Build a great place to live and if you do a good job, you might get a boost in a century. I would call this "the Chicago model".
The fundamental issue cannot be ignored: supply and demand. Spain population has increased by 2 million in just 2 years, far outpacing residential construction. Right now, the system excludes those who cannot afford the ever-increasing rents. Rent control, although well-intentioned and a very popular policy, has numerous negative effects supported by a variety of studies both in Spain and abroad. Rent control or any other alternate system to allocate the scarce units will leave many without access to housing.
The solution, IMHO, building more, could be theoretically be championed by the State, but with ever-increasing construction costs, regulation, taxes on everything, scarcity of land in big cities, and pensions entitlements, where will the money come from? It's not cheap to build with the quality standards that we all desire everyone to have.
Building co-ops like those that exist in Vienna do exist in Spain, but they are not a panacea, the same problems that a State-run initiative has will apply.
> Right now, the system excludes those who cannot afford the ever-increasing rents
It also creates a system where the only new buildings are luxury condos because on paper it’s usually the only thing that would turn a profit after investing a decade of hoop jumping and political wrangling. No affordable development would ever pass that sort of system.
So the gov is tasked with building affordable housing. Creating a bad situation themselves, pointing the finger at developers and only offering very expensive bandaids as the solution that happens to give them more power, money, and control over the city.
Kingmakers in an high end market while feigning solutions for the low end, and pushing the middle to the suburbs and small towns.
> Rent control, although well-intentioned and a very popular policy, has numerous negative effects supported by a variety of studies both in Spain and abroad.
No, it doesn't. Everywhere in Spain it works well. It was always there. Those 'studies' come out of mainly the bloated neoliberal Anglloamerican investment circles like the Brookings institute - which was cited just in this discussion.
> The solution, IMHO, building more, could be theoretically be championed by the State, but with ever-increasing construction costs, regulation, taxes on everything, scarcity of land in big cities, and pensions entitlements, where will the money come from?
China is able to build housing like that for ~1.5 billion people and they don't run out of money. Maybe the problem is the bloated, destructive real estate investment sector in the West?
Net, yes. But inside that Lottery - ticket sales are income, and collected winnings are expenses. And I'd bet that unclaimed winnings end back up in the government's coffers - therefor, you claiming your winnings means that you benefit at taxpayer expense.
The last one occasionally fails to show ads due to some javascript error (visible in the console). The same error was also observed on a few other pages with the "you may also like" footer, so my guess is that some ads were supposed to be visible on many pages, but were accidentally hidden due to some configuration issue.
It boggles my mind how valuable advertising is. Who is clicking on that shit and presumably buying those products? I just cannot believe that there were actually $100k/day worth of actual ad conversions, no matter the player count. Yet the money flows so I guess people really do click on that shit and then buy that shit.
When I say love, I mean genuinely seek them out. When I was younger, there was no internet in my house, and adverts were the opportunity to step away from the TV and do something else. But I worked as a babysitter in December a few years ago and things have certainly changed a lot.
They would turn on the TV just to watch ads to "find out what I want for Christmas" then turn it off again when the advertising finished and ask for Netflix. When playing games on an iPad or laptop, they would click every ad to open it in a new tab, meaning they could browse products after they were done playing.
The first couple of times I told the kids not to do that, and reported back to the parents after. But turns out most parents liked this behaviour...it made Christmas shopping easier, because their kids would make a list of cheaper things aimed at them, rather than all asking for expensive iPads and PlayStations.
I have to agree $100k/day seems close to unbelievably high, so I had to do some napkin math. In short, it seems it may be possible.
If the avg player dies 10 times, and the ads shown had $.5 CPM, then to make a dollar you'd need only 200 players. So to make $100k/day you'd need 20M daily actives, which is very high but it was really popular around those days.
Is 20M daily actives possible? Yes, because if the average play session is 15 minutes, with that many players you'd have ~200k concurrent players. There's currently a game on Steam called "banana" where you just click on bananas, and that one has 292k concurrents. There are also several Roblox games with that many concurrents, so it checks out.
This is very true. I have known people truly shit at their jobs. They've done things I would assume to be the final nail in the coffin - and some how they just trundle along frustrating everyone around them. WFH and you can easily get away with under performing by 25-50% in countries with strong protections for employees.
It may be overblown by media, sure, let's say we agree on that, but I know of at least 3 cases of very close people that have suffered the issue in the last 3 years alone. It may be my social bubble, but I don't think it's a completely fabricated matter.
> It may be overblown by media, sure, let's say we agree on that, but I know of at least 3 cases of very close people that have suffered the issue in the last 3 years alone.
For curiosity's sake, were the affected people owners of multiple properties or was this issue considering their primary residential homes that they were actively living in?
I know no one who had his first home or summer house squatted. No one.
I've lived here all my life.
I know at least 15 okupas who lived +4 years in properties of banks, unused and not finished, which, after eviction, are still unused and unmaintained. What harm did this okupas do? They didn't contributed to rent inflation, so they did some good.
Having property unused and don't having an eye on it is madness. I wouldn't do it. That's common sense. People think that money buy things. Ok, buy a Ferrari and park it outside of a big city and leave it there during a month.
This law is here to protect the right of housing. Some mafias use it? Could be, but this law works to protect real families and the benefits are much greater than the harm that opportunists do abusing it, this organizations doesn't have anything to do with the okupa movement.
It does not mean you have the right to live in a flat en La Castellana for whatever you want pay. It means the State has to implement policies to help people access housing.
Also, article 33 give citizens the right to private property. You cannot come squat in my house because article 33 should prevent it, even when article 47 exists.
Let's avoid considering outliers to maintain a balanced discussion.
While I don't believe anyone has the right to live in Castellana or the Royal Palace, it also wouldn't be fair to require someone to move to the desert to find a home.
> For example: more supply can generate more demand. Demand can be inflexible with respect to supply. Supply and demand are unstable and can change unpredictably. In a monopoly situation price can be manipulated. Short term large supply can hamper long term.
Any model that tries to predict human behaviour will be imperfect, we all know that.
There is hardly a monopoly of housing in Spain, if we keep the current disconnection between supply and demand, prices will for sure keep increasing. There is evidence that building more reduces prices. It's not the only condition needed to reduce prices, but it's an important one:
https://commonwealthbeacon.org/housing/study-says-boosting-h... https://www.upjohn.org/research-highlights/new-construction-...
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