They didn’t accidentally do shit. They ignored the consequences of their decisions for profit at the expense of everyone else. You don’t get to make $100 billion dollars and feign ignorance about how you got it and the damage you caused to obtain it.
I still think municipalities share a significant amount of blame here. They definitely could have at least limited vacation rental saturation, and didn’t do anything.
I live in a ski town, and have been to city hall meetings on this issue. The overwhelming amount of attendees at these are vacation homeowners or their representatives, and the prevailing attitude is, “fuck the locals, our profit is at stake here.” A number of owners have changed their primary residence to our town just to have more say that local long term renters. These meetings are held at 2pm, when locals are working. It’s about as fucked as it can get. And when we’ve had a sympathetic council person, they’re immediately recalled or replaced the following election cycle. It’s a shitshow.
During COVID, when the Airbnb boom really took off, we had a 25% resident attrition rate. That’s no typo; twenty five percent of our valley’s residents had to leave town because they were priced out (about 5000 in a population of 20,000) because either rents skyrocketed, or the owners of their homes sold out from beneath them. These days, much of our local labor force commutes at least an hour into town. It has gotten a little better, and some have been able to moved back, but the damage is done.
Even for prospective buyers, like my wife and I, prices are outrageous. Our current home, which is valued around $600k, would have been $200k pre COVID. And this is solely because of Airbnb assholes.
They are a company with zero morals and the goal to maximize profits. That’s what capitalism is for and were it’s good at.
The government needs to create rules and laws to make sure that this profit maximizing doesn’t happen on the back of ordinary people, but since corporate america is allowed to control the government through money, this doesn’t happen.
Capitalism is a tool, can we please start to use it like that again?!
the problem is already in the word itself… capitalism
aka to capitalize on someone else’s problems\misfortunes
Capitalism is a tool. Without it, we wouldn’t have cars, smartphones and so much more.
The problem is that we started to let the tool decide what is important. And since for them profit is more important then people, we are fucked.
Is a hammer generally bad because it can crush your fingers?
I feel like the US is far down on the victims list. Look how they massacred my boys Spain and Italy
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Prague city center is basically just airbnb flats now
Same in Nashville. It’s a shame. I wish the government would regulate this more.
“accidentally” 🤦♂️
It was - and is - entirely fucking intentional.
