Btw the business in the bottom isnt a bad idea if its some local one. I heard in tokyo there are a lot of family businesses because of walkable streets and this style of building. But even here in sweden i live above a family-run restaurant and they make pretty good food so thats nice.
It depends on the quality of regulation in your country.
When the regulation isn’t properly done or enforced, for example when living above a restaurant you get things like excessive smells (they’re supposed to have their own chimney all the way to the top of the building) and higher fire risks (they’re supposed to have specific fire safety facilities above and beyond what a normal habitational unit would have).
Around were I am - in Portugal - living above a restaurant being a good thing or not very much depends on the municipality were you’re living since some are quite corrupt or just plain incompetent and Justice around these parts is a slow, innefective and unreliable joke.
PS: Mind you, shops on the ground floor of appartment buildings around here are pretty standard, it’s just that specifical example of yours of a restaurant might not be such a great thing to live above when the regulations that are supposed to protect everybody else aren’t sufficient or aren’t enforced. Most other kinds of shop don’t really have that problem.
Shophouses are pretty ubiquitous in SE Asia but they aren’t typically MDUs like pictured; more like townhouses. I wonder if that’s the situation in Tokyo too?
Did you end up eating more pizza than you would otherwise? Also I feel like everything in my apartment would smell like pizza which would get old.
What’s crazy to me is this is a well known problem yet the people that have the ability to legislate this have just 100% ignored it.
The presidential candidates in the US either completely ignore it (trump) or give a solution of building 3 million new homes (Harris). No one wants to actually start regulating the number of homes that an individual or company can own. It’s an obvious solution to the problem yet, complete silence from the law makers.
In my state (Idaho) it’s because a good number of the legislators are landlords.
They don’t give a fuck that half their apartments are Airbnbs, they prefer it that way.
Because when a significant proportion of the housing market gets turned into business spaces (which is what AirBnBs are), it reduces supply in the housing market, pushing house prices up.
This benefits politicians in several ways:
- Most national politicians are at the wealth level were they have enough savings, excess income or simply receive “housing subsidies” as part of their work (for example, parliamentarieans when they’re from a city other than where the parliament is located) that they are also “realestate investors” alongside their day-job as politiciasn, in which case higher house prices directly make their properties worth more hence make them richer.
- Realestate inflation is generally not counted in the Official Inflation indexes in most of the West. It is however counted in the Real GDP numbers (via a mechanism called Inputted Rent). Give the way Official GDP (which is the Nominal one, i.e. after inflation has been removed) is calculated, housing inflation by feeding into Real GDP but not into the inflation index used to calculate Nominal GDP from it, directly pushes up the Official GDP numbers, so for government politicias housing inflation is a wonderful way to create fake GDP Growth (fake because house prices going up by mere price inflation isn’t really actual wealth - i.e. the “Product” in GDP - being created) which they then parade all over the Press as being the result of their great work in government.
- It makes their very wealthy and very thankful friends even more wealthy and they’ll be very thankful to those politicians. Lot’s of thankfulness available from the Owner class for people who pass measures to make their Assets worth even more, from being welcome to the most luxurious events all the way to millionaire payouts in the Speech Giving Circuit, Non-Executive Board memberships and gold-plated “Consultancy” gigs.
Quite a few cities have worked hard on outlawing Airbnb. At least in Europe and (AFAIK) Canada.
The US? I have no idea
That’s not as surprising as you may think. Take campaign financial reform. Campaign finance reform is one of the only issues that 100% of Congress agrees that it needs to be fixed. Every single one of them HATES the fact that they have to spend upwards of 75% of their time in Congress on the phone calling rich donors. There have been multiple common sense bills that have been introduced that call for capped and federally supplied campaign funds. Almost none of them will vote for it, because that removes the primary tool of power that big moneyed interests have to put pressure on politicians, so their big money donors tell them not to vote in their own self interests, and dangle a check in front of them to do so.
I do see one problem with this type of regulation – if you say “no more than 3 homes per entity”, the “homes 4 rent” megalandlords will just create thousands of “homes 4 rent asdf” shell companies to get around the limit. I foresee tons of cat-and-mouse accounting shenanigans trying to dodge this sort of requirement.
A simpler method would be to increase both the property taxes and the homestead exemption, tuned so that individual homeowner pays about the same.
Limiting Airbnbs would help, too. Require city or county licensing for all guest accommodations, maybe, and have a set number of licenses?
Also, I don’t want to try to kill off all housing rentals. Think about college housing, about people moving halfway across the country for a job, people who’ve just gotten divorced… there are lots of circumstances where it makes more sense to rent for a time than to pony up $$$ to buy a house or a condo. In a functional market, this would be, say, 10% of housing, and you wouldn’t have the absurdity of “I pay $3000 in rent because the bank doesn’t think I’ll pay a $2000 mortgage”.
In the megalandlords shell company scenario, I’m sure that is hypothetically possible but it would at least make it more difficult for the mega corporations to buy so many single family homes. It would have to help improve the market. Shell companies could also be addressed in the legislation.
I’m using airbnb for my work trip. Renting out a room in an older lady’s home. That should really be the only way airbnb functions.
10 years ago, Couchsurfing was like this, I don’t know how it evolved since then
It’s a similar problem in Canada from what I can tell. I visited Vancouver BC for work a few years ago and the place I stayed in was an Airbnb rental in a building that had very clear markings stating that those types of rentals were not allowed. Nobody is checking nor enforcing that stuff, but at least if someone was made aware, something would happen to stop it? In the US it’s just a free-for-all for capitalists and landlords.
A house down the street from me (I live in the US) was torn down and replaced with a main house, and a second separate house on the back of the property. Both are rented out separately at what I’d imagine are exorbitant rates (for reference, a house down the other direction on my street is being partially rented for $5400/m and the other part at $3800/m). The driveway runs alongside the right side of the house and because 2 different tenants rent each house, the front house can’t use the driveway at all because they run the risk of blocking the other tenant. So now all of their cars litter the street (7 of them at one point when they had friends over).
I fucking hate landlords.
The landlords love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth.
- Adam Smith
Something in this quote triggered the meme that you can say anything and just attribute it to some famous dead person and people will assume it’s true. So i did the right thing and googled and it turns out the quote is at least mostly right. As i found it with my googling is: “As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.” -Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, book 1, chapter VI I think that leaving out the “like all other men” might misrepresent the actual thoughts of adam smith a bit without proper markings i am still happy that i spent 20 minutes of my life fact checking a random comment on the internet.
If you read the entirety of both Wealth of Nations, and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I believe that you’ll find that pulling the segment of “like all other men” out of the original quote reflects the sentiments of Mr. Smith correctly. He used that phrase to mean all other men of capital, not the entirety of the human species. He spells that out in his previous work “A Theory of Moral Sentiments,” but to leave the quote unabridged allows for bad faith arguments against the spirit of the author’s self proclaimed intentions of artificially and quickly expanding wealth so that the nations could work together to create utopia eventually. Adam never intended us to stick with capitalism after the late 1800s by his own benchmarks in both volumes.
In Florida I toured a place that I thought was a house to rent but ended up being one of 7 apartments spread across the house, garage, and guest house. Literally the bathroom was in the kitchen and the hallway just had dry wall separating it in half. The stair well for one of the units was just nailed poorly to the outside of the house and wasn’t covered at all.
Incant imagine what parking would have been like.
Agreed on the hatred towards landlords.
I live in Florida too and see this all over my city. Tons of houses have been haphazardly carved up to make into apartments. It’s a double-edged sword because I want everyone to have a roof over their heads, but they are charging ridiculous rates that folks can’t afford anyway.
Oh yeah. I fled the state after my rent went from $1,500 to $2,700 a few years ago, with no work having been put into the shithole that I had to syphon dirty water from the air conditioner by hand to keep it from overflowing.
I can’t even imagine the convoluted thoughts that lead to thinking these places are fair to be priced like that. But you get your loan evaluation on your properties based on how much you charge for rent so suddenly it makes a lot more sense.
iMmiGrAnTS ArE CauSiNG HouSiNG CriSis!!!
