Barcelona Mayor Threatens the Great Firewall of Catalonia to Fight AirBnB
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We were considering a three month stay in Barcelona and this took it right off of the table. We use AirBnB for long term stays in cities like this and since we more or less live in Spain, when we come into a city like Barcelona to visit we generally do so in a very healthy way, helping to support locals who need to supplement their income on the weekends to help pay their bills.
So this is one long term resident family lost on day one by this mayor. No idea how this impacts the average tourist, but our family data sounds like the AirBnB data, the mayor is doing the exact opposite of what she publicly claims that she is doing.
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in the face of homogenization that accompanies the arrival of multinational chain stores.
If that was their goal, why don't they ban those instead? Making people lose their homes as an indirect attack on chain stores makes no sense. Don't let the chains build in the first place!
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@scottalanmiller said:
in the face of homogenization that accompanies the arrival of multinational chain stores.
If that was their goal, why don't they ban those instead? Making people lose their homes as an indirect attack on chain stores makes no sense. Don't let the chains build in the first place!
I was just going to mention that. Or make it very hard for those chain stores to compete in that environment. Banning rentals is the exact opposite of what they are going to want to do. If people can't afford their homes they are going to start shopping at less expensive chain stores.
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If the company refuses to cooperate, the City Council may even initiate proceedings to prevent online access to the site from the entire Catalan territory.
They are attempting to force an NSA-like action of turning over private data with the threat of Internet censorship as the means to forcing it to happen. It's actually worse than just censorship, it is attempting to breach privacy and security as well! This is truly evil and yes, let's hope that Madrid and or Brussels steps in and shuts this down. This is horrible and one can only hope that Europe has better protections than this.
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This certainly shows that I had been extremely foolish to think that Catalonia was in any way prepared for self governing. I've been supportive of them up until now.
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And notice that the mayor of one city is attempting to use her power, at least to threaten, to take away the rights for people in other cities and towns to have access to things that are perfectly legal there! This isn't about Barcelona or her own role as mayor, this is very much something else. She's not just out to hurt a business or two that she doesn't like, she's out to hurt people who have no power to vote for her as well!
She knows very well that stopping AirBnB in Catalonia will increase the hotel business in Barcelona by making it almost impossible to get low cost accommodations in the rest of Catalonia.
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Something that Rick Steves has pointed out in his videos about Europe... home rentals on the continent are a staple of the culture. This means that Barcelona isn't attempting to support the traditional culture, they are trying to change it. This isn't about protecting the city, this is about controlling a region.
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You'd think that watching other people make this mistake over and over would set a good example for the future, but no one seems to learn.
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@MattSpeller said:
You'd think that watching other people make this mistake over and over would set a good example for the future, but no one seems to learn.
I'm told that this mayor hasn't been like this in the past and has actually had a decent track record of doing non-evil things. Someone suggested that she may be making incredibly threats in the hopes of enacting change. But these aren't the kinds of threats you can back down from. Using fear and corruption to try to force changes that the law and democracy do not support is, well, evil. Especially when the end result is something unethical and bad.
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I am putting together a short article about why we won't visit Barcelona again until this gets fixed. I'm so disgusted by Catalonia, I can't believe it. It seems like such a nice place when we were last there in 2012.
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Apparently shutting down expression is something she has been involved with previously:
Scroll down to see the English version.
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wasup with this?
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ahahaha ignore - internal issue.
PS: Fortigate is still blocking you
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We should start a petition to get Fortigate to have better policies.
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@scottalanmiller said:
We should start a petition to get Fortigate to have better policies.
What good would that be? They'd never see it!
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It looks like the bit about blocking the website comes from a statement the government released over a year ago (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/07/08/catalonia-fines-airbnb-threatens-to-block-locals-from-using-site/). So before the mayor came to power. It was a stupid idea and it doesn't look like it's gone anywhere.
I'm not sure why you're singling her out, but it doesn't look like this is anything to do with her. Unlicenced tourist apartments have always been illegal in Barcelona, as they are in many cities (including New York I believe?). This is nothing new. What is new is her suggestion of using existing laws to help solve the chronic social housing problem in Barcelona, which on the face of it seems laudable, but I suspect in practice simply won't work.
Whether you're in favour of allowing unlicenced tourist rentals or not (and I'm on the fence), Barcelona clearly has a housing problem and is in danger of becoming like Venice - a museum where no locals can afford to live. I can see why they're considering all their options. I suspect that an article showing why a family of Americans are refusing to visit will be met by the majority of locals with "good, that's the idea".
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@Carnival-Boy said:
It looks like the bit about blocking the website comes from a statement the government released over a year ago (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/07/08/catalonia-fines-airbnb-threatens-to-block-locals-from-using-site/). So before the mayor came to power. It was a stupid idea and it doesn't look like it's gone anywhere.
Hopefully it goes nowhere. She threatened, according to the article, not just businesses she didn't like but competing municipalities. Hopefully the EU has good protections for this stuff. Sad that they would have to step in and use them, though.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I'm not sure why you're singling her out, but it doesn't look like this is anything to do with her. Unlicenced tourist apartments have always been illegal in Barcelona, as they are in many cities (including New York I believe?). This is nothing new. What is new is her suggestion of using existing laws to help solve the chronic social housing problem in Barcelona, which on the face of it seems laudable, but I suspect in practice simply won't work.
No, it's quite different. I'm all for stopping the tourist issue in Barcelona. But that's nothing to do with the problems here. That's a red herring. It's actually unrelated to the problems with this mayor.
The problems here are:
- Singling out innocent businesses and attacking them instead of the people not paying their taxes.
- Attempting to extort private information from third parties.
- Using threats of Internet censorship and control of information to coerce the innocent into caving to her reckless and hopefully illegal demands.
- Attempting to attack and destroy through illegal means businesses outside of her political jurisdiction.
On top of that, that what she is trying to do is the opposite of what people wanted - she is actually trying to build the Barcelona tourist business, the worst sort of it, in fact, the low end hostels and other businesses that obviously have her in their pockets. She is using the standard tactics, just like the US did with the banks, of making an unrelated enemy, confusing the voting populace and getting them to scream for exactly the opposite of the results that they intend so that she can line the pockets of the people who appear to own her.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Whether you're in favour of allowing unlicenced tourist rentals or not (and I'm on the fence), Barcelona clearly has a housing problem and is in danger of becoming like Venice - a museum where no locals can afford to live. I can see why they're considering all their options. I suspect that an article showing why a family of Americans are refusing to visit will be met by the majority of locals with "good, that's the idea".
Right, which is why the city deserves to turn into Venice - because like in the US, the blind hatred of outsiders, being leveraged by the businesses who bring them in to make people actually bring more in, is going to be their downfall.
They claim that they don't want short term renters - but instead are shutting down the long term renters' options and going to short term only.
They claim that they don't want the bad tourist traffic. Yet it is the only type they want to promote.
They claim they want to support traditional lifestyles, yet they are turning away from tradition and from businesses most likely to support tradition.
They claim they want people to be able to afford to live there yet are taking away the options to pay for your apartment!
Only the rich investors can afford to live in a place where there is no option to rent your home. It's that simple. It locks people into jobs, localities, etc.
Everything she is doing is the opposite of what the people in Barcelona have been asking for. But she did it by getting them xenophobic and upset and getting them to support doing the opposite of what they wanted. And honestly, once a people does that, they deserve the destruction that they bring on themselves. What she and the people supporting her are attempting to do is evil. I have zero sympathy.
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It's shocking how blind everyone is to this. The traffic that people have been upset about in Barcelona is primarily from the licensed hostels with their college party crowd tourists that surf and fill the beaches and don't support the local, traditional businesses. But very carefully the rich hostel business wasn't just avoided in this crackdown, but its competition is being shutdown!
