Barcelona Mayor Threatens the Great Firewall of Catalonia to Fight AirBnB
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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!
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I'm sure that things like AirBnB are having an affect on the local taxes, but wow, it's hard for me to grasp that it could have that much of an effect. (did I get the effects/affects right - I still can never remember).
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Why Barcelona Needs To Do Something About Tourists This was asked and I figured better to make it available for everyone.
Barcelona is a truly amazing city. One of the largest cities in Europe and by far the biggest tourist city. A number of years ago they did some major promotions to make more tourists come there and they worked far better than the city had planned and now the city is literally overrun with tourists. Far more than even a city of four million can handle (Barcelona is roughly the same size as San Antonio, Texas.) The infrastructure is just not there for them. The city is the largest port on the Mediterranean and is loaded with great beaches and is the top architectural destination in the world (as cities go.)
The problems really arise not from there being tourists but from the types of tourists that were attracted: American primarily, and nothern European, college students or poor travelers of similar age who are there for the party, not for the city.
So the issue becomes that the city is full of poor, tourists who are passing through and stop there to surf, lay on the beach and do nothing to explore or support the traditions and culture of the city. Instead they tend to eat at McDonald's or other big chain restaurants or non-traditional restaurants that cater to them. Almost no money flows into the city from the tourists traffic that they have because they are all using the free attractions and they are not even supporting local businesses.
Because of this, a small number of non-Barcelonian businesses are getting rich (like McD's) and making real estate very expensive while the ma and pa stores on the corner that made Barcenola the quaint, amazing big city that it is, get no business at all and can't afford to stay open. In theory at least.
If you visit Barcelona you feel this immediately. Even back in 2012 there was no denying that the city was a theme park overrun with kids walking the streets, all over the beach but not spending money anywhere.
The tourists businesses is literally making the city too expensive to live in while not making the city any money, it's actually losing money on the tourists that they are getting. It's ruining the way of life in the city because the hostel market has taken over instead of being a side business like in other European cities.
Barcelona is also a major cruise port, so gets hit with day trippers coming off of those ships which is just as bad.
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@Dashrender said:
I'm sure that things like AirBnB are having an effect on the local taxes, but wow, it's hard for me to grasp that it could have that much of an effect. (did I get the effects/affects right - I still can never remember).
Effect: noun
Affect: verb -
The effect on taxes is minor, except that the ones paying the taxes are the ones who apparently own the mayor. The thing about AirBnB businesses is that they still owe taxes (at least in other cities they do) so if there is an issue with taxes not being collected that's between the city and the taxpayers, it would have nothing to do with AirBnB. Going after AirBnB is misdirection to keep the populace happy while keeping them from noticing that tax collection is not being addressed, people not paying their taxes are not being hunted down and companies that do pay taxes are making more money while bringing in solely the worst kinds of tourists - the ones that people wanted to kick out.
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If Barcelona really wanted to solve its problems it would do nothing like this. AirBnB and VRBO bring in the rare, long term, "live like the locals" kind of tourists or long term residents that Barcelona claims to want. The ones that don't stay in the traditional tourists areas, those that want to eat and shop at the local places, the ones that want to practice speaking in Catalan while there.
The way that they should target the issue, IMHO is:
- Promote AirBnB and VRBO, they are the potential saviours of the city.
- Start collecting taxes from people who aren't paying them.
- Begin to curtail the hostel business.
- Forbid the building of chain restaurants and shops outside of certain areas.
- Begin to raise the cost of the bottom end hostels.
- Begin to turn away cruise ships (by not letting them schedule stops there.)
- Stop building the high speed rail designed to bring northern European and backpacking travelers easily into the city from all over Europe.
