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.
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.
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.
This is something that can be done at the municipal level. Forget about Trump; this won’t happen at the federal level. Write your local mayor and town alder.
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.
There’s quite a few landlord MPs in Canada as well
Quite a few cities have worked hard on outlawing Airbnb. At least in Europe and (AFAIK) Canada.
The US? I have no idea
NYC, San Francisco, and Santa Monica did it. A lawsuit Airbnb put forth to to block it in NYC got dismissed even.
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.
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.
Lol because most of them own a few of these
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.
I lived above a pizza shop at one point. Was not an issue.
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?
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
12 years ago I used Airbnb to lodge around Japan for a trip, just slept on some dude’s couch, we went out for drinks. It was pretty sweet back then.
Not that much of a meme though, I live in downtown Madrid and that’s basically my building, only a few tenants remain here, 80% or more of the building is tourists.
Didn’t expect a 13, Rue del Percebe reference in Lemmy of all places.
We need a 13, Rue del Percebe y Asterix crossover!
iMmiGrAnTS ArE CauSiNG HouSiNG CriSis!!!
I mean the Starbucks is fine. If you’re into it, it’s great to have it nearby. And if it’s not your thing, maybe the building next door has something that isn’t so anti-worker. The short term rentals are indeed a menace though.
That example being in France, there are plenty of coffee shops serving good quality coffee much cheaper than Startbucks.
In countries like that it’s generally only the tourists from countries with no such traditions that end up in Starbucks since the locals just frequent the coffee shops which are generally much cheaper and generally have better coffee.
I live in a country that nowadays gets swamped with tourists - Portugal - especially in my hometown of Lisbon and lots of such large international brand shops pretty much only get frequented by tourists, plus there’s a certain styling of establishment that’s done to appeal to tourists - roughly, those establishments which look like the kind of thing you would find in the Departure Hall of a large Airport anywhere in the World, are aimed at tourists.
All that to say that in the context of a French Cartoon a Startbucks probably represents very well that kind of cookie-cutter same-style-everywhere-in-the-World establishment that’s actually worse and more expensive than the local version and exists to cater to tourists.
Fair enough, I’ve never been to a French city.
However I was thinking in the context that mixed purpose buildings are cool. Would I prefer a locally owned shop? Hell yeah. But it’s also cool to at least have SOMETHING available so close.
Nearest cafe and shop are both over a kilometer away from me. I wish there was a corner shop 200 meters away and a bar 100 meters away like at my old apartment. But the part of the city I live in is entirely residential.
That kind of mixed purpose building is pretty standard in Europe (I actually can’t think of a country I lived in or visited here that doesn’t do it for most appartment buildings, expecially in areas with more foot traffic) so probably the author of the cartoon didn’t even think about that side of things at all.
I suspect appartment buildings with shops on the ground floor qualifies as one of those “it’s so common that nobody thinks about it” kind of things over here.
I’m in Europe, but at least in my country, it’s not ubiquitous. Some parts of some cities have it.
Ah, interesting.
Which country is it, if you don’t mind me asking?
Estonia
Ah, I’m not at all familiar with Eastern Europe (never got around to visit any of those countries, though Estonia specifically is on my list).
Could it be that there is less of a tradition of people walking around everywhere on the street due to the cold over there so there’s no real point in having small shops everywhere or maybe something to do with the building culture from back in the Communist times (I’m thinking they weren’t exactly keen on there being small businesses everywhere)?
Around here (Portugal) even with the local love for cars (not exactly the greatest characteristic of this country) people do tend to walk around in cities, especially city centers, and most housing are appartment buildings, so it’s absolutelly normal for those buildings to be made with shop spaces on the ground floor.
I’ve seen the same not just in next door Spain and further out in France, but also in places I lived in such as The Netherlands, Germany and England.
Granted, I generally lived in or visited cities, where all the more central places (what the brits call “the high street”) tend to be built like that, but for example peripheral neighbourhoods tend to have far fewer or no shops on the ground floor of buildings (and that’s also the case in Portugal), though by central I don’t mean specifically city centers, just areas in cities with more foot traffic (for example London has hundreds of maybe thousands of streets and stretches of street they would the call the “high street” which are really just the ones with more traffic and were in practice every single appartment building has shops on the ground floor, but London also has whole neighbourhoods with just one shop here or there)
20m² for 700€ is an absolute steal, I’ve never seen any apartment that cheap before. Best I can get in my area for 700€ is a 5m² septict tank with 5 room mates.
“We used to have to get up at six o’clock in the morning, clean the tank, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!”
You were lucky!
Back in my day there were 7 of us living inside a brick shithouse. We had to clean it with the one toothbrush we all had, eat the crumbs from the crust of the stale bread, go to work down pit at 4am for 18 hours a day, every day, and when we got home, our Dad would chase us down street hurling bricks at us from the shit brickhouse then make us build it up again before we could go to sleep!
You guys had a house!?!
At least there’s an elevator. It could be a walk-up.
You need a key though, which only the landlord has
Elevator only goes so far. You still have stairs to do.
Those stairs don’t even seem to work
Mixed use zoning and a multiuse building? This defintely isnt a north american city. America is “too big” to build like this.
