Perche

Here is a B&B in Puglia, near Lecce, that is offering free nights to a small band who can play jazz in the evening in their garden, or to someone who can make a high definition video of their property so they can use it to publicize themselves, and also to anyone who can give them an hour of lessons in speaking either German or English, and also help them write and edit a website they want to put up in either of these two languages. It seems as if Baratto has a lot going on.
http://www.barattobb.it/pagina.cfm?I...5&IDRegione=13

Perche

Here is the barter site in english. It started out to be for just one week called barter week. But if you look at the bottom right and click on that, you can see that about 850 B&B's decided to start doing it all year long.
http://www.settimanadelbaratto.it/en/

damon88

damon88

This is a super cool tip

Thanks

Perche

Returning to Venice this past Sunday, I missed a huge demonstration on Saturday called, "Venexodus." I can reaffirm that AirBnb and similar websites are even more unpopular than cruise ships. Not only in San Francisco where AirBnb was founded, but all around Europe there is a major crackdown underway.

A correct alternative to the spelling Venezia is Venexia (dialect). The meaning of Exodus is obvious. There has been a store in Campo San Bartolomeo that displays the changing number of residents, similar to ones that display the progressive national debt in the USA. When I first started spending part of the year here, people were concerned when it was well over 60,000. There was a sense of tragedy when it dipped below 60,000. It recently plunged to below 55,000.

At the Venexodus march on Saturday hundreds of citizens gathered with suitcases (empty), and marched between San Bartolomeo and City Hall. At City Hall a man dressed as a doge had a giant fake suitcase, got on a gondola, and was rowed out of the city, to symbolize its closure. This was to protest the continued loss of population. I missed the demonstration, but saw the Venexodus posters in a lot of places.

It was widely covered by the media, and I discussed this with friends, a mixed crew that included a former lobby piano player from Hotel Danieli, a Professor, a teacher, and engineer, a poet, a doctor, and a student. The ire is more about failed policy that has allowed AirBnb and similar sites to proliferate unchecked, and why Venice hasn't done the things to rein them in that Barcelona, Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Amsterdam, and other cities are doing.

The news quoted people saying things such as, "My daughter lives in a condominium, and over time it is now just tourists renting there, coming home drunk, and making disasters," "People are pushing out residents to make more money from tourists." My friends said the same sorts of things. "I used to have neighbors. They've all been pushed out. Every day there are new people. I no longer have a neighbor to look after my dog when I go away for the weekend. Just tourists clanging their noisy luggage up and down the stairs at all hours."

I asked what was worse, cruise ships or short term rentals. Every one of them said they don't care about cruise ships. They are an ecological concern for the long term health of the foundations of the city and the lagoon. They said it doesn't affect them because they never go near Rialto or San Marco anyway. They live in Dorsoduro, Castello, Canareggio. They all said that AirBnB is what is killing their way of life right now.

The news articles went on to say, "Venice has been having a declining population for a while, but while trying to find a solution AirBnb came in and gave us the coup de grace." "Nobody wants to see their apartment building turned into an illegal hotel." "The fact that tourists are coming here, using facilities, dumping garbage, damaging infrastructure, and not paying any taxes by using apartment rentals is a scandal."

There was no mention of cruise ships during Venexodus. Just STR's turning apartment living upside down, and making affordable housing extremely difficult to find.

The underlying cause is bad policy. Policy is necessary to affect behavior. All of the money spent on educating the public about smoking didn't have the effect of banning cigarettes from public places and increasing the taxes.

I asked how Barcelona and Berlin solved their problem. In San Francisco the Chronicle recently covered that only 15% of STR's are registered and pay taxes. In Italy, almost none of them pay taxes. Less than 2%. They give a fake tax receipt to the guest. Barcelona went into action when they figured out that $2.9 billion was being sucked out of the economy from people renting their apartments and dodging taxes. They passed a law saying that the landlord of an unregistered STR not paying quarterly taxes will be fined 3,000 euros. The law also said that anybody who lives in a building who suspects that someone is using their apartment as a STR can report them to authorities, who will do a quick inspection. If it is found to be true the person making the report gets a huge chunk of the 3,000 as a reward. Now there are only a handful of registered, taxpaying AirBnbs in Barcelona, which has halted the destruction of affordable housing in the city.

My Venetian friends said that wouldn't work in Italy because it would remind people of the days of Fascism (not that Spain wasn't also Fascist). Many other European cities are cracking down on unregulated STR's. Amsterdam will fine you severely if your apartment is rented out for more than 60 days per year. Paris, for more than 120 days. There is a national ban on AirBnb's in Germany. A few still exist, but you need to get a special license that in effect, turns the apartment into a bed and breakfast.

The sentiment of my Venetian friends is that Venice needs to adopt the "Swiss approach." In Switzerland, AirBnb's are legal, but they restrict the number permissible to only a small certain percentage of apartments per region, thus preventing them from acting like harmful germs to the fabric of the city.

Here is a link to an interesting video, "Venexodus: march against the depopulation of the city." You don't need to understand the language to get the feeling. It starts 15 seconds after you click on it.
http://video.corrieredelveneto.corri...6-0d71dcea08cd

damon88

Thanks for posting

Perche

In the spirit of the same, I awoke to the headline in the that San Francisco Chronicle that San Francisco just passed the nation's 2nd strictest anti AirBnb laws, after NYC. You cannot rent out your apartment for more than 60 days per year.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle today, "The measure’s passage is a blow to Airbnb, the nation’s largest vacation-rental company, which originated in San Francisco and is still based here. Under current city law, hosts can rent a room in their house or apartment for an unlimited number of days, or entire homes for up to 90 days a year. All those would be capped at 60 days under the legislation the supervisors approved Tuesday."

"Critics of Airbnb and similar firms say some property owners have turned their houses and apartments into what are essentially full-time, short-term rentals for out-of towners, taking housing off the market that would otherwise be available to people who want to live here."

"Airbnb tried furiously to head off the legislation, partly by showing the supervisors that it was willing to compromise on an issue that has long vexed city officials — the rental giant’s refusal to provide the names, addresses and guest stays that would be part of a mandatory registration system for hosts."

"Airbnb said this week that it would be willing to turn over the information. With such a registration system, Airbnb could cut off listings when they hit the city’s annual cap on number of nights rented. As it is, only about 1,700 out of an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 hosts are registered, making it all but impossible for the city to enforce its current annual rental caps."

"When the Board of Supervisors tried to hold rental outfits accountable for booking unregistered listings, Airbnb sued the city. A federal judge indicated last week that he was likely to rule against the company, potentially exposing it to steep fines and criminal penalties if guests are booked into unregistered listings."

Hopefully, Venice will follow in the footsteps of Barcelona, Berlin, San Francisco, and other cities that have been experiencing these destructive effects.

rickg523

As a traveler who prefers rentals to hotels, I support mandatory registration, reasonable occupancy limits, zoning limitations to avoid "hotel neighborhoods," and severe financial consequences for property owners who fail to remit taxes. Otoh, properly registered businesses - which once a proper regulation regime is implemented is what these rentals become - should not be limited to conducting business for only 60 days a year. Anymore than the Gritti should be forced to close if there was a problem with rat-trap, by-the-hour love hotels in Venice.
I get the frustration and recognize that elected officials tend to reach for a sledgehammer to swat a fly, but the approach taken in NYC and SF will simply encourage an underground peer-to-peer system, like bit-Torrent replaced Napster.
There is no way a city in a free society can stop a resident from letting someone stay in their home. Encouraging neighbors to drop dimes on one another smacks of every totalitarian government in history. Will city governments pay "proctors" to watch and report their neighbors. I saw that method used in outlying villages in Greek islands by the Colonel's junta in the early 1970's. And I saw what those villagers did to those "snitches" first chance they got.
STR is here to stay. It would be best for cities to foster and regulate companies like Airbnb so that the transactions do not go completely peer-to-peer. Once that system arises, control becomes an illusion unless governments close the internet.

Perche

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/S...h-10617319.php

Italy didn't adopt the Barcelona approach because Italians don't want to be encouraged to spy on their neighbors. However, countries have the right to watch out for the interest of its people and not let corporate giants like AirBnb destroy thwart the will of its people and tear the social fabric, by using its own means. The countries I mentioned are all doing it their own way

When a company like AirBnb refuses to be regulated, eventually government steps in and regulates them. It's not different from big tobacco, or even airlines. All that has to happen now in SF is for the mayor to sign the bill that was passed. What will happen next is what has happened every time a city has tried to regulate AirBnb. They file a lawsuits so that its corporate interest overrides the interests of the citizens who live there.

AirBnb has filed lawsuits to stop every effort to regulate them. I believe that every city has a right to preserve its interests, and Venice is no different.

In Barcelona, whether or not you agree with its approach, it reduced AirBnb from listing thousands of apartments, like Venice, and destroying neighborhoods, to less than two dozen now. Berlin also reduced the number of units from thousands to less than to dozen. Zurich did the same.

Amsterdam recently created a highly funded agency to scour its tax rolls, and to go after the owners of sites suspected to be AirBnb's if they haven't paid a hotel tax. There is no substantive underground alternative movement in those cities, although there will always be some scofflaws.

The bit-Tinder/Napster analogy doesn't hold, in my opinion. A landlord and customer physically occupying an physical space will think differently than a teenager thinking about downloading a song from the anonymity of their bedroom.

A better analogy is what happened to tobacco companies. Tobacco company executives swore in congressional hearings that smoking doesn't cause cancer, and resisted every attempt to rein them in, even preventing them from advertisements aimed at children, like Joe Camel. AirBnb is doing the same. They have lawsuits counter-attacking every city that has tried to regulate them. They have pending lawsuits against San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and other cities. Los Angeles is about to pass legislation to regulate them, and AirBnb will certainly use their bottomless pockets to sue them. There is even a class action suit, the The People vs. AirBnb, and a class action lawsuit was even filed because minorities are much less likely to be able to get a room through AirBnb than non-minorities because host screening is not regulated.

I don't know of any country trying to eliminate these sorts of unregulated business completely, they are just trying to make them become responsible corporate citizens.

In Venice the estimate is that a person who converts their apartment and becomes an AirBnb "host" makes on average 89,000 euros per year on that apartment, pays no taxes, and follows no rules. They then use that money to obtain more apartments to continue to devour the neighborhood. The average annual income of a Venetian is just under 18,000 euros. A Venetian cannot compete for an apartment with AirBnb, so this process must be tightly limited if Venice is to service and not become a museum. They are a corporate bad actor, and as is happening all over Europe, they will eventually be reined in.

The Hotel Gritti is not a good analogy. It operates legally, pays millions of euros in taxes per year on its profits, employs hundreds of people, charges guests a several euro per night sojourn tax, and is tightly regulated by the government. It is an asset to the city, not a destructive force.

Perche

There is a mathematical rationale why cities are adopting 60 or 90 day rules.

The 60 day rule comes from the following reasoning. AirBnb started out by someone renting an air mattress in their apartment in San Francisco. Then, people started renting out a room in their apartment. Then, they started renting their whole apartment, some of the time. Now, 80% of AirBnb's listings are for the whole apartment, rented out all of the time, with nobody living in it. "Hosts" are not, "sharing" their apartment, they are renting their hotel.

In Venice, that brings in about 89,000 euros in annual untaxed profits to a "host." If Venice passes the 60 day per year rule and has the means to enforce it, and to withstand AirBnb's inevitable countersuit to block it, that apartment/hotel can only be rented 1/6th of the time, and the income would go down to 14,833 euros per year.

The average monthly rent a Venetian pays for a one bedroom apartmentis about 10,800 euros, or 9,600 per year. It's about 1,500 per month, or 12,600 per year for a two bedroom, and 1,300 for a three bedroom, or 15,600 euros per year. Evicting a tenant and turning their apartment into an AirBnb wouldn't be any more profitable than renting it to a Venetian.

Based on average rental price in a city, sometimes the 90 day rule works out to be the balance point to nullify the AirBnb effect.

The owner of the apartment will still be able to rent it out if they go on frequent business trips or vacations, or spend a month on the beach in the summer, etc,. However, they will otherwise want to live in their apartment or rent it to a Venetian, because there won't be any money to made by evicting a Venetian and turning it into a tourist hotel.

Hundreds of cities all over the world have enacted policies to control profiteers, and to stabilize rents because availability of fair, affordable housing is considered a right. Venice shouldn't be any different, and doesn't have to stand by and be destroyed by having to adopt the perspective from a USA lens.

Everywhere around the world AirBnb resists any and all attempts to regulate them, no matter how small. They don't negotiate regulations, they fight them.

The largest hotel group in the world is the Wyndham Hotel Group, with 683,000 rooms in 77 countries, and a market cap of $5.2 billion. AirBnb has a market cap of $32 billion, and lists over 1.5 million rooms, in over 190 countries. It is the third most valuable venture capital funded company in the entire world.

They feel as if they are too big to be regulated, and they have the money to embark on endless lawsuits. They've been successful at preventing regulations from being implemented in the USA, where corporate elites rule. They have been less successful at blocking regulations in European countries that have a different model.

I've never seen so much wrath in Venice about invasive tourism. Hundreds of apartment owners are reporting receiving unsolicited letters from AirBnb, suggesting that they convert their unit into an AirBnb rental. This is a rapacious business that I hope gets reined in soon, and the talk right now is to adopt the Swiss model. I hope Venice does so soon.

I don't personally fault people for choosing AirBnb. Few know how it affects Venetians, or how Venetians feel about it. There are many, many, legitimate, regulated apartments for rent by licensed real estate companies that have been around for many, many years, as an alternative that is less damaging to the city.

rickg523

I am absolutely not excusing bad corporate citizenship on the part of Airbnb. My personal preference is to use local rebuttal agencies representing legacy short-term (vacation) rentals. And I am in no way saying the "wild west" situation is tenable. I just think ham-handed attempts to simply squelch supply in the face of demand doesn't work, has never worked, and won't work. And often leads to unintended consequences worse than the condition the legislation was trying to address. Instead of a flat days per year limit, I believe a comprehensive but rational set of regulations involving registration, taxation, occupancy and zoning permits and an absolute prohibition of the use eviction to convert the property to STR, can be a more effective approach to getting a handle on the inevitable rental of properties that would legitimately otherwise stand empty.
That's in general. Venice has specific and unique conditions. Though the opportunity to profit from vacant properties has terribly exacerbated the problem, the depopulation of the city predates the advent of Airbnb. The elephant in the room to me is that there are so many empty dwellings, but rather than undertake the expensive renovation of uninhabited houses, property owners have thrown people out of their homes to put the apartments on the short term market. And the city let them do it.
Universally, municipal officials often look the other way at abuses by property owners, but as you have described it and cited, the situation in Venice is egregious. There should certainly be political reckoning. And I wonder whether Airbnb by being so uncooperative, even intransigent, has unwittingly given municipal politicians convenient cover for their own significant failings. Any property listing on an internet rental service, is not beyond the ability of city government to find and regulate or penalize for violating regulations. I can find the exact locations and addresses of propetirs in cities I've never visited using information in the listing, the photos, and Google maps. And if tenants are being evicted, I'd think there would be a very specific list of exact properties available to city officials. If they wanted that list.
Airbnb ought to be more transparent, but this most appalling behavior by owners should not require any intervention by Airbnb to be stopped by the city.

mmack

Interesting comments. What I can't understand is why municipalities don't go to the AirB&B website and just look up the listings? Then pay a visit to inspect.

Jobs for Venetians! We are looking forward to our next visit in March 2017. We stay in a hotel, always.

Perche

Great question. I think it's because the owner will almost not be there. They probably won't even be in the region, or will be making so much money that they won't be in Italy.

The last person I know who went AirBnb in Venice stood outside, started to get obviously anxious and a lady from a beauty parlor in the square came out and asked him if he was the guy waiting for the AirBnb. He said said yes. She was holding they key for him, and took him there. She said the owner wasn't in Italy, but she was helping him out.

In another instance that someone recently related to me, vaporetto stops have arrival and departure areas. She waited for a long, long time at the arrival point. No one was there to meet her to take her to the AirBnb. She walked over to where the departure area was because she saw there was a lady standing there also for a long time. She introduced herself, and that lady said she was there to take her to the AirBnb. She said she wasn't the owner, and said the owner wasn't in the country.

obscure2k

Returned from our annual November trip to Venice today. Our close friends in Venice lovingly restored an apartment on Misercordia in Cannaregio where they live with their young child . An owner of one of the adjacent apartments recently died and the heir is now renting the apartment via AirBNB. Our friends are unhappy as they do not like travelers or transients invading their space. They do not know who will be their neighbors in that apartment on any given day. It is very troubling. Hope I just made sense. That 0620 departure from VCE connecting at CDG is brutal. Venice was just glorious these 10 days.

Perche

You made great sense.