It’s good news just considering that Peter #Thiel is a stakeholding¹ cofounder of airbnb. This is the same motherfucker who got Trump into power in 2016 by using Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and Thiel’s dark money contributions – which more recently got JD Vance into power. Also the same xenophobic scumbag motherfucker behind Palantir. The same piece of shit who cofounded PayPal (a surveillance capitalist). Thiel’s profits are detrimental to the world.
¹ to be clear he was a stakeholder ~10 years ago… not sure if that’s still the case.
Nice work, not many people know/remember all of this. Whenever Facebook tried to spin a “rogue scientist took our data” I responded - you mean you handed it to the company with the same motherfucker in board and plenty of other connections. Brexit, trump and who knows what else (effective Russian propaganda in Europe?) is of their doing.
Munich is handling it really well in my opinion. They have rules for homeowners, which are that an apartment cannot be empty for more than 3 months, cannot be used (fully) as an office (of course you can have an office in your apartment) and that the apartment can be used as vacation home for a maximum of 8 weeks per year. I just checked Airbnb again and the offers are sparse.
If Airbnb would be used by renters to offer their home in times where they aren’t there themselves, then it’s a great concept. However capitalism fucked everything over and now it’s just used to generate income by rich people who can afford to buy accommodation.
So in effect you cannot have a second home in Munich? And what are the repercussions for violating these rules?
Why would you want to have two homes in the same city? It’s hard enough finding one apartment, if people go around having multiple accommodations, it’s just unfair for everyone else.
Maybe two homes in two cities? For any combination of personal/family and work related reasons? I’m just dreaming here :)
I would see people owning multiple homes in a vacation scenario. It used to be fairly common where I live for people to have a vacation home at the beach or in the mountains. These were relatively inexpensive and people would go down perhaps for a week or two in the summer and often spend long holiday weekends there also. The homes could also be rented out to other vacationers when the owners weren’t using them. Usually there would be multiple local agencies that would handle the scheduling, and in the pre-internet days they would publish booklets with a picture or two of the houses and the weekly rates that varied with peak rental season. This worked pretty well and there were usually still plenty of houses for local residents who lived there year-round and even temporary workers who just came for the peak tourism season.
This has changed in more recent years, though, especially since the pandemic. At the beach many of the cheap, small old houses have been torn down and much larger, more expensive houses have been built. Sometimes investors have even been approved to build one house on a lot, then go ahead and build duplex or even triplex homes and the towns don’t make them tear it down or give any other significant penalty. At the Outer Banks the vacation season shifted from summer to year round and investors have turned almost all available properties into short-term vacation rentals. Given the distance from the mainland this has made it difficult for seasonal workers to find housing, to the extent that some shops and restaurants have started offering housing to employees as a way to attract workers.
Of course, a vacation scenario is even less tenable at scale in an ordinary city than someplace built primarily for tourists.
