I am totally unfamiliar with Spain, but wondering what would government have to do to improve the situation? They wouldn’t build government owned and operated houses? Or is it that they do not issue permits for builders, or tax incentives are all wrong?

A lot of other European governments took on too much public debt and had to enforce austerity measures. This proved very unpopular.

Unlike the US, the Spanish government did not bail out private industry debt. And so 15 years later here we are. Not enough housing stock and not enough private builders to carryon building more.

How much effect will 65000 flats have on this?

Not really true, Romania, Italy, UK, Ukraine, Peru, Germany, France and more are not hotter than Spain.

Is there something else you're trying to hint at that you don't dare to say out loud perhaps?

And meanwhile, getting any kind of building permits is super hard so there's only a trickle of new property being built that lags behind demand.

There's a real estate bubble where real estate value outgrows inflation structurally. So housing is getting more and more expensive. To the point where a normal person with a normal income has basically no chance at all at finding anything decent on the market.

The solution of building more housing and making it easier for property owners to rent out their property are consistently not happening. The Netherlands actually has large amounts of empty property where the owners prefer to not rent it out and keep their investment liquid because it's such a PITA to get out of an agreement. There's also a history of privatized housing corporations selling off their property to make some quick money for the share holders. The net result is a huge mess of private property that is either not rented out or rented out at extortion prices. At the same time there's also growing amount of empty commercial real estate. Because people work from home now. Converting that for housing is another regulation challenge.

The problem isn't greed but broken policy. The reflex of "protecting" renters has had the opposite negative effects on the rental market. Things like Airbnb are more like a symptom than the cause of this.

The way I see it, house construction should not be expensive. It's artificial scarcity. A 50K camper can be pretty comfortable. But forget about having the right to use that as a place to live. You are instead expected to pay extortion rents or buy your own 500K piece of shit tiny apartment that is actually smaller and less comfortable than the bloody camper. A camper is just a house with wheels. Those are mass produced in factories. Houses without wheels should be much simpler to make. This never was a technical problem. Prefab housing is kind of a solved problem. It's not that hard. Any idiot can construct a garden shed in an afternoon. If the rules were different, most big cities would have huge slums with campers and other improvised housing. Regulation is what keeps this under control. But when policy breaks down, slums like that become the next logical level of this crisis.

A good example of exemptions in the Netherlands are so-called holiday homes where people live permanently; despite this clearly being illegal. Evicting people would create an unsolvable problem for bureaucrats. So, a lot of people that live like that got their situation legalized. And of course recreational units tend to be in nice places too. So, it's a popular thing. If tens of thousands of people start parking their campers on the edge of town bureaucrats would struggle to address the issue without creating a bigger crisis.

Probably something like this will force a solution eventually.

Not great for prices (Ryanair is complaining about high landing fees) but it does mean tourists have a good job being dispersed into the countryside and having a good experience.

By what measure? Granted, I now live outside of Barcelona after moving here from an island with ~700 people on it, so for me pretty much any city is big, but I'm fairly sure Barcelona is within top 100 worldwide in terms of population living in it, so I'm guessing you're saying "not a large city" by some other metric?

This is the wrong way to frame this issue. A lot of cities like Paris and Amsterdam have this issue with short-term renting. "Build moar" is just not really an option for these type of city.

Firstly, the constructible area of the city is limited. So build, but build where ? You can expand horizontally, but this creates challenges with public transportation and other public services. And it can be slow since it means having to expel industry and agriculture further to rezone area into constructible home/office area. So the other option is to build up, which means destroying potentially historic building, changing the skyline and viewpoint. This would be bad for tourism (and people who live here might not like it either), since this is a big reason why people even come to visit.

In the past, cities had simple way to deal with this. With zoning and hotel licences, the city could have a real urban plan on how it wanted to evolve and how much space it wanted to dedicate to tourism vs industry vs offices vs homes. But AirBnb came and just said "fuck that" and bypass complitely the licence système and or building and operating permit usually needed for tourism. Greed and capitalism took advantage of that and the number of place to rent or buy descreased significantly in favour of short term tourism rental, making living in the city slowly unaffordable.

Building more is not that simple. AirBnb respecting the law is a simple solution. It won't complitely solve the issue of the availaibility of affordable home, but it sures as hell help.

Get over it! Seriously, most buildings are not historic. By trying to make them all historic you ensure they are all lost and the few that really are historic can't stand out for the history they represent. Save what is really history, but not everything.

Similarly, the skyline will change. That is life. Accept it. You do not own the view, it is the combination of everyone, and not everyone agrees with you so why are you forcing your preferred view on others?

It's a lot more selfish and malicious than that. They want to remain housed affordably, so they support rent control, but they don't care about the city being affordable in general or for anyone not already living there. Often they outright oppose it (because those moving in would be ethnic minorities or poorer, with concerns about crime), but they disguise their racism with ridiculous aesthetic preferences about "skylines" and "shadows" and "neighborhood character", block highrises, block most construction, and you end up with rent controls for current residents but years long wait lists. Working 100% as designed.

What locals in attractive locations really want is to restrict supply, because the majority are homeowners and want to preserve their paper net worth. They caused the problem, benefit from it and don't want it fixed.

Sure, everyone wants their particular city to be frozen in time for cuteness and nostalgia reasons. However, it sort of assumes that the sociopolitical environment is also frozen (it isn't).

so instead you end up with voters voting against densification because, essentially, "I got mine."

p.s. i'm not sure that places that banned/heavily restricted airbnb experienced a meaningful decline in rental prices (e.g. new york, san francisco, vancouver, etc). it's basically a distraction from failed policy.

p.p.s. new york is one of the most popular tourist destinations and incredibly built up, and doesn't seem to have issues with tourists wanting to visit. tokyo too. and these also still have their quintessential historic/preserved areas, too.