Prague takes on Airbnb to dam flood of tourists (The Observer, 1 Feb 2020)

• 'I'm a stranger in my own city': Prage takes on Airbnb to dam flood of tourists

• By Robert Tait. Published in the Observer on 1 February 2020

• https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/01/overwhelmed-prague-tries-to-limit-airbnb-to-curb-tourism

• Summary:

  • As the number of short-term and tourist flats in Prague available on Airbnb increases, residents are unhappy and feel overwhelmed and priced out of many areas.

  • The mayor, Zdeněk Hřib (Zdenek Hrib, liberal, Pirate Party), is planning to barr property owners "from leasing out entire flats except when it was their own home and they were temporarily vacating it", and "(t)ourists demanding Airbnb rentals would be limited instead to single rooms in accommodation where the owner also lived".

• Keywords: Prague, Czech Republic, Airbnb, Apolena Rychlíková (Apolena Rychlikova, film-maker and journalist), Janek Rubeš (Janek Rubes, vlogger)

This story is also useful because it mentions data on the number of flats on Airbnb in Prague: 5,537 in March 2016 and more than 13,000 in May 2018, with a jump from 17,913 to 52,738 in the number of beds, which can be used to show the spread of Airbnb-listed flats in Prague over time. A one-time snapshot of data on Airbnb in Prague can be found on Inside Airbnb: http://insideairbnb.com/prague.

The story also says 80% of available rentals are entire flats, all according to an impact report from the city’s Institute of Planning and Development (http://en.iprpraha.cz, but there's no link to the data set).

It says "(a)n average Prague resident needs to pay 14 times the annual salary excluding tax, housing, eating and clothing costs to buy a flat in the city, the mayor said", but there's no link to the original data set.