Airbnb and shared living in Prague: How much space do apartments for Prague residents take up?
The non-profit organization Arnika, together with the Tolerable Housing Association, is trying to prevent amendments to the Act on Tourism, which is being prepared by the Ministry of Regional Development. That is why he is organizing an online request for “Apartment Buildings”, which has already been joined by several dozen other associations since the beginning of August. He will then send an open letter to the government. With his activity, he wants to convince the current government to reject the amendment in the same form and to start steps to correct the situation.
More money for accommodation
Legislation should solve problems related to the provision of accommodation, especially in apartments inside apartment buildings, especially in places with a high rate of tourists. The state wants to provide entrepreneurs in accommodation services with equal conditions. It therefore wants to mandate that alternative accommodation platforms share information about accommodation providers. Entrepreneurs who use apartments for accommodation must enter the number of the apartment as a place of business in the trade register. The owner of the apartment will also monitor the monitoring of night peace and disorder.
In addition, the state wants to determine a tool to regulate shared accommodation for municipalities. Furthermore, a distinction will be made between professional and occasional accommodation providers. The aim of the proposal is to have a fair coexistence between accommodated persons and residents. Both accommodation providers and property owners will have to more strictly select their guests and control how they behave. Straightening the market will help better searchability of accommodation and easier checks, which will be similar to the offer.
Opponents of the news, however, say that legal regulation of Airbnb will not solve the problems, but instead legalize what is illegal today. The law can enable not only the operation of existing ones, but even support the creation of additional accommodation capacities at the expense of permanent housing.
According to activists, it is short-term accommodation such as the Airbnb platform that has grown into a state leading to the occurrence of a the accumulation of such phenomena that are incompatible with permanent housing and the protection of the health of the people living here, nor with public interests in the sustainable development of the territory and the expedient use of public investments coordinated by the spatial plan. At the same time, according to them, the apartments violate the legislation. According to approval, they should be used for permanent housing.
An overabundance of “empty” apartments?
According to the Czech Statistical Office, it is located in Prague 93,627 unoccupied apartments, which represents 13 percent of the total 721,332 apartments. This follows from last year’s census data. The largest share of usually unoccupied apartments is in Prague 1. There are 5,760 unoccupied apartments out of 12,783 occupied apartments. Prague 2 has a quarter of unoccupied apartments, Prague 3 an eighth.
An inhabited apartment means that it has a registered permanent address in Pražan. “The apartment in which the working week in question appears to be unoccupied from the point of view of the statistical definition, but it is necessary to remember that it may not actually be empty reports Jan Cieslar, press spokesman of the CZSO. Also, student apartments can appear uninhabited because students are registered as staying in their parents’ house. In reality, however, he has been happily living in the apartment for several years.
Praguers curse
“Generally speaking, we are dealing with complaints about the lack of vacant apartments for various reasons,” Prague press spokesman Tadeáš Provazník tells Bleska. These complaints are recorded by both the municipality and the city districts that have their own housing stock. This fact is said to be due to the general lack of vacant apartments on the market.
“As for Airbnb, the number of complaints about this platform decreased after the covid pandemic, however, we assume that this autumn there will be an increase in the number of complaints about this type of accommodation,” comments Tadeáš Provazník. Housing fund m of Prague has 7,196 apartments, with which the city actively manages, another approximately 14,000 apartments (from available analysis Institute of Planning and Development as of 2021) have urban districts. Both types make up 2.9 percent of the total number of 721,332 apartments in Prague.
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