https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2026/06/04/overtourism-which-european-countries-are-becoming-the-most-hostile-to-travellers
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'None of us could have predicted this': Scottish island closes on Sundays after visitor surge
https://www.euronews.com/travel/2026/06/05/none-of-us-could-have-predicted-this-scottish-island-closes-on-sundays-after-visitor-surge
Tourists staying in short term rentals, rather than hotels and resorts, seem to be cited as causing some of the friction, which makes sense if the locals can't escape tourists even at home. At least I see this mentioned in many of these articles.
In some areas it is an issue with, say, a party house that you can't control because even if the authorities issue a citation, it's new people next week. But you should be able to hold the owners accountable. Most often, though, it's less about not being able to escape the tourists than about not being able to afford to find a place to live in the town you grew up in.
Generally speaking hotel and residential stock are separate. Nobody looks at a large luxury hotel in Vegas and thinks it should be full of locals living there long-term. But they do look at STRs that way. And in most cases, STRs were indeed housing stock before they were rentals.
At the end of the day, it's anger about a housing shortage in most cases.
Of course, this being California, around us, strong protections for tenants are a lot of the problem too. If someone has been in an apartment for a year and stops paying rent, it can take 1.5 years or more to evict them. So in our area, landlords have literally responded by making tenants move out after 10 months. We have a friend with a decent-paying, salaried position that should yield a comfortable life who has lived in five places in four years. Every eight months he is apartment hunting. If there were adequate supply of housing, landlords would be desperate to hang onto a tenant like that and some are, but apparently others would rather just churn. It's not an isolated story.
By the way, I tried to get zoning passed that would allow two units per parcel (allowed always under CA law now) but only one STR. The idea is that for a homeowner, it gives rental income which, yes, drives up prices, but at current construction prices, there are almost no jobs in our area that pay for a house, certainly not with one income. So until people see houses as an asset that depreciates, the idea of selling your house at less than you bought it for (which should be how it works since it should be worth less) is anathema. And of course no builder can sell for less than cost. So prices are beyond salaries.
For an investor, it gives an additional component that must be rented long term, which creates a unit subsidized by the STR.
The other option is to build houses at the rate we built them in the 1950s, but I don't see that happening.