Run for mayor (or local equivalent), win, and then push for/implement a bunch of rules that make the town inhospitable to tourists.

I assume the tourism brings in money to the local community, yeah? Cutting off that income will probably mean you won't be able to win the next subsequent election, so act fast.

My dude is about to become a Scooby Doo villain

I mean, maybe test the water supply? Odds are there’s something very wrong with it these days

Try organizing with other long-term locals to tightly regulate and license short-term rentals. Structure a local ordinance so that you can run a genuine hotel or real B & B, but can't rent out a vacation home; eliminate the profit motive.

Additionally, I would suggest organizing to revamp zoning laws so that you can have high-density housing built in the town center. (Be warned that you'll get a lot of NIMBY people if you try that though.)

Maybe push for a local rule against short-term rentals? That would treat the actual problem you mention having - lack of access to property being taken up by short term rental owners. If successful, you might even see a lot of people selling off their former short term rentals, increasing the supply and helping your issue further.

Might be a bit of a stretch, but start a paper mill company! They make a whole town smell REALLY REALLY BAD. During my childhood there was one in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, and it was not a tourist destination at all. Then the paper mill closed and suddenly it WAS a tourist destination.

Also, does Lemmy have an Unethical Pro Life Tips community yet? This question would be perfect there. Also also, don't rule out criminality so quick!

You’re best approach would be to make AirBnB illegal or impossible to insure.

http://www.unfairbnb.net/airbnb-bans1

The town I am located in had this same issue and saw it happening to an extreme elsewhere in the country. So they implemented restrictions on how many Vrbo and Airbnb's a person can have active at once.

It unfortunately didn't take affect retroactively, but it was immediate. Which was really funny to see as some recent purchases and renovations were suddenly put on the market again after the city pulled the rug from under them.

As I understand it, you can purchase whatever you want, but to Vrbo, Airbnb, etc, you must register the property with the city as a non-permanent residence, of which, there is a limit of one per organization or individual within city limits.

Totally cheesable, as one could be in a spouse's, or dog's name or some other rich people crap. And again, not retroactive, which sucks as housing is still a nightmare here.

So my advice. Get a petition going with a similar solution put together. Get into some city council meetings. Get vocal. Make some cool posters.

This solution won't target tourists, and may take longer. But in my mind, it will target the real problem.

I’d watch some Scooby Doo episodes for some tips, and just hope some meddling kids don’t ruin your plans.

the secret ingredient is crime

Tl;Dr, it's not the tourists per se, it's the shitty laws in your area. They wouldn't be able to fuck up the housing market if there was an abundance of housing.

I mean, maybe consider channeling your ambitions for the good of everyone. Think of it this way: the tourism itself isn't the problem, it's how the tourism is being handled that is. There are local small businesses that depend on those tourists, whose money largely stays in your community, as compared to big corps like Wal-Mart that are much more extractive; the tourists gain an appreciation for your small town, and members of your small town get opportunities to meet new people and grew new commerce that they never would otherwise. The issue is that, because of certain factors that are true for much of the US, these tourists are being catered to in ways that are harmful for locals. The good news is that you can change these factors, they're not set in stone, they're just set in bad policy, often local bad policy.

For example, Airbnb has exacerbated the already existing housing shortage, but there is a housing shortage because of our insistence on almost exclusively building sprawling tracts of single family homes. The simple fact of the matter is that it's not really realistic to house everybody in a single family home (and there's a lot of reasons for this), and it's really hard to build them cheap enough and in plentiful enough supply to keep competition high and keep housing affordable. This means that single family home tracts inevitably trend towards being affordable only by those who already have assets, which would be people like landlords and Airbnb operations. Building more mixed-use neighborhoods and higher density housing (where subletting is often prohibited) would at least blunt the housing affordability crisis. Unfortunately, many city councils and planning commissions (at least here in CA) throw shit fits about anything but single family housing being built, and then proceed to wonder why nobody can afford the $500,000 Mini-McMansions that have sprung up.

Directly regulating vacation rentals is tricky to do well. Many tourist areas just sort of end up converting their regulations into fee collecting operations, which doesn't really help anyone. Other places directly limit how many properties can be vacation rentals, or even outright ban them, but enforcement is almost universally sloppy and you're all but guaranteed to get sued by Airbnb. This is still a developing field for local governments, but I think the trick is not ending up accidentally creating black markets. One strategy that could work well is working to increase traditional and/or small business hotel availability in your area, which would naturally eat into the profit margins of vacation rentals and make them less inticing, but I don't know how effective that would really be since those markets don't have perfect overlap.

Edit: seeing lots of replies in this post from people whose towns have regulated this stuff, some more successfully than others. I'm glad to see that this is a concern for city leadership across the country.

The issue that lies at the heart of the vacation rental problem is that a vacation rental operator can collect in four days what they'd get from a traditional renter in a month from a property, and since property values are only going up due to the housing shortage, they're making money on the front and back of the business, basically. This makes it so that, as a property owner trying to maximize your own outcomes, you'd be leaving money on the table by not evicting your tenants and converting your rental home into a vacation rental. You don't even have to have a high occupancy, so as long as you rent for a few days a month, your mortgage is covered. Of course, if everyone does this, there's nowhere left for the locals to live. I've seen too many small towns shoot themselves in the foot this way; the average wages stay close to entry level, but the only people who can afford to live there are the retirees. Everyone gets angry at Obama that all of the kids move away and nobody ever moves into town, but nobody wants to leave money on the table and provide an affordable place to live either. It's a sort of tragedy of the commons.

There's not going to be a solution that makes everyone happy. IMO, the best solution is to just start building lots and lots of (good) mixed use apartments around special public transit districts. That should, if anything, normalize prices at the entry level for the housing market, and allow people to save money by not anchoring them to a car payment, car insurance, car maintenance, tags, etc etc. At least that way, you can build lots and lots of housing quickly to try and get a grip on the cost of shelter. I'm not sure that attempts to directly regulate vacation rentals will be successful, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be tried.

So, what can you do with this? Run for city council; if you're in a small or medium city, these races are still accessible for the average person and you'd be amazed at the amount of power that city councils have. You could also run for mayor, run for state legislature, run for county board of supervisors, or even just join an advocacy group like CA YIMBY (Yes In My BackYard, which advocates for more housing and transit oriented development to try and make housing accessible and affordable again). Besides, small towns tend to have a lot of former high school football stars in them that think they're immune to legal consequences, so I'd be real careful about trying to interrupt their money making operations through stuff like propaganda.

Use bots to create fake comments and stories about tourists being robbed. In the middle of the night you can go around and fire of a gun around the Airbnb (or where you live to keep the housing costs down).

Put up posters "denouncing" the local sentiment of lynching tourists and setting fires to airbnbs.

I feel like this isn’t an easy answer without knowing why tourists are showing up

Across the whole town? Open a paper mill, those things stink to high hell.

Get a large communist movement going in your town. The rich are terrified of actual communists. They'll flee to England.

Do you live anywhere with skunks by any chance?

Other municipals have enacted anti-AirBnB policies. Gotta pick that or sabotage though, lol. If you start pushing for anti-AirBnB ordinances and then sabotage tourism, they'll be knocking on your door quick lol. Everything I can think of for destroying tourism would land you in jail, /shrug

1/ Make a website that showcases your towns' amazing Leprosy colony and it's amazing successes. Perhaps these reformed lepors have taken up work in fake bakeries, butchers etc.

2/ Spread the word.

OP secretly just wants a bunch of low wage service workers to lose their jobs

What's your budget for this project? If you can out-spend the tourism board you can convince everyone your town is bad/the next town over is better.

You could also try making the town unpleasant by, say, opening a coal fired power plant or putting up hundreds of billboards for erectile dysfunction medications. But presumably you also want to live there?

Sell really cheap booze all over town. Like, 15c a gallon cheap. Advertise it on social media. Wait for a month or two. Profit.

Review bomb all the popular tourist attractions?

I live in a small town that was starting to be overrun by airbnbs. Local council and mayor have put bylaws in place now that make it costly and a less attractive option for homeowners. It especially punishes people who are renting out the whole place without living there. That way the economy still can continue and not bankrupt a bunch of people but people are dissuaded from airbnbing and are incentivized to sell rather than short term rent. Your community might already be looking into it, It’s a well known contributor to the housing crisis not just for buyers but limiting long term rentals available too. Look up short term rental bylaws or call your local city and ask.

Getting involved in local politics and push for a ban in short term rentals. Chances are a lot of the locals are making money off property or businesses the tourists put money into, so good luck with that.

Anything else isn't going to be legal. At best gray area stuff. You need to make the town look bad and scary for tourists. Dress like a homeless person. Make places smell bad. Put up bad, frightening graffiti. Stick signs around the tourist areas about how unwelcome they are, or asking for help with the drug/pedofile problem. Signs at parks or beaches warning about hyperdernic needles.

Why not organise some politically challenging demonstrations and raise the terror threat level?

That usually dampens tourism and housing market for a while, especially if there's an actual attack.

Things are illegal only if people find out you did it

A ton of tourists would mean real estate increase in value.

So its gonna be a welcome thing for people who own, and terrible for everyone else

Why not just get your local government to build low income housing? Pay for it with an AirBnB tax.

Start conspicuously smoking a legalized substance or pretend to smoke something around popular areas. For drastic measures, carry a fog machine in your backpack with you.

Put warning signs for Piranhas claiming they leap up rivers like salmon, near any body of water.

Turn the public garbage cans around so that it faces away (not effective if they are the cylindrical type).

If you have enough people, try to track influencers and such that promote it and make yourself heard on their blogs/Instagram/twitters.... Make prospective tourists think twice.

Once they are there, honestly you can try to do similar but I wouldn't get nasty. I live in Barcelona and some people are sabotaging tourists left and right (fake indications that take you to other places instead of the tourist spots, attacking tourist buses and bikes, painting nasty messages...). Granted things have cooled down after the pandemic.

Legal way ? So let's behave like social democrats, you know these tender fleshed leftists who run away before being tear-gazed by the police, write petition and support political candidates.

• Build an organization like Town inhabitant against mass tourist and find a few other people annoyed. At this moment you're not just a pissed-of Karen or a punk-kid, but a politcal lobby like any other and it gives you some weight when aksing stuff to official

• An easy way would be either a petition to the mayor, or an open letter in the local newspaper. It doesn't force the mayor to do anything but show him that some people are pissed off.

• If it's not sufficient, organize a protest, it usually require some paperwork/coordination with the local police but it's absolutely possible to have legally 50 pissed of inhabitants holding signs while walking from the beach to the townhall. Not only it would frighten tourists but put some pressure over the mayor

• Take appointment with the political parties running the town, both in the majority and opposition factions

• If you're organization is big enough, get some legal advises form a lawyer, an example is how these Greek locals decided to use their right to sit on "private beach" and got a court order to remove the illegal extension of these private beach and get them fined (I believe that there is a minimum space between the end of the private beach and the sea and some operator weren't respecting that law)

What do tourists come to see in your town?

Braćo Hrvati

Move to Sunnybank we have big community /m/sunnybank

So the hard but correct way to do this is to found a housing coop and buy up everything that gets to market, as well as build housing in large amounts. when the coop has two digit percentage ownership, rent and property prices should start to go down, especially if you also try for some political work. For example there exist rules in some places that limit short term rentals to 5months/year or one rental/person.

Fortunately our law is still organized in such a way that it’s illegal to destroy an industry sector unilaterally.

I’m really sorry that someone filled your head with such machiavellian modes of thinking, but if you’d like to be able to buy a house a more wholesome route could be going to your local town council and advocating to reduce red tape around new construction.

Life isn’t always about getting exactly what you want, when you want it. It’s therefore a little disturbing that your first thought isn’t

Maybe my plans don’t work

but rather

How can I destroy a thriving marketplace serving thousands of other people to burn open a path for the implementation of my own plans?”

Perhaps instead of disrupting thousands of other people whom you’ve deemed unworthy of access to those houses, you could disrupt yourself by saving for a couple more years to raise the price point you can afford.