Cities these days

It depends on the quality of regulation in your country.

When the regulation isn't properly done or enforced, for example when living above a restaurant you get things like excessive smells (they're supposed to have their own chimney all the way to the top of the building) and higher fire risks (they're supposed to have specific fire safety facilities above and beyond what a normal habitational unit would have).

Around were I am - in Portugal - living above a restaurant being a good thing or not very much depends on the municipality were you're living since some are quite corrupt or just plain incompetent and Justice around these parts is a slow, innefective and unreliable joke.

PS: Mind you, shops on the ground floor of appartment buildings around here are pretty standard, it's just that specifical example of yours of a restaurant might not be such a great thing to live above when the regulations that are supposed to protect everybody else aren't sufficient or aren't enforced. Most other kinds of shop don't really have that problem.

Shophouses are pretty ubiquitous in SE Asia but they aren’t typically MDUs like pictured; more like townhouses. I wonder if that’s the situation in Tokyo too?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shophouse

I lived above a pizza shop at one point. Was not an issue.

In my state (Idaho) it's because a good number of the legislators are landlords.

They don't give a fuck that half their apartments are Airbnbs, they prefer it that way.

This is something that can be done at the municipal level. Forget about Trump; this won't happen at the federal level. Write your local mayor and town alder.

Because when a significant proportion of the housing market gets turned into business spaces (which is what AirBnBs are), it reduces supply in the housing market, pushing house prices up.

This benefits politicians in several ways:

• Most national politicians are at the wealth level were they have enough savings, excess income or simply receive "housing subsidies" as part of their work (for example, parliamentarieans when they're from a city other than where the parliament is located) that they are also "realestate investors" alongside their day-job as politiciasn, in which case higher house prices directly make their properties worth more hence make them richer.
• Realestate inflation is generally not counted in the Official Inflation indexes in most of the West. It is however counted in the Real GDP numbers (via a mechanism called Inputted Rent). Give the way Official GDP (which is the Nominal one, i.e. after inflation has been removed) is calculated, housing inflation by feeding into Real GDP but not into the inflation index used to calculate Nominal GDP from it, directly pushes up the Official GDP numbers, so for government politicias housing inflation is a wonderful way to create fake GDP Growth (fake because house prices going up by mere price inflation isn't really actual wealth - i.e. the "Product" in GDP - being created) which they then parade all over the Press as being the result of their great work in government.
• It makes their very wealthy and very thankful friends even more wealthy and they'll be very thankful to those politicians. Lot's of thankfulness available from the Owner class for people who pass measures to make their Assets worth even more, from being welcome to the most luxurious events all the way to millionaire payouts in the Speech Giving Circuit, Non-Executive Board memberships and gold-plated "Consultancy" gigs.

Quite a few cities have worked hard on outlawing Airbnb. At least in Europe and (AFAIK) Canada.

The US? I have no idea

I do see one problem with this type of regulation -- if you say "no more than 3 homes per entity", the "homes 4 rent" megalandlords will just create thousands of "homes 4 rent asdf" shell companies to get around the limit. I foresee tons of cat-and-mouse accounting shenanigans trying to dodge this sort of requirement.

A simpler method would be to increase both the property taxes and the homestead exemption, tuned so that individual homeowner pays about the same.

Limiting Airbnbs would help, too. Require city or county licensing for all guest accommodations, maybe, and have a set number of licenses?

Also, I don't want to try to kill off all housing rentals. Think about college housing, about people moving halfway across the country for a job, people who've just gotten divorced... there are lots of circumstances where it makes more sense to rent for a time than to pony up $$$ to buy a house or a condo. In a functional market, this would be, say, 10% of housing, and you wouldn't have the absurdity of "I pay $3000 in rent because the bank doesn't think I'll pay a $2000 mortgage".

That's not as surprising as you may think. Take campaign financial reform. Campaign finance reform is one of the only issues that 100% of Congress agrees that it needs to be fixed. Every single one of them HATES the fact that they have to spend upwards of 75% of their time in Congress on the phone calling rich donors. There have been multiple common sense bills that have been introduced that call for capped and federally supplied campaign funds. Almost none of them will vote for it, because that removes the primary tool of power that big moneyed interests have to put pressure on politicians, so their big money donors tell them not to vote in their own self interests, and dangle a check in front of them to do so.

Lol because most of them own a few of these

They profit off it

10 years ago, Couchsurfing was like this, I don't know how it evolved since then

The landlords love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for the natural produce of the earth.

• Adam Smith

In Florida I toured a place that I thought was a house to rent but ended up being one of 7 apartments spread across the house, garage, and guest house. Literally the bathroom was in the kitchen and the hallway just had dry wall separating it in half. The stair well for one of the units was just nailed poorly to the outside of the house and wasn't covered at all.

Incant imagine what parking would have been like.

Agreed on the hatred towards landlords.

[Sharpens guillotine with revolutionary intent]

We need a 13, Rue del Percebe y Asterix crossover!

Me neither. Nice to know it's starting to be internationally recognised 😆

That example being in France, there are plenty of coffee shops serving good quality coffee much cheaper than Startbucks.

In countries like that it's generally only the tourists from countries with no such traditions that end up in Starbucks since the locals just frequent the coffee shops which are generally much cheaper and generally have better coffee.

I live in a country that nowadays gets swamped with tourists - Portugal - especially in my hometown of Lisbon and lots of such large international brand shops pretty much only get frequented by tourists, plus there's a certain styling of establishment that's done to appeal to tourists - roughly, those establishments which look like the kind of thing you would find in the Departure Hall of a large Airport anywhere in the World, are aimed at tourists.

All that to say that in the context of a French Cartoon a Startbucks probably represents very well that kind of cookie-cutter same-style-everywhere-in-the-World establishment that's actually worse and more expensive than the local version and exists to cater to tourists.

1st floor shops are great, especially in tight cities

"We used to have to get up at six o’clock in the morning, clean the tank, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!"

Sounds like a space about the size of Bubbles's shed on Trailer Park Boys.

As an American who doesn't read your weird Euro numbers, I'm going to assume that means you get a 15 square mile apartment for $30.

Don't know where those numbers come from, it is illegal in France to rent something that is less than 9m2.

It was extended to 20m² with the help of galvanized square steel and screws borrowed from aunt.

Elevator only goes so far. You still have stairs to do.

You need a key though, which only the landlord has