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

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!

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.)

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.

The tourists aren’t the problem, so don’t see them as the cause of your issues. The problem is the way they’re housed. You can’t ban Airbnbs if your town doesn’t have enough affordable hotels to let the tourists stay over. They’ll be back, with more and worse legal loopholes, or if not and the economy takes a hit, local government may implement policy to attract them.

Get involved with local politics, organise the people living in your town, petition the local government to do something about the problem. You’re not the only one affected by this and you have the advantage that tourists can’t vote you out of the council. Either get elected or convince the people that did get elected to act.

Find out what the local laws state about Airbnb-type arrangements. In many places they’re illegal without a permit. Reporting illegal Airbnbs could be a good way to get the ball rolling. If there’s no permit requirement, convince local politicians of the benefit of a permit system, and move on from there.

Expect a lot of backlash. Your desire for affordable housing directly opposes other people’s livelihoods. If this is a recent phenomenon, you’ll find more locals to take action against the encroaching tourism industry than there are people profiting from it. If this has been going on for years and has only been causing housing prices to rise recently, you may find that there are more people living off of tourists than there are people mad about them.

Sabotaging the local economy by yourself will only land you in trouble. If you were important or powerful enough to ruin an entire industry, you wouldn’t be asking for advice here.

the secret ingredient is crime

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

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.

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.

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.