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.