[imagesource:enca]

You might already know that there are currently more Airbnb sites in the City of Cape Town than in the cities of Amsterdam, San Francisco and the city-state of Singapore combined. There’s even more than in Barcelona and Berlin, where the housing crisis has been a huge conversation.

The issue of locals being priced out by tourism has become such an issue in the Spanish city that thousands of protesters, including more than 150 organisations, marched through the streets recently to protest against ‘over-tourism’, which they claim is making Barcelona ‘unliveable’.

Even though Cape Town has just over 29,000 Airbnbs right now – last year, the figure was more like 21,000, so the growth has been immense – the ire of some locals hasn’t exactly prevented the government from regulating the market to ensure the city is liveable for all in the short and long term.

While Airbnb is a lekker little side hustle or an additional revenue stream for many, the growth in short-term residential rentals harms the locals who are being increasingly priced out of living in their own country.

In May, Moneyweb noted that the “rampant demand” for short-term residential rentals in Cape Town is “unbelievable”, with Alexa Horne, managing director of Cape Town-based DG Properties, saying that they are seeing more and more families move out of their homes to cater to tourists while buyers consider homes that can include a cottage for renting out.

“So in terms of short-term rental everything’s booked out way in advance, and it just seems that it is a demand that we can’t keep up with at the moment. So it’s really forming a huge part of the market in Cape Town,” she said.

“I speak purely from a Cape Town perspective, because I do think we are in a little bit of a bubble here in what’s going on from a tourism perspective, also from foreigners moving here.”

The whole hybrid-working situation, the “swallows” relocating from their European winters to our temperate climate when it suits them, on top of increased semigration, is starting to drive up the cost of living, and Capetonians are starting to feel the pressures – some more than others.

Former 5FM radio host Dan Corder addressed the housing crisis in Cape Town on his new TV show airing regularly via eNCA. He considered how the DA and Airbnb are ‘in bed together’ to continue the project of more short-term rentals even as local residents stress over where to live.

 

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A post shared by Dan Corder (@dancorderonair)

Watch the full show here.

Airbnb is perhaps the best-known short-term rental site, but many others have also risen to prominence such as Booking.com and the South African LekkeSlaap.

Last year, a memorandum of understanding was reached between the South African Department of Tourism and Airbnb at the start of September, which is when returning Minister of Tourism Patricia de Lille said in a statement that little was known about the short-term rental sector in the country.

“Insufficient information is available about the unregulated short-term rental subsector, and this hampers informed policy decision-making.”

This just sounds like a nice way to skirt the issue.

 

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A post shared by Dan Corder (@dancorderonair)

The issue might be less about tourists flooding the Mother City – they are welcome, the money flow is good – and more about the accommodation and housing model that currently exists. As Dan notes, in almost every country, hotels create more job opportunities for locals than Airbnb does, while the money from Airbnb often goes straight into the pockets of the land owners, and not so much the country.

Additionally, when it comes to the government’s role, the budget is completely skewed in favour of those few at the top while government-owned buildings are being sat on instead of being developed into social housing to address the crisis.

Watch more about that in the full show with Dan Corder at eNCA.

In his next show, Dan Corder goes in-depth about how mass tourism can go from a blessing to a curse, causing the housing crisis in Cape Town – catch that around the 10-minute mark.

[source:enca]