Cape Town’s housing crisis meets tourism-fired Airbnb boom

The laughter of children echoed against walls lined with dozens of mattresses in a large, dim room of an illegally occupied building in Cape Town’s bustling and touristy city center. A girl was having her hair braided on a stool near neatly placed plastic bags holding the belongings of people who had moved into the abandoned building from across the city.The property is in the heart of Cape Town, where rental prices are soaring as tourism is booming.“My income doesn’t allow me to pay Cape Town’s exorbitant rent prices,” said one of the residents, Fundisa Loza, 46.She moved in with her two daughters, aged 12 and 18, to be near her night-shift work at a call center in the central business district, about a 20-minute walk away.Accommodation in the area is listed as starting at about 10,000 rand (US$600) a month for a one-room apartment, impossible on Loza’s monthly salary of 8,400 rand. Airbnbs nearby — many near the popular District Six Museum dealing with the apartheid-era forced removals of non-white communities to remote and underdeveloped townships — average about 1,500 rand a night.“It’s extreme,” Loza told reporters.TOP DESTINATIONNestled between spectacular mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, Cape Town is a growing tourism destination, topping the Telegraph and Time Out magazine’s rankings for this year of best cities in the world.It has more short-term rental units than bigger cities such as Barcelona, Spain, and Berlin, which see up to five times more visitors per year, said Jens Horber from the housing activism group Ndifuna Ukwazi.In touristy locations like the city center and the Atlantic seafront, Airbnb listings have increased by 190 percent since 2022, Horber said.“Long-term rental units have been converted into tourist accommodation, removing units from the housing supply, raising rental costs and pushing out locals from neighborhoods where they can no longer afford to live,” he said.The growth of offers for tourists and “digital nomads,” including in areas where many locals have jobs, has stirred anger and resentment.Loza’s family lives in one of three occupied buildings on the same street, each home to up to 50 people who are all facing court eviction orders. She has been registered for years on a waiting list for state-subsidized housing that a city official says already holds about 400,000 names.‘NO ACCESS’“We cannot access homes, we don’t have property,” Loza told reporters. “Why must the city be reserved for certain people?”According to the Inside Airbnb data project, Cape Town counted more than 26,870 listings on the platform, among the highest in the world and surpassing places such as Washington, Sydney, Toronto, Chicago and Hong Kong.More than 60 percent of the city’s Airbnb hosts have multiple listings, it says.“These hotel-like entities are operating without licenses, restrictions or limits in residentially zoned areas,” said Wits University urban researcher Sarita Pillay Gonzalez, calling for better regulation.STRICTER ELSEWHEREAmsterdam, Barcelona and New York, for example, have imposed stricter Airbnb rules, including caps on annual rental days.University of Waterloo researcher Cloe St-Hilaire estimated that Cape Town as a whole has lost 1.5 percent of its housing to Airbnbs, most of which are concentrated in only a few areas of the starkly unequal city.The figure rose to 26 percent in Sea Point, a magnet for tourists over the December summer holidays, she said.For city official Luthando Tyhalibongo, Cape Town’s “housing stress is not foreign-made, investor-made or Airbnb-made... It is supply-made.”Cape Town’s population was more than 4.7 million in 2022, census data showed, up nearly 28 percent from 2011.“When a city grows, its housing stock must grow with it,” Tyhalibongo told reporters.The historically working-class neighborhood of Woodstock, about 5km from the touristy Victoria & Alfred Waterfront, is another area under pressure.Shalner Ching, 45, said younger generations used to live there in houses inherited from their parents, but have now rented or sold the properties.She has abandoned hopes of raising her family near her parents’ home, where she grew up.“I was forced to find a home outside of my community,” Ching said.