For years, AirBnB and other holiday rental platforms have been choking the life out of Europe’s most vibrant cities. And the EU has welcomed them with open arms.
 
We all know AirBnB isn’t the innocent “home-sharing” site it pretends to be. The platform and others like it encourage greedy opportunists to snap up real estate in city centres to rent exclusively to tourists, driving out long-term residents, raising rents and killing local businesses.
 
In recent years Berlin, Barcelona and other European capitals threatened by the Silicon Valley giant have taken action by restricting short-term rentals. AirBnB has spent thousands of euros to persuade the EU Commission to override their laws -- and it looks like their lobbying is about to pay off.
 
We can’t let this happen. If AirBnB gets its way, the lively, colourful neighbourhoods visitors love will disappear, replaced by charmless tourist dead zones.
 
Tell the EU Commission to stop overriding local laws and let cities protect their own residents’ right to affordable housing!
 
Europe is AirBnB’s biggest market, home to over half the rentals listed on the site. And a huge percentage of those rentals aren’t just spare rooms. They’re entire flats that would otherwise be rented to locals.
 
How big of a percentage? One survey suggested 44 percent. But we don’t know for sure, because AirBnB isn’t obliged to disclose its data -- one of the many special favors it’s been granted by the EU Commission.
 
Thanks to tireless lobbying -- between 2015-16, AirBnB more than quadrupled its EU lobby spending -- the Commission is prepared to defend the platform against the cities that would harm its business.

Cities like Berlin, which passed a holiday rental ban in 2016 to stop AirBnB from contributing to gentrification. Since then, an estimated 8000 flats have returned to the long-term rental market. But AirBnB has been fighting tooth and nail to overturn that ban, as well as similar ones in Barcelona, Paris and Brussels.

After failing on a local level, the company’s lobbying arm filed a complaint with the EU Commission, which is now poised to pass a much softer set of regulations Europe-wide. If that happens, all the work those cities have done to secure affordable flats for their citizens will be lost.
 
We’ve only got a small window before they make their decision. We’ve made our voices heard over lobbyists before, whether in the EU’s landmark vote to ban bee-killing pesticides last month or in pushing the Commission to take a stance against single-use plastics. Now, we need to speak up louder than ever to tell the EU we value European cities’ character over Silicon Valley profits.

EU Commission: Don’t let AirBnB gentrify our cities to death! Let local governments make their own restrictions on holiday rentals.

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