Berlin is one of many European cities that have faced new housing crises
– or worsening existing ones – attributed to Airbnb, where homes were
converted to unlicensed, super-profitable hotel rooms, driving up
housing prices, shrinking rental inventory, and making the city
unaffordable for the people who lived and worked there.
The rules were created in 2014, with a two-year grace period. They
banned whole-home rentals outright, but preserved limited rights to rent
out rooms within homes on a short-term basis. This is one of Airbnb’s
touted advantages – the ability to stay with locals in their homes –
but the majority of Airbnb rentals were for whole-homes.
Other European cities have also created rules intended to limit Airbnb
rentals to those that accord with the story that Airbnb is a way for
people to occasionally rent out a room, or fill their homes while
they’re on vacation themselves. In London, homeowners are limited to
letting out their flats for a maximum of 90 days’ per year, which
exceeds these standards – but the rules were posed as a way of allowing
for allowing Londoners to fill their homes while taking any reasonable
amount of annual holidays.
The German Senate Department for Urban Development and Housing has
published a report on the effect of the measure’s first year, and found
that it returned 8,000 units to the city’s long-term rental market. More
than half of those units had not been used for short-term rentals, but
had been left empty, presumably in anticipation of flipping them as
property rates rose, due, in part, to the supernormal rental returns
Airbnb offers to homeowners.
These returns have been a serious problem for cities around the world.
In Santa Monica, landlords can make as much from 3 months’ worth of
Airbnb rental as they can from renting to Angelenos in need of housing
for an entire year. This economic temptation spurred a wave of evictions
and speculation, and drove the city to contemplate similar regulations to curb the practice.
The Berlin and London rules are remarkable, because in other cities, Airbnb has spent millions to fight similar proposals, emerging victorious in San Francisco.
Other European cities contemplating Airbnb crackdowns include Amsterdam, Paris and Barcelona.
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