Financial Times
George Moris never imagined that his job as a primary school teacher on the picturesque Greek island of Santorini would require sleeping in his car, spending the night on a colleague’s couch or in empty classrooms.
However, thanks to the support of homesharing platforms like Airbnb, most property owners in Santorini rent out their spaces to wellpaying foreign tourists. As a result, school teachers like Moris and other officials are struggling to find affordable housing.
When Moris arrived in Santorini in September 2022, when the tourist season was still in full swing, he did not find longterm rental opportunities. Eventually he found a hotel room for 20 euros a night. “A miracle for Santorini,” he said.
But there was a catch: Moris had to agree that if the hotel owner found another guest, “even in the middle of the night,” they would leave so the owner could charge a higher price.
Problems of this nature are not just limited to Santorini, which last year attracted almost 60% more tourists than it did before the pandemic, in 2019, but also in many of Europe’s most popular tourist destinations from sunkissed Greek islands to Prague, Lisbon and historic ones Italian cities Airbnb and other shortterm rental platforms hurt the housing market badly.
In Santorini, school teachers who arrive in September each year are usually forced to spend the first months of the school year in hotels until the tourist season is over. As a result, their housing costs often exceed their income the monthly salary of new teachers is usually no more than 1,000 euros.
“Most teachers don’t want to be sent here,” says Anthi Patramani, president of the island’s association of those responsible for secondary education. “When they come, it’s drama.”
In Italy, the longstanding rental crisis has its epicenter in Venice, where the city’s central islands have more beds for tourists, about 49,000, than there are permanent residents. About 40% of these tourist vacancies are rented through the Airbnb program for shortterm stays in apartments that were historically residential.
The trend is similar in many other Italian cities. Local officials and social activists say this is not only leading to an acute shortage of affordable housing, but is also destroying traditional urban life in the country.
“This is affecting our cultural heritage,” said Giacomo Menegus, legal counsel for the activist group Housing under High Pressure, a movement that started in Venice and is now spreading to other cities. “We don’t have a living city anymore, we have a kind of Disneyland or plastic attraction without people living there. Everything becomes more or less artificial or extremely touristy.”
The Greek island of Ios has 2,000 permanent residents and welcomes around 150,000 visitors each summer, mostly clubbers from the UK and Ireland. The mayor, Gkikas Gkikas, has the nearimpossible task of finding housing for teachers, doctors, firefighters and coast guard personnel sent to the island.
“Every year it gets harder,” he commented. That year, a firefighter was staying at the local museum and a coastguard was forced to stay in a room next to the island’s helipad.
Antonis Koutsoumpas, 30, a maths teacher who was sent to Ios in midyear, spent three months in a room with no kitchen, heating or hot water. However, he said the island’s permanent residents, who benefited from the additional income from shortterm rentals, were indifferent to the authorities’ appeals.
“The worst thing was that there was no help from local residents, not even from the students’ parents,” said Koutsoumpas.
Dimitris Alvanos, a doctor who has lived on Ios for 21 years, said that the housing crisis in the Greek Cyclades islands is posing a problem for health services due to a lack of staff to work in the medical centers.
To encourage doctors to move to the islands, the government offered an allowance of €1,800 in July and August. But although some doctors showed interest, Albano said, “no one came because they couldn’t find a place to stay.”
While universities were closed during the pandemic, many apartments were rented out on a shortterm basis. This spring, university students from several Italian cities, including Milan, Rome, Florence, Bologna, Padua and Turin, camped out in tents in public squares to protest the acute lack of affordable housing.
“Many people who used to rent their apartments to students have decided to rent them to tourists instead,” said Councilor Francesca Benciolini in Padua.
As the housing crisis deepens, calls for intervention are growing louder. The High Pressure Housing movement is calling on the government to support legislation that would allow cities to regulate their local housing markets and the use of housing units.
Regulatory measures passed in each city could include quotas for shortterm rental units, or a permitting system that would allow tenants to rent out their properties to tourists for a period of time and then oblige them to return to the longterm housing market.
So far, however, Italy’s tourism minister has proposed a law that only requires the registration of properties rented for short stays. Menegus argues that this is “completely insufficient to restore the housing market in cities where there are too many Airbnbs”.
Airbnb said its service serves “a small fraction of total visitors in Europe” just 4% of tourists traveling to Venice, for example. The company pointed out that renting rooms is “an economic lifeline” for homestays. “We attach great importance to housing issues, comply with local regulations in Greece and have proposed national regulations in Italy to help preserve historic cities like Venice,” he added.
Some Italian cities are trying to act within their limited powers. Florence Mayor Dario Nardella said the city will give landlords tax breaks if they rent their properties to longterm residents. However, it is possible that the initiative will be legally challenged.
To curb the impact of shortterm rentals, several cities including Paris, London and Barcelona have imposed restrictions. However, the implementation of the measures proved difficult. Some renters have managed to craft online ads to circumvent regulations that require registration or regulate the number of nights per year that properties can be rented for short periods.
In Greece, there are ongoing discussions about introducing stronger municipal controls aimed at landlords who own multiple properties that they rent out for short stays.
Meanwhile, on the country’s touristpopular islands, the government is considering incentivizing developers to renovate old city buildings and then set aside 40% of that property for residential use by doctors, nurses and teachers.
“There are plots of land that could be used,” said Akis Skertsos, the minister in charge of housing. “But the problem will not be solved immediately.”
Translated by Clara Allain