Airbnb and the Global Housing Crisis

Airbnb was once celebrated as a symbol of the so-called “sharing economy,” a promise of cultural exchange and supplemental income that seemed harmless enough. Yet in cities across the world, the platform has become an accelerant of a housing crisis whose consequences fall almost exclusively on the people who actually live in those cities. The combination of predatory tourism models and the rise of digital nomadism - marketed as a liberating lifestyle - has reshaped urban housing in ways that reward transient visitors while pushing long-term residents out of their own neighborhoods.

The pattern repeats itself from Buenos Aires to Mexico City, from Lisbon to Barcelona, and in places like Bali where tourism has long dictated the pace of development. As foreigners arrive with stronger currencies or higher purchasing power, landlords quickly discover that a short-term rental yields far more profit than a stable, long-term tenant. Apartments once intended for families become miniature hotels. Housing stock evaporates almost overnight. Prices rise to levels completely disconnected from local wages. And what used to be living communities turn into stages for lifestyle tourism, optimized for foreign consumption rather than for the people who sustain them.

In Buenos Aires, entire sections of the rental market have effectively dolarized, making it impossible for tenants paid in pesos to compete with visitors paying per night. In Mexico City, the influx of remote workers escaping American rent prices has driven a wave of displacement in Roma, Condesa, Juárez and beyond. Lisbon, already exhausted by years of speculative real-estate investment, saw its neighborhoods hollowed out as long-term units became short-term commodities. Local residents are now forced farther and farther from the city center, while apartments sit empty half the year awaiting tourists.

Barcelona stands as a rare example of a city that eventually pushed back. After years of unchecked proliferation of illegal short-term rentals, the municipality imposed one of Europe’s strictest regulatory frameworks: freezing new tourist rental licenses, forcing platforms to remove unregistered listings, conducting extensive on-site inspections, and imposing heavy fines on owners and platforms alike. The city’s message was unambiguous: housing is not an asset class for global speculation, and the right of residents to remain outweighs the commercial interests of tourism giants.

In Bali, the crisis takes yet another shape. Agricultural land and family compounds are transformed into villas catering to foreigners who treat the island not as a place with its own social fabric, but as an inexpensive backdrop for remote-work fantasies. Locals who once relied on long-term stability now face increasing precarity, rising rents, land pressure, and a cultural erosion that is harder to quantify but impossible to ignore.

This global trend exposes a deeper imbalance: digital nomads and short-term tourists are not simply visiting; they are participating in a form of economic displacement enabled by their mobility and purchasing power. They may not intend to harm the places they love, but intention is irrelevant to impact. The truth is that no neighborhood can absorb a sudden influx of temporary residents with higher earnings without pushing out those who depend on that same housing to survive.

For these reasons, we do not encourage our audience to stay in apartments that have been siphoned away from local housing supply to fuel a speculative tourism market. There is a clear ethical distinction between accommodations designed for visitors - hotels, hostels, guesthouses, and legitimate colivings - and homes that were never meant to operate as commercial assets. Responsible travel begins with the acknowledgment that we are entering someone else’s city, someone else’s ecosystem, and someone else’s housing market. A trip should not cost a local their home.