Media Finally Notices Airbnb Devouring Cape Town's Housing Market

By Fazila Farouk

I research and write about the inequalities produced by the digital economy. I’ve been monitoring AirBnB since 2016 and it’s really good to finally see the mainstream media picking up on this issue.

Recently eNCA’s The Dan Corder Show featured AirBnB’s cannibalisation of the rental housing market in Cape Town.

According to Corder, Cape Town now has more than 29 000 AirBnBs, which makes the city unaffordable for locals. Cape Town’s prioritisation of tourism and its support for AirBnB is pushing families of colour further away from well-located urban housing stock.

This issue is not just about financially stressed families of colour being pushed to places that are further away from work opportunities and decent social amenities. It is also about the symbolic issue of the transformation of the apartheid city, which is something that Cape Town has never addressed.

In this regard, Corder correctly references “the evils of spatial apartheid”, which continue to affect where and how people live. 

Back in 2016, I penned an op-ed bemoaning not just the impact of AirBnB on the rental housing market, but also the exorbitant prices in the buying market, which is particularly taxing for Black South African families seeking to get a foothold in historically white suburbs.

As a mortgage-poor Black Capetonian who paid way too much for her house in the suburbs, this is an issue that I speak about from first-hand experience. It’s definitely a key factor in this apartheid city's lack of transformation.

While addressing historic injustices has long been a marginal issue in Cape Town, the failure of the city's housing market has recently also started affecting the white middle class who increasingly find the city bowl unaffordable.

So, while Barcelonians are currently protesting mass tourism; while Germany affected stronger regulations on rental stock as far back as 2016 when the negative externalities of AirBnB became apparent; and while the city of London embraced policy reforms such as a "Living rent for Londoners", Cape Town is bucking the trend and continuing to promote a brand of tourism that marginalises its own people.

Thanks to its poorly regulated housing market, what Cape Town actually fosters is "social cleansing". It's a far cry from the platitudes of "social cohesion" that glide so glibly of the tongues of local politicians.

Watch an excerpt of The Dan Corder show on TikTok.

Read my op-ed at the Daily Maverick.

Image courtesy Hilton1949/Wikimedia Commons.