EU Plan Would Give Cities New Powers to Curb Airbnb and Short-Term Rentals
European cities would gain clearer legal authority to restrict short-term rental listings on Airbnb and similar platforms under a draft law the European Commission is set to put forward on Wednesday as part of a broader push to make housing more affordable.
The proposed Affordable Housing Act confronts what Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has described as a "social crisis." She has pointed to nurses, teachers and firefighters who can no longer afford to live in the communities they serve, as well as students who drop out because they cannot pay rent and young people who delay starting families.
The draft plan, seen by AFP, would allow cities and other local authorities to limit short-term lets — and in some cases restrict purchases of residential property intended for that purpose — in areas formally classified as "under housing stress." To qualify for that label, a neighborhood or city would need to show a strained relationship between house prices and local incomes. Authorities would also be required to consider population dynamics and the projected balance of housing supply and demand, and any measure they adopt would have to be nondiscriminatory, necessary and proportionate.
The restrictions would not apply to homeowners who occasionally rent out their primary residence for short stays.
The plan responds to years of complaints in tourism-heavy cities, where residents blame short-term vacation rentals for shrinking the supply of long-term apartments and pushing up prices. Many municipal governments, from Barcelona and Lisbon to New York and Tokyo, have already imposed or explored controls on tourist flats. But those efforts have often faced legal challenges from rental platforms and tourism operators, leaving local authorities in a gray zone over how far they can go under EU single-market rules. The new framework is intended to provide legal cover by spelling out when intervention is justified.
The stress is not limited to tourist centers. Over the past decade, property prices in the 27-nation bloc have risen roughly 60 percent and rents about 20 percent, according to Brussels. Short-term rentals account for only around 1.2 percent of the EU's housing stock overall, but in popular districts of some destinations their share can hit 20 percent. The EU draft also acknowledges that vacation lets can provide much-needed income for households, while warning that in tightly constrained local markets they can make the shortage worse.
Rental platforms reject that link. In a letter to the Commission this month, tech industry group CCIA argued that for most cities the claim that short-term rentals are driving housing stress does not withstand the evidence. It also pointed to cities with restrictions where rents and hotel prices had gone up, and noted that Lisbon had recently rolled back some of the earlier curbs it imposed. An Airbnb spokesperson said Europe's housing emergency needs "structural solutions," and that the focus in implementing the new act should be on increasing the supply of homes.
The proposal now moves into the EU legislative process, where the European Parliament and member state governments will negotiate its final shape. If approved, it would mark one of the bloc's most direct attempts to set common boundaries for short-term rental rules while leaving the exact measures, and the definition of housing stress on the ground, to local officials.