Housing as a Political Tool: Gender Inequality in Student Accommodation in Iran
This paper studies the gender inequalities in university-provided student accommodation in Babolsar, Iran, in relation to the role of the dominant political power and its approach in shaping the physical form of public dormitories and the living conditions of students. Secondary data analysis based on a questionnaire survey is utilised, and the results show that in numerous physical and non-physical ways women’s public dormitories are designed and controlled in favour of the dominant political power and against the wishes of their residents. This research examines how the ideological and cultural background permeates institutional practices in housing and affects the living conditions of a disadvantaged social group, which can open a discussion on the role of housing in social exclusion.
Why Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Had a Limited Impact on the Primary Housing Market in Poland?
In this paper we present the first insight about the impact of the COVID epidemic on the pri-mary housing market in Poland, with a focus on Warsaw which is the largest market. We ex-plain the structural features that allowed the market to return to pre-shock levels after the pandemic shock. Contrary, after the 2007-2008 global financial crisis the negative consequences lasted for several years. This time a sharp monetary policy and fiscal intervention was carried out. Moreover, the developer sector is much more mature, has expanded its production capaci-ties. We show empirically that the monopolistic competition of developers allowed them to restrict excessive demand that was observed before the COVID broke out. In this way they were able to increase prices despite the economic problems. Another important structural change was the increased housing demand, mainly for investment housing, which was fi-nanced predominantly with cash and contributed to the development of the rental market. We approximate the investment demand, which was generated by private households that pur-chased flats for rental, with the help of a simple demand and supply model.
Introduction to the Special Issue: Short-Term Rentals and the Housing Market
Editorial.
Airbnb, Platform Capitalism and the Globalised Home
Airbnb, the most ubiquitous of the many online short-term rental platforms offering residential homes to tourists, has infiltrated local neighbourhoods and housing markets throughout the world. It has also divided policy-makers and communities over whether tourism in residential homes is a benign example of the so-called ‘sharing’ economy or a malignant practice which destroys neighbourhoods. These differing positions reflect alternative and changing notions of ‘home’ within wider processes of financialisation and platform capitalism. This paper examines these themes with reference to stakeholder statements solicited in response to government inquiries on how to regulate short-term rental housing in Australia.
Airbnb and Amenity: Is Short-Term Letting Reshaping How We Live in the City?
The popularity of short-term letting (STL) platforms like Airbnb has created housing and planning challenges for cities worldwide, including the potential impact of STL on the quality of life of nearby residents and communities. Underpinning this concern is an inherent tension in urban living between the rights and interests of individual residents, and the collective rights and interests of neighbours. Through interviews with Australian Airbnb hosts, this paper examines how STL hosts navigate this tension, including how they frame their property rights, how they seek to minimise their impact on neighbours, and how they perceive the role of regulation in balancing individual and community rights. In doing so the paper contributes to both theory and policy debates about urban property rights and how ‘compact city’ planning orthodoxies are reshaping the lived experience of urban residents worldwide.
Short-Term Rentals and the Residential Housing System: Lessons from Berlin
The increasing professionalisation of Airbnb-style short-term rentals has emerged within a grey space between residential housing and hotel accommodation. Subsequently, an array of contestations have arisen, due in no small part to the intangibility of online short-term rental platforms as well as the absence of clear regulation at the municipal level. In urban settings already confronted with housing issues such as supply shortages and reduced affordability, recent studies show how the proliferation of short-term rentals can amplify housing market pressure while feeding into the broader urban processes of gentrification, touristification, and displacement. Using Berlin, Germany, as a site of analysis, this paper explores the expansion of short-term rentals in relation to various policy interventions designed to regulate the conversion of residential housing into tourist accommodation.
Challenging the Discourse around the Impacts of Airbnb through Suburbs Not Cities: Lessons from Australia and COVID-19
Supporters of short-term rental (STR) platforms state that STRs represent a small fraction of the housing market of major cities, and therefore have little impact on rents. However, there is emerging evidence that suggests that STRs have highly localised impacts. In this article, we use the natural experiment of the pause in tourism caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to highlight the impact of a decrease in STR listings on rental markets in the case study city of Hobart, Australia. We find that rental affordability has improved in Hobart’s STR-dense suburbs with the increased vacancies from the underutilised STR properties. These results provide evidence of the impact of STRs on local housing markets when analysed from a finer scale than the whole of city approach. The focus on local housing markets help local communities and city governments build an argument for the impact of STRs on tight housing markets.
The Impact of Airbnb on Long-Term Rental Housing: The Case of Ljubljana
Airbnb has become a fixture in the development of global cities, especially influencing their residential characteristics. The company derives from the concept of the sharing economy, the essence of which is the exchange of services or goods between individuals that set the rules of operation without generating profits, but together generating more revenue. It insists that it does not represent direct competition to other urban accommodation services and that it merely seeks to expand the tourism market. Nonetheless, this article proceeds from the assumption that Airbnb is influencing and transforming the housing market of the cities it operates in. It focuses on Ljubljana, which until 2019 had a record number of international arrivals and overnight stays. The findings confirm that short-term Airbnb rentals affect the long-term rental market in Ljubljana. They also show that rentals through Airbnb involve an extremely high share of the grey economy.
Conditions for the Introduction of Regulation for Short-Term Rentals
Most cities in major agglomerations in Europe started to address the rise of short-term accommodation rentals by introducing regulation designed to protect the local housing stock. The momentum behind the widespread introduction of such regulations can be attributed to qualitative and quantitative factors. This article examines selected fields related to short-term rentals in order to uncover the (structural) triggers or conditions that are necessary and sufficient for municipalities to initiate the regulation of their housing market. The study is based on the systematic examination of the effects of those triggers and their combinations using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). With this method, we explore the implementation or non-implementation of regulation on a sample of major German cities. The results suggest a universal set of conditions covering three central fields: housing market situation, accommodation market conditions and tourism accommodation demand.
Understanding Short-Term Rental Regulation: A Case Study of Lisbon (Portugal)
Notwithstanding the positive impacts of short-term rentals (STRs), it is often their negative effects that have been raising pressing questions for urban planners and public policy-makers, including changes in housing dynamics, conflicts between residents and visitors, tourism gentrification phenomena, unfair competition practices, and tax evasion, among other externalities. Because of this, short-term rental regulation has become an important item on the political agenda of municipalities that live daily with these issues. In order to contribute to a better understanding of STR regulatory approaches, this paper investigates how Lisbon (Portugal) has been responding to the effects attributed to STRs. It can be concluded that the main negative impact of STR in Lisbon is its effects on the housing prices increase and that the main STR regulation measure is focused on zoning: definition of zones for the application of differentiated STR rules and management.
Investigating Green Marketing Implementation with the Hedonic Price Model in Residential Projects: The Case of Istanbul
The strategic importance of green marketing (GM) in value creation for the end customer (VCEC) and the contribution of the spatial and structural characteristics of a residential project (RP) to the final price have been acknowledged in the literature. However, GM features that can lead to price increases have not been evaluated from the VCEC perspective. This study examines the impacts of GM strategies on RPs. This study applies Hedonic Price Modelling to newly built RPs in Istanbul and evaluates the results from the perspective of the Attractive Quality Attributes Theory. The results showed that the total price of the RPs was affected more by design-related sustainable features of RPs and revealed that there is a relationship between GM and sustainable design. The study highlights the importance of GM, which companies can use to operate effectively in a competitive market and increase the satisfaction of end customers through value creation. The study’s findings can be considered useful information for policies on creating a sustainable built environment.
The COVID-19 Pandemic, Airbnb and Housing Market Dynamics in Warsaw
In this study, we analyse the impact of COVID-19 on house rents and prices in Warsaw, the capital of Poland. Hedonic indexes indicate a slight increase in prices (ca. 1.2%) and a substantial drop in long-term rents (ca. -7.7%) between March 2020 and December 2020. The largest decline in rents occurred in centrally located neighbourhoods, which was largely due to the inflow of new housing supply from the short-term rental market (the Airbnb Warsaw market shrank by almost 30% in December 2020 y/y). Using hedonic methods, we show the effect of the shrinking Airbnb market on the drop in long-term rents. The study indicates the elasticity of rents with respect to Airbnb supply, with a 1% change in Airbnb listings leading to a 0.031% change in rents.