The Airbnb Curse

France is the most visited country in the world, with over 100 million tourists a year. To welcome the merry hordes, property owners have converted vast amounts of housing into holiday rentals. There are more than 800,000 such listings in France; Paris alone has 60,000.

Finding a place to rent to live in is a lot harder. Last year, France passed an ‘anti-Airbnb law’ that cuts tax breaks for holiday rentals and gives more powers to local authorities to regulate short-term lets and put quotas on tourist accommodation. (Other places that have taken measures to restrict short-term holiday rentals include Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, London, New York and San Francisco.)

Last month, La Provence reported that Marseille, where there were more than 15,600 Airbnb listings in 2023, had used the new law to reduce the maximum number of tourist rental days for a primary residence from 120 to 90 days. Airbnb ads on France TV still urge viewers to rent out their homes on the platform while on holiday, and to use the proceeds to cover their trip. From this year, property owners in Marseille will only be allowed to rent out a secondary residence for short-term lets if they also offer a place of similar size, in the same neighbourhood, on a long-term contract.

The housing market in France (rental and sales) is tight for many reasons, some universal (high interest rates, inflation), others more particular to the country (vacant properties that sit unoccupied as the spoils of a contested inheritance). To say nothing of racism. The Charente Libre reported in December that a home seller specified in his Facebook listing for a €48,000 house in the village of Montmoreau: ‘Arabs and people from Africa as well as people who live more than 150 kilometres away, go your own way, I won’t answer.’ There are plenty of landlords who share his sentiments, even if they don’t express them quite so bluntly. Other landlords don’t want long-term tenants at all, because they don’t trust them to pay the rent and evicting them is legally difficult. Better to cash in from tourists instead.

To research and write a book on the history of cognac and its current popularity among Black consumers, I moved to France in the autumn of 2023. Before I arrived, I read stories online about all sorts of people being unable to secure housing. Not just new immigrants, though they were plentiful. Their stories of despondency and despair littered Reddit threads such as r/expats and websites like ExpatForum. One person had found that nearly €10,000 euros a month from a UK pension and part-time work in the US wasn’t enough to get them through the door of a French estate agent.

French residents don’t have it any better. They too gnash their teeth on Reddit (r/immobilier), stymied by the deluge of required documents, without which their applications go nowhere: pay slips, proof of current rental payments, tax returns, CV, letter of motivation and, most important, a permanent job contract in France with a salary of at least three times the rent. Even when those conditions are met, a guarantor is generally required. Last April, Aujourd’hui carried the headline: ‘La fraude aux dossiers de location explose.’ Potential renters were taking to Photoshop to modify (or create) whatever they could in the hopes of meeting the criteria – when a 10m² studio can attract 765 applicants.

I recently saw a listing on Leboncoin in a small and remote town for a 25 m² studio at €450 a month. It required so many documents that the site’s word limit was exceeded and the listing ended mid-word. Guarantors were asked to provide a copy of the deed to their home.

As a non-salaried writer, I tried fruitlessly for a year and a half to acquire a long-term lease. While I relied on a series of shorter-term rentals, I applied for housing like it was a part-time job. French landlords do not care how good your (US-based) credit is, what savings you have, what sources of income or who you are (except when they do: see the Charente Libre article). Finally, two weeks ago, a landlord took a chance on me and offered a regular lease. I have decried Airbnb’s impact on housing to anyone who will listen. I have railed against the way it creates undue scarcity in the French housing market, and contributed to my difficulty in finding a secure roof over my head. But it was also the only thing that kept me from the streets.