Cape Town, beware of Unfairbnb — tourist hordes are making some cities unliveable

Tourism is the new swear word.

Graffiti on the walls lining the steep steps up to Antoni Gaudi’s famous Parc Güell high above Barcelona last month made it bluntly clear that many local inhabitants would rather I had not come expensively, all the way from South Africa, to visit their neighbourhood.

I just missed the now-infamous episode of 3,000 protesting Catalans squirting tourists on the iconic Las Ramblas boulevard with water guns, but I certainly got their message.

Barcelona was completely rammed. A city of 1.6 million barely coping with 13 million visitors annually. The best we could do for accommodation was a tiny hotel room at an exorbitant rate – none of the reported 18,000 Airbnb properties in the city had anything reasonable to offer. Every train, long distance or Metro, was packed.  

The F1 Spanish Grand Prix was on, and three cruise ships were in the harbour, to add to the usual peak-season crush in what has become, in one of my least-favourite expressions, a bucket list destination.

Three days in advance, we could only find a single available ticket to see inside another Gaudi masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia. That offered an expensive, distinctly unspiritual tour through the jam-packed, still unfinished cathedral. The area around the majestic site resembled Wembley on Cup Final day.

And when we finally reached Parc Güell at the opening hour of 10am, officials informed us that the park was sold out for the day – in spite of the area being almost empty at the time – and I could only book an online ticket for the next day. I later discovered that there was a bus service right to the park gate which local authorities had requested Google Maps to remove, so it would remain a viable service for residents only and tourists would still have to do the hot slog up the hill.

Barcelona has now become a poster child for the problems of overtourism. The industry contributes 14% of the city’s revenues and employs an estimated 150,000 people, yet it is inexorably making the Catalan capital unliveable for residents. In response, authorities are restricting Airbnb, raising tourism taxes, stopping new hotel builds, limiting cruise ship numbers and moving them further out of the city, and capping tour group sizes.

But, at the same time, they’re hosting the America’s Cup yachting for the next month and boasting that will attract another two million visitors! The posh boating extravaganza is a demonstration of the city openly wanting wealthy visitors only. Backpackers, the Ryanair brigade, hen parties and those on puny rands are not welcome.

George Orwell, one of the city’s most famous chroniclers, would see a bitter irony in Barcelona, a global symbol for socialism during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, becoming Monaco on steroids. (Iconoclastically, Orwell loathed the Sagrada Familia, calling it “hideous” and saying “the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance”.)

What really matters to anyone living in Cape Town is what all this means for our city which experienced record numbers of visitors last December. Official estimates are that the tourism sector contributes between 2% and 3.5% annually to the local economy and has sustained between 3% and 5% of all jobs in the city, employing about 45,000 people directly.

These are very significant numbers and carry the promise of growth in the future. As a developing economy with a massive unemployment problem, we do not have the luxury of spurning tourism.

We are different to Barcelona (and Venice, Paris, Prague or Dubrovnik) in many ways. Our visitor numbers are fewer than our total population. We are not within range of short-haul, cheap flights from major centres which generate massive short-stay business.

Ditto in terms of distance for cruise ships which means the terminal is not overburdened and is well situated to avoid impact anywhere except the V&A Waterfront which can handle it. (The exception is the local jaunts to Mozambique and back which gridlock the elevated freeway as vehicles dropping off thousands of local departees mesh into the cars picking up the arrivals – traffic officials need to get their act together on that one.)

And while Cape Town is full in December, it’s not Florence-in-July-full where you walk on pavements packed five abreast.

In broad terms, therefore, I reckon we can carry on attracting tourists at every level with one very big exception. Airbnb has savagely distorted a long-term property rental market that was already taking strain before its inception. Astonishingly, Cape Town now has 23,500 properties listed on Airbnb, 40% more than Barcelona, generating an estimated R2.3-billion in income for property owners.

This means that people who want to visit Cape Town are being prioritised over those who want to live here. We have the highest rental rates in the country – R25,000 a month seems to be the basic entry level now in the middle-income parts of the city – and the lowest vacancy rates (2% versus 6% nationally).  

In terms of percentage of those middle-income wage packets spent on rentals, we are approaching London levels. And the situation is getting worse as developers create tower blocks of more small apartments designed purely for short-term stays.

This is a choke chain on creating a liveable and lived-in city. And the kickback has started. Many sectional title buildings have banned short-term lets because of the disruption to the space caused by transient visitors.

Read more: Turning tourism upside down — a future where tourists have to qualify to visit other countries

The city needs to be keeping a close watch on Barcelona and other popular destinations like New York, San Francisco, Paris and Amsterdam which are putting hard brakes on Airbnb, and then apply here what really works in creating more long-term rental stock.

They should take effective measures to encourage visitors to stay in hotels and guesthouses in areas zoned for accommodation where genuine employment opportunities are created and the state gets a better tax yield (many Airbnbs are off the books in terms of SARS).

As for Barcelona, my experience there has caused me to seriously reassess my approach to holidays. We are inclined to think of others as the problem, when we are the problem. I caught myself saying “we found a place where there were no tourists” which overlooks the fact that we were tourists ourselves, no more welcome than anyone else.

The truth is that there are too many people like me going to places like Barcelona to gawp at great cost.

A languid Karoo road trip suddenly feels much more worthwhile. DM