The Airbnb Invasion of Barcelona

5/5/2019 The Airbnb Invasion of Barcelona | The New Yorker
A Reporter at Large
The Airbnb Invasion of Barcelona

In the tourist-clogged city, some locals see the service as a pestilence.
By Rebecca Mead April 22, 2019
Even in residential areas, wheelie suitcases constantly rattle over the cobblestones. Illustration by Javier Jaén
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n 1904, the city of Barcelona received a petition for development from Eusebi Güell,
I an industrialist and a patron of the arts. Güell had bought a tract of land on the
ank of Muntanya Pelada, or Bald Mountain, which rises above the plain that
extends to the city’s port. Güell had ambitious plans for his hillside property: it was
to be designed by Antoni Gaudí, the celebrated architect, with sixty houses set on the
bosky grounds. Güell’s business model, which required prospective residents to invest
in the project before their houses were constructed, was awed, and only two were
ever built. But the grounds were completed. Serpentine paths twisted up the hillside,
and at the center of a spectacular bifurcated staircase there was a fountain in the form
of a lizard, its skin composed of mosaic shards in blues and yellows.
The development was sold to the city in 1922, four years after Güell’s death, and
became a beloved public park, with the lizard as its icon. In time, Park Güell proved
too beloved for its own good, and by 2013 nine million visitors were traipsing
through it annually. “The Park has almost stopped being used as a park,” a municipal
report noted at the time. It had become, instead, a “tourist place.” That year, in an
effort to mitigate the damage and crowding caused by so much foot traffic, the city
introduced a fee to access the park’s “monumental core,” which includes Gaudí’s
staircase, and also limited the number of tickets sold to eight hundred an hour.
From the local government’s perspective, the change was a success: the year after the
restrictions were introduced, the number of visitors fell to 2.3 million. Still, the ow
remains constant. When I arrived at Park Güell at 11 . . on a Tuesday morning in
February—hardly peak season—I couldn’t get in for another two and a half hours.
When I nally entered the monumental core, at a cost of ten euros, it was as bustling
as Coney Island’s boardwalk on a sunny Sunday afternoon, and Instagramming
admirers formed a mob around Gaudí’s lizard.
Park Güell’s shift from a shared public space into a cultural zone occupied almost
exclusively by tourists is understood by some worried residents of Barcelona as a
story about the prospective fate of the city itself. Albert Arias, a geographer with the
local government, told me that he had publicly criticized the selling of tickets as “a
very bad solution,” adding, “It is acknowledging a problem by fencing off public
space.”
Some twenty million tourists descend annually on Barcelona, which has a population
of just 1.6 million people. (New York City receives three times as many visitors but
has more than ve times as many residents absorbing the in ux.) A lot of factors
have contributed to the throngs in Barcelona. Policy decisions in Madrid, and in

Catalonia, encouraged a boom, and framed it as an economic-survival strategy,
the
especially after the global
the global nancial
global nancial crisis
nancial crisis of
crisis of 2008
2008. City officials successfully sold
of 2008
Barcelona to the international market as an especially fun European destination, with
good weather, pretty beaches, lively night life, and just enough in the way of
museums and architecture to provide diversion without requiring an onerous cultural
itinerary.
External forces have also contributed to what critics have called the “touristi cation”
of the city. The growth of Airbnb and the rise of such budget airlines as Ryanair have
Airbnb
coincided with Barcelona’s increasing popularity. When Airbnb
Airbnb was founded, in the
San Francisco Bay Area, a decade ago, it marketed itself as a more evolved version of
couch sur ng, in which youthful travellers used social media to nd a free place to
crash. Couch sur ng was predicated on personal exchange: hosts got to know their
guests, with the understanding that one day they might spend a free night at their
guests’ home. Airbnb introduced the notion of hosts charging an affordable rate for
that place to crash, so that a tourist on a budget could book a bed in the spare room
of a local’s home. The company soon raised millions of dollars in venture nancing,
and its listings and aspirations grew glossier. In 2010, Joe Gebbia, one of the
founders, told the Times, “We started by renting out spare rooms in our apartment,
but it’s grown to entire apartments, homes, castles, boats, even private islands.” Brian
Chesky, another founder, said at the time that he saw no reason that Airbnb, which
extracts commission fees from all transactions, should not grow into a billion-dollar
company, by enabling people in appealing locations to “monetize their house.” Forbes
has valued the company, which is planning to go public, at thirty-eight billion
dollars.
Currently, one and a half million visitors stay in Airbnbs in Barcelona annually, and
although ve times as many people book rooms in traditional hotels, the company is
in uencing what the city feels like, especially for permanent residents. There are
almost twenty thousand active Airbnb listings in Barcelona. Even in residential
neighborhoods, the sounds of dozens of wheelie suitcases rattling over the
cobblestones after an 11 . . checkout—and of late-night revellers sampling the bars
that have sprung up to cater to them—have become as reliable as the bells of the
Sagrada Familia, Gaudí’s un nished drip-castle cathedral.
Nearly half the Airbnb properties in Barcelona are entire houses or apartments. The
conceit of friendly locals renting out spare rooms has been supplanted by a more
mercenary model, in which centuries-old apartment buildings are hollowed out with
ersatz hotel rooms. Many properties have been bought speci cally as short-term-
rental investments, managed by agencies that have dozens of such properties.
Especially in coveted areas, Airbnb can drive up rents, as longtime residents sell their
apartments to people eager to use them as pro t engines. In some places, the
transformation has been extreme: in the Gothic Quarter, the resident population has
declined by forty- ve per cent in the past dozen years.
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Lately, owners and agencies have been exploiting a loophole in rental regulations that
allows a homeowner to rent out a spare room only occasionally. The loophole is being
used to justify a single apartment being divided up into three or four rooms, each
with its own lock on the door. These rooms are advertised on Airbnb as separate
rentals. A traveller who signs up for one will nd himself sharing a bathroom, a
kitchen, and a living space with perhaps half a dozen other renters from around the
globe, in a de-facto hostel without a host. Reviews on one such apartment, minutes
from Park Güell, indicate that some visitors are delighted by its international vibe:
“Met people from Japan, China, Hungary and Argentina, all within four days!”
Others are less comfortable with the arrangement: “We were concerned when the
host told us to pretend to her neighbors that we were her friends visiting and not
that we were using Airbnb.”
Properties used almost exclusively for Airbnb rentals are offered on the company’s
Web site with photographs that might have come from a shelter magazine: carefully
staged table settings, closeups of fruit bowls. The same neutral, vaguely Scandinavian
design can be seen in listings from Bangor to Bangkok. (The critic Kyle Chayka has
aptly characterized this aesthetic as “AirSpace.”) The Barcelona Airbnb I stayed in, in
the Eixample, an elegant n-de-siècle district, was typical: stylishly but minimally
equipped, with furnishings and a Nespresso machine in the kitchen. There were
no signs of regular habitation, which wasn’t a surprise. According to Inside Airbnb, a
watchdog site founded by Murray Cox, a Brooklyn-based housing activist, the
Eixample apartment, which goes for about two hundred dollars a night, is available
to rent three hundred and forty-three days a year. Its owner has ve other properties
in the city listed on Airbnb.
ne neighborhood of Barcelona that has been particularly affected by the

O phenomenon is the Raval, a section of the old town west of La Rambla, the
famed pedestrian thoroughfare. The Raval, which is less than half a mile square, was
historically poor and densely populated, its narrow streets lined with tall tenement-
style buildings. By the end of the twentieth century, it had become Barcelona’s
equivalent of San Francisco’s Tenderloin, associated with drugs, prostitution, and
crime. Between the seventies and the nineties, the Raval’s population fell by half, as
residents moved to more salubrious neighborhoods. The city then began a program
of urban regeneration, using a familiar strategy—designating an area as a cultural
zone and constructing museums and academic institutions intended to change its
tenor by attracting new visitors and residents. In 1995, a contemporary-art museum
opened in the Raval: a stark white building, designed by Richard Meier, which
bordered a public plaza. “This is the landmark of the nineties Raval,” Alan Quaglieri
Domínguez, a researcher at Rovira i Virgili University, told me. I met him outside
the museum one afternoon, for a tour of the Raval.
Today, the area surrounding the museum feels like a grittier version of the sloping
plaza leading to the Pompidou Center, in Paris, with skateboarders skimming ramps
and walkways. Quaglieri said of the Raval museum, “It’s known more for its façade
than its collection.” A terrace café caters to students, tourists, and affluent residents
who have recently been drawn to the area. When I visited, a nearby cultural center,
which also opened in the nineties, had an exhibit about Stanley Kubrick on display.
The true landmark of the contemporary Raval, however, is a billboard that looms
over the plaza. Placed there by an activist group, it features an illustration of a “not
welcome” mat laid over a puddle of blood, and announces, in Catalan, a list of
aggressors to the neighborhood: real-estate speculators, tourist mobs, and Airbnb.
Quaglieri, who is in his late thirties, wore a tweed jacket and a pastel-colored wool
scarf as he led me along one of the Raval’s main strips, Carrer de Joaquín Costa. The
neighborhood has been a site of political activity since the Spanish Civil War, he
explained, and in the rst half of the twentieth century it was one of the most
densely populated places in Europe. It emptied out in the following decades, but
began absorbing a wave of African and Asian immigrants in the nineties. As we
walked, we passed halal butchers and stores selling international calling cards. These
establishments sat side by side with cocktail bars. The area looked somewhat like the
Marais of thirty- ve years ago or Brooklyn’s Williamsburg section circa 1990: a
working-class neighborhood being recast as a site of bohemian charm.
Quaglieri led me down a narrow thoroughfare. “This street was always known among
locals as a peculiar one,” he said. Drug dealers had operated on the block, and, for
locals, this touch of seediness had made it a humble but relatively affordable place to
live. On an Airbnb map, however, the area could be presented as chic: it was close to
the best bars and restaurants in the Raval, and it was a ten-minute walk to the
Boquería food market, which has been so swamped by visitors that venders have
resorted to planting “ ” signs among their unintentionally
photogenic displays of fruit and vegetables. “If you put a tourist apartment there, you
can rent it quite easily,” Quaglieri went on. “And once there is one, or two, or three, or
four, it changes the street.”
Quaglieri’s own apartment building was a few blocks away. Two of its nine
apartments, he said, had been listed at one time or another as temporary rentals,
including one that had been rented out by two sisters from Romania, both in their
twenties. “It was their residential strategy—it was how they could afford the
apartment,” he said. Many people advertising properties on Airbnb belong to a
generation whose members are accustomed to living with peers. Quaglieri noted that
he had often been kept awake by late-night parties conducted in extremely loud
Russian or German. Not long ago, when Airbnb guests checked into his building, he
knocked on the door and politely reminded them that their hotel was his home. The
presence of courtyards at the rear of buildings, typical for the Raval, literally ampli es
the noise problem. Once, Quaglieri said, he’d had to get out of bed and go around
the block to “in ltrate” a party in an opposite courtyard, in order to ask the visitors to
turn the music down.
We continued on to Carrer de la Cera, which is considered the birthplace of the

Catalan rumba, and which has long been the center of the city’s Romany population.
A handsome building with deep arches and graceful balconies had recently been
renovated. A Raval balcony often has a clothesline hung with laundry; Quaglieri
noticed a balcony that instead had a small square folding table and two chairs. “This
is a classic sign of a tourist apartment,” he said. “I have never seen so many of those
as I have done in the past two years.” Such places were being occupied by a transient
population, whether their stay lasted three days or three years. As Quaglieri saw it,
foreign workers in tech or freelancers in creative industries who temporarily installed
themselves in Barcelona, as a life-style choice, before decamping for another alluring
city, were not much different from tourists.
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Airbnb promises to let visitors “live like a local,” but Quaglieri argues that its users
generally have in mind a speci c kind of local: someone who lives just as the visitors
do back home. This consistent demographic of tourists, interchangeable with one
another in their cosmopolitan tastes and habits of consumption, expects to nd
wherever it goes the café culture of Melbourne, the industrial lighting of Brooklyn,
and the Internet speeds of Stockholm. “These people are not looking to live like a
working-class family of migrants from Bangladesh,” he said. “They are not looking
for that kind of local.”
We crossed the Ronda de Sant Pau, a boulevard that separates the Raval from its
more middle-class neighbor Sant Antoni. Quaglieri wanted to show me a café,
Federal, which Australian expats had opened a few years ago. We might as well have
been in Hackney or the Mission District or anywhere else that hipsters gather: signs,
in English, requested that visitors with laptops con ne themselves to a large common
table, every seat of which was occupied by a young person using the Internet. We
ordered drinks: a warm ginger infusion for me, a turmeric latte for Quaglieri. “More
and more tourists are looking for things that are generally cosmopolitan,” he said,
grimacing as he sipped his in ammation-reducing beverage. Not far away from
Federal, Quaglieri told me, the city had proposed creating a “pedestrianized
superblock”—an area where car traffic is restricted. Representatives of neighborhood
groups had expressed concerns about the proposal, even though it did seem likely to
improve their own quality of life. Quaglieri explained the apparent contradiction.
“They perceive it as a threat,” he said. “Anything that makes the area more ‘livable’
makes it also more interesting to outsiders. As a result, the local people say, ‘It’s better
to do nothing. Otherwise we’re just preparing our neighborhood for this other
population.’ ”
ourism counts for nearly twelve per cent of Barcelona’s economy. But up until
T the end of the twentieth century Barcelona was seen primarily as an industrial
port. Its international pro le rose dramatically when it hosted the 1992 Summer
Olympics. Among other refurbishments, city planners redeveloped the derelict
waterfront and renovated a beach on a spit of land known as the Barceloneta. A new
promenade featured a glittering hundred-and-seventy-foot-long stainless-steel
sculpture of a sh, by Frank Gehry.
When Airbnb rst began offering listings in Barcelona, in 2009, it was in the
immediate aftermath of the global nancial collapse, and the service was greeted
with an almost desperate enthusiasm. Antonio Paolo Russo, a professor of geography
at Rovira i Virgili University, told me that signing up with Airbnb brought ready
cash to Spanish families struggling with unemployment. By 2010, the city had
decided to liberalize the rules governing short-term vacation rentals, and thousands
of licenses were soon granted to apartment owners. Over the next four years, the
number of licenses in Barcelona quadrupled.
Daniel Pardo, a housing activist in Barcelona, told me that, a decade ago, “talking
about tourism as the source of problems was just perceived as crazy.” He added, “It
was the official truth that tourism was a good thing, and nobody challenged it.” I met
him in a bar in the Gothic Quarter one evening, along with Martí Cusó, another
activist in the neighborhood. Pardo, who has thinning hair and a beard, bears a
passing resemblance to Lenin; he looked weary, having spent the day fruitlessly
challenging a housing eviction. Cusó, who hunched in his chair, wearing a combat
jacket, told me that he was a lifelong resident of Barcelona. “I was born inside the
rst Roman wall, and now I live inside the second one,” he said. But his home town,
he said, had become like a theme park— lled with restaurants selling paella, tapas,
and sangria, none of which have local origins, but which conform to a generic image
of Spain. “Tourism is the face of capitalism in Barcelona,” Cusó said, with
resentment. In the building where he lived, two of the nine apartments were short-
term rentals, including one whose owner rented it to half a dozen foreign students
for six months at a time—at four times the rent he could collect on the ordinary
housing market.
The rst signs that residents were fed up with tourism came, Pardo and Cusó told
me, in the summer of 2014—“the hot summer of the Barceloneta.” In the tiny grid of
streets abutting the promenade, there were few hotels, but Airbnb rentals were
plentiful. “There was a kind of revolution in the Barceloneta—they were invaded by
Airbnb apartments,” Pardo said. (Currently, there are about four hundred listings
there.) That August, photographs spread on social media of three young Italian men
frolicking in the neighborhood wearing nothing but their watches and goofy grins.
Hundreds of people in the Barceloneta gathered in the streets to protest what the
local newspapers called el turismo de borrachera—binge-drinking tourism. Pardo told
me, “Most people taking part had never demonstrated before—they just knew they
couldn’t stand it anymore. You had tourists who were half naked, people drunk. And
the noise—it’s a dense neighborhood, so the noise is heard everywhere.”
The protests in the Barceloneta precipitated greater cohesion among neighborhood

groups throughout the city, many of which were concerned about similar problems,
such as access to housing and privatization of public space. They began voicing
opposition to the pestilence of young visitors who came to Barcelona not to sample
the local culture but to enact internationally recognized tropes of partying: going on
“limousine pub crawls” or playing beer pong at Flaherty’s Irish Bar, just off La
Rambla, as if it were Mardi Gras three hundred and sixty- ve days a year. “It’s
Magaluf all over again,” a leader of a neighborhood association said at the time. He
was referring to a town in Majorca that had become so overrun with intoxicated
Britons that the local government was obliged to remind visitors not to defecate in
the streets.
By 2017, tourism had risen to the top of a list of Barcelona’s most pressing concerns.
According to an annual survey taken by the city, sixty per cent of residents felt that
Barcelona had reached or exceeded its capacity to host tourists. Three years earlier,
only thirty- ve per cent had felt this way. That summer, anti-tourism protesters lined
the waterfront, standing knee-deep in the Mediterranean bearing banners reading
“ ,” in English, in the face of bikini-clad visitors who
were somnolently tanning themselves. Thousands of protesters marched along La
Rambla and loudly informed tourists that they were not welcome. Pardo and other
activists staged protests against illegal Airbnb apartments by renting them on the
site, checking in while using a hidden camera, and then refusing to leave, with the
media there as witnesses. They staged an action to expose a landlord who was
illegally renting out thirteen apartments in the Ribera neighborhood. After obtaining
access to one of the apartments, the activists were about to lm themselves reading a
manifesto when the manager suddenly came back—and they had to ee. “We forgot
to lock the door!” Pardo said, with chagrin. It was the kind of rookie mistake a tourist
would make.
t’s easy to see why having your local plaza invaded by naked foreigners could be
I objectionable when you’re trying to do your grocery shopping. It is less obvious
what harm is caused by a new café offering reclaimed-wood trestle tables, free Wi-Fi,
and a at white. In some respects, the growth of Airbnb in Barcelona is not so much
a local issue as an example of a global trend in urban gentri cation. The Airbnb
effect felt in the Raval closely mirrors the transformation in the Amsterdam
neighborhood of the Jordaan, a formerly working-class area now lled with bars and
boutiques, and in the Venice neighborhood of Giudecca, which used to be off the
tourist path but is now studded with rental apartments. Paola Minoia, a geography
professor in Helsinki, told me that in Venice it often makes more economic sense to
own a rental apartment than to work, since revenues from rentals are taxed at a far
lower rate than income. The anti-tourism protests of Barcelona recently spread to
Venice, where in a couple of locations the city had installed metal gateways that can
be locked when too many visitors show up. Venetians protested the move, calling it a
capitulation to the pressure of tourism rather than a solution to it.
In Barcelona, the protests were accompanied by actions from the local government.
In 2015, the city elected a left-wing mayor, Ada Colau, in part because she ran on a
platform that included taking measures to limit tourism. That year, the city council
placed a moratorium on new hotels, and in 2016 Airbnb and another home-sharing
platform, HomeAway.com, were each ordered to pay a ne of six hundred thousand
euros for having listed unlicensed rentals. (Airbnb appealed the decision, and the case
is ongoing.)
Colau, who is up for reëlection in May, has been developing a comprehensive

strategy for managing tourism. She commissioned Albert Arias, the scholar who had
opposed the introduction of tickets at Park Güell, to explore ways in which
government might intervene constructively in the tourism sector, rather than simply
letting the marketplace take its course. One signi cant concern was the effect of
Airbnb tourism on Barcelona’s housing market: all those rental apartments had to
come from somewhere, and the housing stock for locals was being depleted. In areas
with a smaller supply, rents inevitably rose. And Airbnb- lled neighborhoods
changed in other ways that made them less hospitable to residents: designer-clothing
stores and restaurants ourished while establishments that catered to locals, such as
dry cleaners and tailors, shut down. “If you live here, you take a shower, you go for
some bread, you go to your workplace, you come back, you buy some fresh fruit,”
Arias said. “Maybe once a week, you go to the cinema or have a drink with some
friends. But tourists are doing this kind of thing all the time.”
Arias’s report, which was issued in 2017, recommends strict enforcement of the
prohibition on illegal rentals, and a concerted effort to direct tourism to less popular
areas. Arias said that in Barcelona—where some sidewalks are crowded with armies
of foreigners on Segways—locals could no longer afford “to think of tourism as a
discrete object with clear boundaries.”
Airbnb, aware of the growing hostility toward it, has begun working more closely
with local governments. Among other things, it has introduced an online tool that
makes it easier for the city to identify hosts who are breaking rental laws. From the
company’s perspective, policymakers accustomed to dealing with traditional
hospitality operators need to adapt their regulations to the kind of travelling that
Airbnb has fostered. Patrick Robinson, the company’s director of public policy for
Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, told me that Airbnb is not the cause of over-
tourism in Barcelona; indeed, by disseminating tourists more widely, the service has
helped take the pressure off the city’s central core. But, he acknowledged, “guests who
are living cheek by jowl with people who have made their homes there for many
years need to engage and behave in an appropriate way.” Robinson said that the
platform’s review system, which applies to both guests and hosts, creates an incentive
for good behavior—guests who receive consistently bad ratings may nd that a
subsequent request to rent a property has been rejected. Airbnb has experimented
with ads that urge its users to be more considerate. A recent campaign in Amsterdam
warned guests, “Please practice sel e-control. These streets get busy!” It also
reminded them that “ ‘gracht’ means canal, not garbage bins.”
n places where tourism has so far had less of an impact, and where the local
I economy is struggling, services such as Airbnb still retain an allure. In Palermo,
which, for all its cultural riches, is far less visited than other cities in Italy, the
municipal government has partnered with the platform to funnel tourism taxes into
neighborhood development projects. Towns in rural Italy are also promoting
themselves to visitors: last year, Airbnb began a program intended to encourage
tourism in rarely visited villages. Among them are Apricale, a mountaintop
settlement in Liguria, and Pisticci, a hamlet in the far south of the country. In such
remote places, it is hoped, home-sharing will be accompanied by wealth-sharing.
Data-analytics software enables Airbnb to identify parts of the world that are
starting to attract interest from visitors, and these destinations are then
recommended to other adventurous travellers, through a promotional campaign titled
Not Yet Trending. Recent picks include Xiamen, a coastal city in China opposite
Taiwan; the Outer Hebrides, in Scotland; and Uzbekistan.
One place that would welcome some of the visitors currently clogging up Barcelona
is a tiny municipality in central Italy, not far from Bologna, called Valsamoggia,
which I visited in early spring. There, the feeling is simple: the more Airbnb, the
better. “Valsamoggia is an authentic place—not like Venice, which is too touristic, and
not really Italian,” Federica Govoni, the local council member responsible for
tourism, told me as we drove through the area together. The countryside was
beautiful: hilly and green, with striking clay cliffs and, Govoni told me, a signi cant
population of wolves. Valsamoggia lacked hotels, she noted, but abandoned
farmhouses could easily be converted into lodges for visitors on biking or walking
trips, and local residents could rent out spare rooms during truffle-hunting season.
I’d gone to Valsamoggia because it is participating in a pilot program with a startup

travel platform called Fairbnb. A coöperative based in Bologna, Fairbnb describes
itself as an ethical alternative to its near-namesake. Sito Veracruz, one of the co-
founders, a Spaniard who lives in Amsterdam, told me, “Vacation rental is a thing
that is not going to disappear—people really enjoy it, and it is here to stay. The
question is, How can it be managed in a way that decreases the negative impact and
increases the positive?” Hosts on Fairbnb, which is launching in ve European cities
in June, including Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Bologna, are permitted to advertise
only one apartment—their own—in order to prevent the transformation of a family

home into a speculative asset managed by a rental agency. The company draws on the
logic and appeal of crowdfunding: half of the site’s fteen-per-cent commission fee is
channelled directly into development projects, which are chosen by the owners of the
rental properties, the travellers, and the local community. Govoni hoped that
Valsamoggia would be receiving some of that funding. “Airbnb is a very good
platform for a host, but all the value goes to San Francisco,” she said. “We need to
put the value into the town.”
While I was in Valsamoggia, I visited one tumbledown property—a barn, a

farmhouse, and a collection of ramshackle stone buildings—whose owner, Paola
Larger, has for the past two decades worked as a hiking guide and a hotel manager in
the Dolomites. Having discovered Valsamoggia on a trip to visit friends, she had
decided to relocate there. Her intention was to live alongside her guests, with the old
barn serving as a space for meetings or retreats. “This will be like the village square,”
she said, as we picked our way through a rubble- lled forecourt. The site was
spectacular, with views over the mountains down to the valley below, though Larger
told me that the views would soon be obscured by foliage. “It is like you are in a
green bubble,” she said. She had some other ideas for maintaining serenity, such as
installing a sauna on the mountainside. “Of course, you have to get the right guests,”
she told me. “It’s not for everyone.”
Veracruz said that the home-sharing movement had fallen victim to the tragedy of
the commons. An individual apartment dweller might ourish for a while by renting
out his spare room on Airbnb, but if his landlord decided that it would be more
pro table to turn the entire building into tourist accommodations, he would nd
himself kicked out when his lease was up. This trend is palpable in Bologna, which is
home to one of Italy’s oldest universities, and where students make up more than a
fth of the old city’s residents. Until recently, it was easy to nd an inexpensive
apartment there; now apartments formerly occupied by students are being turned
into tourist rentals. There are currently more than thirty- ve hundred listings in the
city.
In Bologna, I met an Airbnb host named Mauro Bigi, a personable environmental

consultant in his thirties. Five years ago, he and his partner started renting out a
room in their apartment, partly to make some extra money but also as a way to meet
new people. “We thought maybe two or three people a year would stay,” he said.
Instead, the room is now rented out an average of three nights a week. “You meet so
many people, and after a few hours they are a friend,” Bigi said. He looked forward to
being able to list his apartment on Fairbnb, not least because Airbnb’s algorithm had
started pushing him to rent his apartment for a price so low that it no longer made
economic sense for him to do so. Airbnb, he went on, encouraged a kind of
professionalization of hosting—such as offering twenty-four-hour check-in—that he
was unwilling to engage in. “That is not my philosophy,” he said. “I want to meet
people and show them the city.”
Bigi and his partner travelled a lot, staying in Airbnb apartments themselves, and
often looking up locals they had hosted in Bologna. He knew that some Bolognese
saw increased tourism as a blight. “Bologna has two million tourists a year, but if you
talk to people the perception is that we are invaded by tourists, like Venice,” he said.
“It is visible here because it is new.” Bigi felt that, so far, at least, the commodi cation
of his domesticity had been a good thing. He had lived alongside people from
different cultures, and he had learned to adapt as a host; he now put a kettle in the
room for Chinese visitors, who appreciated such an amenity. Being an Airbnb host
had offered him a useful lesson in mutual understanding, he thought, even if the
people he was understanding were people very like himself. The goal was nding the
proper balance. “We don’t want fake cities where only tourists live,” Bigi said. “We are
residents, and we want to promote our city, not transform it.”
After talking with Bigi, I checked in to my Airbnb: an older couple’s spare bedroom,
equipped with an enormous antique wardrobe and high shuttered windows. One of
my hosts met me at the door wearing a blue blazer, having made the old-fashioned
gesture of dressing up to greet a guest, even one who was paying a hundred and
twenty dollars a night. My suitcase safely stowed, I went out for a walk through the
handsomely colonnaded streets of the city, and soon arrived at the base of what I had
recently learned was its best-known landmark, a pair of twelfth-century brick towers.
The smaller one, known as the Garisenda, leans at a vertiginous four-degree angle—
a tilt as great as that of its better-known cousin in Pisa. The Bologna towers are on a
busy intersection, and were being ignored by all passersby, with not a single tourist
posing for a photograph while pretending to hold the Garisenda up. I snapped a
picture—I’d never even heard of the leaning tower of Bologna before—but moved on
quickly. The street was lled with bustling locals on their way home from work, and
the last thing I wanted was to get in the way. ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the April

April 29,
29, 2019
2019, issue, with the headline
“Airbnb Moves In.”
Rebecca Mead joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1997. She is the author of “ My
Life
Life in
Life in Middlemarch
Middlemarch.” Read more »
in Middlemarch
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The Airbnb Invasion of Barcelona

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5/5/2019 The Airbnb Invasion of Barcelona | The New Yorker

The Airbnb Invasion of Barcelona

By Rebecca Mead April 22, 2019

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