For several days, political initiatives have been multiplying against furnished tourist accommodation such as Airbnb, accused of causing real estate to explode and hindering access to housing.
Thursday, May 4, the City of Paris announced that it was going to prohibit, within the framework of its future Local Urbanism Plan (PLU), the creation of new furnished tourist accommodation in areas plagued by “overtourism”where there is a lack of housing all year round.
“Entire sectors of Paris will be prohibited from the creation of new tourist accommodation because we consider that the offer is already very abundant and we are aiming for a spread and a balance of establishment in intramural Paris”explained to the press Emmanuel Grégoire, first deputy to the socialist mayor of Paris. “The challenge is simple, it is to try to regulate, or even curb, the pressure of the market which reduces the stock of available housing for the benefit of permanent residents towards diverted uses”, he added. Among these districts are Paris Centre, the Saint-Martin canal, the Grands Boulevards, the Champs-Elysées and Montmartre.
This measure, which does not provide for quantified objectives in the form of quotas, will not apply to owners who occasionally rent their main residence within the limit of 120 days per year, but only to professional rental companies.
The city, which had 43,000 furnished tourist accommodation in the fall of 2022, also hopes to take advantage of a bill which will be discussed in June in the National Assembly to regulate the transformation of offices into furnished tourist accommodation.
One in eight businesses transformed into furnished tourist accommodation in two years
The elected officials fear that the appetite of investors will now turn to offices, for which there is still no regulatory tool, after having set their sights on small businesses, the transformation of which is now regulated. According to Dorine Bregman, assistant in charge of shops at Paris Center, one in eight shops has been transformed into furnished tourist accommodation in the heart of the capital between 2020 and 2022.
Long disarmed in the face of the uncontrolled explosion of tourist accommodation, the City of Paris has greatly strengthened its legal arsenal in recent years. Since 2014, it has set up a mechanism for authorization of change of use with compensation in the event of transformation of an accommodation into furnished tourist accommodation. Since 2022, Parisian regulations even require that the surface be compensated up to three times in certain districts. The regulations have also tightened for businesses, whose change of use to furnished tourist accommodation has been subject since January 2022 to authorization from the town hall.
In 2021, the Airbnb platform, attacked by the City, was also fined 8 million euros for having published a thousand advertisements without a registration number. “Today, the regulatory tools are showing their first positive effects and we are witnessing a drop in the number of declared tourist accommodation”underlined Mr. Grégoire.