TEMPORAL RENTAL PLATFORMS AND THE COMMODIFICATION OF HOUSING
Urban Front members participated in conversation on temporal rental platforms and the commodification of housing tomorrow, November 7th, at the World Urban Forum in Cairo!
The growth of temporary rentals around the world is playing a significant role in the housing affordability crisis. Its geographic and quantitative expansion is taking place in a context of generalized deregulation and is benefiting from digital capitalism. In this context, even the most progressive governments find themselves facing a series of difficulties in designing and, above all, implementing adequate regulations to protect the population's right to housing.
In the general process of real estate financialization, housing as an investment vehicle is the permanent object of new formulas that expand the frontier of extraction of urban rents that are highly concentrated. Although temporary rentals are traditionally associated with tourist residences, their massification also involves middle-income sectors and "new citizenships" such as the "digital nomads" who combine the mobility of tourism with remote work and who, even so, in many cases are economically displaced from their countries of origin.
Several studies show the relationship between the expansion of the supply of temporary rentals of a whole housing unit and the dynamics of the increase in the price of permanent housing and eviction processes of the tenant population or of those who do not have security of tenure. This is evident in large cities but also in small urban areas and is even affecting peripheral areas and popular or social housing itself, with temporary or financialized rentals gaining ground in informal settlements, slums and favelas.
This event seeks to outline an analysis of how the temporary rental sector is being structured in its global and local components, what is the role of the different actors involved, the real impact on the right to housing of different sectors of the population and what are some ways to guarantee this right in the current context. It seeks to bring together a diverse range of actors and organizations organizing and thinking about the phenomenon of temporary and/or platform rentals from a human rights perspective, reinforcing translocal alliances committed to the right to housing.
PARTICIPANTS
Leilani Farha, The Shift, Canada
Maria Silvia Emanuelli, Coordinator Habitat International Coalition Latin America Office, Mexico
David Harvey / Miguel Robles Durán, Co-funders Urban Front, USA
Ana Maria Vasquez Duplat, Project Coordinator Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Argentina
Lorena Zárate Soneyra, Co-cordinator Global Platform for the Right to the City, Canada
Co-organized by the Center for Strategies and Action for Equality, the Habitat International Coalition Latin America Office, the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, The Shift and Urban Front. For more information, click here.
