In Lisbon, Residents Seek a Vote on Banning Airbnb

António Melo has lived all his seventy-one years in Lisbon’s Alfama neighborhood. But after the owner sold the building to a tourist accommodation company, they refused to renew his contract. “I fear eviction at any moment,” Melo explains “[but] I have nowhere else to go.”

His story has become common among the Portuguese capital’s 546,000 residents, who receive thirty to forty thousand tourists a day. Elderly residents have been forced out of neighborhoods they’ve spent their entire lives in. This exodus “prevents us from having a community life in the local area,” according to Ana Gago, a University of Lisbon geographer who has done on-the-ground research in the Alfama district. “And that is violent.”

Alfama has seen its resident population crash from a 1980s high of twenty thousand to just one thousand today. Unusually, while prices have “skyrocketed” — in the words of academic Luís Mendes, a housing consultant for city legislators — Lisbon’s overall population is also declining. “The effort rates for rent are now really high — well above the one-third of income everyone speaks of to keep rent at sustainable levels,” explains Mendes.

Compared to other major European cities, the rise in living costs has been relatively recent and rapid. Portuguese wages, however, are the lowest in Western Europe — and have lost all relation to these costs.

The predicament for homeseekers in Lisbon is nightmarish. But some residents are pushing back — and are mobilizing to force authorities into a referendum that could halt the displacement of housing by Airbnb and its ilk.

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