Contemporary phenomena and strategies of living in Italy. Edited by Michael Obrist, Antonietta Putzu, Park Books 2023
Too many tourists
Bottle caps fill the cracks between the cobblestones in the streets of Trastevere, once an infamous neighbourhood, in the heart of Rome. Tourists flock to bars and restaurants, crowding the winding alleyways and banging trolleys up and down narrow staircases to homes no longer inhabited. The area is depopulating. ‘In one building, out of ten flats, eight are now vacation rentals’ Stefania Porcelli told me five years ago, when I stared investigating the spread of Airbnb in Rome. Porcelli runs the family business, a historic restaurant called Checco er Carrettiere, a stone’s throw from Piazza Trilussa. Surrounded by photographs on the walls, she remembered the days when her father handed out a plate of pasta and a banknote to the men leaving Regina Coeli, Rome’s jail, round the corner in Via della Lungara. In the following decades, the poor and ill-fames district would change radically.
Between 1951 and 1971 Rome’s historic centre lost 54 per cent of its population. Many families were evicted from the small dark homes in Trastevere, other families left willingly in exchange for small buyouts, lured into new homes in more peripheral areas. Trastevere, the second most populous district in the centre, lost almost one third of its residents – dropping from 51,000 to 21,000 residents. Today only 80,000 residents live in the centre of Rome, 20,000 of whom are in Trastevere, with an increase compared to 2001 thanks to an influx of foreigners.[1]
Over the years the district changed as new, richer residents moved in. ‘They mixed in and became part of the neighbourhood’ Porcelli explained. The homes in Trastevere were bought and renovated by a much more affluent class of residents and their value increased. ‘Then everything changed’. The tourist boom spurred by the 2000 Jubilee and then by the 2008 economic crisis completely transformed Trastevere. ‘Small homeowners starting selling or turning their homes into vacation rentals’ Porcelli told me. In recent years, more and more apartments in Trastevere turned up on Airbnb. And as they did, more and more residents left, their apartments also converting to Airbnb. ‘So while in previous decades residents were being replaced by other, more affluent, residents, today residents are being pushed out altogether by a temporary population of tourists’.
According to data from Inside Airbnb[2] the number of accommodations on Airbnb in the Italian capital peaked in May 2019 when 30,619 rooms and entire apartments were listed on the website. 64 per cent of total listings were for entire apartments: 20,000 homes in Rome were being rented to tourists on Airbnb; almost 11,000 of these homes were located in the city centre, in first municipality. After a slight drop in 2020, the number of listings is rising again, while Italy has yet to deal with the issue of short term rentals, something that has been tolerated by public administrations and promoted by the media. Hence, Italy is one of the few European counties with no regulation in place whatsoever, except for a measure introduced in 2017 for fiscal reasons – a law stating that renting up to four apartments is not considered as a commercial activity.
With no regulations in place, until the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, in March 2020, Airbnb grew in Rome at an annual rate of 8 per cent; but the historic centre registered far higher rates: in absolute terms, the most central districts saw an increase of 3,355 accommodations between 2016 and 2019 (+27 per cent).[3] The increase of vacation rentals was such that in 2019 in some central urban areas the ratio of beds on Airbnb to residents was 1 to 2.[4] Also, research found that the spread of Airbnb in Rome showed that, alongside a strong spatial concentration of listings in the historic centre, economic benefits were concentrated in the hands of very few hosts.[5] Far from being a tool for ‘making ends meet’ aiding an impoverished middle class – as went the claim – Airbnb is a tool for concentrating wealth and increasing spatial and economic inequality.
Italy’s oil
‘Tourism is Italy’s oil’ is a widespread belief in Italy and a frequent headline in leading national newspapers. Indeed in 2019 Italy was the fifth most visited country in the world with 65 million overnight tourist stays (3 million more than in 2018), of which 42 million came from abroad, according to the Bank of Italy.[6] International travel receipts in 2019 reached €44.3 billion, accounting for 41 per cent of the exports of services. This is a considerable figure. International tourism has grown mainly with holidays in seaside and mountain resorts, while the number of tourists in cities, to which 60 per cent of total holiday spending is attributable, has decreased slightly since 2017. The tourism sector in Italy generates 5 per cent of GDP (13 per cent, including induced activities) and employs 6 per cent of the workforce.[7] Of course tourism is not an economic sector in its own right, but the sum of activities pertaining to different economic sectors and branches: services, transport, catering, culture, accommodation and so on. From the point of view of the economic impact, according to the Bank of Italy almost one third of the added value generated by tourism in Italy is attributable to the use of homes for tourist rentals. The other economic activities that contribute most to the formation of tourism value added are the hotel, restaurant and transport sectors and, above all, retail trade. The sectors with the highest incidence of tourism are accommodation services, air transport and travel agencies.
However, aside from a strictly economic aspect the impact of tourism must be measured from other perspectives as well: environmental, social and urban issues are also linked to the growth of tourism. More specifically, they are linked to the absence of public policies guiding the growth of tourism and redistributing tourism expenditure in favour of communities. One third of the added value attributable to tourist rental homes feeds into property income derived from the vacation rental market, a sector with low added value because it produces few jobs, often precarious and poorly paid ones. This tourist expenditure is captured by homeowners who already enjoy an advantage over those who do not own a second home in an attractive location. Vacation rentals widen this gap: according to the real estate consultancy firm Nomisma, short term rentals generate the same profit as a yearlong ordinary rental in only 120/130 days.[8] This rent gap leads to a rise in property values in central areas and reduces the stock of homes in the long-term residential market, fuelling a housing crisis.
Another problematic aspect of the tourist economy concerns labour. Tourism is said to create jobs, but these are mostly poorly paid jobs. Trade and tourism employ over 5,4 million workers in Italy, more than the entire manufacturing industry. But 82 per cent of jobs in the tourism sector are qualified as blue-collar and over half are part-time.[9] Also, tourism tends to substitute other economic sectors rather than add to them. Following the 2008 economic crises, when Italy’s industrial output shrank by 25 per cent[10] and aggregate domestic demand crumbled under fiscal policy measures, tourism seemed to be the only thing going in Rome, a city that has traditionally lacked an industrial sector. The sectors that recorded the most significant increases in Rome between 2008 and 2019, both in absolute and relative terms, were personal and collective services and business services, which grew by +41.6 per cent and 30.7 per cent respectively, closely followed by hotels and restaurants (+28.8 per cent).[11] Between 2004 and 2011, about half of the employment growth in the tertiary sector in Italy was due to the development of hotel, restaurant and domestic services.[12] But according to the national social security service institute (Inps), 64 per cent of workers in the accommodation and catering sectors are poor.[13] Workers in the culture and arts sectors are not doing any better. A survey conducted in October 2019 found that half of the workers interviewed, many with degrees and doctorates, do not earn more than €8 per hour. Almost 40 per cent of the respondents earn less than €5,000 per year.[14]
Furthermore, tourism also generates costs. The transformation of so many flats into holiday homes produces social costs in terms of a decay in urban quality and the right to the city. Gentrification due to rising property values and the direct or indirect expulsion of residents from central areas triggers a substantial transformation of the local social and cultural ecology. The replacement of a resident population with a temporary one has also led to the replacement of commercial activities, changing the economic fabric of the historic centre of many cities in Italy, which has specialised in tourism-related sectors. So-called food and beverage activities have replaced the commercial establishments needed by residents, and the heart of Rome has become mono-functional.
The effects of the growth of the short-term rental market, however, do not only concern the historic centre. The greatest impact of Airbnb in Rome in terms of depleting the rental housing stock has been in semi-peripheral areas where a population of young people and students usually find cheaper rental accommodation. On a national level, the supply of rented homes started to decrease in 2015, just as demand increased. The supply was even estimated to be negative by 2020, against a growing demand. Already in 2015, the main real estate agencies attributed the decrease in ordinary supply to the increase in short term rentals.
Hollow cities
Indeed the impact that tourism is having on the urban quality of cities such as Rome is impressive. In 2019, homes on Airbnb exceeded those rented to residents in the centres of six cities: Bologna, Florence, Naples, Palermo, Rome and Venice, according to data from Inside Airbnb analysed by the geographer Filippo Celata.[15] Along with residents, neighbourhood shops have disappeared, prices have risen and the continuous flow of tourists has made streets and squares impassable. In a word, historic centres have become uninhabitable.
Before the pandemic, social movements and citizens had already voices strong concerns about the effects of overtourism (tourist overcrowding) and short-term rentals. But instead of regulating rentals and favouring residents, authorities have spoken only about the need to ‘educate’ tourists and to focus on ‘quality tourism’ – a choice of words framing the desire to attract a richer class of tourists than the one brought by low-cost rentals and cheap flights. To combat excessive congestion, mayors have begun to restrict access to parts of the cities. In Florence, Venice and Rome, ordinances have been issued prohibiting tourists, but also residents, from sitting on the steps of monuments. In 2017, the mayor of Florence announced that he would have the steps of churches watered down to prevent tourists from sitting on them. In Venice, gates were set up to regulate access to the historic centre.
The widespread impact of an unregulated growth of short term rentals became evident in March 2020, when Italy went on lockdown in order to mitigate the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic. The heart of Rome witnessed a 70 per cent drop in population. Similar percentages were registered only in sky resorts.[16] For months Trastevere lay empty and silent, hollowed out, when tourism suddenly came to a halt. The emptying out of the historic centres showed how tourism, a sector time and time again defined as central to the Italian economy, rests on very fragile foundations – suggesting, moreover, the need to review the comparison of tourism with a fossil fuel in times of environmental crisis.
Over the last decade, numerous cities and natural landscapes in every corner of the planet have undergone profound transformations linked to tourism. The intensive exploitation of resources has left territories destroyed and polluted, historic centres emptied of inhabitants and overcrowded with tourists, empty homes and street in different cities all looking and feeling like the same place. These are some of the effects of a process that modifies urban and natural ecosystems, consumes and erases the characteristics that make tourist destinations attractive.
The collapse of an urban economy heavily reliant on tourism and informal employment took a heavy toll in the Eternal City. Only a handful of restaurants in Trastevere reopened when the restrictions introduced to mitigate the Covid-19 contagion were eased in May 2020. Most commercial activities had switched management multiple times during the past years, as the tourism boom fuelled by cheap Airbnbs transformed the old neighbourhood into a tourist resort. Antonio is one of the few restaurant owners who has been working in Trastevere for over a decade. ‘It’s sad – he told me – Most restaurants didn’t reopen for a long time because there were no tourists. But the problem in Trastevere is that there are no residents’. Commercial activities in densely inhabited, more peripheral areas of Rome, thrived. But the city centre struggled to come back to life. Rows of closed shutters lined the empty building in a neighbourhoods gone silent. Alessandro, who runs a bar around the corner from Trastevere’s main square, told me that his work routine followed Ryanair’s weekly flight schedule to Rome. But in 2020 Trastevere seemed to have gone back to the time when the neighbourhood was dark, poor and dangerous.
A city of empty homes and homeless people
Many homeowners held on until the return of tourists by renting their empty flats with one-year temporary contracts at most. Others sold. But while those 20,000 vacation rentals remained empty, in a city where according to official data 166,000 homes are unoccupied,[17] many struggled to pay rent, and faced increasing hardship as the city administration struggled to deliver the necessary aid – mainly food stamps and emergency rent subsidies. Many of those facing economic hardship were employed in the tourism sector: the waiters, cooks and baristas, who make up a young, poor and precarious workforce increasingly dependent on family welfare.
Less than 18 per cent of Rome’s population lives in rented homes. Applications for rent subsidies submitted in February 2020, before the pandemic, were around 10,000 according to the Tenants Union (Unione Inquilini). On 6 May 2020, there were 30,000 applications, but according to the municipality, the total number of applications would be double that. In fact one third of renters, 50,000 households, applied for emergency aid, and more than 220,000 Roman families applied for food vouchers.[18] The city administration, whose offices are notoriously understaffed and whose political leaders across different administrations have held a hardliner approach towards the housing crises and poverty in general, failed to meet these demands. Tenants unable to pay rent added up to those already unable to secure a home in the private market before the pandemic.
Rome counts over 90 occupied buildings that provide self-managed emergency housing for approximately 10,000 people. According to the city administration, the housing emergency in Rome concerns 57,000 families, equal to about 200,000 people.[19] Many of them have been waiting for decades for a council house. At the end of December 2022, the city administration published the list of applications for council housing submitted before 31 December 2020 – that is before the wave of evictions caused by the pandemic, which aggravated an already precarious housing situation for tenants. 14,349 families applied before 2021 and are on the waiting list for a council house. But according to the Tenants Union (Unione Inquilini), 7,681 applications have been excluded – more than 6,000 were classified as inadmissible, while 1,294 were cancelled (179 because the applicant died). Housing allocations are proceeding slowly: according to the Tenants Union in the oast 17 months, since Mayor Roberto Gualtieri took office, only 70 houses have been assigned: 6 houses per month, the worst figure ever.[20] Furthermore, council housing is being sold and privatized. According to the housing expert Enrico Puccini, 20,000 of the 76,000 council houses in Rome will be sold.
For those who cannot access the property ladder, prospects are bleak. According to Puccini in Italy there is no social housing to speak of. ‘What Italians call social housing is merely a rent-to-buy scheme, in which future tenants are selected by private constructors, and the city has no oversight on the process’. The city’s plan provides for private constructors to allocate 30 per cent of all newly built homes to people in need on a subsidised rent basis, but in August 2022 a survey carried out by the city’s housing department revealed half of the social housing units are occupied by tenants who lack the minimum requirements to live in them. Puccini has conducted extensive research on housing in Rome, analysing the scarce data available. What is peculiar about Rome’s housing crisis, according to him, is the fact that it has not been driven solely by rising prices and rents. While many European cities witnessed a ‘recovery’ of real estate values beginning in 2013,[21] Italy saw a decrease.[22] Rome recorded an average drop of 27 per cent in rents and 19 per cent in property values from 2008 to 2018.[23] In this context, Airbnb contributed to the stabilisation of property values in the central areas of cities and to widening the gap between central and peripheral house prices: after 2008 central boroughs such as Trastevere survived the market slump relatively unscathed also thanks to Airbnb, but in areas outside the city centre home prices dropped. ‘But evictions continued and spiked in 2016’ Puccini notes. In Rome approximately nine thousand eviction notices are issued each year. He believes that evictions continued to increase after 2008, even when house prices were dropping, because the problem lies also is in the job market. ‘Tenants simply aren’t earning enough to pay rent’. So what is driving both the housing crisis and the tourism boom is not only real estate values, but the stagnant economy mainly based on this sector, and low wages.
The tourist market has been used by many owners (but also by those who have rented houses to sublet them on Airbnb) to buffer the effects of the crisis in an adaptive process that re-oriented the process of rent extraction around tourism, in the absence of forms of government of the city’s transformation processes.[24] Rome, and Italy in general, has proven to be particularly suitable for the grafting of a business model centred on real estate income. Rome’s urban economy has thrived on real estate speculation since the post-war year when the city expanded to become Italy’s largest metropolitan area. But real estate, Puccini points out, needs demand. But Rome’s stagnant economy has proven far from attractive. So that demand relies more and more on tourism.
Outside the city centre, with few alternative sectors to the real estate and tourism attracting investments, a demographic standstill, high rates of unemployment, underpaid and precarious labour especially among the youth who increasingly depend on parents and grandparents, Rome’s economy is far from vibrant. To many the city feels forever on the brink of collapsing under mismanagement, public debt, incompetence and plain lack of political vision. ‘This is part of the problem: Rome has become depended on tourism as a natural resource. People adapted to the only thing going: everybody opened a restaurant, a bar, or bought a home to rent on Airbnb’ says Puccini. But the economic shift towards the tourism sector has impoverished Rome in many ways. The growth of tourism and of the related services sector has meant not more wealth, as the tale would have it, but more badly paid and precarious jobs, which translated into too many people struggling to pay rent. It’s a vicious circle.
Of course tourism in itself is not the real issue. The point is the growth of an unregulated tourism that is reshaping the city thanks to a planning and management void and the absence of measures for pre- and re-distributing wealth and tourism expenditure. Too many city administrations in Italy view tourism as an easy shortcut to compensate for state cuts to public spending, as a means to revive local economies thanks to a foreign demand, in territories made fragile by disinvestment processes. But as Samuel Stein put it, this is as a lazy, short-term growth strategy,[25] replacing other economic sectors instead of adding to them. Not only is this strategy not working, it’s widening the gaps.
Two years ago, in the absence of tourism, a choice about Rome’s economy could have been made: an effort could have been made to bring back residents to the city centre and foster a more diverse economy. But that did not happen. Meanwhile, the national government was busy compensating tourism-related commercial activities in hollowed out cities such as Rome, Florence and Venice with public subsidies for the extraordinary drop in demand. No one stopped to reflect about the fact that perhaps this economy is no longer sustainable and should therefore not be subsidized, nor did occur to those in government that at times of climate change perhaps these drops in demand won’t be so extraordinary in the near future. That chance to rethink the urban economy in a long-term, sustainable, perspective, was lost. And as tourism restarts not all boats are being lifted. But as the cracks in the tourism economy begin to widen once again, as cities increasingly suffer the effects of climate change also brought on by unsustainable tourism-related practices and enterprises, public debate about the price we are all paying will become inevitable.
[1] Paolo Berdini, La città in vendita. Centri storici e mercato senza regole (Rome: Donzelli, 2008)
[2] Inside Airbnb, Rome <http://insideairbnb.com/rome/> (accessed 15 May 2019)
[3] Filippo Celata, La ‘Airbnbificazione’ delle città: gli effetti a Roma tra centro e periferia (Rome: La Sapienza, Dipartimento di metodi e modelli dell’economia, il territorio e la finanza, 2007)
[4] Filippo Celata, Barbara Brollo, #mapparoma27. Airbnb: 15.700 alloggi solo nel 1° Municipio (Rome: Mapparoma, 2019) https://www. mapparoma.info (accessed 15 Feb 2023)
[5] Antonello Romano, ll fenomeno Airbnb e la geografia degli host a Roma, (No code geography, 2019) https://www. nocodegeography.com (accessed 15 Feb 2023)
[6] Bank of Italy, Survey on international tourism, 5 July 2020, https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/indagine-turismo-internazionale/2020-indagine-turismo-internazionale/statistiche_ITI_05062020.pdf (accessed 15 Feb 2023)
[7] Bank of Italy, Questioni di Economia e Finanza (Occasional Papers) Turismo in Italia: numeri e potenziale di sviluppo, July 2019 https://www.bancaditalia.it/pubblicazioni/qef/2019-0505/QEF_505_19.pdf (accessed 15 Feb 2023)
[8] Nomisma, Terzo rapporto sul mercato immobiliare 2022, https://www.nomisma.it/terzo-rapporto-nomisma-sul-mercato-immobiliare-novembre-2022/ (accessed 15 Feb 2023)
[9] Federazione Italiana pubblici esercizi, Osservatorio sul mercato del lavoro nel settore turismo, XII Rapporto
[10] Istat, Evoluzione ciclica della produzione industriale e del fatturato in Italia e in Europa, 02/2014, https://www.istat.it/it/files/2014/02/capitolo-1.pdf (accessed 15 Feb 2023)
[11] Comune di Roma, Annuario Statistico, Cap 2 Le caratteristiche dell’occupazione, anno 2019 https://www.comune.roma.it/web-resources/cms/documents/CAP_2_Caratteristiche_occupazione_2020.pdf (accessed 15 Feb 2023)
[12] Istat, Rapporto annuale 2012
[13] Inps, Relazione annuale del presidente, XXI Rapporto annuale, July 2022
[14] Mi Riconosci? Inchiesta rivela: metà dei lavoratori nel settore culturale guadagna meno di 8 euro l’ora, https://www.miriconosci.it/inchiesta-rivela-meta-dei-lavoratori-nel-settore-culturale-guadagna-meno-di-8-euro-lora/ (accessed 15 Feb 2023)
[15] Filippo Celata, Antonello Romano, Overtourism and online short-term rental platforms in Italian cities, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, (30:5, 1020-1039), 2022
[16] Filippo Celata, Antonello, Spostamenti di popolazione ai tempi del coronavirus, (No code geography, 2020) https://www.nocodegeography.com/big-data/spostamenti-popolazione-ai-tempi-del-coronavirus/ (accessed 15 Feb 2023)
[17] Istat, Censimento delle popolazioni e della abitazioni, 2019, http://dati-censimentipermanenti.istat.it/?lang=it, (accessed 15 Feb 2023)
[18] Sarah Gainsforth, Dopo il turismo, riabitare Roma, DinamoPress, 15 May 2020 https://www.dinamopress.it/news/dopo-turismo-riabitare-roma/ (accessed 15 Feb 2023)
[19] Comune di Roma, Linee guida e criteri generali finalizzati all’avvio del Programma Strategico per il superamento della condizione di disagio e della condizione di emergenza abitativa nel territorio capitolino, Delibera della giunta capitolina n. 86, 19 May 2020
[20] Roma, Unione inquilini boccia Gualtieri: assegnate 70 case, Askanews, 11 January 2023, https://www.askanews.it/cronaca/2023/01/11/roma-unione-inquilini-boccia-gualtieri-assegnate-70-case-pn_20230111_00184/ (accessed 15 Feb 2023)
[21] Eurostat (2020), Housing price statistics. House price index, https://ec.europa.eu. (accessed 15 Feb 2023)
[22] Real estate values in Italy have risen again only in the past two years, thanks to the highest increase of property purchases in the past fifteen years, according to Nomisma.
[23] Enrico Puccini, Il mercato immobiliare romano: 10 anni di perdite, Osservatorio Casa Roma, 2020 https://www. osservatoriocasaroma.com (accessed 15 Feb 2023)
[24] Stefano Sampaolo, Tra rendita e nuove logiche di sviluppo: processi adattivi e reattivi di una città alle prese con uno strisciante (e non compreso) declino economico urbano, in A. Coppola, G. Punziano (a cura di), Roma in Transizione. Governo, strategie, metabolismi e quadri di vita di una metropoli, (Rome, Milano: Plan Publisher, 2018)
[25] Samuel Stein, Tourism: An Ideology and an Accumulation Strategy, DinamoPress, 28 January 2020, https://www.dinamopress.it/news/tourism-an-ideology-and-an-accumulation-strategy/ (accessed 15 Feb 2023)
