Pressure mounts on Brussels to deliver on Airbnb
rules
The EU’s delay on a rulebook for short-term rentals is
exasperating cities and MEPs alike.
BY PIETER
HAECK
July 28,
2022 5:06 pm
https://www.politico.eu/article/pressure-mount-brussels-deliver-airbnb-rule/
Tourism is
back — and so is cities' irritation with platform-driven tourism.
For once,
that ire is aimed not at the platforms themselves, but at Brussels. A
long-awaited European Union rulebook on short-term rental platforms like Airbnb
was pushed back over the summer — fueling the impatience of a group of European
cities and lawmakers. Such rentals negatively affect the affordability and
liveability of cities, they claim, and the delay further exacerbates the
problem.
In a letter
dated July 14, seen by POLITICO and signed by dozens of MEPs and more than 10
European cities, the European Commission was urged "to urgently go
forward" with its so-called short-term rental initiative.
Counterintuitively,
Airbnb having a big summer — however annoying it may be to cities — could help
keep the issue on the Commission's list of priorities. The bloc has otherwise
been very occupied by so-called horizontal legislation, such as digital
competition and content moderation, raising concern that more sector-specific
legislation would continue taking a back seat.
A contentious debate
With the
new rulebook, the EU's executive is set to wade into a debate that for years
mostly played out within cities, courtrooms and EU member countries.
An EU-wide
survey the Commission conducted from September to December last year to prepare
for the initiative revealed how contentious the topic is — the survey got 5,696
responses, an unusually high number. In addition to platforms like Airbnb and
Booking.com, a coalition of cities also weighed in, calling itself the European
Cities Alliance on Short-Term Holiday Rentals. Among the cities were major
tourism hotspots like Amsterdam, Barcelona, Paris and Berlin.
Since then,
the timing of the expected rulebook has been in flux. It originally featured on
the Commission's agenda for June 1 — but was pushed back to the fall. It
resurfaced on a draft Commission's agenda seen by POLITICO for October 12, but
was scrapped again later.
Such
ongoing delays are testing the nerves of a wide coalition of European lawmakers
— comprising MEPs from the Greens, S&D, The Left, EPP and Renew — as well
as cities and urban policy lobbying groups like Eurocities.
"We
are extremely worried the proposal currently no longer features on the list of
initiatives planned to be launched until December," lawmakers and cities
wrote in the July 14 letter directed to Executive Vice President Margrethe
Vestager and Commissioner Thierry Breton. Short-term rentals have already
affected housing prices, they wrote, and the current cost-of-living crisis adds
fuel to the fire.
"Current
increases in the cost of living, rents and house prices are putting many
European households under escalating financial pressures," the letter
reads.
Illegal content
Signatories
of the letter, and other observers, suspect that the Commission needs some time
to figure out how the rulebook will relate to other EU laws, like the
content-moderating Digital Services Act and the bloc's data protection rules,
the General Data Protection Regulation.
Initially,
there were calls to address short-term rental platforms in the DSA. One of the
proposal's catchphrases was: "What is illegal, should be illegal
offline." Part of the debate around short-term rental platforms is whether
listings that defy local regulation should be considered "illegal
content" that platforms should tackle. In their feedback, the
aforementioned European Cities Alliance advocated for such action.
But it
didn't happen. "We spoke to the Commission [and asked]: Are you gonna
tackle this in the DSA, or will there be a lex specialis as a plug-in onto the DSA?
They said: 'No, let's not handle this in the DSA, because that's horizontal
regulation,'" Greens MEP Kim van Sparrentak, in charge of Parliament's
report on affordable housing, said. "But then you have to deliver it, of
course."
Another
point of controversy is cities' access to the short-term rental platforms'
data. Cities claimed in their feedback that they needed access to all kinds of
data (such as the host's identification data, the number of beds in the
accommodation, and the number of nights rented out) to enforce local rules —
but platforms have said these requests were "incompatible" with the
GDPR.
Van
Sparrentak sides with the cities in this one: "The problem at the moment
with Airbnb is that there is no obligation to share data, which makes it
impossible to enforce. There are already a lot of cities with regulation[s] on
short-term rentals ... but they can't enforce it because there is no obligation
to share the data that might be needed."
Asked for a
comment, a Commission spokesperson said that the Commission planned to adopt an
initiative in the fall, focusing "on transparency issues in the short-term
rental sector."
Airbnb, in
a statement, said that four in 10 EU hosts say that hosting on Airbnb helps
them to cope with the rising cost of living. "We continue to support the
EU’s work to update its rules and unlock the benefits of hosting and the single
market for more Europeans," the platform said.
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