In recent years, Mexico City has experienced something of an explosion of tourism that goes beyond the times and spaces that were previously common. Longer stays, some to the point of blurring the border between visiting and living. Also located in places not necessarily adjacent to the usual tourist attractions. So it is rare to find a group of friends, family or work in the capital that has not commented on the presence of apartments with short- or medium-term tenants in their neighborhoods. But, although the phenomenon is common to several parts of the city, it is not distributed equally for all, far from it. An analysis of the geolocalized data of the accommodations available on Airbnb, a reference platform for this type of rental, shows which neighborhoods the density is not only higher, but much higher.
This data is provided by the InsideAirbnb projectwhich collects them on a semi-annual basis from the same app. At the end of June, there were 26,500 listings, including entire accommodations and rooms. Of these, 17% can be considered as probably inactive because they are declared unavailable on the platform or because they only allow reservations for periods of more than 30 days (in addition, a small percentage, the most expensive 0.1%, probably have exorbitant prices just to avoid reservations for certain seasons). Applying these filters results in 22,521 offers. If we take the housing data from the 2010 census and divide it by neighborhood, we can use it to estimate the ratio of active accommodations per 100 homes. The resulting map allows us to clearly identify which points in the city have a greater relative presence of these: Condesa, Roma Norte and other adjacent areas in the areas with 15 to 20 or even almost 25 accommodations per hundred homes built: the Hipódromo is the area with the highest concentration in the entire capital.
By ranking these data, it is easy to see this same concentration. But now we can also see how many absolute accommodations are accumulated in certain neighborhoods. Here, all the neighborhoods in the Hipódromo area score above 20 out of 100. But if the ranking is ordered by total accommodations, it turns out that Juárez has a total of more than a thousand places, and Cuauhtémoc up to 900. However, by having a greater amount of housing, it is possible that the effect of the presence of tourist accommodations is diluted. Also in the perception of those who live there, which helps to understand why the conversations about tourism and its effects (benefit or saturation) correspond more with the relative data than with the absolute.
But “accommodations” includes very different categories: larger or smaller dwellings and even rooms in apartments that would be shared during the stay. And although certain areas of Mexico City accumulate more of all types than others, there are also differences between them: the majority of all types are concentrated in the Cuauhtémoc district, but Miguel Hidalgo (including the exclusive Polanco area) has around 1,200 medium-sized dwellings; and Benito Juárez has around 1,000 rooms.
This diversity is also reflected in the average prices, which are higher for complete homes and tend to correlate with their number of beds, but are mainly affected by where they are located. Thus, all the neighborhoods in Polanco tend to have the most expensive nights on average: up to 4,000 pesos for a night in a home with 5 or more beds. But in private rooms, Coyoacán is close, denoting a certain specialization in the offer profile for each area.
These last figures reflect, like few others, the double-edged sword that this tourism represents, which transcends traditional boundaries. Prices that are beneficial for the property, and which also bring with them the signal of the additional consumption expected in the shops of these same colonies. But at the same time they suggest the impact that it can have on prices (of the long-term rental housing itself, but not only): an apartment occupied for 20 nights in a month at a price of 3,000 pesos yields 60,000 pesos gross, above any average rent in the city.
It is precisely this possible cost that the capital government cited to launch and approve a new express regulation: since April of this year, owners and platforms are obliged to register, comply with a series of requirements (among them, for the former, the obligation to attend to any nuisance generated to the neighbours) and remain available for requests from the authorities. In fact, for those who have four or more accommodations, the registration must be of a commercial nature and as an establishment, with all that this implies. However, it remains to be seen to what extent this can have an appreciable effect both on the size of the offer and on its characteristics and possible effects. The data from other cities (for example, in Spain) that have maintained similar obligations for years suggest that there is actually much more available than registered, which would leave many of these homes off the radar (at least of this type of radar) of the competent authorities. The possibility of suspending tourist activity licenses in areas declared as saturated, something that is also contemplated in the regulations, depends in the case of accommodations precisely on the existence of a faithful and systematic record of them. Thus, it seems that the city is still putting the first pieces of a machine that will have to be fine-tuned, just as has happened to so many others in the world.
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