AUSTRIA 2021
CITY OF VIENNA AGAINST AIRBNB
HARD FOUGHT VICTORY After a long fight, the Vienna Housing Councillor has finally won a victory against Airbnb, which is now forced to remove all apartments in the city belonging to social housing from its website. Furthermore, the platform decided to cooperate with the City by revealing data on the number of rented apartments and watching for possible breaches, though it remains to be seen whether this action will be lasting or short-lived
T
he love between Airbnb and Vienna is mostly a bitter one. It was more than two years ago that Vienna was among the ten European cities (Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Bordeaux, Brussels, Krakow, Munich, Paris and Valencia) that asked the EU for help in fighting the expansion of Airbnb. The cities also didn’t much like other holiday rental websites, as they felt soaring rental prices were pushing locals out of their own neighbourhoods. As an example, Palma de Mallorca voted to ban almost all listings after a 50% increase in tourist letting led to a 40% rise
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in residential rents. Back in 2016, over 11,000 apartments in Vienna were already being offered through Airbnb and 2,000 apartments were constantly rented, thus making them inaccessible to normal tenants. This prompted the City, that same year, to amend its Tourism Promotion Act in order to force people to pay taxes on income earned from short-term sub-letting, even if they only did so occasionally. Along with writing letters to the EC, by the end of 2018 the City of Vienna had also amended the Vienna Building Code to render short-term letting – including through rental
services like Airbnb – illegal across large areas of the city. This decision was in line with pre-existing rules stipulating that only up to 20% of a building’s floor space can be used for non-residential purposes in residential areas. The 2018 alteration stated that commercial use for the purposes of short-term leasing does not qualify as residential use, thus prohibiting such rentals. However, apartments in residential zones were allowed to be rented (even on a short-term basis) if the owner or head tenant continues to use the apartment for their own purposes. That is to say that a student was permitted to rent
