Homes for people, not for profit
A grassroots campaign against unregulated short-term lets in the hearts of Polish cities.
You scrape savings together for years, sign up to a 30-year mortgage and buy the flat you dreamed of...
You move in after months of renovation. A wedding, plans for kids, a new life. Then one night the music through the wall wakes you up. Behind your neighbours' door there is a crowd of strangers - they have booked the flat for a stag do.
This is your life now. And it is happening to tens of thousands of Poles.
The rest of Europe has passed proper short-term rental laws. Poland - after nearly three years of work - has come away with next to nothing. The new duties boil down to signing up to a register.
The government's bill gives residents' associations and housing co-ops no say. It gives councils no power to create Airbnb-free zones.
Every point the listing platforms made - Airbnb, Booking - was taken on board in full. Not one of the points residents made was.
France, Spain, the Netherlands and Slovenia have hard caps. We don't even have a register. Hover over a country to see its law.
You're the last resident left in your building - with no rules for Airbnb letting, every other flat in it has been turned into an unstaffed hotel. You run through the city pulling off the padlocks the fake hoteliers have clipped to the railings and gates. The neighbours you meet on the way fall in behind you.
The padlocks in the game are real: the same key boxes are hanging in Warsaw, Kraków, Gdańsk and Zakopane right now – anywhere flats are being turned into holiday lets.
Strefa wolna od mieszkańców
Resident-free zone
StopAirbnb.pl
In the game, the resident-free zone covers the whole of Warsaw.
Outside the game it spreads building by building – and without rules for short-term lets, nothing is going to stop it.
Real voices from people whose daily life has turned into a tourist dorm.
I've lived here for forty years. I used to know every neighbour, kids ran around the courtyard and the stairwell smelled of dinners cooking. Today four of the five flats on my floor are Airbnbs. Suitcases come banging down the stairs at two in the morning and I don't know a single face behind any of the doors. The other week someone tried my door, thinking it was the flat they'd booked for the night.
- Halina, 71
The flat above us goes by the night. Every weekend it's a different lot - stag dos, birthdays, tourists on a break. Music, shouting, heels on laminate. Our little boy wakes up terrified and won't sleep on his own any more. We've called the police four times, but the owner lives abroad and couldn't care less.
- Tomek and Ania, parents of a four-year-old
I rented a studio for five years. The landlord was always friendly, until one day he told me he was “changing what the flat is for”. Three months' notice and I was gone. A month later I saw the same flat on Airbnb at 380 złoty a night. Now I'm hunting for a room I can afford on a teacher's wage.
- Kasia, 29
Tourists' suitcases are wrecking the listed marble stairs we'd only just restored, and it cost us plenty. We're forever fixing the front door, because tourists who can't work out how to open it force it instead. At the residents' meeting we tried to ban short-term letting and found out the law hands us nothing to do it with. Investors have a right to their profit; we have no right to any peace.
- Marek, 56
I've lived here for forty years. I used to know every neighbour, kids ran around the courtyard and the stairwell smelled of dinners cooking. Today four of the five flats on my floor are Airbnbs. Suitcases come banging down the stairs at two in the morning and I don't know a single face behind any of the doors. The other week someone tried my door, thinking it was the flat they'd booked for the night.
- Halina, 71
The flat above us goes by the night. Every weekend it's a different lot - stag dos, birthdays, tourists on a break. Music, shouting, heels on laminate. Our little boy wakes up terrified and won't sleep on his own any more. We've called the police four times, but the owner lives abroad and couldn't care less.
- Tomek and Ania, parents of a four-year-old
I rented a studio for five years. The landlord was always friendly, until one day he told me he was “changing what the flat is for”. Three months' notice and I was gone. A month later I saw the same flat on Airbnb at 380 złoty a night. Now I'm hunting for a room I can afford on a teacher's wage.
- Kasia, 29
Tourists' suitcases are wrecking the listed marble stairs we'd only just restored, and it cost us plenty. We're forever fixing the front door, because tourists who can't work out how to open it force it instead. At the residents' meeting we tried to ban short-term letting and found out the law hands us nothing to do it with. Investors have a right to their profit; we have no right to any peace.
- Marek, 56
Eight reasons unregulated Airbnb is everybody's problem.
Every flat handed to tourists is one fewer on the long-term market. Less supply, higher rents for the people who actually live here.
Barely 500 people still live inside Kraków's old town ring. City centres are turning into places nobody lives.
Suitcases day and night, strangers in the stairwell, parties till dawn. Tourists trying your door at three in the morning because they think it's the flat they booked.
In Warsaw's Wola, escort agencies running out of nightly lets. On Marszałkowska, a 50-person party in one flat that ended with several police units and the fire brigade.
The more investors pile into Airbnb, the worse the prices get for anyone who just wants to buy a flat and live in it.
The government's bill puts no fire safety duties on hosts at all. A hotel has them. The building next door that's been turned into a hotel doesn't.
A city's local plan can rule out a hotel on a given street. What good is that if a block of flats can become one? Short-term letting lets owners run a hotel exactly where the council decided not to allow one.
As short-term letting grows, developers change what they build. Instead of family homes we get micro-studios aimed at tourists. We live with that for years: fewer ordinary homes, more nightly lets.
The lines trotted out against regulation - and why they don't survive contact with reality.
“The people who live in city centres are the ones who lost out.”
Mikołaj Paja - Miasto Jest Nasze
These measures work in Spain and in France. They'll work in Poland too - if the government stops taking its cues from the platforms.
We can't carry on with whole buildings quietly turning into unstaffed hotels. It makes life worse for residents and pushes them out of the inner city. The people who live in a building should get to decide whether a hotel business runs in it. In France, a residents' association can write a short-term letting ban into its own rules. In Poland, neighbours have nothing at all to protect themselves with.
Politicians taking the side of Airbnb investors over the people who live here.
„Let us remember that thousands of Poles have invested their savings in things like flats for short-term letting”
Why this is a problem
The minister has eyes only for the most privileged group of investors, and none for the millions of Poles who spent every last złoty on the one home they dreamed of, where they want to live and raise a family - often on a mortgage that will follow them their whole working lives. Meanwhile a comparatively small number of wealthy people are turning their home into a hotel.
Andrzej Domański
Minister of Finance, Civic Coalition
„We have to balance the interests of those who simply want to live quietly in their block with those of people who want to run a business there”
Why this is a problem
That balance is a fiction. The right to live quietly in your own home is not something to be traded off. Running a business in someone else's building is a privilege, and it can't come out of the pockets - or the sleep - of the people who live there.
Dariusz Klimczak
Minister of Infrastructure, Polish People's Party (PSL)
Two minutes, and a ready-made message goes to your MP asking them to vote for real Airbnb rules.
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