Extreme renting: Santorini’s teachers forced to rough it in Airbnb haven

George Moris never imagined that his teaching job on the picturesque Greek island of Santorini would force him to sleep in his car, crash on a colleague’s couch or spend the night in empty classrooms.

But with most of Santorini’s property owners — empowered by home sharing platforms such as Airbnb — catering to high-paying foreign tourists, teachers like Moris and other public sector workers struggle to find affordable homes.

When Moris arrived in September 2022, with the tourist season still going strong, he found no long-term rentals available. At one point he found a hotel room for €20 a night, “a miracle for Santorini”, he said. But it came with a caveat: if the owner found another guest, “even in the middle of the night”, Moris agreed to pack up and go so the hotelier could charge a higher rate.

Such problems are not confined to Santorini, where tourist arrivals last year were almost 60 per cent higher than their pre-pandemic level in 2019. In many European tourist hotspots — from sunny Greek islands to Prague, Lisbon and historic Italian cities — Airbnb and other short-term holiday rentals are severely disrupting the housing market.

In Santorini, teachers arriving each September are typically forced to spend the first few months of the school year in hotels until the tourist season winds down. As a result, their housing costs frequently exceed their salaries, as new teachers’ monthly earnings do not usually exceed €1,000.

“Most teachers don’t want to be sent here,” said Anthi Patramani, president of the secondary education officers’ association on the island. “When they come, there is drama.”

In Italy, the epitome of the rental housing crisis has long been Venice, where tourist beds on the islands in the city’s heart — about 49,000 — exceed the total number of long-term residents. About 20 per cent of those tourist beds are let Airbnb-style, for short-term tourist stays in former residential apartments.

Many other Italian cities are experiencing similar trends. Local officials and social activists say this is not only causing an acute shortage of affordable housing but also destroying the fabric of the country’s traditional urban life.

“This has an effect on our cultural heritage,” said Giacomo Menegus, a legal adviser to the activist group High Pressure Housing, a movement born in Venice and now extending to other cities. “You have not a living city but a sort of Disneyland, or a plastic attraction without people living there. Everything is going to become more or less fake, or very touristy.”

The Greek island of Ios — with 2,000 permanent residents — receives about 150,000 visitors every summer, especially clubbers from the UK and Ireland. Ios mayor Gkikas Gkikas faces the almost impossible task of finding housing for teachers, doctors, firefighters and coastguard officers sent to work on the island.

“It gets harder and harder every year,” said Gikas. This year, a firefighter stayed in the the local museum, while a coastguard officer lived in a room adjacent to the island’s helipad.

Antonis Koutsoumpas, 30, a mathematics teacher assigned mid-year to Ios, spent three months in a room without a kitchen, heating or hot water. But he said the island’s permanent residents — buoyed by their increased incomes from short-term leasing — are now indifferent to public officials.

“The worse was that there was no help whatsoever from the locals, not even the parents of the students,” Koutsoumpas said.

Dimitris Alvanos, the resident doctor on Ios for the past 21 years, said the housing crunch across Greece’s Cycladic islands is a problem for the health services, as medical centres suffer from a lack of staff.

The government has offered a €1,800 bonus in July and August as an incentive to doctors to move to the islands. But while some doctors were interested, Alvanos said that, “since they were unable to find accommodation, no one ended up coming”.

This spring, university students in a number of Italian cities — including Milan, Rome, Florence, Bologna, Padova and Turin — camped out in tents in public places to protest about the acute lack of affordable housing, after residential apartments were converted to short-term holiday rentals en masse while universities were closed during the pandemic period.

“Many people that used to rent to students decided to rent to tourists,” said Francesca Benciolini, a Padova city councillor.

As the crunch worsens, calls for intervention are mounting. The High Pressure Housing movement has urged the Italian government to support legislation that would empower cities to regulate their own local housing markets, and how residential units are used.

City-level regulatory measures could include quotas on the number of units devoted to short-term rentals, or a permit system allowing landlords to rent properties to tourists for fixed period, before requiring them to revert to the long-term residential market.

So far, though, Italy’s tourism minister has suggested a law only requiring the registration of apartments rented for short stays, which Menegus argues would be “completely unsuitable to restore the housing market in cities where there are too many Airbnbs”.

Airbnb said its service accounted “for a small fraction of total visitors to Europe”, representing just 4 per cent of total travellers to Venice, for example.

“We care deeply about housing concerns, enforce local rules in Greece, and have proposed national rules in Italy to help preserve historic cities like Venice,” the company added.

Some Italian cities are trying to act within their limited powers. Florence mayor Dario Nardella said the city will offer tax incentives to encourage property owners to rent homes to long-term residents, rather than short-term visitors, thought that initiative could face legal challenges.

Cities including Paris, London and Barcelona have put in place restrictions on short-term rentals in an attempt to curb their impact, but enforcement has proved challenging. Some landlords have become adept at constructing online listings to circumvent rules requiring registrations or governing how many nights in a year properties can be offered for short-term lease.

In Greece, discussions are under way about more controls in cities, targeting landlords who own multiple homes rented out on short-term leases.

Meanwhile, on the country’s coveted islands, the government is considering incentives for construction companies to renovate old municipal buildings, then allocate 40 per cent of those properties to homes for doctors, nurses and teachers.

“There are properties that could be used,” said Akis Skertsos, a minister responsible for housing. “But the problem will not be solved tomorrow.”

Additional reporting by Cristina Criddle in London