Airbnb and urban population change: an empirical analysis of the case of Stockholm, Sweden

Internet platforms enabling the short-term rental of private homes are an increasingly important provider of tourist accommodation and a challenge for urban policy. Airbnb is frequently blamed for encouraging property owners to remove their homes from the permanent housing market, thus contributing to the gentrification and displacement of local residents. Empirical research on this topic has been mostly represented by qualitative or indirect quantitative studies, which focus on changes in housing availability rather than the actual population. In our study, we fill this gap by presenting a study of the city of Stockholm, using two sources of georeferenced data: information on properties offered for rent on the Airbnb platform and micro-data on individuals and properties derived from the national statistical office. We verify whether the high number of apartment rental offers on the Airbnb website contributes to the high number of apartments that became uninhabited during 2012–2016. Using both aspatial and spatial autoregressive models, we find that the platform expansion does have a significant effect on the number of emptied apartments, and thus conclude that the presence of Airbnb contributes to the process of touristification, understood as the replacement of permanent residents with non-permanent populations. This confirms that when analysing urban population change and the gentrification process, mobile populations should be considered. Context-aware multiscalar and relational approaches are needed to understand the interrelation between human mobility, housing markets and regulations, and transnational internet platforms.