Paris (AFP)
From the bed at dawn, a young man still in T-shirt opens the door to the controllers: the mayor of Paris continues his hunt for unlawful leases AirBnb hoping for a new tour of the state.
"This is not a rental, it's my parents' apartment and I live here", breathes the inhabitant of this building of the very chic 7th arrondissement, located a stone's throw from the Eiffel Tower, the agents of the Office for the Protection of the Premises of the City of Paris.
Popular with tourists, this type of housing is ubiquitous on short-term rental platforms, says Marlène. She is one of about 30 agents who, once a month, go door to door, hoping to surprise AirBnb tenants out of nails.
The problem, she concedes, "is that the owners warn tourists and ask them not to open the door" or "to pretend to be friends, or family".
About 65,000 Paris homes are rented on AirBnb. And "a good part of them, probably a good half, are illegal rentals that have no registration numbers", yet mandatory, plague Ian Brossat, Deputy (PCF) in charge of Housing.
In February, the mayor of Paris had sued AirBnb for putting online 1,000 unregistered homes.
The rules are clear: a dwelling in principal residence can be rented only within the limit of 120 days per year. But "today, we are more and more confronted with professionals, multi-owners who buy homes with the sole purpose of turning them into a cash machine", irritates Mr. Brossat.
"In 2018, as a result of control operations, 188 owners were summoned to court" for a presumption of offense, "among which, 179 were sentenced," rejoices the mayor of Paris. In total, the amount of the fines amounted to 2,138,500 euros.
But for Ian Brossat, "if we want to be more effective we must probably strengthen the rules".
- "Not the power to forbid" -
Monday, at the microphone of France Inter, the socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo said it was necessary to "go further and perhaps even ban AirBnb in a number of districts" from the center of the capital.
"I do not want, and I do not have the power to ban generally AirBnb," she said however in her book published Wednesday "The Place of Possible" (editions of The Observatory).
Forbid AirBnb would be "a violation of property rights of Parisians," says the platform, and this measure would "against the Constitution and the main principles of the EU." "The housing problems in Paris are old and have not been caused by the rental of short-term housing," the company adds.
In addition, "the number of second homes and vacancies has steadily increased since the 1960s," says AFP AirBnb, citing the figures of INSEE estimating "100,000 the number of vacant housing in Paris".
Paris is also facing a new problem: the transformation of "many commercial premises" into "accommodation dedicated to tourists", to which the current rules can not be applied, according to a letter sent in July by the town hall to the Minister of Housing, Julien Denormandie. The letter, which asks the state "to quickly change the legislation", has so far remained unanswered, according to the cabinet of Ian Brossat.
A lobby of several cities against AirBnb is also set up: on Thursday, the representatives of Lisbon, Madrid, Reykjavik, Berlin, Bologna or Barcelona will meet in Brussels to discuss "prospects for collaboration" and "the constraints posed by the European legislation and the deliberate future of the EU Court of Justice ", two decisions of which are expected shortly.
© 2019 AFP