Temporary rental platforms one more face of the commodification of housing. Debate on the problems and possible solutions.

The growth of temporary rentals around the world is playing a significant role in the housing affordability crisis. Its geographic and quantitative expansion - which today is of increasing interest also to the Global South - is taking place in a context of generalized deregulation and is benefiting from digital capitalism. In this context, even the most progressive governments find themselves facing a series of difficulties in designing and, above all, implementing adequate regulations to protect the population's right to housing.

In the general process of real estate financialization, housing as an investment vehicle is the permanent object of new formulas that expand the frontier of extraction of urban rents that are highly concentrated. Although temporary rentals are traditionally associated with tourist residences, their massification also involves middle-income sectors and "new citizenships" such as the "digital nomads" who combine the mobility of tourism with remote work and who, even so, in many cases are economically displaced from their countries of origin.

Several studies, especially in the countries of the global north where this phenomenon has been occurring for many years, show the relationship between the expansion of the supply of temporary rentals of a whole housing unit and the dynamics of the increase in the price of permanent housing and eviction processes of the tenant population or of those who do not have security of tenure. This is evident in large cities but also in small urban agglomerates and is even affecting peripheral areas and popular or social housing itself, with temporary or financialized rentals gaining ground in informal settlements, slums and favelas.

The advance of these platforms and their impact on the right to housing occurs not only in a context of lack of regulation, but also of direct incentive by public bodies. If, on the one hand, cities are responding to increased pressure to regulate these platforms, others are collaborating directly with them in strategies to boost the local economy through tourism.

It is necessary to confront temporary and/or platform rentals as a new economic model for cities, a new housing industry; and not only as a phenomenon that affects access to housing. To this end, this event seeks to outline an analysis of how the temporary rental sector is being structured in its global and local components, what is the role of the different actors involved, the real impact on the right to housing of different sectors of the population and what are some ways to guarantee this right in the current context. In this sense, the conversation seeks to bring together a diverse range of actors and organizations from the global North and South that are organizing and thinking about the phenomenon of temporary and/or platform rentals from a human rights perspective, reinforcing translocal alliances committed to the right to housing in a context of increasing speculation on a global scale.