LOCAL ELECTIONS 2026: Cape Town’s Airbnb surge exacerbating the housing crisis — what are political parties proposing?

Ask any Capetonian what they think of their rent and their response will probably include a string of profanities. Average rent in the Western Cape outstrips all other provinces, with tenants paying R12,561 per month in the latest quarter – a 9.7% increase from Q1 – for accommodation, according to the PayProp 2026 Rental Index. That’s R1,999 more than the runner-up, Northern Cape. Ndifuna Ukwazi, a social justice organisation that advocates for access to affordable land, painted a sombre picture of how unaffordable the Mother City has become for its residents. According to them, 76% of the city’s population earns below R22,000 a month, 58% earn below R10,000, and 25% earn below R3,500 a month. They argue that standard affordability benchmarks for housing should not exceed 30% to 33% of a household’s income, yet more than half of the city cannot afford payments exceeding R3,333. Taking this into consideration along with PayProp’s findings, only the top percentile of the city’s population can comfortably afford its rental/bond prices. In central suburbs like Sea Point, the average monthly rental fees for a one-bedroom apartment can reach more than R20,000, almost totally pricing out local residents. How did we get here?Ndifuna Ukwazi points to colonial-era land dispossessions along with apartheid-era spatial planning, like the Group Areas Act, for initiating Cape Town’s housing crisis. “Post-1994 state housing policy prioritised building Breaking New Ground (BNG/RDP) houses on cheap, distant land, creating “poverty traps”. Simultaneously, the state failed to regulate property speculation or implement inclusionary housing, allowing gentrification to push working-class families out,” Yusrah Bardien, the group’s communications and strategy specialist, told Daily Maverick.Short-term rentals like Airbnbs are also compounding the crisis. With an estimated over 22,000 active listings, Cape Town now hosts more Airbnbs than Singapore, San Francisco and Amsterdam combined – and they’re mostly concentrated in the city’s most crucial economic suburbs like the CBD, Gardens and the Atlantic Seaboard. Bardien also pointed out that the City of Cape Town’s own CBD Local Spatial Development Framework (2026) acknowledges that more than 70% of the inner-city’s rental stock is used up by the hospitality industry.Further rubbing salt in the wound, the City’s housing waiting list stands at about 365,000 households, which will take more than 70 years to address, according to the City.To say Capetonians are gatvol would be an understatement, so, ahead of the local government elections, Daily Maverick wanted to know where the major parties stand and what they plan to do to curb Cape Town’s housing crisis.Here’s what they had to say.DACurrent sitting Cape Town Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis, the party’s candidate in the upcoming elections, told Daily Maverick that Cape Town’s housing shortage largely stemmed from a basic supply and demand problem, citing population growth and semigration as important drivers of the rental escalation.He did, however, concede that short-term rentals like Airbnbs contributed to pressure in neighbourhoods like the city’s CBD and Atlantic Seaboard, but insisted that it would be too simplistic to blame them as the single cause. This does not mean that short-term rentals should get a free ride, according to the DA. The party is hoping to keep these rentals in check through the current Short-Term Letting By-law. If passed and implemented, the by-law will rate properties that are available for short-term letting for more than 50% of its annual room-night capacity as commercial accommodation rather than an ordinary residential property.Geordin Hill-Lewis said Cape Town’s housing shortage largely stemmed from a basic supply-and-demand problem. (Photo: Gallo Images / Brenton Geach) With that being said, Hill-Lewis told Daily Maverick that the party did not believe that rent control was the right solution to curbing the rapid rental inflation the city was experiencing. The DA rather planned to increase the city’s housing supply by releasing well-located and unused state land to private developers. The party also says it planned to reform zoning, which would allow developers to build more dense housing, like apartment blocks. Though there was no mention of any mechanism that would prevent anyone from continuing to sub-let these dwellings as short-term rentals, unless the Short-Term Letting By-law works as a strong enough deterrent.ANCThe ANC told Daily Maverick that it blamed the DA for leading Cape Town while being driven “by profit, and not the socioeconomic wellbeing of its residents”.Short-term rentals were part of a larger problem with Cape Town’s housing market, while being one of its largest contributors, the ANC claimed. Similarly to the DA, the ANC said it would push to release well-located land for development, but with a strong emphasis on redress. The party said that only developers who committed themselves contractually to building low-cost housing would be prioritised. In particular, the CBD and areas like Sea Point would be the focus of land releases from the ANC. Again, like the DA, the ANC said it did not support the outright banning of short-term rentals in certain zones or implementing night caps, fearing that hotels and similar businesses would monopolise tourist accommodation. Though the party said it supported these ideas in the short term, the ANC believed that it wouldn’t solve the bigger housing problem.In general, the ANC’s plan is centred on addressing the “spatial apartheid” that the city is facing by availing land for social and affordable housing in areas that are currently inaccessible to first-time buyers and the working class. Good/Rise MzansiGood and Rise Mzansi are campaigning together for the Western Cape this year, and their mayoral candidate Brett Herron spoke to Daily Maverick about the parties’ plans to address Cape Town’s housing crisis. Herron outlined plans to address Cape Town’s housing crisis, stating that short-term rentals were a significant contributor to the shortage because housing stock was lost to long-term tenants, promising that “short-term rentals need City intervention, and we will do so”.He noted that a broader systemic issue lay in how development was incentivised. According to Herron, the City currently granted developers up to 30% additional bulk for residential builds without requiring any contributions to affordable housing in return. Good party secretary-general and Cape Town mayoral candidate Brett Herron. (Photo: Ziyaad Douglas / Gallo Images) Herron outlined several proposed solutions to address the shortage, including a binding Tenants Charter to protect renters across private residential housing, social housing, and City-owned rental stock.The party also wanted to implement the 2018 draft Inclusionary Housing policy, which would compel developers who applied for and received additional building rights beyond standard zoning allowances to contribute to affordable housing.To regulate short-term rentals, Herron rejected proposals to levy commercial property rates, arguing that the focus must be on managing supply. He proposed enforcing primary zoning compliance through the Development Management System and revising the Guest Accommodation Policy so that short-term letting was restricted to properties where the primary occupant remained in residence.Additionally, Herron advocated for both releasing well-located public land for social housing and having the municipality directly build rent-stabilised affordable housing itself, rather than relying solely on underfunded national subsidy schemes.ActionSADereleen James, ActionSA’s Cape Town mayoral candidate, favours advocating for targeted economic interventions rather than blanket bans or caps on short-term rentals to curb the housing crisis. She argued that while short-term rentals did play a significant role in the rental shortage, Cape Town faced a broader housing supply failure. To tackle the influx of short-term rentals, ActionSA proposed a R100-per-person-per-night tourist levy administered through online booking platforms that would generate revenue for the City to invest elsewhere. However, Daily Maverick was not told why ActionSA landed on R100 for the proposed levy.ActionSA Cape Town mayoral candidate Dereleen James. (Photo: Darren Stewart / Gallo Images) James said that the party also planned to look into vacancy levies, geographically targeted surcharges in high-density accommodation areas, non-resident levies and progressive surcharges on secondary investment properties that would incentivise property owners to return units to the long-term rental market.The party was hopeful that the proposed tourist levy would fund broader cost of living relief efforts like making weekday MyCiti bus fares free for commuters. James also promised a one-year freeze on municipal property-rate increases while doing an audit of the City’s finances and rates structure. And on public land management, ActionSA also proposed a temporary freeze on the sale of City-owned land while a municipal asset audit was undertaken. Following this proposed audit, the party planned to accelerate land releases for affordable and social housing in partnership with the private sector and social housing institutions. EFFThe EFF did not respond to Daily Maverick’s questions, but that doesn’t mean we can’t take a look at their manifesto and what it promises. The manifesto pledges an immediate freeze on the sale of all municipal-owned land and the reliance on private property markets to drive social housing. Most notably, the party intends to exercise municipal expropriation powers to seize abandoned land and hijacked buildings that will be converted into affordable housing by the municipality. Seemingly, the central cog in the EFF’s plan is to eliminate the reliance on private developers and have the municipalities finish stalled or abandoned developments. The manifesto also sets explicit inclusion targets that promise to reserve between 5% and 10% of the to-be redistributed land for people with disabilities. It also promises to allocate housing to all disabled applicants within the first 12 months of taking office. In an interview with CapeTalk’s Clarence Ford, the party’s mayoral candidate Nontando Nolutshungu offered some insights into what the party is planning for housing in the city. She said that the party planned to do an audit asap if it won Cape Town and identify land that could be used for social housing. She also criticised the sale of land to private developers, saying that “they are only building for people who can afford… private developers are building posh houses for the middle class and upper class who can afford to buy in those areas”.What about the Short-Term Letting By-Law?While parties provide plans for the future, the City is currently working on a draft Short-Term Letting By-Law that claims to provide some level of relief. The by-law wants each listed short-term rental property on booking platforms to register with the City to have a City-issued registration number that must be displayed, otherwise the listed property should get removed. The by-law will target properties that are rented out for more than 50% of the year, and do not form part of someone’s residence – like a backyard flat or spare room. If a property meets the 50% occupancy threshold, it will be reclassified as commercial accommodation and charged higher business property rates. The Rent Control Group, an affordable housing advocacy group, says the by-law will largely be ineffective. Leila Kidson, a member of the Rent Control Group, told Daily Maverick that the by-law would not do anything to increase how many houses were being taken off the market, but rather just add a tax that the owners could probably afford to pay. In an op-ed published by Kidson, she calls the by-law, at its core, an “exercise in reclassification for property rates purposes”, “with no mention of or attempt to manage the retrogressive effect of short-term letting on the long-term stability and tenure of the residents who make our city run.” Ndifuna Ukwazi also remains critical of the by-law, saying that “framing short-term rentals as a narrow property-rates issue fails to address the housing crisis”.Ndifuna Ukwazi’s Bardien added that generating more revenue from rates did not guarantee that the City’s housing stock would be returned to local long-term renters. DM