MEXICO CITY — A fierce protest in Mexico City railing against gentrification and mass tourism was fueled by government failures and active promotion to attract “digital nomads,” according to experts, who said tension had been mounting for years.

The criticism comes after Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum alleged that the July 4 protest derived from xenophobia, reviving a debate over an influx of Americans in the city.

Many Mexicans say they’ve been priced out of their neighborhoods — in part because of a move made by Sheinbaum in 2022, when she was the Mexico City mayor and signed an agreement with Airbnb and UNESCO to boost tourism and attract digital nomads (remote workers) despite concern over the potential impact of short-term rentals.

Last week, that came to a head. Hundreds of demonstrators, in a largely peaceful manner, marched through tourism centers of the city with signs reading (in Spanish) “Gringo: Stop stealing our home” and “Housing regulations now!”

Near the end of the march, a group of protesters turned violent, breaking the windows of storefronts and looting several businesses. One protester slammed a butter knife against the window of a restaurant where people were hiding, and another person painted “kill a gringo” on a nearby wall.

“The xenophobic displays seen at that protest have to be condemned,” Sheinbaum said on Monday. “No one should be able to say ‘any nationality get out of our country’ even over a legitimate problem like gentrification. We’ve always been open, fraternal.”

The frustrations were built upon years of mass tourism and rising rent prices in large swaths of the city. The influx of foreigners began around 2020, when Americans flooded into the Mexico City to work remotely, dodge coronavirus restrictions and take advantage of cheaper living costs.

In the years since, choice neighborhoods like Roma and Condesa, lush central areas dotted with cafes and markets, have grown increasingly populated by foreign tourists and digital nomads. Temporary housing units are increasingly being rented through companies like Airbnb that cater to tourists.

Rents and living prices have soared, and English has been increasingly common on the streets of those areas. Some groups have described the phenomenon as a sort of “neo-colonialism.”

The Mexico City Anti-Gentrification Front, one of the organizations behind the protest, stated it was “completely against” any acts of physical violence and denied that the protests were xenophobic. Instead, the organization cited failures by the local government to address the root of the problems.

“Gentrification isn’t just foreigners’ fault; it’s the fault of the government and these companies that prioritize the money foreigners bring,” the organization stated. Meanwhile “young people and the working class can’t afford to live here.”

The organization, in its list of demands, called for greater rent controls, mandates that locals have a voice in larger development projects in their area, stricter laws making it harder for landlords to throw out residents, and prioritizing Mexican renters over foreigners.

Mexico’s protest comes on the back of a wave of similar protests across Europe railing against mass tourism. Tensions in Mexico have also been compounded by wider inequalities and the Trump administration targeting Latino communities in the U.S. as it ramps up deportations.

Protesters’ cries against government failures were echoed by experts, who said that surging gentrification is a product of both a shortage of affordable housing in the city and longtime government failures to regulate the housing market.

Antonio Azuela, a lawyer and sociologist, and others said that they do see the protest as a xenophobic backlash to digital nomads arriving in the city, but anger boiled over because of lax housing laws.

“What has made this explode is lack of regulation in the market,” Azuela said.

Mexico City’s government over the course of decades has made few efforts to control development and create affordable housing.

Legislators estimated there are about 2.7 million houses and apartments in the city, but about 800,000 more are needed. New affordable housing developments have arrived at the fringes of the city, said Luis Salinas, a National Autonomous University of Mexico researcher who has studied gentrification in Mexico City for years.

Controls, meanwhile, have been marked by lack of enforcement, and companies such as Airbnb have capitalized, he said.

Today, more than 26,000 properties in Mexico City are listed on Airbnb, according to Inside Airbnb, an advocacy organization that tracks the company’s impact on residential communities through data. For comparison, there are more than 36,000 Airbnb properties in New York City and 19,000 in Barcelona, where protests have also broken out.

“The government has treated housing like it’s merchandise,” Salinas said. The government’s actions “are completely insufficient,” he added. “The federal government needs to be intervening far more nowadays.”

Airbnb said it helped contribute more than a billion dollars in “economic impact” to Mexico City last year and that spending by guests has supported 46,000 jobs in the city. “What’s needed is regulation based not on prohibitions, but on respect for rights and transparency of obligations,” it stated.

Last year, Mexico City’s government approved the most ambitious rent control law since the 1940s to moderate prices and set caps on short-term rentals to 180 nights a year, but Salinas said that enforcement of short-term rental legislation is on pause until after the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

And even then, the country’s government will have to take far greater actions to get the situation under control, Azuela said.

“This isn’t going to end by just reining in Airbnb,” he said. “They’re going to have to do a whole lot more.”

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MADRID — Spain’s government wanted to send a message last month with its crackdown on vacation rental company Airbnb, a minister told The Associated Press on Tuesday. The message was that the Spanish economy and its housing market are not a “free-for-all” that value profits over the rule of law.

The government ordered Airbnb to remove from its platform almost 66,000 holiday rentals identified as violating local rules by failing to list license numbers, listing the wrong license number, or not specifying the apartment’s owner. Airbnb is appealing the move.

Spain is one of the world’s most visited countries. It has approximately 49 million residents but last year received a record 94 million international visitors.

Meanwhile a housing affordability problem that is particularly acute in cities such as Madrid and Barcelona has led to growing antagonism against short-term holiday rentals. Airbnb is perhaps the best-known and most visible facilitator of such business.

The rise of Airbnb and other short-term rental companies is related to rising rents and housing costs, according to Spanish officials.

“Obviously there is a correlation between these two facts,” Consumer Rights Minister Pablo Bustinduy told the AP. “It’s not a linear relation. It’s not the only factor affecting it; there are many others. But it is obviously one of the elements that is contributing.”

The country has a shortfall of 450,000 homes, a recent Bank of Spain report stated. In the tourist hot spots of the Canary Islands and Balearic Islands, half the housing stock is tourist accommodations or properties owned by nonresidents, according to the report.

“Tourism is for sure a vital part of the Spanish economy; it’s a strategic and very important sector,” Bustinduy said. “But as in every other economic activity, it must be conducted in a sustainable way. It cannot jeopardize the constitutional rights of the Spanish people — their right to housing, but also their right to well-being.”

The country has seen several large protests that have drawn tens of thousands of people to demand more government action on housing. Homemade signs, including one that read “Get Airbnb out of our neighborhoods,” at a recent march in Madrid point to the growing anger.

“A balance must be found between the constitutional rights of the Spanish people and economic activities in general,” Bustinduy said.

Regional governments in Spain are also tackling the issue. Last year, Barcelona announced a plan to not renew licenses for any apartments in the city as short-term rentals (approximately 10,000 are currently licensed) by 2028 to safeguard the housing supply for full-time residents.

Airbnb said that while its appeal goes through the courts, no holiday rentals would be immediately taken down from the site.

In response to Spain’s order, Airbnb has said the platform connects property owners with renters, but it doesn’t have oversight obligations, even though it requires hosts to show that they are compliant with local laws.

Tech companies like Airbnb must be held accountable, Bustinduy said.

“There is a battle going on about accountability and about responsibility,” he said. “The digital nature of these extraordinarily powerful multinational corporations must not be an excuse to fail to comply with democratically established regulations.”

Bustinduy, who belongs to the governing coalition’s left-wing Sumar party, dismissed the idea that the Spanish government‘s action toward Airbnb could discourage some tourists from visiting.

“It will encourage longer stays, it will encourage responsible tourism, and it will preserve everything that we have in this wonderful country,” he said, “which is the reason why so many people want to come here.”

The minister also took a shot at low-cost airlines. Spain has pushed against allowing such airlines to charge passengers for hand baggage. Last year, it fined five budget airlines, including RyanAir and easyJet, a total of $179 million for charging for hand luggage.

“The principle behind these actions is always the same: preserving consumer rights,” Bustinduy said. “Powerful corporations, no matter how large, have to adapt their business models to existing regulations.”

Editor’s note: AP reporter Joseph Wilson contributed to this report from Barcelona.

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Short-term rentals aren’t allowed in residential areas, a restriction intended to prevent neighborhoods from being overrun by tourists at the expense of residents. Instead, the units can operate in the island’s five resort zones and some surrounding areas if their owners register with the city and pay an initial $1,000 fee and then $500 each year to renew.

Although making the registration process less cumbersome has helped, city officials say they’re focused on complaints about illegal short-term rentals in residential areas and don’t even know how many unregistered units may be operating in the resort zones.

Owners who followed the rules expressed frustration at having to pay the higher tax rate while others continue to rent their properties without regulation, underscoring the intractability of the problem. Meanwhile, Honolulu is grappling with how to best navigate the pressures of a tourism-driven economy.

“It really makes me feel angry,” Kuilima Estates East short-term rental owner Michael Heh said.

Heh and his wife, he said, jumped through all the required hoops. But competitors can host more people than allowed by law, he added, by simply not registering their properties.

“They’re escaping the higher property taxes, and they’re able to rent to six (people) instead of four,” he said as an example. That results in crowded communal spaces.

The city began requiring short-term rental owners to register in 2022 as Airbnb and other rental platforms grew in popularity, prompting complaints about rowdy behavior and parking as some neighborhoods became crowded with tourists.

But the process was cumbersome.

“It required a lot of documents,” said Pam Taylor, who with her husband Bryan Taylor owns a one-bedroom unit at Turtle Bay’s Kuilima Estates East.

The Taylors, who live in Utah, purchased the unit in 2019 after their Kahuku-based son got tired of them sleeping on his couch during their visits to the island. They said it took nearly a month to register their property in 2022. It helped that Bryan Taylor was familiar with some of the paperwork required through his experience in the mortgage business.

Honolulu passed a law last year to streamline the process. Now fewer official tax certificates are required. Also, website screenshots are allowed, as are attestations that the city can follow up on submissions if needed.

The number of properties registered as short-term rentals rose from 680 on July 3, 2024 to slightly more than 1,000 by Sept. 18, and then to about 1,380 earlier this month, according to Department of Planning and Permitting spokesperson Davis Pitner.

Like many cities, Honolulu’s biggest source of money is property taxes. Different users pay different rates: Residential units where the owner doesn’t live on the property are charged one of the lowest rates, at 0.04 percent for their first million dollars of assessed value and 1.14 percent beyond that. Hotels and resorts are charged the highest rate, at 1.39 percent of all assessed value.

Short-term rentals don’t fit neatly into either of those categories. That’s why the city recently created a new transient vacation classification, which it set last year at 0.09 percent for the first million dollars of assessed value and 1.15 percent beyond that.

That means the owner of a million-dollar short-term rental unit should be paying $9,000 each year rather than the $4,000 required of nonowner-occupied residences.

At that rate, city officials estimated last year, short-term rentals could bring in about $16 million of annual property tax revenue. That number is projected to rise to $17.8 million next fiscal year, spokesperson Ian Scheuring stated in a text.

Scheuring said it’s difficult to know how many eligible properties aren’t correctly registered, so the city doesn’t have an estimated dollar amount of what it’s missing out on.

Kuilima Estates East is in Turtle Bay, one of O’ahu’s five sanctioned resort zones. The others are Waikīkī, Ko Olina, Mākaha and Hoakalei.

About 80 percent of the complex’s 168 units are used as short-term rentals, Bert Wilkinson, president of the Kuilima Estates East HOA, said. Of that 80 percent, he said, slightly more than half were registered with the city as of December.

Owners at Kuilima Estates East were reminded to register their short-term rentals during a recent homeowners association meeting ahead of a heavy tourist season. Like the city, the HOA doesn’t know exactly how many neighbors are supposed to register but still haven’t.

People don’t register their units largely because it would mean higher property taxes and because of a lack of city oversight, O’ahu Short Term Rental Alliance director Jill Paulin said.

“They’re not enforcing,” she said. “That’s the biggest reason.”

Enforcement against registration scofflaws will arrive eventually, Pitner said. The city is finalizing a template to give notices of violation to people who don’t register, but he declined to give an estimated timeline.

Meanwhile, the city is picking its battles, focusing on complaints that point in the direction of illegal units operating where they shouldn’t — in residential areas.

“If you’re in the resort areas, we presume that you’re able to do these things,” Department of Planning and Permitting Director Dawn Takeuchi Apuna said at a council hearing last year. “Just pay the fee and let us know, and then we can be more focused on enforcing against illegal (short-term rentals).”

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