What Happens When a City Bans Airbnb? The Data from 5 Cities That Tried

The council chambers in city after city have filled with the same two crowds. On one side: residents who believe short-term rentals are hollowing out neighborhoods and driving rents to the moon. On the other: hosts, property owners, and tourism advocates who argue that banning Airbnb will gut local economies and solve nothing.

Both sides cite data. Both sides sound certain. And in more and more cities, one side has won a vote and passed a ban.

So what actually happened next?

I spent time tracking the real outcomes across five cities that moved from debate to action. Some banned STRs outright. One tried and got stopped by courts. One is mid-experiment right now. Each one tells us something important about the gap between what regulators promise and what the data delivers.

The results are more complicated than either side wants to admit.

New York City: The Biggest Experiment in the World

No city has gone further, faster, against short-term rentals than New York. Local Law 18 took effect on September 5, 2023. Under the law, hosts must register with the city, remain present during all guest stays, and cannot host more than two guests at a time. In practice, that last rule made entire-home rentals in most of the city functionally illegal.

The results were immediate and dramatic. Airbnb listings in New York City dropped from roughly 22,000 active units to approximately 3,227 registered listings after enforcement began. That is an 85-90% reduction. In the outer boroughs alone, listings fell from around 17,000 to just 1,400, translating to an estimated 80,000 fewer guests per month.

The city celebrated. Housing advocates declared victory. The promise had been made: remove the short-term rentals, and apartments would flow back to long-term tenants and rents would ease.

That did not happen.

According to data cited by the Habitat Magazine analysis of Local Law 18 in September 2025, Manhattan rents reached all-time highs averaging around $4,700 per month. Across the city, rents increased approximately 8% in the two years after Local Law 18 went into effect, compared to roughly 3.5% nationally. The rental vacancy rate, which was already at 1.4% before LL18 took effect according to the 2023 Housing and Vacancy Survey, showed no meaningful improvement. Jonathan Miller, CEO of appraisal firm Miller Samuel, put it plainly: “The law doesn’t seem to have a material impact in making rents more affordable.”

A critical and underreported piece of this story: it is still unclear how many of those 18,000-plus removed short-term rental units actually entered the long-term rental market. Many may have stayed vacant, been converted to second homes, or found other uses entirely. The pipeline that advocates assumed existed never fully materialized.

Meanwhile, hotels won. An Airbnb-commissioned report found that NYC average hotel room rates climbed by 6-7% year over year after LL18 took effect, hitting around $283 per night in July 2024. Visitors did not leave. They just paid more for a hotel room.

The Mayor’s Office touted the removal of tens of thousands of illegal rentals as a housing victory. The outer boroughs told a different story. The same Airbnb report estimated $1.6 billion in lost visitor spending for those neighborhoods, more than 15,700 fewer jobs, and $573 million less in worker earnings.

StaySTRA data on the New York City market shows what remains on the other side of the enforcement wall: just 47 active listings post-LL18, with an average daily rate of $273.52 and an occupancy rate of 87%. The hosts who survived the law are fully booked. The city still draws 65 million visitors annually. But the economic picture for outer-borough hosts and small tourism businesses is grim.

By late 2025, New York City Council was considering Intro 1107, a reform proposal that would allow owners of one- and two-family homes to operate short-term rentals without being physically present during stays. A telling admission that the original law overreached.

Dallas: The Ban That Never Landed

In June 2023, the Dallas City Council voted to ban short-term rentals from single-family residential neighborhoods. Under the new ordinance, STRs would only be permitted in areas zoned for hotels and in certain high-density multi-family zones. If it had taken effect, the ordinance would have eliminated the vast majority of Dallas Airbnb listings.

It never took effect.

Within months, a district court judge issued a temporary injunction blocking enforcement. The Fifth District Court of Appeals upheld that injunction in February 2025 and again in July 2025. As of March 2026, Dallas STRs are still operating normally, and the city is now asking the Texas Supreme Court to step in.

The price tag for this stalemate: the city of Dallas has spent at least $3.5 million in taxpayer money fighting the legal battle as of early 2025, according to reporting by CandysDirt. The housing problem the ordinance was meant to solve remains untouched.

What has enforcement looked like in practice? The city has processed 160 STR-related complaints since June 2023, roughly 11 per month, mostly for noise, parking, and litter violations under existing code. Nothing has changed on the ground for either operators or renters.

There is one additional wrinkle that makes the Dallas political calculus harder than ever: the World Cup arrives in 2026. AT&T Stadium in Arlington will host matches, and the Dallas-Fort Worth area needs every available hospitality bed it can get. Removing STRs from the market in a World Cup host city is a conversation that elected officials are not eager to have.

As CandysDirt noted in July 2025, the STR ban in Dallas remains stalled with no resolution in sight. The city passed a law. The law does not exist in practice. And the housing situation it was meant to address has received exactly zero attention from the policy intervention.

Dallas is a warning. Passing a ban is not the same as implementing one.

Maui: The Most Aggressive Bet Yet

No city on this list has made a bigger swing than Maui County, and none carries a higher economic risk alongside its housing promise.

The context is devastating and important. In August 2023, wildfires killed 102 people, destroyed approximately 2,200 structures in West Maui, and displaced more than 12,000 residents. The disaster threw a spotlight on an island where roughly half of all families were already spending more than 30% of their income on housing. Short-term vacation rentals had long been blamed for squeezing the housing supply. After the fires, that argument acquired urgent moral weight.

In December 2025, Maui County Council passed Bill 9 by a 5-3 vote, and Mayor Richard Bissen signed it into law on December 15. The law phases out approximately 6,200 short-term vacation rental units from apartment-zoned districts. West Maui properties must transition by January 1, 2029. South Maui has until January 1, 2031. Properties in resort-zoned areas are not affected.

The housing upside is real. An economic analysis prepared by the University of Hawaii Economic Research Organization found the policy would “increase housing affordability somewhat,” with more than 11,600 households representing 21% of island families potentially able to afford the converted units at reduced prices. Median condo prices have already responded: the REALTORS Association of Maui reported a 22.8% year-over-year decline in median condo sale prices as of December 2025, a direct market response to the approaching phase-out.

But the same UHERO study was clear-eyed about the costs. The policy would eliminate roughly one-quarter of Maui County’s visitor accommodations. Visitor spending is projected to shrink by 15%. Approximately 1,900 jobs, about 3% of the county’s entire payroll, are expected to disappear. The island stands to lose an estimated $65 million per year in real property taxes and roughly $50 million more in general excise and transient accommodations tax revenues.

That is not an argument against the decision. It is a recognition that Maui made a genuine choice to prioritize housing over tourism revenue, with eyes open about the cost. Whether that tradeoff delivers depends entirely on execution. In February 2026, the Maui Planning Commission rejected a bill that would have exempted thousands of vacation rentals from the phase-out. The law is moving forward.

Maui will be the most watched STR experiment in the United States over the next five years.

Barcelona: The 2028 Bet Europe Is Watching

In June 2024, Barcelona Mayor Jaume Collboni announced that when the city’s approximately 10,000 existing short-term rental licenses expire in November 2028, they will not be renewed. No new licenses have been issued since the announcement. When those licenses expire, Airbnb-style tourist apartments will be eliminated from Barcelona.

The legal foundation solidified in March 2025, when Spain’s Constitutional Court upheld Barcelona’s authority to end the licensing program, rejecting property owner claims that the phase-out constituted an illegal property seizure. The court cited Spain’s constitutional right to housing as grounds for the decision.

The city’s housing argument is grounded in real numbers. Barcelona residents have watched rents climb approximately 62% over the past decade. The growth of short-term vacation rentals into every neighborhood, alongside structural supply constraints, has been a significant contributing factor. Mayor Collboni’s framing is straightforward: return 10,000 units to the housing market and ease the pressure.

The honest question is what actually happens to those 10,000 units after 2028. If recent history from other cities is any guide, “removed from STR” does not automatically mean “affordable housing.” Owners may leave units vacant, use them as personal homes, or shift to longer-term furnished rentals that still carry high price tags. Shelterforce research found that rent controls in Barcelona are showing some promise, but STR presence continues to limit progress. The city has built in incentives for owners who commit to affordable long-term rentals starting in 2027, which is the right structural approach. Whether the incentives will be strong enough is a question for 2029.

Barcelona is the boldest bet in Europe. City governments from Paris to Amsterdam to Lisbon are watching what happens.

Santa Monica: Ten Years of Data, One Uncomfortable Finding

If you want to know what happens after a city bans Airbnb, the most useful place to look is the city that did it first.

Santa Monica passed its Home Sharing Ordinance in 2015. The law banned the rental of entire homes for less than 30 days, allowing only hosts who were physically present to offer a room to guests. It was aggressive for its time, and it worked in the narrow sense: Airbnb listings in Santa Monica dropped by roughly 60% within two years of implementation.

Then enforcement got complicated. The regulation’s effectiveness eroded in its second year as enforcement resources fell short of the scope of the problem. The city eventually reached a 2019 settlement with Airbnb requiring all Santa Monica listings to be registered home-shares, which tightened compliance somewhat.

But the housing market question is where the data gets uncomfortable for advocates. A 2024 peer-reviewed study by Cayrua Chaves Fonseca, published in the International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis, used the Synthetic Control Method to compare Santa Monica’s rent outcomes against comparable Los Angeles County cities that did not implement similar regulations. The finding was unambiguous: the Home Sharing Ordinance had no statistically significant impact on rents in Santa Monica.

The most likely explanation mirrors what appears to have happened in New York: the units removed from the short-term rental market did not flow into the long-term rental market. They stayed vacant. They became second homes. They shifted to furnished longer-term rentals that still carried high price tags. The pipeline connecting “one fewer Airbnb” to “one more affordable apartment” was leaky from the start.

Ten years of data from the city that went first arrives at a consistent conclusion: banning short-term rentals reliably reduces short-term rentals. It does not reliably reduce rents.

What the Pattern Reveals

Step back from the five individual stories and a consistent picture emerges across all of them.

Enforcement, when it actually happens, works mechanically. New York’s listings dropped 85-90%. Santa Monica’s dropped 60%. Where regulators committed resources to enforcement, listing counts fell. Cities can, in fact, remove STRs from the market if they choose to.

The housing benefit is a different problem entirely. The critical variable is not whether STR units disappear from platforms. It is whether those units become long-term housing for people who need it. That conversion is not automatic. Owners have choices. Many of them make choices that do not benefit renters.

Enforcement is genuinely hard. Dallas spent $3.5 million and accomplished nothing on the ground. Santa Monica watched its own law erode in year two. Even New York City, with formidable regulatory resources, has not resolved the question of where those thousands of removed units actually went.

The economic costs are real and tend to fall hardest on the people regulators say they want to protect. Outer-borough New York hosts and tourism workers, Maui hospitality employees, small operators who built livelihoods around STR income: these are not Wall Street landlords. Many of them are exactly the working-class residents that housing policy is supposed to serve.

What Smart Hosts Do With This Information

If you operate in a city where a ban is being debated or working through courts, the Dallas story is your first read. Legal challenges have real power to stall enforcement for years. But years of injunctions also mean years of uncertainty that make long-term planning nearly impossible. Build a contingency plan even while the courts deliberate.

If you are in a market like Maui where a phase-out is now law, the window to adjust your strategy is real and narrowing. The smart operators are already mapping which of their properties fall in exempt resort zones, which could convert to mid-term furnished rentals serving traveling nurses or remote workers, and which markets outside the regulation zone might absorb their capital.

If you are in a market with no current regulation, the data from these five cities should sharpen how you read political signals. City councils that frame the STR debate entirely around housing affordability, without engaging seriously with the unit-conversion question or the economic costs, are likely heading toward a New York-style result: dramatic headline action, modest housing impact, and significant collateral damage to the tourism economy they also claim to support.

The evidence from five cities is consistent: bans are not the end of short-term rentals. They are a reshaping of the market. The operators who understand that tend to find their way through.

We do our best to keep our reporting accurate and up to date, but situations evolve and we are only human. Always verify current details directly with local officials and sources before making decisions.

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For a deeper look at the New York City market including active rental counts, average daily rates, and neighborhood-level data, check out our New York City market profile.

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