New Haven residents and housing advocates stood outside City Hall Tuesday, under a banner that read “New Haven is not for sale!” as they called out Airbnb for worsening the city’s housing shortage.
Local tenants accused the online vacation rental marketplace of price-gouging residents and shuffling them outside city limits.
City Legislators, who joined the evening news conference, presented a proposed short-term rental ordinance, which would ban non-owner-occupied rentals of 30 days or less if the property is not the operator's primary residence.
Newly elected state representative and Director of New Haven’s Fair Rent Commission, Wildaliz Bermudez, said her office is seeing droves of tenants with rapidly increasing rent.
Bermudez also recalled looking for a one-family home with her husband in the city’s Fair Haven neighborhood, only to be outpriced by investors looking to flip permanent homes into Airbnb-listable vacation rentals.
“In the neighborhood where we live, there is a plethora of Airbnbs,” Bermudez said. “What does that mean for the actual neighborhood? It means we don’t know who our neighbors are; it means that the cost of the neighborhood will continue to rise.”
New Haven is at the center of Connecticut’s statewide housing drag. In 2024, the Bridgeport-New Haven area ranked fourth nationwide in rental competitiveness, outpacing even Manhattan in terms of affordable unit competition.
A centerpiece of New Haven Mayor Justin Elicker’s policy agenda has been creating more affordable housing units.
The city in recent years has converted hotels into homeless shelters and built thousands of affordable units, though housing advocates say that increased market infiltration from corporate landlords and out-of-state property owners must be regulated for these initiatives to succeed.
Other organizers called out luxury apartment buildings in the Downtown neighborhood like The Liberty and The Taft, which they say rent out empty apartments as vacation rentals through Airbnb.
Joshua Stanley, union president for Local 217, who represents New Haven’s hospitality and hotel workers, and said Airbnb’s presence in both the housing market and vacation rental industry has made things especially rocky for the Elm City’s hotel employees.
Hotel workers at the Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale went on strike in 2024. But Stanley said cuts to workers’ hours are making it impossible for hotel employees to live in New Haven.
“We achieved a contract that would help people get back on their feet, but when the rent is going up way beyond inflation, it’s so hard for people to keep up and not get priced out of the city,” Stanley said.
Stanley said that New Haven is seeing record tourism numbers, but that the benefits of the boom are not trickling down to the city’s hotel staff.
“Hospitals, healthcare tourism is on the rise; we’re watching [a] biotech boom. There are more and more people travelling to this city,” Stanley said. “No matter how we have struggled with the companies to work with them through strikes and negotiations at the table, the economic standard that we want is still not adding up for our members.”
