A general view of Cape Town City Centre on December 18, 2025. Nestled between spectacular mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, Cape Town has emerged as a growing tourism destination, topping in 2025 the Telegraph and Time Out magazine’s rankings of best cities in the world. Activists say the drive to profit from tourism accommodation is pricing locals out of coveted neighbourhoods, including areas near District Six — a site long associated with the apartheid-era removals that displaced non-white communities to remote, underdeveloped townships.
The laughter of children echoed against walls lined with dozens of mattresses in a large, dim room of an illegally occupied building in Cape Town’s bustling and touristy city centre. A girl was having her hair braided on a stool near neatly placed plastic bags holding the belongings of people who had moved into the abandoned building from across the city. The property is in the heart of Cape Town, where rental prices are soaring as tourism is booming.
“My income doesn’t allow me to pay Cape Town’s exorbitant rent prices,” said one of the residents, Fundisa Loza, 46. She moved in with her two daughters, aged 12 and 18, to be near her night-shift work at a call centre in the central business district, about a 20-minute walk away. Accommodation in the area is listed as starting at around 10,000 rand (nearly $600) a month for a one-room flat, unaffordable on Loza’s monthly salary of 8,400 rand.
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Nestled between spectacular mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, Cape Town is a growing tourism destination, topping the Telegraph and Time Out magazine’s 2025 rankings of best cities in the world. It has more short-term rental units than bigger cities such as Barcelona and Berlin, which see up to five times more visitors per year, said Jens Horber from the housing activism group, Ndifuna Ukwazi. In touristy locations like the city centre and the Atlantic seafront, Airbnb listings have increased by 190 percent since 2022, Horber said. “Long-term rental units have been converted into tourist accommodation, removing units from the housing supply, raising rental costs and pushing out locals from neighbourhoods where they can no longer afford to live,” he said.
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