The Real Cost of the Digital Nomad Movement.
I should say at the outset that I understand the appeal. Being a digital nomad, that is. David and I lived it. For years we ran Mr and Mr Jones from wherever we happened to be, laptops open in hotel rooms and rented apartments across Southeast Asia, Europe, and beyond. We know what it feels like to land in a beautiful city and think: I could stay here.
What I did not fully understand at the time is what happens to a place when thousands of people arrive with the same idea simultaneously, earning salaries in currencies that make the local cost of living feel like a rounding error. The digital nomad movement is quietly reshaping cities in ways that are not always visible from the window of a co-working space and the travel industry has been remarkably slow to reckon with it.
Cape Town is where I see it most clearly, because Cape Town is home. And because David and I have not simply observed this crisis from a distance. We have lived it.
De Waterkant is where I was living when I met David, 26 years ago. It is where he moved in with me, the neighbourhood we returned to whenever we came back to South Africa. For those who do not know it, De Waterkant is a small enclave at the foot of Signal Hill, with a history reaching back to the 1700s. Its cottages were built by the descendants of slaves brought to the Cape Colony by the Dutch from Africa, India, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and elsewhere in Asia, and It was, for generations, a traditional residential area of Cape Town’s Muslim community, part of the broader Bo-Kaap, and its mosques and kramats remain part of that heritage. In more recent decades it was the heart of Cape Town’s LGBTQ+ community, its rainbow district, known internationally for its open-mindedness and the feeling that you could be entirely yourself there. The kind of neighbourhood where you knew your neighbours and the café owner knew your order. The community that made it what it was has largely dispersed. Café Manhattan, South Africa’s oldest gay bar and restaurant, still holds its ground, but it is increasingly an exception rather than the rule.
The cottages that once housed families and long-term residents have been sold to foreign buyers and either left sitting empty for eleven months of the year or converted into managed short-term rentals. Walk through De Waterkant on a weekday in winter and the silence tells you everything. These are not homes any more. They are investments.
David and I can no longer live there. There is almost no long-term rental inventory left, and what does exist is priced beyond what two people can reasonably expect to pay. Purchasing property is no more realistic. Prices in De Waterkant and the surrounding neighbourhoods have been driven so high by foreign buyers and investor demand that they are out of reach for the vast majority of South Africans, and if you are not already on the property ladder in much of this city, the door is all but closed. But here is the thing, we were not priced out by a single dramatic event. It happened gradually, one lease not renewed here, one building converted there, until one day the neighbourhood that felt like it had been ours for more than two decades simply was not any more.
I say this not because our situation is the most serious. It is not, and I am aware of how it sounds. Two professionals lamenting the loss of their neighbourhood is, by any honest measure, a first world problem. It pales beside the families fighting to remain in District Six, beside the hundreds of thousands of households on the social housing waiting list, beside the generations of people of colour forcibly removed from their homes under apartheid and whose communities have never been adequately restored by any government since. But I mention it precisely because of the contrast. If two people with professional incomes, one born in this city and the other who has called it home since his early twenties, can be quietly priced out by the short-term rental economy and the influx of foreign spending power, then the extreme pressure being exerted on people with far less is not difficult to imagine. It is simply not being imagined by the people creating it.
Earlier this year, graffiti appeared on the Sea Point promenade: “Digital nomads go home! Now!” The frustration is everywhere. And the numbers back it up. Cape Town now has nearly 27,000 Airbnb listings, a 92% increase since 2019, with more than 80% of them entire homes. In Sea Point, roughly a quarter of the housing stock has been absorbed by short-term platforms. In the city centre, around 70% of downtown residential housing is dedicated to hotel rooms or short-term rentals. Property prices have risen 31% in five years, double the rate of any other major South African city.
Remote workers and digital nomads, drawn by the climate and a cost of living that feels negligible in dollars or euros or pounds, have added fuel to the fire. But when someone earning a London salary competes for a place to stay in Woodstock or Green Point with someone earning a Cape Town salary, the outcome is a foregone conclusion.
In January, a video went viral of a freelance operations manager earning around R20,000 a month, tearfully explaining how she and her daughter faced homelessness after her landlord converted the property to Airbnb. It struck a nerve far beyond housing policy, touching on something deeper about who Cape Town is really for.
Because this crisis did not begin with digital nomads. It began with apartheid. The geographic inequality of white minority rule persists more than thirty years on. Townships remain poor. It is reported that more than 400,000 households sit on the social housing waiting list. Nearly a fifth of residents live in informal dwellings. The population has grown 65% since 2001, and the infrastructure has not kept pace. What digital nomads and short-term rentals have done is add an entirely new layer of pressure to a system that was already failing. In Bo-Kaap, generations of families are being priced out. In District Six, where the apartheid government displaced more than 60,000 people in the 1960s, families who managed to remain are now facing eviction after their property was sold to a developer. The patterns rhyme in ways that should make everyone uncomfortable..
I want to be honest about the tension in writing this. We are a travel company. We benefit from people wanting to visit Cape Town and other great cities around the world. I am not arguing against tourism or remote work being a digital nomad. The city needs the 210,000 jobs and the revenue that tourism generates. But both can be done well, and both require the people making the decisions to think about long-term consequences rather than just short-term revenue.
What I am arguing against is the wilful blindness. The idea that you can land in a city, pay your rent in a foreign currency, drive up the cost of everything around you, and bear no responsibility for what happens next. The Instagram post from the rooftop co-working space does not show the family who used to live in the flat downstairs and the tik tok video about your R250,000 (~US$15,300) a month penthouse in Sea Point is more than a little tone deaf.
This is not unique to Cape Town. Barcelona is phasing out short-term rental licences. New York has introduced strict registration requirements. Amsterdam caps short-term lets at 30 nights a year. Cape Town is proposing commercial tax rates for short-term rental properties, though I do not believe this goes nearly far enough. A tax adjustment signals intent, but it does not create housing, protect long-term tenants, or address the deeper structural failures that the city and local government have been slow to confront.
There is a colonial dynamic at play when people from wealthier economies settle in communities where their spending power dwarfs that of local residents, extracting the beauty and the culture without contributing meaningfully to the fabric of the place. In South Africa, where the spatial legacy of colonialism and apartheid is built into the geography of every city, that parallel is not abstract. It is lived.
The travel industry has a responsibility here. At Mr and Mr Jones, we think about this constantly. We think about where we send our clients and how their presence in a place can be a net positive rather than a net extraction. We will always champion locally owned and managed properties, recommend restaurants where the revenue stays in the community, and design itineraries that respect the rhythm and reality of the places we love.
None of this is simple. Cape Town’s housing crisis is the product of decades of spatial inequality, chronic underinvestment, rapid population growth, and a property market that responds to profit signals rather than human need. Short-term rentals and digital nomads are not the whole story. But they are a significant and accelerating chapter, and it is one that the travel industry cannot afford to keep ignoring.
I write this as someone who loves this city. Who chose to make it home. I write it because I think we owe it to the places we love to tell the truth about what is happening to them, even when the truth is uncomfortable, even when it implicates us.
Because a city without its people is just scenery. And scenery, no matter how beautiful, is not enough.
Yours in travel and the pursuit of the extraordinary, always,
(Ps. Thinking of travelling? Read a little more about our thoughts on ethical travel, fragile places, and doing good – quietly or our thoughts on Off Season Travel and knowing when enough is enough)
