Increase in Households Triggered by Accommodation Closure Due to the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Historical Center of Kyoto City

Shunpei Kamino and Haruka Kato ()
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Shunpei Kamino: Department of Lining Environment Design, Graduate School of Human Life and Ecology, Osaka Metropolitan University, Osaka 545-0051, Japan
Haruka Kato: Department of Lining Environment Design, Graduate School of Human Life and Ecology, Osaka Metropolitan University, Osaka 545-0051, Japan

Sustainability, 2024, vol. 16, issue 22, 1-16

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many accommodations to close. However, the pandemic might play an important role in providing an opportunity to achieve sustainable tourism with a good balance between housing for residents and accommodation for tourists. As the theoretical framework, this study aims to investigate the change in households triggered by accommodation closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic in Kyoto City’s historical center. Furthermore, the causes of these changes were examined by analyzing the real estate properties traded on the market. For the analysis, this study considered the COVID-19 pandemic as a natural experiment to investigate the causal relationship between the number of households, closed accommodations, and real estate properties. As a result, it was found that households increased by approximately 1.34 in neighborhood associations with closed simple accommodations. Regarding the causes of the increase, closed simple accommodation properties tend to change to short-term rentals. This study also highlighted that closed simple accommodations have significantly smaller room sizes than other property types, with only slightly higher prices. As a theoretical contribution, our findings suggest that the pandemic might have suppressed tourism gentrification, but increased the number of households.

Keywords: sustainable tourism; COVID-19 pandemic; household; tourism gentrification; accommodation; real estate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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