Effect of simple accommodation regulation on preventing population decline in the historical centre of Kyoto City

Recent tourism gentrification has been attributed to an increase in extreme short-term rentals through P2P digital platforms. Although many tourist cities have implemented regulations on short-term rentals, several studies have shown the ineffectiveness of those regulations. This study aimed to investigate the effect of the Kyoto City government’s regulation on preventing population decline in the historical center of Kyoto City. The Kyoto City government indirectly regulates simple accommodations (SAs) through the host’s location of SA management stations. Specifically, small SAs must have hosts who are stationed approximately 800 m from the management SAs. The research design adopted the difference-in-differences regression analysis that analyzed the effects of the number of accommodations on population change. As a result, this study found the number of opening SAs decreased by about half after the regulation. The result suggests that the regulation on SAs might have made it more difficult for SAs to open. Instead of SAs, the number of opening hotels increased by about 1.5 times after regulation. In addition, the regulation increased the number of populations by 7.419 [1.268, 13.57] for each additional hotel from the pre-regulation to post-regulation periods. In the historical center of Kyoto City, population decline accelerated from the pre-regulation period (n = −365) to the post-regulation period (n = −1073). Therefore, our findings were interesting as the populations increased in the NAs where hotels opened during the post-regulation period. Thus, the Kyoto City government’s regulation was effective in preventing population decline due to tourism gentrification.