June 13, 2025 by Ryan Wangman and Maddy McCarty
2026 World Cup Stakes Are Bigger Than A Trophy — U.S. Affordable Housing Is At Risk, Too
North America’s first full-blown football feast in over 30 years is headed for the oven, and the timer is set for 360 days from today.
The 104-game, 39-day 2026 FIFA World Cup will kick off in Mexico City on June 11, 2026, and the U.S. got its first taste this weekend with the start of the smaller-scale Club World Cup.
Superstars from the globe’s biggest game are expected to draw hordes of fans to 16 cities across the continent, driving construction of new hotels, entertainment venues, restaurants and more, while billions in public investment flow to stadium, transportation and infrastructure upgrades.
“This is not the Super Bowl. That’s a one-week sort of thing,” said Victor Matheson, professor of economics at College of the Holy Cross. “This really is eight Super Bowls, seven, nine, whatever city you’re in.”
About 6.5 million spectators are expected to attend matches in Mexico, Canada and the U.S., with a flock of non-attendee visitors in tow, for the largest edition of the world competition to date.
But all of those visitors will need a place to lay their heads. And in cities already grappling with housing affordability crises, warning cries are rising that the massive event could worsen displacement by pricing locals out and cutting permanent supply.
In some places, cracks are already showing.
The risk isn’t dramatic evictions or demolition, but a systemic loss of affordability from rising rents and landlords looking to make a quick buck by converting units into short-term rentals ahead of the matches.
The U.S. has never hosted a sporting event of this magnitude in the STR age, and host cities’ hotel capacity will fall short in many markets, like Dallas, which expects to welcome almost 49 visitors for every existing hotel room. Housing advocates say a swift rise in profiteering could pull units off the market and reverberate long past the event itself.
Recent history shows that what goes up doesn’t necessarily come down. In places like Inglewood, California, a rash of newer STRs near SoFi Stadium helped drive up nearby apartment rents 50%.
“Our affordable housing stock is at stake,” said Noah Suarez-Sikes, organizer for Better Neighbors LA, a coalition pushing for enforcement of the city’s home-sharing ordinance. LA prohibits the conversion of affordable housing stock to short-term rentals but weak enforcement has allowed more than 70% of area Airbnbs to go unlicensed.
“The problem with converting that housing to STRs is it doesn’t go back to being a long-term rental when the event is over,” Suarez-Sikes said. “It’s lucrative to run an illegal STR. You can keep your costs low and bring in some cash.”
The Draw Of STRs
STRs exploded in popularity over the past two decades. Their flexibility may be especially attractive to World Cup visitors, who follow their team to multiple cities throughout longer tournament runs.
The global STR market has grown 20-fold since 2011, skyrocketing from roughly a million listings to 20.3 million in 2023. The U.S. market nearly doubled in just the past six years, with the number of available STR listings jumping from 1 million in 2018 to 1.7 million last year, according to industry tracker AirDNA.
As a result, the rental market also looks vastly different from the last time the country had a major worldwide event, the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Airbnb hadn’t been founded yet and Vrbo was still in its infancy. That means no studies have evaluated the link between global-scale U.S. sporting events, short-term rental conversions and housing affordability, though international academics have found a correlation.
STRs garnered unprecedented demand during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, when hotel rooms were 600% more expensive than usual. Property prices began surging before the event and the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, with rents rising 95% in São Paulo and 132% in Rio between 2008 and 2013. More than 67,000 people were forcibly evicted over that time and rents remained elevated until the pandemic crashed the market.
The World Cup also offered a substantial cash grab for Qatari landlords in 2022. Apartments previously rented for $2,500 a month went for $1,700 a night. Four years later, renters in Doha still haven’t seen a price correction.
The impact of worldwide sporting events on the broader rental market puts landlords in the driver’s seat during rent negotiations, with impacts that spiral, Matheson said.
“Landlords have outside options that allow them to bargain better with those folks, saying, ‘Hey, I don’t need you at $1,000 a month because I’m going to make $6,000 in just one month here,’” he said.
Critics argue STRs shrink affordable housing stock, which can permanently displace residents. Yet as the World Cup approaches, cities have opaque plans to prevent its fallout on vulnerable populations, including rent pressure, according to Jennifer Li, director for the Center for Community Health Innovation at Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute.
U.S. stadiums tend to be in low- to middle-income areas like Miami Gardens, home of Hard Rock Stadium, where the median household income is $60K. That sets properties up as prime targets to become short-term accommodations for World Cup spectators, she said.
“In that small window of time, there’s a huge risk for owners to either evict a lot of current existing tenants or to raise the prices of those units,” Li said. “Then in the long term, it will displace low- and middle-income community members.”
A surge in STR listings for U.S. cities hosting major sporting events is well documented. The Phoenix market saw aggressive STR growth during the 2023 Super Bowl, said Bram Gallagher, director of economics and forecasting for short-term rental data company AirDNA.
“They went from 16,000, 17,000 to about 31,000 available listings, which is a huge amount of growth,” Gallagher said.
AirDNA has not yet begun tracking World Cup 2026 data, but FIFA Club World Cup, the 32-team tournament across 12 U.S. venues that started June 15, has boosted STR listings in several markets, Gallagher said. The number of STR nights booked in Jersey City-Newark this month is expected to increase by about 50% compared to last June, according to its data.
“The Club World Cup is much, much smaller in its interest, and it’s already generating some additional rentals … So I would imagine the World Cup is going to be much greater in impact,” he said.
The financial incentive of renting out property during the World Cup can be hard to resist.
“If you have a housing unit that comes open, a lease comes due in May or June 2026, why would you fill it with a long-term lease when you could make a short-term profit?” said Michael Frisch, associate professor of urban planning and design at the University of Missouri Kansas City.
Big Event, Mid-Sized City
With a population under 600,000, Kansas City is one of the smallest cities picked to host the World Cup. Other regions hosting matches include Houston, Dallas, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, New York-New Jersey, Philadelphia and Miami.
Preparation for the World Cup at Arrowhead Stadium
Missouri’s largest city has received more attention over the past 24 to 48 months as a regional destination as opposed to a flyover, said Audrey Navarro, managing partner at Kansas City-based Clemons Real Estate. The success of its sports teams — namely the Kansas City Chiefs, which won three Super Bowls in five years — has buoyed the city’s reputation, and the World Cup is fast-tracking construction time frames to capitalize on that momentum.
“People who are already investing in Kansas City, or thinking about investing in Kansas City, or pursuing a specific project, really tightened up their timeline to try to get it to deliver prior to the World Cup,” Navarro said.
But housing advocates were already worried an influx of new visitors and companies was hurting longtime Kansas City renters, especially given sluggish housing development and a growing STR trade. Owners of STRs can make 75% more from short-term renters and are constricting supply, according to a 2024 study from the Mid-America Regional Council.
“In a region missing nearly 24,000 units, with over 64,000 households unable to find a place they can afford, the growth of STRs is another factor pushing housing in the region out of reach for a growing number of households,” the study states.
Local stakeholders expect the World Cup to throw fuel on the fire.
“The rent is too damn high,” said Tara Raghuveer, director of the city’s Tenant Union Foundation. “That struggle has become even more high-pitched in recent years as the economy has looked the way it has, as wages have continued to stagnate, and frankly, as our city has pursued economic development that favors young urban professionals and tourists over the people who make the city work.”
Matheson said he would be “zero surprised” if there was an uptick in displacement from landlords converting traditional units to STRs in host cities ahead of matches, particularly for tenants on month-to-month leases.
That could impact Kansas City in unpredictable ways.
“Something that plagues us in our organizing here is when people are displaced from places like Los Angeles or New York, they sometimes end up in places like Kansas City,” Raghuveer said. “When people are displaced from places like Kansas City, we don’t know where they go, because there really isn’t any place to go.”
The Midwest, including Kansas City, has gotten more serious in addressing issues surrounding housing affordability over the last five to 10 years, said Geoff Jolley, executive director of Local Initiatives Support Co. Greater Kansas City. But it still has a ways to go. In addition to a shortage of affordable units, over one-third of the population is burdened by housing costs.
“Typically, people think of the Midwest as a more affordable place to live compared to the coast, which I think is still true to this day,” Jolley said. “But the reality is, people are also making less money in the Midwest. And so it’s more affordable, but it’s relative.”
Now Is The Time To Act
Los Angeles is another city in a unique spot as it prepares for three major events in the next three years: the World Cup in 2026, the Super Bowl in 2027 and the Olympics in 2028.
Preparation hit a major roadblock earlier this year when wildfires ripped through Southern California, burning over 37,000 acres and destroying more than 16,000 structures, including 800 rent-controlled apartments. Preliminary estimates pegged fire damages at $50B.
SoFi Stadium, which will host eight games during the 2026 World Cup
While officials are working quickly to rebuild, accommodations are likely to be an issue during and after FIFA’s event. The worst of the wildfire’s housing impacts may diminish by a year from now, meaning residents will likely clear out of the city’s hotels and STRs in time for tourists, said Sean Fulp, vice chair at Colliers.
But LA’s affordable housing crisis preceded the fires, and many put some of the blame on STR proliferation and lax enforcement of a city ordinance that banned converting rent-stabilized housing into tourist accommodations. An illegal market is flourishing, prompting calls for the city to just say no to the World Cup and other events.
In neighborhoods adjacent to SoFi Stadium, which will star in all three upcoming sports bonanzas, landlords have hiked rents to encourage longtime tenants to leave so they can cash in on short-term renters.
“We have a housing crisis,” Fulp said. “And we had a housing crisis before the fire. So the supply has been tight and will remain tight because we just aren’t building quick enough and it’s very difficult to develop right now.”
The Los Angeles Housing Department told the city council last year that it would need significantly more staff to get a handle on its STR problem before major sports tourism events. There are more than 32,000 unlicensed Airbnbs in the region, according to Inside Airbnb.
Continued noncompliance and the approaching sports events should justify prioritizing ordinance enforcement, Better Neighbors LA’s Suarez-Sikes said.
“It’s pretty much going to be open season on our affordable housing if people think they can get away with it,” he said.
Hitting the issue hard now would show landlords — including those who hiked prices following the deadly wildfires — that the city will prevent them from breaking the law going forward, he said.
“If we allow operators to break the law and convert these units en masse, more people would be displaced. More people will be made homeless,” Suarez-Sikes said. “Rents will likely raise, and it will damage the social and civic fabric of the city.”
The Big Picture
Short-term rentals have been definitively tied to rent increases. Academics from the Urban Politics and Governance research group and McGill University’s School of Urban Planning found in 2022 that STRs raised rents $810 per year for the average renter household in Los Angeles.
A 2020 study found STRs were responsible for as much as one-fifth of actual U.S. rent growth, though industry research shows lower impact: A 2025 Oxford Economics report on European STRs commissioned by Airbnb determined that if all STR listings were returned to the residential market, housing prices would fall by less than 0.7%.
“I have spoken to and have seen tenants who are turfed out of their houses due to STRs. I have seen tenants who have seen their rents go up due to STRs,” Suarez-Sikes said. “I also think, from a basic economic standpoint, the evidence is on our side … The less supply that you have, with the demand remaining constant, the price goes up.”
U.S. Men’s national team at the 2022 World Cup
AirDNA’s Gallagher said that evaluating STR’s impact requires more nuance. STRs have the benefit of being flexible. Some are only available for certain portions of the year or will convert back to homes after an event is over.
The number of U.S. homes sitting vacant — another potential solution often brought up when evaluating the housing crisis — dwarfs the number of STRs, he added.
“The ability of even totally eliminating short-term rentals from the equation to increase the affordable housing stock is, I believe, very limited,” Gallagher said. “It’s almost an academic question, because if it did have an effect, it would still be very, very small.”
Airbnb argues that hosting properties on its platform helps low- and middle-income workers afford their homes, though data shows that more than 30% of U.S. listings are handled by “megahosts” with 21 or more properties in their portfolio. Almost 3 in 4 are handled by hosts owning more than one property, according to NerdWallet.
Others point to the fact that the 2026 World Cup will be the first tournament hosted since FIFA’s 2017 landmark Human Rights Policy, which prompted Canada, Mexico and the U.S. to ink a united strategy that considers the effects of large events on vulnerable populations, including increased rent pressure.
Major sporting events have a documented history tied to human rights and displacement, and FIFA acknowledged that significant human rights violations occurred during the Qatar World Cup.
Host cities are supposed to be working with grassroots organizations and stakeholders to finalize a draft human rights action plan before the end of August, said Li, who is also the leader of Dignity2026, a “rag-tag” coalition of advocates hoping to force FIFA to prevent the human rights violations that stained the World Cup in Qatar.
But cities aren’t communicating, and stakeholders don’t have clear information from FIFA about what it expects from cities, she said. In the grand scheme of things, preventing landlords from converting long-term rentals to STRs is likely low on the priority list.
“It’s a five-alarm fire every day now on other issues, and so they don’t always have the bandwidth, capacity or the information to be able to successfully advocate,” Li said.
Technology and social media also present challenges that were unheard of in 2002, when the U.S. last hosted a mega-event, the Olympics. For example, the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office is suing a self-described “Airbnb business coach” who allegedly pocketed $4M by leasing rent-stabilized apartments, listing them as STRs under fake names, and encouraging social media followers to do the same.
“We’re in a different world now than we were 20 years ago, with Airbnb and the applications to allow us to monetize existing housing stock for a period of time,” Fulp said.
Matheson, the Holy Cross professor, co-wrote a paper in 2009 that analyzed the relationship between mega-events and rental prices in various U.S. cities. At that time, he failed to find a consistent impact on rental prices.
The dynamic has changed significantly since 2009 due to the explosion of short-term rental companies like Airbnb and Vrbo.
“Now that landlords have a second way to make money out of those apartments, that could be enough to fundamentally change the equation,” Matheson said.