Medellín Draws the Map, but the Building Signs the Permit

The Signal

In the territorial route of Medellín’s POT mid-term revision, neighbors stopped demanding that “rents be stopped” and started demanding cartography: that the plan state, sector by sector, where short-term rental is allowed, restricted, or banned (360 Radio, June 8, 2026). While the city draws its map, the rule that may actually settle the matter is being written in Bogotá. On December 2, 2025, the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism published a draft decree requiring that, in order to register a tourist dwelling in the National Tourism Registry, the owner prove the activity is permitted both in the territorial plan and in the building’s horizontal-property bylaws — a permission that can be certified by the bylaws themselves or by the building administrator (El Tiempo; La República; comments closed December 16, 2025). As of July 2026 the draft is still contested: Asohost and the Colombian Chamber of Electronic Commerce say none of their recommendations made it in (Occidente, July 9, 2026).

The Context

Medellín already tried to control this and found out it does not hold the key. The registry is national: sanctions are handled by the Ministry and the Superintendence of Industry and Commerce. The city’s Tourism Secretariat filed some 1,200 cancellation or suspension requests with national authorities and got no effective response (El Colombiano, April 2025). On the municipal side it does what it can: 135 technical inspections and 51 properties suspended through April 2026, concentrated in El Poblado, Laureles-Estadio and Belén (Habitante Siete, April 24, 2026). The market figures do not agree with each other either: roughly 8,300 accommodations registered in the RNT (El Colombiano, 2025) against sector estimates counting tens of thousands of active listings on platforms; nationally, the registry went from 70,149 entries to an estimated 104,000 operating establishments by October 2025 (sector analysis, January 2026). The number that matters for what comes next: 69% of Medellín’s short-term rental units are apartments under horizontal property, and inventory grew from around 5,000 beds in 2019 to more than 17,000 in 2025 (same analysis). Meanwhile the legal ceiling for a residential rent increase in 2026 is 5.1% — the CPI, under Law 820 of 2003 — and a furnished unit doubles the range.

The Reading

The familiar story — foreigners arrive, rents go up — no longer explains what is happening. Residential rent is capped by law; what is not capped is the change of market. And the fight over that change is moving into two instruments nobody associates with gentrification: a map and a set of bylaws. If the decree survives as drafted, the permit to rent by the night will not come from the mayor’s office or from the platform: it will come from the territorial plan on the drawing, and from the co-ownership in its bylaws, with the qualified majorities an assembly requires. That is a radical decentralization of control — and a change in who votes. In a building, the assembly is made of owners. The tenant, the one who can actually be displaced, does not vote there. Medellín could end up holding the most granular tool it has ever had over short-term rental, with the most vulnerable party absent from the room where it is used.

The Pattern

It is the same move as Athens, through a different door. In July 2026 an Athenian court ordered a company to cease short-term rental operations in a building by invoking the co-ownership bylaws, which reserved the apartments for “exclusively residential use” (ruling ΜΠΑ 2937/2026). There a judge brought it; here a decree would. In both cases the state regulates the use and not the asset: the price of land remains untouched, and rent keeps looking for its next form. When the registry door closes, the market does not go down — it changes format (30-day mid-stay, corporate, furnished) and it changes border. In the Aburrá Valley that border is made of paper: what Medellín restricts, Envigado and Sabaneta do not, and they write their own plans. The question for the next twelve months is not whether short-term rental gets regulated. It is who ends up holding the signature: the assembly, the city, or the city next door.