2026-04-10 ยท playbook
Coffee-to-Stay ratio โ the early-warning gentrification metric
When a city's monthly Airbnb costs more than 600 specialty coffees, you're not nomading โ you're being farmed.
What it is
Coffee-to-Stay ratio = (Monthly Airbnb cost) รท (Specialty coffee price)
It tells you how many cups of coffee your monthly accommodation costs. Sounds dumb. It's not.
Why it works
Specialty coffee price is purely local โ you pay what locals pay. Airbnb price is purely tourist โ you pay what global capital pays.
When the ratio explodes, it means accommodation has decoupled from local prices, which is a leading indicator of:
- Locals being priced out of neighborhoods
- Service workers commuting from further away
- Restaurant menus pivoting to dollar-priced expat clientele
- Eventual government backlash (visa restrictions, short-term rental caps)
Reading the numbers
| Coffee-to-Stay ratio | What it means | |---|---| | < 250 | Healthy. Local prices and tourist prices haven't diverged. | | 250-450 | Normal nomad city. Tourist premium exists but not crazy. | | 450-700 | Expensive. Nomads are competing with finance / tech salaries. | | > 700 | Hyper-touristified. You're paying 8ร local rates for housing. |
2026 snapshot
Notable ratios from our 30-city dataset:
- Tbilisi: 300 (healthy)
- Chiang Mai: 170 (very healthy)
- Bali: 340 (still ok)
- Lisbon: 1,150 (gentrification crisis territory)
- New York: 760 (you knew this)
- Paris: 740 (yep)
Lisbon is the cautionary tale: in 2018 the ratio was around 400. Five years of nomad influx + Golden Visa + AirBnB bait pushed it to 1,150.
Run any city in our calculator and the ratio is shown next to the monthly burn โ if you see > 700, factor in that the city is mid-gentrification and prices are likely to climb 10-15 % per year.
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