Tbilisi's Old Town Gentrification: How Abanotubani to Vera Is Changing Under Nomad Pressure
Gentrification is reshaping rents, displacing families, and turning sulphur bath neighbourhoods into tourist corridors — changing Old Town faster than expected.
10 min read
The building on Leselidze Street has a new cafe on the ground floor where a hardware store used to be. The menu is in English, the coffee costs more than a full meal at the canteen around the corner, and the clientele is international in a way that the street was not five years ago. Upstairs, the Georgian family who has lived there for three generations watches the transformation with feelings that range from economic gratitude to cultural vertigo. This is gentrification, Tbilisi style, and it is happening faster than anyone predicted.
Quick Takeaways
- •Rents in central Tbilisi neighborhoods popular with nomads have risen thirty to fifty percent since 2020
- •Historic buildings in Sololaki and the Old Town are being converted to short-term rental apartments
- •Georgian residents in popular districts face displacement pressure as landlords favor higher-paying foreign tenants
- •The transformation brings economic benefits alongside cultural anxiety about losing neighborhood character
- •The debate mirrors patterns seen in Lisbon Barcelona and other cities that became nomad destinations
Tbilisi's gentrification conversation is happening in real time, driven by a convergence of factors that accelerated dramatically after 2020. Georgia's visa-free policy, its low costs, and its appeal to digital nomads brought a wave of international residents to the capital that was small by global standards but significant relative to Tbilisi's compact urban core. The neighborhoods that absorbed this wave, primarily Vera, Sololaki, and the Old Town district around Abanotubani, were already architecturally distinctive, culturally layered, and economically fragile. The arrival of residents paying in euros or dollars into a lari economy created pressures that are familiar to anyone who has watched similar processes in Lisbon, Prague, or Medellín, but that feel different in Tbilisi because the city's scale makes the changes more visible and the stakes more personal.
Understanding what is happening in Tbilisi's old neighborhoods is important for expats not because it demands guilt but because it demands awareness. The choices you make about where to live, what to pay, and how to engage with local culture have consequences in a small city with a developing economy, and those consequences are more visible than they would be in a larger or wealthier capital. The gentrification story is also, in a complicated way, a story about what makes Tbilisi attractive in the first place and whether the things people come for can survive the impact of their coming.
What the Old Town Was Before the Change
Tbilisi's Old Town, stretching from the Metekhi cliff above the Kura River through the sulfur bath district of Abanotubani and up into the narrow streets of Sololaki, is one of the most architecturally distinctive urban environments in the former Soviet space. The buildings are a mix of Georgian, Persian, Art Nouveau, and Soviet influences, with the iconic wooden balconies, carved facades, and internal courtyards that define Tbilisi's visual identity. Many of these structures are in various states of elegant decay, their beauty inseparable from their deterioration, creating an aesthetic that attracts photographers, artists, and precisely the demographic that accelerates gentrification.
Before the recent changes, these neighborhoods were primarily residential, housing Georgian families in apartments that were large by space but modest by amenity. The courtyards functioned as communal social spaces where children played, neighbors gathered, and the daily fabric of Georgian urban life was woven. Rents were low because the buildings were old, maintenance was minimal, and the neighborhoods, while charming, were not considered prestigious by Georgian standards. The prestige districts were Vake and Saburtalo, with their newer construction and broader streets.
The Old Town's transformation from residential backwater to desirable destination happened gradually and then suddenly. The first international visitors who stayed long enough to rent apartments discovered that beauty, walkability, and culture could be had for prices that seemed impossibly low. Their presence attracted cafes, which attracted more visitors, which attracted Airbnb operators, which attracted investors. The cycle is textbook gentrification, but in Tbilisi it operates in compressed time and concentrated space, making its effects more dramatic per unit area than in cities where the same process unfolds across dozens of neighborhoods simultaneously.
The Rent Dynamics That Drive Displacement
The numbers tell a straightforward story. An apartment in Vera that rented for 400 dollars per month in 2019 now commands 600 to 800 dollars. In Sololaki, similar increases have occurred, with some landlords doubling their asking prices after discovering that foreign tenants would pay rates that Georgian tenants could not. The increase is not uniform — apartments on quiet side streets remain more affordable than those on main roads or near popular cafes — but the trend is consistent enough to create real pressure on Georgian residents who have lived in these neighborhoods for decades.
The Airbnb effect amplifies this pressure. Landlords who can earn more from short-term rentals to tourists than from long-term leases to Georgian families have an economic incentive to shift their apartments to the tourism market. This reduces the available housing stock for locals and drives up long-term rents by creating competition between two markets with very different price sensitivities. The effect is particularly acute in buildings where some apartments are rented to Airbnb guests and others to long-term residents, creating a dynamic where the transient population's noise, schedule, and expectations clash with the residential character of the building.
For Georgian families, the choice becomes stark. Accept rising rents and the changing character of their neighborhood, or move to less central, less expensive districts where the cultural richness that defined their previous life is absent. This is not a choice that generates sympathy from people who never experienced the pre-gentrification neighborhood, but for residents who raised children in these courtyards, bought bread from bakers who knew their names, and navigated a social world built on decades of proximity, the loss is real even if the economics are impersonal.
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Vera: The Neighborhood That Nomads Made Their Own
Vera, the neighborhood that climbs the hill west of Rustaveli Avenue, has undergone the most visible transformation of any Tbilisi district. Its tree-lined streets, proximity to central Tbilisi, and relatively intact architectural character made it the default choice for digital nomads seeking a base in the city. The result is a neighborhood that now feels binational, with Georgian and English operating in roughly equal proportion in its cafes, a concentration of coworking spaces that did not exist five years ago, and a food scene that reflects international rather than purely Georgian tastes.
The transformation has brought genuine benefits. Buildings that were deteriorating have been renovated, sometimes sensitively and sometimes not. Restaurants and cafes have created employment and foot traffic. The economic activity generated by the nomad population circulates through the neighborhood in ways that benefit some local businesses. The international presence has also created a cosmopolitan atmosphere that some younger Georgians actively enjoy, seeing it as a sign of their city's arrival on a global stage rather than as an imposition.
The costs are less visible but equally real. Vera's Georgian character, the babushkas selling churchkhela on the corner, the men playing backgammon in courtyards, the neighborhood rhythms shaped by Orthodox holidays and market days, is attenuating as the population composition shifts. The new cafes are often designed for Instagram rather than community, their prices calibrated to foreign budgets rather than local ones. The result is a neighborhood that is simultaneously more international and less Georgian, a trade-off whose evaluation depends entirely on who is doing the evaluating and what they valued about the place before it changed.
Architectural Preservation and Development Pressure
Tbilisi's historic architecture is legally protected through cultural heritage designations, but the enforcement of these protections is inconsistent and the definitions of acceptable renovation are contested. Buildings in the Old Town that carry heritage status cannot be demolished, but the interiors can be gutted and reconfigured, creating situations where a historically significant facade conceals a modern apartment that bears no relationship to the building's original character. The result is a kind of architectural taxidermy that preserves the appearance of history while evacuating its substance.
The tension between preservation and development is particularly acute because the buildings that need protection are also the buildings that need investment. Many of Tbilisi's most beautiful structures are genuinely at risk of collapse, their foundations undermined by decades of deferred maintenance and their wooden elements degraded by weather and neglect. The investment that gentrification brings could save these buildings, but the investment is motivated by commercial return rather than cultural preservation, and the renovations it produces often prioritize tourist appeal over historical integrity.
Several organizations are working to address this tension, including the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial and various heritage advocacy groups that promote preservation-conscious renovation. Their work is important but underfunded relative to the scale of the challenge, and the speed of commercial development consistently outpaces the capacity for thoughtful preservation. For expats who chose Tbilisi partly because of its architectural character, this dynamic creates an uncomfortable awareness that their presence is part of the economic pressure that threatens the very thing they came to enjoy.
How Georgians Experience the Change
Georgian attitudes toward gentrification are more nuanced than the polarized narratives suggest. Many Georgians, particularly younger ones with international experience, welcome the economic dynamism and cultural exchange that foreign residents bring. They see Tbilisi's transformation as a natural evolution of a city finding its place in a globalized world, and they view the nostalgia for pre-gentrification neighborhoods as sentimentality that ignores the poverty, deterioration, and lack of opportunity that characterized those same neighborhoods a decade ago.
Older residents and those on lower incomes tend to experience the change differently. For them, the transformation is not abstract or aspirational but immediate and practical. Their rent is higher, their neighbors are strangers who leave after three months, and the shops they relied on have been replaced by establishments they cannot afford. The social network that sustained them, built on decades of proximity and shared experience, is fragmenting as long-term residents move to cheaper districts and are replaced by a rotating population of short-stay foreigners.
The Georgian government has been largely passive on the issue, viewing the influx of foreign residents as economically positive and politically uncontroversial. There are no significant rent control mechanisms, no policies specifically addressing short-term rental displacement, and limited public debate about the long-term implications of a developing-country capital becoming a budget destination for residents of wealthy ones. This policy vacuum means that the gentrification process in Tbilisi operates with less friction and fewer safeguards than it would in a Western European city, which is partly what makes it attractive to nomads and partly what makes its impacts more acute for locals.
What Awareness Looks Like in Practice
The question of what expats should do about gentrification does not have a clean answer, because the dynamics are structural rather than individual. No single person's housing choice causes gentrification, but the collective impact of thousands of housing choices shapes neighborhoods in ways that individual awareness alone cannot prevent. What awareness can do is inform the smaller decisions that cumulatively matter: choosing a landlord who treats Georgian tenants fairly rather than one who has displaced them, spending money in local businesses rather than exclusively in international ones, learning enough Georgian to participate in neighborhood life rather than existing entirely within an English-speaking bubble.
Some expats in Tbilisi have engaged more actively, supporting organizations that advocate for affordable housing, participating in community events, and building relationships with Georgian neighbors that create mutual understanding rather than parallel existence. These efforts are individual and small-scale, but they represent a model of expat engagement that acknowledges the impact of one's presence without retreating into guilt or indifference. The point is not to solve gentrification through personal virtue but to live with awareness of what your presence means in a city where it means more than it would in London or New York.
The most honest position is probably one of productive tension: enjoying what Tbilisi offers while acknowledging that your enjoyment is part of what is changing it, appreciating the beauty of the Old Town while understanding that your appreciation has economic consequences, and staying long enough to care about the city's future rather than passing through quickly enough that its transformation is someone else's problem. This tension is uncomfortable but it is also more honest than either the guilt that paralyzes or the indifference that ignores.
A City Deciding What It Wants to Become
Tbilisi's gentrification is not a crisis in the catastrophic sense but a transformation in the irreversible one. The Old Town will not return to what it was in 2015, and the forces reshaping Vera and Sololaki are unlikely to reverse. What remains to be determined is whether the transformation produces a city that retains its distinctive character within a more international framework or one that sacrifices its soul for an economic model built on transient residents and short-term rentals. That determination is being made not through policy or planning but through thousands of daily decisions by landlords, business owners, residents, and the foreigners whose presence drives the change.
For expats in Tbilisi, this is not a spectator story. You are a participant whether you choose to be or not, and the nature of your participation matters at the margins even if it does not determine outcomes. Living thoughtfully in a gentrifying city means staying curious about what was there before you arrived, building relationships that cross the economic divide your presence creates, and contributing to the neighborhood in ways that go beyond the rent you pay. It means acknowledging that the beauty and affordability that drew you to Tbilisi are connected, and that protecting one may require rethinking how you consume the other.
Written by
Carl S Moller
Founder & Editor, Expat Blueprint
Carl S Moller is the founder and sole editor of Expat Blueprint. He researches and writes every guide himself, working from immigration ministries, tax authorities, national statistics and recent first-hand reporting rather than claiming to have lived in all sixteen countries covered.
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