Let me give a concrete example. Bed Stuy is a neighborhood in New York City. It is currently facing gentrification, where long term residents (like local shop owners and families) are competing with short term residents (young professionals and tourists). These two forces already competed for rentals, the long term residents controlled the properties.
The short term residents are willing to pay a premium in the form of AirBNB to remain in the neighborhood.[a] This can take the form of a young professional staying in an AirBNB for a month while looking for a rental, or a tourist staying in the neighborhood for a few weeks. This has 3 important effects: 1) AirBNB makes money, 2) an apartment that could have been a rental becomes unavailable to long term residents, and 3) the lister of the AirBNB, who is typically a wealthy long term resident of Bed Stuy, makes a profit.
The result of these 3 factors is a continuous squeeze on poor, long term residents of Bed Stuy. It comes in the form of an increase in price on their most demanding economic cost: housing. (1) and (3) incentive the continuation of this process. (2) contributes to the downfall of the neighborhood in the form of housing instability.
For those who doubt that housing instability contributes to violence, look at the most unstable housing in New York City: the public housing. The wait lists are years long, the applicants are supremely vetted, and felons are generally not allowed. Any yet crime proliferates around the public housing in New York, including in Bed Stuy.
edit:
[a] The flip side of this AirBNB housing premium is experienced by poor, long term residents in the form of rent increases.
Grouping young professionals and tourists together under short term residents is a little bit ridiculous. This type of thinking seems to dominate housing discussions, that young people (or any incoming immigrants to a city/neighborhood) are a nuisance that must be put up with, and the good, ideal state of the neighborhood would be for nothing to ever change and everyone to stay where they are.
You need more housing supply in Bed Stuy with or without Airbnb. It's reasonable to try to limit Airbnb so it doesn't get too out of hand, but it's definitely not the major driver of demand today. And you won't avoid gentrification by pretending that the demand is somehow not legitimate and can be easily controlled so that you never need to build anything new.
Honest question. What would a well-meaning, well-informed anti-gentrification activist find here to argue with?
I assume these people exist. And anecdotally, I'm 100% sure that the anti-gentrification protesters in my neighborhood include a lot of the young people you posit are the target of the anti-gentrification protests.
So, honestly asking:
- are we all just disagreeing on the basic economics that supply drives down prices at the neighborhood level?
- are young professional people in older rental apartments arguing that gentrification is _caused_ by the building of "high-end" units, which in turn price even _them_ out?
- something else entirely?
What would an intellectually honest, no-skin-in-the-game argument be?
Best I can tell, the best good-faith summary of the progressive stance on housing/gentrification would be that we can't afford to wait until supply & demand sorts this out. If most people can afford up to $1500 rent, but the cost of the median unit has gone up to $4000, realistically in the very best case scenario it might take 10-15 years until supply increases lower the median price to that level. And there are people hurting right now so we can't afford to wait that long.
Granted, I've never actually heard anybody say that, but that's an intellectually honest claim that seems in line with their views and that I think that is reasonably true. If they would say that, and they would commit to increasing supply in the long term in addition to proposing short term relief measures, I think we could have a much more productive debate.
The frustrating part is that what the vast majority of these people actually say, is that supply & demand have zero bearing on housing. And they've been saying this for decades. Failed progressive policies are a big part of why we have a housing shortage.
It's like if there was a small spark of a wildfire, and I were to claim that water won't work, we better just wait and see what happens. So we wait and let the fire keep getting bigger, and keep saying water won't work. At some point it actually becomes true that water alone won't work, once it is so far out of hand that there's possible way to deploy enough water to bring it under control. But the takeaway for the next time there are new sparks somewhere else should not be that water doesn't work!
I think they specifically meant young professionals renting for a single month, then moving on to other more permanent housing, and being replaced by another young professional doing the same thing.
I think one problem at least is that if an area gets filled with young professionals with cash to burn, the businesses in the area either start realising they can start charging premium rates for things or they get bought by people who do. In addition to this, as the area becomes more desirable and affluent, landlords realise that they can increase the rents. This means that over time, the area becomes unaffordable for those who have lived there for decades, unless there's something like rent control introduced.
> unless there's something like rent control introduced.
s/rent control/more housing/ and then yes.
Or perhaps do both, even better use housing vouchers instead. But you'll never rent control your way to a functional, affordable city. It can be a better bandaid than doing nothing at all but it's too untargeted and has too many downsides. And it very much falls into that same trap of thinking that young people aren't real residents who also need housing.
More housing seems to be very difficult though - developers are much more interested in building luxury flats that they can sell to people who aren't even going to live there, because that is a better return on their investment. Local councils are struggling horribly to build because land is so expensive.
Local council budgets are strangled enough as it is, and social housing is quite costly.
This sort of scale has to be driven at government level and the tories have a vested interest in keeping house prices as high as possible so that their voter base sees a return on their investment.
This is complete nonsense in so many ways. Multi-unit housing is mostly illegal to build, and even projects that do meet zoning requirements can get blocked by endless red tape. Fix that and housing becomes cheaper to build and it won’t all be “luxury”.
Also, “luxury” is just a nimby boogeyman and doesn’t mean anything. Older housing is still very expensive, because there is simply not enough housing. Even if new housing does come with a small premium over older, people move out of older housing into the newer housing freeing up space in the slightly less expensive older units for lower income residents, and the market as a whole gets less expensive as you build enough housing to meet demand.
Young people ARE a nuisance that must be put up with when en masse. I live in an area that went through the full extent of gentrification, from being colloquially referred to as a "slum" to being a place where single-family homes go for $1M+.
The first wave of gentrification were college students because they are the group that would pay $1,000/mo per bedroom in a 4-bedroom house (which is a common way for developers to flip a property into a rental). They did not give two shits about the neighborhood, and would constantly litter, trespass, and be noisy at all hours of the night... and as the density of students living in the area increased, it got worse (careless landlords renting to them is also part of the problem). Apartments change hands every year, so you're not even consistently dealing with the same nuisance neighbors.
I agree that neighborhoods need to change, but they need to change in a way that isn't unbridled gentrification. We need diverse multi-generational communities of families, young people, and old people because we keep each other in check (same goes for race and class). In my experience gentrification creates waves of homogenization.
> Bed Stuy is a neighborhood in New York City. It is currently facing gentrification, where long term residents (like local shop owners and families) are competing with short term residents (young professionals and tourists).
My friends just bought in Bed Stuy. If one of them hadn't worked for the city's planning department for a few years, there is zero way they would have gotten their paperwork approved in the timeline and cost envelope they needed. They would love to add a story to the building and rent it out, but that's impossible under their community board.
One of the most insidious unions in recent history is large landlords and anti-gentrification activists. Activists increase regulations and the cost of building and new entry. Landlords get asset appreciation while paying for "affordable housing. The latter creates multi-generational, heritable voting bloc to keep the whole mechanism in motion.
This analysis glosses over the underlying problem that drives the dynamic: the existence of NIMBY regulation and restrictions that artificially constricts the supply of housing.
Without supply constraints, the existence of wealthy high-end housing demand subsidizes not competes with working class demand. That’s because the primary characteristic of high-end housing is newness. Today’s luxury housing becomes tomorrow’s middle class housing.
This isn’t just theoretical speculation. We know this is exactly how markets without supply constraints work because of the used car market. Rich car drivers who insist on new, luxury vehicles dramatically lower the cost of car ownership for everyone else by creating a robust used car market. There’s no such thing as “auto gentrification” because carmakers can simply create new and better supply to satisfy high-end demand.
Product quality improves continuously and the poor have access to 10 year old cars that are virtually identical to new luxury cars at a small fraction of the price. The used car market is arguably the greatest source of tangible wealth redistribution in the American economy.
New housing developments almost always will raze a decades old building with 3 or 4 apartments per floor for a shiny new building with 1 or 2 "luxury" apartments per floor. This is partly due to zoning (affordable housing is effectively illegal at a municipal level) and partly due to the housing market (the working class cannot afford to purchase new housing, they must rent the old).
Love the upside though, I've been traveling during covid and staying one month here and there, and this wouldn't have been possible without AirBnB. I've also used AirBnB to stay for a month in SF while I was looking for apartment in the same neighborhood (not my first time doing this). I can't remember the last time I booked a hotel honestly, unless I was forced by work it must have been a decade.
It's a great upside for you. It's a huge downside for the people who actually need to live and work in an area. AirBnB is one of the worst things to have happened in some cities (I know Barcelona has reacted quite negatively to it). In Dublin, for instance, the pandemic literally doubled the long-term rental supply as houses/apartments flooded off AirBnB.
And that's exactly why it's a problem. So many people are traveling, and so many are taking houses that could go to residences of the area.
Also, I don't like that generalization. I stay at hotels when I travel, and actually so do most of the people I know who travel regularly. They prefer what they get with a hotel over AirBnB. So it's not quite as widespread as that, though I do agree, and will counter that that only exacerbates the problem. It's the entitlement of tourists to feel like they should live like the locals when they're not.
If one party is willing to pay higher prices, isn't it basic Free Market Economics to say that it's good that the housing supply is now going to the people who value it higher?
You keep talking about how this is bad for some people, but that just means a tradeoff is being made, and you're not making any argument that it's a bad tradeoff. Why are the tourists "entitled" but the locals somehow aren't?
(Honestly curious here - real estate economics seem to run by different rules and I've never understood why this is so bad)
> isn't it basic Free Market Economics to say that it's good that the housing supply is now going to the people who value it higher?
This assumes basic free market economics is good in all cases, which is not something I agree with. Especially with something this is an essential need (living residences) and in a finite supply.
> Why are the tourists "entitled" but the locals somehow aren't?
I mean, the locals actually live and work there. The tourists don't. They come in, do what they want and leave. They want to live like a local while they're there, though, even though they're not locals. And them living like a local actually harms the real locals. It's the entitlement that they feel that they should live as if they're members of the community when they're not, and that it happens at the expense of the residents of the town.
I find it hard to believe someone is "entitled" to be able to live like a local in their own town.
> (Honestly curious here - real estate economics seem to run by different rules and I've never understood why this is so bad)
Because it destroys the housing market for the residents of the town/city. Driving up prices for them, and driving them further out of the city, etc. Lots of negative externalities come from it for the people who actually need to live and work there.
Doesn't living like a local mean using local services, spending money in local shops, attending festivals and adding to the culture?
A beach town makes most of their money in the summer and it pays for services year round residents enjoy.
These places are better off for the tourism. Many people can continue to work locally because of tourist because locals are buying off the internet.
More and more people are coming to the US. Hanging a newcomers are not welcome here sign ignores that areas of New York start off as one group and constantly change as new waves of people come to the city. The city keeps getting more expensive.
> Doesn't living like a local mean using local services, spending money in local shops, attending festivals and adding to the culture?
The thing is, a lot of these are leaving. As the full-time residents move out of the city, the businesses that cater to them do too, and what's left is touristy things, making it harder for the few residents who do still live in an area overrun by short term rentals.
I'd also argue that visitors who only stay for a week or a month do not add to the culture of a town. They're there to take advantage of it without adding anything, and it ends up destroying it as all those who actually do create the culture get pushed out.
> Hanging a newcomers are not welcome here sign ignores that areas of New York start off as one group and constantly change as new waves of people come to the city.
That's not what I'm arguing. I'm not arguing that newcomers aren't welcome. I'm arguing that tourists who want to live as locals harm the area by forcing prices up for the residents of the town and forcing them outwards, as well as myriad other issues (e.g. coming home at all hours of the night loudly drunk while people are trying to sleep because they have to go to work tomorrow)
The people working at those tourist shops live locally and the tax money gets put into local schools. The profit back into the community.
Tourist do add a lot of culture. They are happy to be there and they add people on the street. They make socializing in local bars / restaurants more exciting.
I honestly can't see a negative.
Your prices are going up because it's New York. New York doesn't sleep but it's not the tourists. Buffalo is a great town. At night the downtown is empty at night. The drunk homeless are usually local.
It's not just New York. It's not just the big cities. And it's not just prices going up. I'm not anti-tourist. I'm anti-tourist thinking they deserve to live like the locals when they're not. Tourists can stay in hotels and still go out to the bars and help bring money to the city. What they shouldn't do is feel entitled to live in a house. In fact every house they live in is one less for the locals to actually live in. That's the issue. It drains supply, which does cause prices to rise exactly for those who can't afford it (who's the ones most likely going to be working in these tourist shops? Not those who can afford $1000+ rent that's for sure).
And the thing is those local bars/restaurants often move out once there's no longer locals around. Tourist bars and restaurants move in, as is seen in several neighborhoods in Barcelona. Tourists feeling like they have the right to live in houses that the locals need is the issue, not tourism itself (at least for this specific one).
I still disagree that tourists add much to culture. Culture of an area is more than just a transient thing caused by people being on the street. It's the festivals, customs, etc of the people of the place. Tourists don't contribute to this in my opinion (except, perhaps, in negative ways when they stumble back to their AirBnB in a residential neighborhood waking up all the people who live there and who have to go to work tomorrow and leaving the area trashed).
An area full of tourist shops is nothing that could be called "local". It's just the exactly identical t-shirt and trinket booths you will meet everywhere in the world, basically ruining the experience even for the tourists (at least for those who care).
It is unstable in that 1) it is a housing option of last resort and 2) no one wants to stay longer than they need to. It is not a place where people "put down their roots," partially by design, partially by circumstances.
I doubt length-of-stay is normally distributed. I would wager that the distribution is skewed heavily to the left. This would result in a that the median is much lower, with a mean that it is biased to the right due to a small number of unusually long leases.
tl;dr: the mean is almost certainly the wrong statistic.
Anecdotally, my closest acquaintance in NYC public housing lived there because she is disabled, unable to work, and has no one to take care of her due to age. She has lived in the same public apartment for decades because she is dependent on the state. Her son fled the apartment after living there his whole life, because he cooperated with NYPD on a murder investigation and was threatened by the local criminal gang. Her only roommate now is her orphaned teenage grandson who is vulnerable to the gangs and has ambitions beyond his immediate circumstances.
I live in Minneapolis. The amount of high end condos and lofts going up around the city is staggering. Same thing in the outer ring suburbs. They're going up faster than they can fill them.
My buddy was a professional hockey player. He played most of his career in Europe and just recently moved back. Moved into a nice condo in the down town area. Four months after moving in, he's seeing ads for the many, many open condos in his building, which have been discounted some $20-$30K below what he paid.
We're now creating a deluge of high end housing that is now sitting empty and the owners/developers are having to compete side by side with each other for tenets now and its become completely cut throat. Add in businesses and people are fleeing the city and those owners are already starting to see the coming nightmare.
So yes, I agree we need to build more house, but FFS we need to build according to the needs of the community, not the developer who's in a "get rich" scheme to gentrify huge swaths of the city.
Pretty much nothing in your screed is factual. The Minneapolis "building boom" reflects the general trend in most of the nation: expansion of the housing stock since about 2005 has been negligible, much less than 1 per hundred residents per year. This is about half the rate of real expanding cities like Houston.
I don't know what better signal you expect than the fact that median sale price of homes in Minneapolis proper has gone up 45% in only 5 years and the time to sell is now 11 days instead of 21 days in 2016, according to Redfin.
I'm not sure I understand your complaint here - it sounds like developers built a bunch of supply, and prices responded by going down? Isn't that exactly what we want?
Crime doesn’t “proliferate” around housing projects in Bed Stuy, it exists just as it does everywhere. Bed Stuy and NYC as a whole rank as one of the safest cities, especially large cities.
Linking the housing projects to crime without rigorously accounting for all other factors is irresponsible. Perhaps housing projects are more heavily policed so more crime is recorded. What factors (ie poverty and low political capitol) led the housing project to be placed where it was.
Housing instability is a critical issue and increasing density and available housing stock is an urgent need.
This totally ignores the positive impact of making housing available to those willing to pay the most for it.
If a young professional is willing and able to pay $3,000 a month for a unit, and a poor long-term resident is only willing and able to pay $2,000, renting to the former will lead to the more productive party gaining access to the high productivity neighbourhood.
If there is a 20% productivity boost from living in the high productivity location, and the young professional generates $12,000 a month in value, while the poor long-term resident generates $5,000 a month, allowing the young professional to outbid the poor long-term resident will lead to a $1,400 boost in monthly productivity.
That productivity boost in turn leads to more jobs created for more poor people.
The effect of Airbnb on the price of housing is pretty small, maybe a few percentage increase.
Not saying that isn't worth doing something about but there it certainly wouldn't be at the top of my list. End onerous and restrictive zoning and increase housing supply should be the first move.
The article you cite is not supporting your view. In fact it lists many cases where Airbnb (or short term leases in general) have a significant effect on both sales and rental property supply and is pushing up prices as a result.
A few percentage increase in a city of 8 million results in thousands of uprooted lives at the margin. I used Bed Stuy as an example because it seems to me a marginalized community. It is surrounded by poorer and richer neighborhoods that do not have the same housing problem I have described. In some sense Bed Stuy is the "frontline" where the processes I describe converge.
Much like in war, the people on the "frontline" experience direct disturbance to their way of life, while those who live far away from the "frontline" have their lives go on as normal even if they are aware of the problems nearby.
The pandemic literally caused housing supply in Dublin Ireland to double due to people fleeing the short-term rental market when tourism dried up. We're talking from ~1600 listings to 3000+. Even if it doesn't affect cost, which is ludicrous given those numbers, it's certainly affecting the supply at a huge rate.
You're attributing the surge in rental supply in a major city during the pandemic entirely to Airbnb?
This is really lazy, unserious analysis.
Housing supply in cities across the entire western world shrank because people were working remotely and fleeing urban centers which were shut down and huge centers of spread.
I read their Discussion and Conclusions and feel they missed an important point: the dynamic of short-term rentals even in quiet, socially-connected neighborhoods is to disarm the vigilance of neighbors. Tight-knit communities look out for each other, and have a sense when things are out-of-place. When short-term rentals invite a stream of tourists, neighbors can’t discern if they are criminals or visitors. It’s like the presence of constant novelty disables the neighborhood’s immune response.
I think a larger component of it is that when you're living in a neighborhood with a large transient population it's a lot easier to justify the kind of bad behavior they wouldn't do to people they'd have to deal with again.
This is basically how a tourism economy works (granted the many people getting fleeced are doing it willingly) to normalize dishonest business dealing.
In the case of AirBNB and short term rentals you get an increase in crime.
I imagine you get an increase in trash, too. For many people, renting an airbnb solely to party extremely hard with your friends is a regular vacation for them. You end up getting drunken people stumbling back from the bars pissing and puking everywhere and throwing bottles because they don't live there. Leaving empty cases of Naturdays to clog the storm drains. Getting into fights with other groups of tourist out posturing. Booking rental exotic cars for instagram pictures and getting pulled over for driving drunk. Whats the saying go, you don't shit where you sleep? These people come to my city and proverbially shit everywhere, sometimes literally.
I've rented from air bnb and vrbo more than a handful of times. I've never engaged in the activities that you described here. We always clean up after ourselves- and we contribute to the local economy via: paying a maid, tourist dollars, and petting local pets
You described the community that operates on the assumption that if they dont know you, you are criminal. It is the only way it can work like that. I dont really think it is so valuable. It is what makes people harassed just for walking home or taking random walk.
Exactly what I was thinking as I read that. I've been harassed when visiting friends who live in neighborhoods like that, and don't see it as a positive trait.
Right, I’m with you on that front. The neighborhood watch committee isn’t for me… it’s probably an archaic concept that peaked in the 80’s but still is an instrument of racism in some places today. See also: Ahmaud Arbery.
I currently reside in a post-war suburb and it’s not really anything malicious, but there is still that dynamic here in some ways. It’s kept alive mostly by my 82 year old neighbor who is in everyone’s business.
I recently discovered an interesting thing in the Brooklyn housing market. There's a new luxury apartment building that was just built in the last two years in Brooklyn Bridge Park. It's right on the park, has harbor and city views, and is very close to desirable neighborhoods like Brooklyn Heights and Cobble Hill. When I went to investigate renting an apartment in this building I discovered that the household can't earn more than $156,000/year gross. So that's about a junior/mid-level developer salary in NYC. Why this restriction? That's obviously not a "low income" salary, but just a "relatively" low income salary, given the location and surrounding areas.
And then when I investigated similar buildings in the same area of Brooklyn (DUMBO, Downtown BK), I found that a lot of the renters of these luxury apartment units are actually foreign university students especially from China and India. Nothing wrong with that. But now I wonder, are those students qualifying for that Brooklyn Bridge Park building because maybe they report no income and are "just college students"? And a junior web developer in NYC can't get qualified because they earn a salary that might be a little more than that? I don't understand any of this.
Absolutely, a junior professional can be risky based on employment opportunities and their desire to move around or even go back to their home state post college. College kids are going to more or less give you a solid year cycle and maybe up to 4 years. Major pluses if they are foreign and have rich parents. Young foreigners are more likely to stay in the same place if it’s safe and desirable, comfort is a good thing (I know I’d be this way if I was living in another country at college age).
I was in a town house association at the time of the housing crisis. It wasn't terrible for this given neighborhood but a number of folks who suddenly couldn't sell wanted to rent.
There was a cap on the number of rentals, but it was also discussed that not letting people rent would mean abandoned units, other risks, folks not paying their association dues. And nobody really wanted to shaft anyone who were already likely in a tough spot. So it was decided additional rentals would be allowed upon request.
But they had to go through a service that did a background check, no super short term leases were allowed (the rate of folks skipping out on those in the area was super high at the time) and etc.
The whole system was operated with much the same idea of the article "the large-scale conversion of housing units into short-term rentals undermines a neighborhood’s social organization".
It worked out pretty well in the end. Only a few foreclosures happened and the number of problem renters was fewer than the original units that were being rented out.
After a while those 'excess renting units' sold and things stabilized renting wise.
This is common for co-ops in NYC. Co-ops are, more or less, condos where the board has more say, and are much more common than condos in NYC. As an owner, you can typically only rent your unit for up to 2 out of every 5 years, and you cannot rent it out for periods shorter than 1 year to prevent short-term rentals.
This keeps the building's occupants very stable, while still giving you some flexibility when life happens. It may also help keep housing costs lower by reducing investor appeal: co-ops are typically cheaper than condos in NYC, though they're also usually older buildings than condos, so apples-to-apples cost comparisons are tough.
Why all the hatred on Airbnb? I think the fact that housing is treated as an investment vehicle rather than... a home should be dealt with first. Just walking around my neighborhood you can see who is renting and who owns based on the upkeep and effort put into the property. Airbnb is a minuscule fraction compared to the torrent of homes that are purchased as investments vs for living in.
Likely because of the outliers. If you live in a "nice quiet neighbourhood" and an airbnb party house emerges, everyone freaks out.
Horror stories on sites like https://www.airbnbhell.com/ are remarkable. Clearly these aren't typical host/guest experiences, but they seem more societally acceptable at hotels vs houses.
Interesting, kind of like poverty is acceptable if it's quarantined downtown/in skid row and tenderloin types of districts (or in suburbs in Europe), but if it's in my district then HOLY SHIT.
Why would a renter do any unpaid upkeep for a property they don't own? That's the job of the land owner if they want to increase the value of their asset. The renter doesn't see any of that increase in appraisal for a well maintained front yard.
For some neighborhoods, Airbnb do make up a much larger share of the finite housing stock. You are adding hotel capacity where there hasn't been any zoned, so you have to make that capacity out of the finite housing stock available, limiting housing available to people who are longer term members of the local economy. That's the fundamental issue with it.
> Airbnb is a minuscule fraction compared to the torrent of homes that are purchased as investments vs for living in.
The two are related. Airbnb makes owning investment properties more lucrative. You can generally make more money and you don't have to worry about tenant protection laws that make eviction and raising rent harder for traditional long-term rentals.
Why do I hate AirBnB? Because I've been at the other end, where I wasn't able to find long term accommodation in a city because so much of it had been ported to short term rentals to give the tourists. The sooner AirBnB is gone and these short term rentals get back on the long term market, the better.
And, the numbers from the pandemic in Dublin show it's quite a decent amount: the supply literally doubled once all those short-term rentals went to long-term because lack of tourism. And that's likely just the more over-leveraged owners, so there's still a lot that's being used as AirBnB than for the locals.
Tourists shouldn't feel entitled to live like locals; they're not locals.
This isn’t an Airbnb problem. This is a regulatory problem. Tons of people want to visit a city, airbnb makes it possible for short-term rentals to find short-term tenants.
Getting rid of airbnb doesn’t solve your problem because some new service for finding short-term tenants will take its place.
Restricting short-term rentals by regulation does solve your problem.
AirBnB is the reason the short term rental problem exists. It exacerbates it. Short term rentals were nowhere near as popular as they are before AirBnB. If AirBnB doesn't exist, they won't be anywhere near as popular as they currently are.
And the issue is these aren't short term rentals. They're long term rentals that are being used for short term. That's the whole issue. These were never short term until AirBnB made it super easy to make them so. Without AirBnB, or some other similar service, this isn't as big of an issue.
Also, in several cities AirBnB allows owners to operate short term rentals illegally because they don't enforce anything or aid in much enforcement at all.
> Without AirBnB, or some other similar service, this isn't as big of an issue.
Emphasis mine — this is my point. The barn door is open; the horses are gone. Get rid of Airbnb and others will follow. Music piracy didn’t magically stop with the end of Napster.
Yes, but if AirBnB were to shut down tomorrow, it would take a while for any of them to get back to the same critical mass. Yes, AirBnB is only a symptom, but if it's gone it does get better, at least for a little while.
Sure, but why would you rather play whack-a-mole than get lasting change? If you want an actual lasting change in how housing is created and allocated, you need regulation with teeth around the behavior you want to actually alter. Or incentives that do the same thing (often regulatory).
Shutting down large public companies with many stakeholders who benefit is both harder and only gets what you want a little bit and only for a little while.
It's not an either-or thing, that's the thing. You can get more regulations (the 'with teeth' being the key part as in many major cities AirBnB hosts short term rentals that are illegally on the short term market) and want the company shut down too. It also doesn't help that AirBnB doesn't do anything to help countries in terms of finding these illegal letters, or in taxes (this might have changed, but I know it used to be an issue in Ireland where AirBnB didn't collect the taxes and it was up to the owner to pay, with expected results), yet loves to take advantage of them.
This a million time, I truly believe AirBnB has changed the world for the better. The real problem in the US is that cities are not built for density, and thus are not prepared for tourism. Tourism is usually good from the point of view of people and commerces: it brings money and life to districts.
Well there have been several studies which concluded that the economic costs out weight the benifits. This has also nothing to do with density US vs Europe. In fact I suspect that many European cities are hit much worse than most US cities, because they are much more popular tourist destinations (the city with the most Airbnb lisings is London).
Centres of some popular destinations (e.g. Nice) are now almost completely short term rental. The knock-on effect is that, even for the few long term residents the city is becoming less liveable because supermarkets are moving out and tourist shops are moving in.
Essentially, short term rentals are turning many old city centres into something akin to Disneyland, an attraction park with nobody actually living there, because they can't afford to.
This exact thing actually happened in the States already. Gatlinburg, Tennessee is a prime example of it. 50 years ago the workers in the area lived there, now they've all been driven out by short term rentals and everything is pretty much tourist hell.
A lively city of tourists? Because there certainly aren't locals living in that city because they're all being driven out. Also lively cities existed well before AirBnB, and AirBnB isn't essential to having a 'lively city'. In fact, I'd argue it's detrimental as all the actual residents that give the city its color get pushed out.
Writing from Prague, where the # of tourists has gone significantly down (to the levels of late 90s or so), life is so much better.
In my opinion, there is such a thing as overtourism and we have entered that territory right before covid. Narrow medieval streets stuffed chock-full of people (sometimes I wondered how no one gets trampled to death). So, so many tourist traps selling weird shit. Flocks of Segway riders dispersing pedestrians. Locals living there for decades were pushed out by short term rentals.
Plus, the unhappy fact that especially young British guys arrived with only one objective, to get monumentally sloshed on (relatively) cheap booze. Then fight the police or random civilians, puke everywhere etc. Oh the joy, straight out of William Hogarth's morality pictures, only with modern clothing.
Tourism makes money, yes. But it can be overdone. And I wonder what the effects are for further development of the country. If you have a choice between studying something hard (engineering) and getting your money from neverending flocks of tourists that come your way, the end result may be societal laziness.
It’s funny because praha and Czechia wouldn’t be what they are today (one of the richest countries in eastern europe) without the tourism. People talk a lot about NIMBYism, this is it.
Nonsense. Tourism was 3 % of our GDP in 2019 and half of that number is internal tourism (Czechs traveling around their own country). Nice to have, but far from crucial.
This is an old industrial country, a former industrial hotspot of the Austrian empire. A few very old cities (Telč, Český Krumlov) really live off tourism and would collapse without it, but Prague is a modern metropolis and mostly lives off normal economic activity, just like any other major city in Europe.
There's a difference between tourists staying in hotels and tourists staying in houses that the residents need to live in. If you can't see that, then there's no sense in replying because we'll never agree on the matter.
The regulations surrounding them, and often what part of town they're in. Hotels are zoned to not be in residential districts, so they're separate from where the locals would live. AirBnBs are not, and every apartment that gets converted to an AirBnB is one that isn't available for the people of the area to live.
Not to mention all the differences between hotels and apartments to begin with in terms of amenities and such.
Not to mention hotels are often included in city planning as places for tourists to stay whereas normal residential apartments are not, so it entirely screws up the city planning as well when these areas get taken over by tourists, further harming the locals. Same with tourist shops/bars come in and start driving out the local ones of a neighborhood or when drunk tourists show up all hours of the night loud and messy while you're trying to sleep for work.
dense European cities have also issues created by AirBnB, mostly with flats going from long-term rental (for residents) to short-term rental (for tourists).
It almost looks like someone find+replaced 'listing' or 'black listing' with 'blacklisting'. If you replace the word black at the places it doesn't seem to make sense with 'listing' it sort of makes sense I think?
ex:
"Similarly, arguments against black short-term rentals often hinge"
->
"Similarly, arguments against listing short-term rentals often hinge
Might be formatting leaking from however they prepared the plain text? Black is sometimes a synonym for "bold" in formatting tools. Like a bad cleanup of an OCR or buggy TeX component or something?
Looks like they just made up an explanation, "We of course have not directly tested whether social organization is indeed the intervening variable"
> Instead, the results point to the possibility that the large-scale conversion of housing units into short-term rentals undermines a neighborhood’s social organization, and in turn its natural ability of a neighborhood to counteract and discourage crime, specifically violent crime. Further, the lagged effects suggest a long-term erosion of the social organization, which would stand in contrast to the more immediate impacts that the presence of tourists would be expected to have. We of course have not directly tested whether social organization is indeed the intervening variable, but it seems clear that the issue is not the tourists themselves but something about how the extreme transience of a short-term rental unit fails to contribute to critical neighborhood social dynamics.
That's really interesting, I would have expected the opposite -- that Airbnbs increase nuisance crime but not violence, due to the nature of most use of Airbnbs.
I wonder if this is measuring a third factor: potentially neighborhoods which are more violent for some other reason are more likely to end up as Airbnbs because of a decreased demand for owner-occupation? Just my personal hypothesis.
> We find evidence that increases in Airbnb listings–but not reviews–led to more violence in neighborhoods in later years.
Has me hypothesizing that an increase in listings but not in reviews means an excess of offer. This could be an early indicator of local socioeconomic degradation that ends up with increase in violence as late-stage symptom.
The exodus of the well-off (and the listings that they leave behind) could be the missing link to investigate in further studies. One way to test this would be to contrast with the change in property sales and rentals. Some of those who are leaving ought to be selling or renting instead of listing on Airbnb. If only Airbnb listings are going up, then my hypothesis would most likely be false.
> neighborhoods which are more violent for some other reason are more likely to end up as Airbnbs
This doesn't look to be the case for me because there's a time interval between those. First the Airbnb shows up, years later comes the violence.
I think it's more like the petty criminals follow the tourists and the travelers (who they can victimize with a cleaner conscience than their neighbors).
You should see these tourists and you will appreciate why they are seen as a mark. Go to miami beach one day or Hollywood. You will see gaggles of guys and gals on vacation near the tourist traps wearing chains, wrist watches, luxury brand clothing, renting exotic cars, carrying cash, acting a fool, getting drunk, getting high, not being aware of their surroundings, not knowing where they are. Its like walking into a jungle filled with tigers and dressing yourself in raw meat.
I don’t like the wording here as it asserts causation rather than correlation.
Skimming the content, it seems like they do attempt to eliminate potential causes, however I don’t feel convinced. it seems like they’ve just proven correlation better than anecdotal evidence.
> the results point to the possibility that the large-scale conversion of housing units into short-term rentals undermines a neighborhood’s social organization, and in turn its natural ability of a neighborhood to counteract and discourage crime, specifically violent crime. Further, the lagged effects suggest a long-term erosion of the social organization, which would stand in contrast to the more immediate impacts that the presence of tourists would be expected to have.
I believe rentals do this in general. Perhaps short-term are worse. You can't meaningfully invest in a community in <5 years.
Airbnb should start a fund get the otherwise incapable into responsible home-ownership. Whatever the negative effects of some short-term units, I'd bet increasing the owner-class would have larger positive ones.
I don't see a need for democratic representation in providing funds or services in pursuit of home ownership...Why do I need an elected official involved? I'd much rather Airbnb or others do the helpful work on the home-ownership side by choice rather than some legal mandate.
I am a voluntary collectivist so when I say democratic representation I mean people have a say in how the program is arranged. I’m not a big fan of representative democracy as it is too easy to co-opt. This is why I mentioned credit unions, as they are collectively owned and subject to member votes. They are not based on legal mandates with the threat of the state behind them but some semblance of mutual agreement between the members. (In practice actual credit unions vary in their real world democratic practices but I’m talking about the more democratic kind.)
The problem with Airbnb running home loans is that the people running those programs have different interests than the community at large. They may focus on profit opportunity at the expense of equitable access or community stability. In practice this would for example lead them to pursue those with more wealth to give up rather than focusing on everyone including those in dire need of secure housing. And if the people have a problem with this there’s not much they can do except try to appeal to Airbnb’s customer base for a boycott.
My point is that you can have democracy without the state and that is what I am advocating. You might be fine with Airbnb running a home loan scheme but to me that sounds like bad news.
And more to the point it’s not what I want to support. I believe strongly in the value of collective well being and I want to support systems that support that. I don’t think hierarchical top down companies can bring us the collective well being I imagine.
That said if you do want to use the state to improve the situation, Singapore and Vienna are great examples for how to do it. Or we could learn from those examples and replicate them with voluntary credit unions. Either way it’s good stuff. I’d look up the many reports of bad outcomes when major investment firms buy properties to see what a home loan program ran by Airbnb would be like.
Tourists don't generally stay in sleepy bedroom communities, they go to where the action is, and probably, those areas have higher violence than the former?
same thing. there can be a latent factor, like it takes awhile for criminals to move from one area to another, so airbnb people aren't the causes but leading indicators for something underneath. this is classic correlation vs causation.
it's not hard to come up with alternative latent factor causations like this, which would lead to radically different conclusions than the paper, so I have to wonder if some sort of bias is leaking in -- I have no horse in this race either way, just skimming it seems like sloppy politicized inferences, and disappointed that reviewers didn't force that to be addressed. e.g., the authors came in with opening hypotheses / observations here, and instead of seeking to disprove them (good science), sought to support them w/ p-hacking (bad science). the correlations are interesting, so the science would be to try to break them somehow to narrow down the conclusions, and instead they promote 1 arbitrary interpretation and leave the analysis to future work
My bet is this study has the cause and effect backward, which seems to be supported by the study itself and their reaching for vague claims of breakdown of neighborhoods ability to fend off crime due to social cohesion.
My observation based on people I know in Chicago who are renting out Airbnb is that rapidly rising crime and taxes have caused people to want to move, however the same factors motivating them to leave, ie crime and taxes, have made it impossible for them to sell their property. Unable to sell their apartments these people turn to Airbnb rentals to help fund their new homes since rentals to people who don't know the neighborhoods better are the only way to monitize properties in neighborhoods that were already falling apart before Airbnb thanks to Chicago's utterly incompetent and corrupt government.
Point being, Airbnb is a symptom of your neighborhood going to shit, not a cause.
"Point being, Airbnb is a symptom of your neighborhood going to shit, not a cause."
Pretty much all the historical cities and tourist magnets around the world seem to be an exception, unless "becoming even more touristy" === "going to shit".
I agree. It's not like those Airbnb's are popping out of nowhere. People are leaving that neighborhood and an increase of Airbnbs indicate that those leaving are folks that do not need to sell an apartment to go to another one - that is, concentrated capital is leaving the neighborhood.
I'd say that the article doesn't get the relation backwards because there's a time lag. I'd say there's a confounding factor causing the capital exodus early on and increase in violence later on. The problem is whatever the rich are inconvenienced by that is making them leave, and it looks like whatever it is it predates reported violent crime.
> People are leaving that neighborhood and an increase of Airbnbs indicate that those leaving are folks that do not need to sell an apartment to go to another one - that is, concentrated capital is leaving the neighborhood.
Source? I know a few people who own AirBnBs and they all decided to buy new properties to rent out. I don't see a reason to expect most AirBnBs used to be residences that the owners fled.
The short term residents are willing to pay a premium in the form of AirBNB to remain in the neighborhood.[a] This can take the form of a young professional staying in an AirBNB for a month while looking for a rental, or a tourist staying in the neighborhood for a few weeks. This has 3 important effects: 1) AirBNB makes money, 2) an apartment that could have been a rental becomes unavailable to long term residents, and 3) the lister of the AirBNB, who is typically a wealthy long term resident of Bed Stuy, makes a profit.
The result of these 3 factors is a continuous squeeze on poor, long term residents of Bed Stuy. It comes in the form of an increase in price on their most demanding economic cost: housing. (1) and (3) incentive the continuation of this process. (2) contributes to the downfall of the neighborhood in the form of housing instability.
For those who doubt that housing instability contributes to violence, look at the most unstable housing in New York City: the public housing. The wait lists are years long, the applicants are supremely vetted, and felons are generally not allowed. Any yet crime proliferates around the public housing in New York, including in Bed Stuy.
edit:
[a] The flip side of this AirBNB housing premium is experienced by poor, long term residents in the form of rent increases.