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There are two kinds of horror stories about Airbnb. When the home-sharing platform first appeared, the initial cautionary tales tended to emphasize extreme guest (and occasionally host) misbehavior. But as the now decade-old service matured and the number of rental properties proliferated dramatically, a second genre emerged, one that focused on what the service was doing to the larger community: Airbnb was raising rents and taking housing off the rental market. It was supercharging gentrification while discriminating against guests and hosts of color. And as commercial operators took over, it was transforming from a way to help homeowners occasionally rent out an extra room into a purveyor of creepy, makeshift hotels.
Several studies have looked into these claims; some focused on just one issue at a time, or measured Airbnb-linked trends across wide swaths of the country. But a recent report by David Wachsmuth, a professor of Urban Planning at McGill University, zeroes in on New York City in an effort to answer the question of exactly what home sharing is doing to the city.
Source: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/03/what-airbnb-did-to-new-york-city/552749/
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bob_super on Friday March 09 2018, @07:44PM (6 children)
> it is also true (as it always has been), that they have been pushed into the last place that rich[er] people improved
No, it's not. Not even close.
Poorer people (a relative thing if they were in NYC a decade ago) get pushed away, into distant suburbs, into neighborhood that were segregated a long time ago, or into areas filled with leftovers of economic shifts (warehouse areas). Essentially, wherever even gentrifying optimists don't want to venture yet. The result of that shift is pretty much always a longer commute and a shittier environment for their family, contributing to keep them at a disadvantage to escape poverty.
Upper-middle-class people might get pushed into "the last place that rich[er] people improved". Especially in this case, where the rich end up removing even more permanent housing than per the normal delusions of grandeur (a.k.a. big offices and giant housing), the lowest earners just get removed from every pleasant (i.e. Airbnb-profitable) area.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @08:02PM (5 children)
When the productive people start moving where production is possible, they call it "white flight".
When the poor start moving where consumption is cheaper, they call it "gentrification".
What they neglect to tell you is that the poor follow the productive in a giant circle: The productive build up something new and shiny, use it for a while, and then move on to do it again; meanwhile, the poor follow behind them, consuming what's left along the way (which is always better than what they had before), leaving behind more trash for the productive to pick up on the next time through.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday March 09 2018, @08:17PM (4 children)
"They" ?
Not even touching the rest of your comment. You assimilate the means of production (driven by logistics) and the actual living areas (driven, for the rich, by quality of life), and that's merely the start of where you're wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @08:35PM (3 children)
It sounds like you're getting hung up on the word "production".
(Score: 3, Touché) by bob_super on Friday March 09 2018, @08:47PM (2 children)
It's a habit: I also can't shake up gravity. Reality sucks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @08:56PM (1 child)
That should help improve your relationship with gravity.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 10 2018, @03:16AM
I just checked. All 54 kg of me still accelerates at 9.8 m/s² towards the center of the planet when I jump in place. Fortunately, the ground below me is capable of supporting all of my mass.