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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: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 09 2018, @08:25PM
Under capitalism, there is no such thing as classism, because what matters is your purchasing power.
That is totally different from Classism, which attributes to a person certain rights based solely on social pedigree (birth, or special designation); in the Europe of old, you could be as poor as a hobo, but still command respect (by law!) just for being a nobleman. That is "classism". A modern example might be the caste system of India.
Even in America (where capitalism is pissed on constantly by the powers that be), there is enough economic "mobility" that people move up and down the hierarchy of purchasing power all the time, and it all that really matters is how productive you are to the people around you.