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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 frojack on Friday March 09 2018, @10:10PM (1 child)
Probably one of the worst offenders is Amazon. Lots of high paying jobs.
But even more low paying entry level jobs. Scan the list. [payscale.com] Notice that any job with the word "Associate" or "Customer Service" in their title offers subsistence level salaries, insufficient to rent even the cheapest apartment.
Tons of these people are camping in homeless shelters, tent cities, parks, church property. In a couple of cases the land owners are quietly paid money by Amazon, but more often they foist servicing and policing these camp sites off onto "city services" which the liberals are fond of funding. Seattle has a climate just mild enough to allow living rough year around. The city would have you believe that the homeless problem resides mostly among its own citizens, former renters and mortgage payers, and not by outsiders attracted by all the "city services". The people on the street know better. Its starting to be a scary place to live.
Meanwhile, the absence of any affordable housing is worsened by the lack of rent control, in the midst of a building boom of high end apartments for those people without the word "associate" in their job title. Much of this is financed by Chinese investors.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday March 10 2018, @04:52AM
Amazon has been soliciting me to interview for years - even when I was homeless
I refuse to work for Amazon
Without ethics we are nothing
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]