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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, Interesting) by Osamabobama on Friday March 09 2018, @11:43PM (4 children)
Implicit in your argument is that the Airbnb customers are additional tourists who aren't canceling hotel reservations for a vacation to the city that would happen either way. If the Airbnb service is merely displacing lodgers away from hotels into cheaper apartments, it would make the city less productive, in economic terms.
Of course, it is likely that additional supply at a lower price will increase the size of the market overall, but that is not necessarily the case.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 10 2018, @01:54AM (2 children)
All the better for NY city. Now, there is more money to fund that excursion to Broadway, or even off-Broadway.
There is NEVER anything wrong with increased efficiency.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday March 10 2018, @04:48AM (1 child)
"There is NEVER anything wrong with increased efficiency."
Creative destruction makes economists' dicks hard
But it has innocent victims: there are 4000 homeless in Portland
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 10 2018, @02:03PM
Only 4K? That sounds like a rounding error to me.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Adamsjas on Saturday March 10 2018, @02:46AM
Implicit in his argument also is that the hotels wouldn't be screaming so loudly if they weren't losing the price war so badly.
https://qz.com/779121/airbnb-vs-hotel-cost-comparison-you-can-rent-an-entire-home-on-airbnb-for-the-price-of-a-hotel-room/ [qz.com]
Note: Unexpectedly, this report comes from ShareBetter, an anti-Airbnb lobbying group, and was funded in part by the hotel industry.
In most markets you get a whole house / apartment for the price of a single hotel room.
For over night stays, hotels still see most of that traffic. But people who want to go spend a weekend or a week are finding the AirBNB a far better deal.
But AirBNB makes MORE of the city productive (in terms of income) because it locates people in neighborhoods that would not benefit from hotel traffic on hotel row. The local stores and restaurants have new customers, who will probably visit more often than the actual house owner, and the house owner gets money for time they would have left the house vacant.
So AirBnB customers are very likely additional tourists - or at least additional to the ABNB neighborhoods.