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: 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.