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, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 10 2018, @01:54AM (1 child)
Historically, it's the fascists who had the boner for genocide. Communist/socialist governments just let the poor starve.
These days, the fascists still have a boner for genocide. Whereas modern socialist governments learned something from history, and are actually doing pretty well on the whole.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 10 2018, @10:52AM
No, by definition (the Conservapedia definition) it's socialists like Hitler that wipe out the Jews and other riff-raff. That's why you have, presumably, liberal Obama supporters marching in Charlottesville waving the Nazi flag. Good people, tho. Many, many good people on that side.