Kiddooooos! After a month and change of lots of running, new-job acclimation, a runaway trip to visit a friend in Florida (sweet glorious sunshine! horrible Trumpian culture!) I'm very cautiously getting up to speed on some long-delayed projects, giving rise to the hope that I'll be posting some travel videos again under a year after the travels in question! Wow miracle times! Til then, let's tide ourselves over with... rambling about the craven and horrible world of late-stage capitalism: travel and housing edition! After the jump: weh.
Late last year, Vice reported on a widespread scam being run in American AirBnBs; this week, Wired UK did a deep dive on a specific scam being run in London. The deal's the same on both fronts: fake listings run by heavily-outsourcing companies lead to renters being shipped around to various units in poorly-managed buildings that may bear no similarity to the advertised place.
What I appreciate about both pieces is that they dig deeper than the specific scams to suggest some of the larger (awful) forces at work on AirBnB in this era. As the Wired article makes clear, companies are in some cases buying up (or "managing") entire apartment buildings - in that instance, a building zoned for residential use without affordable housing because it was seen as relieving a housing crunch! - and turning them into holiday flats. If you've traveled at all to Barcelona, New Orleans, or Berlin, you know what happens next: housing comes off the market, prices rise, local residents get priced out to the outskirts or the suburbs, everything gets worse forever, hooray for capitalism.
What's clearest in both of these articles is that AirBnB absolutely, positively does not care. For all that the company advertises itself as concerned with local connection and a sense of discovery and travel, it manifestly has never spent a nanosecond concerning itself with the lives of the humans who live in the cities whose housing it is upending. Every time a city or country has made an effort to contain the ripple effects of AirBnB, the company has fought back disproportionately. Hell, it launched an expensive ad campaign in San Francisco just to be an absolute prick about very reasonably being taxed for its de facto hotel activities. Which means even if you're fastidiously conscientious about researching your rental, or try to confine yourself to renting rooms from people who actually live where you're traveling, you're putting money in the pockets of some real creepazoids.
My own journey with AirBnB goes back to my earliest solo international traveling, about a decade ago, and fairly early in the company's own history. I don't remember who keyed me into them, but I'd become aware that I could rent out my place in Chicago during a 3-week trip to visit friends in Europe, and similarly found a place for a week in Paris that a young woman rented out (staying with her mother nearby whenever it was booked). It seemed kind of magical - the day I left, I met my renters at lunch to hand off keys, and when I got to Paris I found myself in a tiny studio in a courtyard building washed in blue, checking in just as dusk fell. The whole vibe - as intended - was real people connecting with real people.
The company was a lifesaver too during my dissertation summers abroad. Monthlong stays in Vienna necessitated a home base that was affordable and self-contained. The priority wasn't proximity to the city's sights, but a quiet place to get writing done in between trips to my archives, with enough of a kitchen to cook for myself. I found little unremarkable residential spots near the U-bahn that rented by the month, and I delighted in the simplicity. Elsewhere, during the roaming-the-continent phase of the journey, I snagged AirBnBs more often than not, often happily opting for private rooms over entire apartments. Again, there was a great sense of connection here - long conversations with my host in Munich about her befuddlement at how Americans root for our sports teams and politicians, a wonderful dinner in Oslo cooked by my host as a welcome gesture. But it was during this second summer abroad - specifically when I was subletting from a friend in Berlin, off the AirBnB carousel - that I started to see the signs.
Literal signs - and graffiti - most commonly framed as "AIRBNB OUT." You saw it in Japan, too - in surprisingly rural and off-the-beaten-path areas: "NO AIRBNB." Manifestos were cropping up about how the company was killing affordability - especially keenly felt in the previously-affordable environs of Berlin (which is doing rad stuff to fight back on this front). Cities like New Orleans were starting to crack down with regulations: no units in the French Quarter, with other cities trying to cap nights-per-unit or units-per-owner, in essence trying to reset AirBnB usage to "cut your losses while you're on vacation" levels again.
And I'd seen the signs of the kind of abuse described in the Wired/Vice articles more close to home, too. A friend's crummy now-former husband had gotten into one of the practices described in the Wired article: take out a multi-year lease on an apartment, decorate it like a hotel room, exclusively rent it on AirBnB. Even then, a few years ago, I remember bristling. Chicago's long been an affordable haven, but like everywhere else it's fighting upward pressure on rents, and this kind of lousy abuse of zoned housing struck me as deeply unethical at best.
In short, it began to feel untenable to rent through AirBnb, and so I haven't been. Truly, for something that was for a long time a cost-conscious move, it hasn't been too hard to give up. Hunting well in advance for affordable budget hotels or private rooms in hostels has kept my costs pretty well in line with what they had been on The Bad Platform, and not having to show up in, say, Barcelona and have a host coach me on what to say if somebody asks if I'm AirBnBing means exponentially less social anxiety. PRICELESS! At the end of this month I'll be in Lisbon for a bit, escaping the grayscape of Chicago in February, and I'll be staying in a private room in a hostel in a train station, and how great is that don't answer the answer is really great.
That said, it's a lot easier to be ethical on shorter, more typical vacation-style travels. I don't know what I would do if (or, he muttered aspirationally, when) I got my life back to where it likes to be, with longer and slower travel, taking a month to explore a world-class city instead of a few days or even a week. My sister and her husband are currently working very slowly through Southeast Asia for the second time, and a lot of the markets that expats used to use to sublet places for a month at a time have migrated to AirBnB or its competitors.
In some ways, AirBnB is a lot like Uber in that it solved some very real and actual problems (hailing a ride away from busy intersections, ensuring you can pay with a card, setting rates in advance, etc.) before turning into an evil greedvortex monster for capital. And like Uber, it's hard to know how to put the genie back in the bottle. The Wired article makes clear how toothless regulation of AirBnB has been; absent crippling financial penalties, it's unlikely that compliance is going to outweigh the constant desire for cash. Until our politics (and I think, despite our degraded position, America still has to lead the way) have the nerve to require Uber to treat their drivers as employees, or has the guts to meaningfully regulate, police, and fine AirBnB into shape, we may be stuck in this in-between place where it's very hard to take the upsides without partnering with The Bad People.
There are, of course, avenues to explore. Some hostels offer discounted stays for monthlong residents; homesitting websites are definitionally less prone to abuse a la AirBnB; and truly, anyone embarking on monthlong stays abroad can do the research, reaching out to guides and agencies to get the lay of the land for a more local subletting economy. That work may be the premium for making sure you're not part of the problem, just as paying a bit more for a charmingly basic hotel room is the price for not participating in the housing shortages in Barcelona or London. But it's also important to keep politically noisy about this, given how our tech-unsavvy politicians have a tendency to go starry-eyed at Innovators and Disruptors. Unless there start to be stakes, and meaningful consequences, things ain't, for the most part, and for most people, gonna get better. As with everything in the modern era: make noise for the people who ain't you!
