We need to talk about Airbnb

Jun 14, 2024

Regular readers may have noticed that I use Airbnb a lot; I reserved with Airbnb for all of my personal travel in Italy in the fall semester, and the platform is almost always my first choice when making reservations.

I am not generally an early adopter of technologies, but I was an early user of Airbnb. I started using the site in 2012, before the company’s huge growth spurt in 2013. My profile photo is still from 2012 – I suppose I should update that since I’m more than a decade older now. I’ve stayed in more than 90 Airbnbs in 17 countries so far. Our hosts in Naples (post coming soon) told us that mine was the first profile they’ve seen with more than 50 stays.

What I’ve always loved about Airbnb is staying with locals: sharing the house or apartment with people who can tell me about what to see and where to eat, and having my own room in a real home that is lived in. There is even more to learn about local culture by paying attention in a home than by walking through a city. I can peruse the bookshelves, watch local television (preferably with my hosts), and peek into the kitchen cupboards and the refrigerator to discover local foods.

I learned about oat milk years before it came to the United States from a lovely young couple that I stayed with in Uppsala, Sweden. We cooked and ate dinner together and talked for hours about politics and the environment in our two countries.

In the beginning, Airbnb’s concept was home sharing: the people who started the company first hosted guests in San Francisco on an air mattress in their living room. But as is so often the case, the possibilities for the profit changed things for the worse.

By providing a platform for people to rent a room in their own homes, Airbnb created a successful business model of collecting fees and a percentage of the money paid to homeowners who do not have to follow the regulations imposed on landlords and hotels. Landlords have to register with their cities, pay taxes on their rental income, insure that their rental units meet all city codes for safety, follow non discrimination in housing laws, and so on. Hotels have to pay relatively high taxes, comply with OSHA and other labor regulations, have emergency exit routes posted in all rooms, have smoke detectors and carbon monoxide detectors in every room (these are optional in Airbnbs), pay city and/or state per night tourist taxes, and so on. Since most jurisdictions have no laws in place that govern situations where you are inviting strangers into your own home, none of these regulations apply.

The situation is murkier and more complicated when we come to what most of Airbnb’s listings are now: homes or apartments that have been purchased for the purpose of renting them out. From Airbnb’s perspective, their business is just the platform: they link home or property owners with people willing to pay to use those properties. As such, the company itself is not liable for taxes, safety regulations, and so on. In some cases, Airbnb enables homeowners or renters to break the law: in many cities in the US and around the world, short term rentals of under 30 days are illegal for private properties (i.e. non hotels).

An even larger problem is the profit incentive. Renting an apartment to tourists in a popular location on a per night basis is more lucrative than renting to a family on a monthly basis. One property management website claims that choosing to Airbnb your property rather than leasing it as a standard rental can triple your income, provided that you have a high occupancy rate. So, logically, apartments in many historic, beautiful, and culturally interesting neighborhoods of major cities around the world have been bought up by investors to be used for short term rentals. As a result, there are fewer apartments available for the people who actually live in these cities, and higher rents for the few that are available. In many cases, what was once a vibrant and thriving neighborhood has become a tourist-only landscape, like much of Venice today.

I first became aware of this issue while I was actively contributing to the problem.

After spending two weeks woofing in northern Portugal, living and working with a family near Mangualde, I booked a weeklong stay for myself in Lisbon in the historic Alfama neighborhood. Here is the view from one of my windows.

The first thing I noticed when I arrived was that my “apartment” was almost certainly illegal: what was once a very small two-story home had been subdivided into three tiny apartments, one on each level. The stairs show the creative license that was taken with the remodeling. Taking my suitcase up and down felt extremely risky.

Here is the street that leads to the front door of my house/apartment building. There are three of my fellow tourists in the center and a local resident in the foreground.

As I walked to and from my apartment several times a day through the narrow lanes of whitewashed homes, I smiled and tried to be friendly with the few local people I saw. The locals either ignored me completely or looked at me with clear contempt. I felt hurt by this, seeing myself as one of the “good” tourists. I had taken the time to learn enough Portuguese to have a basic conversation and to do my shopping and restaurant experiences without English, and I genuinely wanted to learn about local culture. But I had no idea what short term rentals had done to their city.

A 2019 paper titled “Commodifying Lisbon” documents this “tourist gentrification” process.[1] Using information from Inside Airbnb, “a mission driven project that provides data and advocacy about Airbnb’s impact on residential communities,” the authors map the concentration of Airbnb rentals in the historic center of Lisbon, where more than 75% of hosts have more than one property listed. In those same areas, housing sale prices increased by more than 50% from the first quarter of 2016 to the fourth quarter of 2017. I was there right in the middle of that period, in the summer of 2016. Local residents interviewed by the authors of the paper reported mailboxes stuffed with offers to buy their property, long term residents being “thrown out” of their homes which were then converted to tourist rentals, and damage to their quality of life as their neighborhoods developed into tourist “theme parks.”

Lisbon is not alone in this experience. Frustrated residents priced out of the housing market in the Spanish city of Malaga have resorted to posting stickers on the doors of tourist rental apartments that say “Go home,” or “A family used to live here.”[2] Cities like Venice, Amsterdam, and Barcelona, are also trying to deal with this crisis. I particularly like this quote from a New Yorker article on Barcelona, which conveys the strange, sad sameness of these rentals:

Properties used almost exclusively for Airbnb rentals are offered on the company’s Web site with photographs that might have come from a shelter magazine: carefully staged table settings, closeups of fruit bowls. The same neutral, vaguely Scandinavian design can be seen in listings from Bangor to Bangkok. (The critic Kyle Chayka has aptly characterized this aesthetic as “AirSpace.”) The Barcelona Airbnb I stayed in, in the Eixample, an elegant fin-de-siècle district, was typical: stylishly but minimally equipped, with IKEA furnishings and a Nespresso machine in the kitchen. There were no signs of regular habitation, which wasn’t a surprise. According to Inside Airbnb, a watchdog site founded by Murray Cox, a Brooklyn-based housing activist, the Eixample apartment, which goes for about two hundred dollars a night, is available to rent three hundred and forty-three days a year. Its owner has five other properties in the city listed on Airbnb.[3]

A handful of places have recently begun to respond to the crisis. In September 2023, New York City actually began enforcing a 2022 law that bans short term rentals (under 30 days) unless the host stays in the same accommodation with the guest for the entire time. Between August and September, Airbnb listings for New York City fell from 22,000 to 3,700.[4] The result has been a massive increase in listings in New Jersey, now the nation’s fastest growing short term rental location; and a thriving black market, where hosts and guests contact each other through Facebook or Craigslist without the protections that Airbnb offers (verified reviews of guests, a dispute resolution process, the fact that they have the guests credit card information, and so on).

France, I recently learned, allows short term rentals only in the hosts primary residence, and for a maximum of 120 days per year. The host doesn’t have to be there, but the 120 day maximum is enforced. Hosts have to register with their local government, and Airbnb, in order to operate in the country, has to share information on listed properties with the local authorities.

Ireland will require anyone renting any property (their residence, a room, another apartment) for less than 21 day periods to register with local authorities and obtain planning permission starting in 2024. The plan is that no such rentals will be authorized in Rent Pressure Zones, high demand areas where maximum rents are already legally capped.

Finally, for one last example where I have some personal experience, a 2017 law for Greater London prohibits any kind of short term rental for more than 90 days per year. The city made Airbnb integrate this limit into their platform: hosts have a counter showing how many nights their property has been rented, and once that counter reaches 90 it is no longer available on the site until the following calendar year.

The 90-day limit does not apply, however, to renting a room in your own apartment, which leaves plenty of room for scams. I thought I was renting a room for three nights in Benjamin’s apartment near St. Pancras station last summer. Benjamin described himself as a London native who studied history at University and enjoyed interacting with his guests. When I arrived, I was met at the entrance to the housing estate (pictured below) by a Turkish man named Zabi who enthused about how he loves his guests, but clearly did not live in the apartment.

The two-bedroom apartment was divided into five separate very small rooms, each with a lock on the door. Here is my room: the bed is touching the wall behind me, and my suitcase is up against the wall on left.

The shared areas consisted of a small bathroom with shower, a second tiny half bath (toilet and sink), and the hallway, where a hot water kettle and microwave were set up.

Even the kitchen had been converted to a bedroom: another professor from Minnesota happened to be staying in that room, and I when his door was open I saw a bed pushed up against the kitchen counter.

The next day I met two veiled women in abayas as I was coming in. One reassured me that this was actually her apartment, and as they were talking she murmured to her companion that “He has added a bedroom in the kitchen.”

I was angry with myself for contributing to this kind of business. The apartment is in a Council Estate: subsidized housing, set aside for people with limited means. The woman who qualified for it had turned it over to Zabi for managing it as an illegal Airbnb.

I was able to find a current listing for a 2 bedroom apartment in this same estate, and rent is $1000 per month - well below market rate for central London. The average wait time (citywide) for a 2 bedroom apartment for people who meet the income qualifications for this estate category is 6 years.

In my opinion, as the London example illustrates, the source of the problem is not Airbnb as such but rather unsuccessful regulation of an outrageously lucrative profit motive. Cities can and should do more to protect their rental markets for residents – by limiting short term rentals to a primary residence and/or for a maximum number of nights per year. Cities like London clearly need to devote more resources to enforcement of their policies as well. But we as consumers can also help by privileging some Airbnb options over others.

Since my experience in Lisbon, I’ve made an effort to use Airbnb responsibly. For me, this means setting the filters to look for a room in someone’s home with kitchen use, rather than renting an entire apartment or residence. The exception is when I’m traveling with more than three people – in those cases, I do look for an apartment, knowing that cooking for four or more people is going to be a significant part of my stay. Even in these cases though, I look at the host’s profile to see whether they have other listings. My goal is to stay with someone who only has one Airbnb property, preferably their own home that they rent when they are out of town. Once you recognize the “AirSpace” aesthetic described above, it’s not difficult to avoid places that are clearly intended exclusively as rentals.

Christian and I are heading to Ireland next week for a 13 night stay, and we are traveling the way one is not supposed to: changing locations far too often as we make our way in a rental car from Northern Ireland south along the west coast. I’ve reserved 9 rooms with Airbnb, all of them in homes shared with residents.

This post is off brand for me, I know (not a single food picture!), but it’s been on my mind a lot as I’m planning for Ireland.

Please let me know what you think in the comments. Can we responsibly take advantage of the best parts of Airbnb, like being able to cook in a kitchen, without contributing to the destruction of historic neighborhoods? Are there alternative platforms you’ve used that are better?

The Geographer's Table

Discussion about this post