I see one stat in the paper that "40% of buildings had airbnb listings in some tracts" but if the buildings had 10 units in them each this still may mean a relatively small number of total listings were from Airbnbs. In fact, even in Boston there are some tracts where I suppose that the average building must have 30+ units which would meant that if 60% of buildings had no listing the total percentage of listings that are Airbnbs is relatively small.
>higher levels of violent crime did not appear immediately after Airbnb listings became available to tourists, but rather developed over the course of several years, the researchers said.
Alternative theory. Every area had some Airbnbs. In neighborhoods that were being wealthier/more popular/had more jobs decided it was easier to just do long-term rentals. In areas where landlords had trouble renting them out to anyone long-term (because locals know if a neighborhood is nice or not) they turned more units into Airbnbs because outsiders don't know/don't care.
I feel like trying to attribute specific numbers to the article's phenomenon is sort of a waste.
It really only takes one individual who is significantly disruptive to change the perception of trust and safety in any given region. The only limit (where percentages and such start creeping in) is in the physical reach that individual has. Anybody who has lived in the same neighborhood as "that guy" knows this to be true.
When "that guy" becomes more, the physical area may not change, but the level of trust and safety might, and that itself can propagate to other areas through gossip, news coverage, etc.
I don't have much of a point, I just wanted to say that the upper limit of "number of people required to make a place feel unsafe" is exactly one.
Seeing constant different groups of people come and go has definitely made neighbors on the block uneasy. Who is to say someone staying in an airbnb is not scoping out the surrounding area for example?
If someone was on the fence about whether this community effect is real - after a single study - wouldn't knowing if 5% of units are Airbnb's are rentals versus 40% be enough to change your conclusions? My prior is that a community cannot be eroded by 10% of unknown people since that is standard for any tight-knit neighborhood anyway.
That's not how market pricing works for things like property since the supply is basically fixed. Changing the available supply by even 5% can easily cause the price to change massively.
Let's say there are 100 homes in an area and normally 95 of them are lived in and 5 are up for sale. Anyone wanting to move to the area has 5 homes to choose from, so competition will force the price down to some level acceptable to the sellers. Now let's say that instead of 5 homes for sale, 4 of the owners decide to keep them for Airbnb rentals instead of selling. Now there's only 1 home on the market so if you want to move there you have to pay whatever the owner is charging or else wait an indefinite period of time until another home opens up. So the price will rise to the highest level a would-be resident is willing to pay, even though we only changed the availability numbers by 4%. In effect, property pricing (including apartment rentals) is determined "at the edges" so to speak.
In the US you can get close to 100%, where the only residents are cleaners, shuttle drivers, handymen, and property managers. There are even new development communities that are solely designed and zoned for rental. This, at least, is the case around Disney in FL.
> To further test the direction of causality for the results, we use a lag/lead analysis in the spirit of Granger [33, 34]. This method is used when the sample includes multiple years and uses both lead and lagged versions of the treatment variable (τ can be both positive and negative).
I don't have enough experience in econometrics/statistics to evaluate this technique. But I would assume they've determined that the increase in crimes lags behind the increase in AirBNBs.
For example, that type of analysis might suggest that the direct crime -> airbnb increase link is unlikely. However, it's possible that there's some other process that's more like simultaneous perceived neighborhood quality change -> airbnb increase and neighborhood quality change -> crime increase (basically third variable change).
Reading this paper I was persuaded that tourism per se is maybe not the causal factor (although not convinced because their measures -- reviews -- were a little odd). However, I'm less convinced that airbnb rental per se is the causal factor. Maybe more closely related to whatever the causal factor(s) is(are) but not necessarily it.
For example, gentrification effects in a community can be felt at much much lower numbers than that. In fact, it can take only a few handfuls of rich people moving into an area for it to start gentrifying because it completely changes the expectations landlords have. Suddenly landlords will greatly increase income requirements and rents and this leads to a feedback loop that makes people with an income above a certain level who wouldn’t even consider living in that area, to now make it an option.
The tipping point in gentrification, for example, isn’t caused by an increase in demand, but instead, an increase in expectations both on the supply and demand sides, which then leads to an increase in demands.
The 20% is arbitrary but I guess my general instinct is that because the baseline for turnover/short-term subletter in any area that is somewhat urban (the focus of the paper) is going to be 5-10% minimum. The 20% I admit I pulled out of my ass, but its hard for me to fathom how a 3% usage in AirBNB would be more impactful than an area that sees 20% year turnover and a 15% subletter rate.
If half the units that would be vacant in wait for a long term occupant are instead flipped on Airbnb, actual rental supply is flipped, even if in reality only 5% of units are Airbnbs.
I have seen areas close to 100%... in Hollywood, FL (not Airbnb though...)
> the effect on violence was only consistent visible for the measure of Airbnb penetration–or the extent to which buildings in the neighborhood have one or more listings (and for the measure of density, or the listings per household in the two-year lags). It was never present for overall usage, or the estimated quantity of Airbnb guests
And
> A second and related concern could be the potential bias due to omitted variables. Though the DID models control for the initial conditions of neighborhoods, they do not necessarily control for trends in these variables that parallel the increases in both Airbnb presence and crime. For example, there is some evidence that gentrifying neighborhoods experience increases in certain types of crime
And
> we have tested this hypothesis in a single city
So there's apparently a correlation between a single metric and a single class of crime in a single city, and there's a multi-year delay in the effect. The author speculates that erosion of social fabric is the culprit, but doesn't actually back this theory up with either data or references. One would at least expect some references to some other study about the correlations on emigration and violence (my two cents here is that it feels more likely that the former is caused by the latter, if a correlation exists at all). They even acknowledge that the correlation could be due to a factor that isn't being accounted for.
But then the article writer drops all nuance and blasts a title pegging blame squarely on AirBnB, even though it isn't even established that correlation is consistently true everywhere, let alone causation.
I mean, yeah, I get that people don't like predatory real estate renting, and want to hear that there's a neatly convenient evil entity to blame, but come on now.
>They even acknowledge that the correlation could be due to a factor that isn't being accounted for.
Related to this, they're performing a regression between Airbnb prevalence and crime, but they only control for a single variable: income[0]. They look at others in a robustness check, but a single control variable practically screams p-hacking.
They also don't address the fact that both Airbnb prevalence and crime are nonstationary[1]. Regressing two nonstationary time series results in a nonsense coefficient[2]. Two totally unrelated time series will have a high coefficient if both exhibit consistent trends.
[0] "We report the results based on using income as the main tract-level control variable"
[1] They are consistent trends over time, see https://www.investopedia.com/articles/trading/07/stationary....
[2] https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/94723/using-non-st...
The municipality I live in does not give a single fuck about Airbnb's "Neighborhood Support Team". They're simply going to license Airbnb rentals, and permanently revoke the licenses of any resident who doesn't meet an onerous (and likely to become more onerous) set of criteria set out in the ordinance. Neighbors hate Airbnbs, and usually with good reason.
It doesn't help Airbnb that they have irritated basically every faction of our board. The more conservative board members are responsive to resident complaints about nuisances and safety. The lefty board members are responsive to concerns about Airbnb displacing housing stock. Restrictions make everyone on the board happy. I don't have a dog in the fight (I've enjoyed several Airbnb stays) but I'm not going to be sad when this happens in the next couple months. Abuses stemming from people (and companies) turning single-family houses into unlicensed hotels aren't tech company tech support problems.
> It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
This so applies to AirBnB. It's not salary per se but those that benefit by renting out units or those for whom this has saved them money I've found typically get so defensive about AirBnB to the point of calling detractors NIMBYists and the like.
I've long thought that AirBnB allows people to profit off something that others around them bear the negative externalities from but I think it's even worse than I would've pegged it. Clear negatives:
1. Reduces housing supply;
2. Creates safety problems;
3. Creates nuisance problems; and
4. Brings temporary residents into neighbourhoods that have no tie to that neighbourhood.
To be clear, I don't have a problem with people renting out rooms or an ADU on their property. Most cities don't either.
But AirBnB is clearly used to create illegal hotels and that's the problem.
The solution is increased enforcement of the laws that make these illegal.
The incentives aren't difficult: Create an anonymous tip line to report illegal AirBnB operations that violate zoning regulations. Have submitters provide the street address and URL of the AirBnB to make it easy. The person operating the AirBnB (or owner of the house) gets fined. The person submitting the tip about an illegal AirBnB receives 25% of the fine.
It wouldn't take long for illegal AirBnBs to close up shop when they realize there are negative repercussions for what they're doing. Keep it anonymous to avoid retribution.
I could even see bargain hunters looking for illegal AirBnBs to stay in, then reporting their hosts to collect their share of the resulting fine to recover some of the cost. The incentives are deeply stacked against the illegal AirBnB operators in this scenario.
Of course, this only works in areas where it's illegal to run temporary rentals. I expect we'll see more of those regulations as the problems with short-term AirBnBs in residential areas become more apparent.
Great idea. Let's fine AirBnB $50,000 per unit per year they knowingly rent out in NYC where they know such things are illegal.
Don't go after the users (those using AirBnB) or the street dealers (those listing individual units). Go after the cartel that knowingly engages in illegal activity on a massive scale.
That'll sort out the problem real quick.
I feel like the whole "rat on your neighbors for money" thing has a lot of negative unintended consequences.
The rules have been made more solid now. They are introducing a very punitive fine and some areas can have no short-term rentals but AirBnb has thrived because they exploited regulation. Local govt has to be in control (although where I am, the reason they didn't introduce anything even stricter is because the tourist economy is so large...so...it is tricky when there is money coming in).
tl;dr: Don't use it, it is worthless.
I called once after an AirBNBer tried to kick down my door at 3AM because he was on the wrong floor. Same guy projectile vomited red wine and bile all over the hallway as he stumbled away before falling asleep in the stairwell.
Anyways, so I called the tip line, and they asked me "When do they show up?". I said I don't know, these people are strangers and I don't know their schedule. I was told to call back when I see them entering the building. So I did that when I saw them entering the building, and I was told "Thank you, we will send someone around shortly". But there were 90 units in my building...how would they know where to look or who to talk to? I was told "We'll talk to management". And then I asked them when they will be here, and they said "Within 6 hours, or possible tomorrow". Why it was so important that I only call them when I physically see someone entering the building if they are going to wait 24 hours to do anything - I do not know.
I'm fairly convinced the NYC tip line is just for show and no one really cares in NYC about stopping illegal short term rentals.
> anonymous tip line
Run by Airbnb? Seems reasonable.
They have to spend resources on the investigation, and build a pile of evidence. You think someone is gonna stake out every suspected violator for days on end?
For all the talk of privilege lately, it takes a whole other level to blatantly break the law en masse under the guise of "disruption".
This always makes me laugh. A lot of hotel regulation was written with fire safety in mind (large building with a lot of small rooms in it and a high number of occupants). But AirBnBs... are just regular apartments so they don't break the fire safety rules (if the appartment is zoned for two occupants, really you aren't breaking any laws by housing two guests).
The rest is simply NIMBY and cities trying to fleece tourists really. Or bureaucrats trying to justify the red tape and regulation that keeps them employed.
EDIT: Wow, I see the downvotes yet no explanations!
Both times, I saw other groups of people with luggage coming in and out. So it likely was impacting multiple units in both buildings.
You're completely missing the real problem with this.
It's not just that short-term rentals bring in transients, keeping the housing unit available for short-term rentals displaces long-term residents who would have ties with the neighborhood, and in the best case of owner-occupied not just ties, but pride in ownership and a vested interest in maintaining both good relationships with the neighborhood and good working order of their property.
Didn't they cover that with item #1: "1. Reduces housing supply"? I don't think they missed it.
The more you think about it the more you begin to realise that this applies to almost everything you can think of. Our economic system is just bad at properly allocating rewards and value.
The area was zoned for -HOUSING- not a hotel.
I've used airbnb a lot in the past, but now that regulators have gotten a hold of it; it's basically a barely cheaper hotel with a lot more ??? on whether or not the place is good and the hosts live up to their reviews.
Isn't the other side of the argument also concerned with housing prices and money?
> To be clear, I don't have a problem with people renting out rooms or an ADU on their property.
What do you see as the differences between airbnb and this? The line between the two seems a little blurry to me and it seems odd to me that someone could be completely fine with one but completely against the other.
Not OP, but I share a similar view. If you're renting out a room of an ADU, you're still occupying the property and using it as housing yourself. The whole difference is that the sole use of the property is not taking it off the long term rental/buying market. With spare rooms/ADUs, that's not the purpose of the property, whereas with renting out a whole house it is.
Wherein Airbnb stays are usually short-term and renting out an ADU is usually longer term
Where I live we call this "tourism"
One of the major "lessons" of the famous book Rich Dad, Poor Dad was that wise wealthy people view housing as an asset and investment, whereas poor and middle class people merely view it as an expense. This thinking is now deeply ingrained in our culture.
Well, not this exactly. I mean when you rent a property, you're renting it from someone else who owns it. That's what residential property is. So there's really only three broad alternatives here:
1. It's owned by governments at some level. I think we can all agree this would largely be a disaster at any sort of scale;
2. They're owned privately. This could be by individuals or a corporation or a cooperative of some sort; or
3. There is no rental market.
Now as I mentioned in another comment: I do support not having unfettered use of residential property as an investment vehicle but you also need private ownership.
Personally I think a good start would be that the beneficial owner of any property is a resident of that city or state and if they're not, they get charged _much_ higher property tax.
You'll note I said "beneficial owner" there too. You want to hide behind an LLC or corporation to own your property without declaring your ownership? Fine. Pay for that privilege.
Cities should be by and for the residents in them, not hedge funds.
There are a couple of corner cases worth mentioning:
1. Rental buildings (ie not condos) should probably be treated differently than, say, individual units; and
2. I firmly believe that every mobile home park in the country should be able to forcibly purchase the land they're on as a cooperative from the current owner at fair market value. Hedge funds buying up the land mobile homes are on is really a disgusting form of capitalism, preying on some of the most vulnerable.
The problem is when people rent/sublet their apt. in buildings that don't allow it, and cause nuisance to all.
Buildings should be able to opt out, and airbnb should respect it, and ban users that misuse it. But, i bet, in the name of profit, things get overlooked.
Anyways, if Airbnb is banned in a city, most of these apt will end up in VRBO/Booking.com/Craigslist, etc... etc... so it doesn't solve much. So, you have to ban all, and not just one. Is that realistic?
I think this is the part that kinda irks me though. Why would any building, township, city ever opt-in? You're specifically asking the people who have every incentive to say no while completely ignoring the renters and tenants who actually benefit from the transaction.
If you only ask the people who own property near where the city wants to build a new highway color me surprised when it's a resounding no.
I agree. It shouldn’t be illegal.
Maybe also an infrastructure tax, based on the increased traffic to the area.
Enforcement of civility, maybe the option to, in-lue of a local rules enforcer to attempt to de-escalate before calling the police the option to pay additional taxes and have the noise and nuisance ordinances (which should exist and have teeth, unlike everywhere I've lived) enforced by those officers?
There is a reason zoning exists.
That's the most attractive thing about AirBnB for me, seeing real homes and not living off a hotel room.
I am a bit confused about this one. AirBnB does not destroy buildings, and they don't keep places empty, empty buildings make no money. In fact, before it started to be used as pseudo-hotels, it was a way for people to monetize the time they don't spend at home by having a tenant.
I mean, before AirBnB, where were travelers staying? Hotels are the obvious answer, but AFAIK hotels still have customers. So what is happening? Are there more travelers than before (outside of pandemics)?
Not saying that there is no problem with AirBnB, but it shouldn't reduce housing supply unless there is some deeper underlying problem.
Further, hotel taxes used to fund a great deal of the city, but Airbnbs are not subject to the tax, so the city's finances are struggling as well.
Personally I'm fine with Airbnbs, and I often stay in them myself when I travel, but if you own more than one Airbnb, you should probably be taxed (and regulated) similar to a hotel owner.
So here's an example of what I mean when I say "reduces housing supply" [1]:
> However, since the onset of the coronavirus crisis the tourist leasing market has dried up, and landlords in the sector have reverted to advertising their properties on sites like Daft.ie
> ...
> In contrast, availability in the rental market has bounced, with 41 per cent more properties for rent nationally and 92 per cent more in Dublin.
So by "reducing housing supply" I mean there are less units to rent or buy because existing supply has been taken off those markets to become illegal hotels.
[1]: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/pandemic-reveals...
I don't think most people object to the idea of people (short-term) renting out a room in the place where they live, or even renting out their in-law unit, or (perhaps slightly more controversially) renting out a vacation home while they aren't there. But turning a residential property into a year-round short-stay hotel does indeed reduce the housing supply.
Not sure how to answer your question about hotels. I don't know if business is worse for them, or if there are indeed more travelers than before.
2) Fix tax laws and incentives so that property owners actually pay tax based on the real value of the property instead of whatever nonsense they pay today (California is especially bad for this, but the mortgage interest tax deduction sure as hell doesn't help)
3) Reduce red tape and regulatory bullshit that slows or massively drives up the cost of new developments
If you don't want "other people" in your sight and zero nuisance, buy the entire street. Personal preference relying on inefficient resource allocation should be paid for.
It's only a 'problem' because our local governments have perverted the housing market (and hotel market) with a Gordian knot's worth of regulation and red tape. How is it that we as a society are so dysfunctional as to be unable to build concrete cubes with windows at an affordable price?
Everything we do has negative externalities, including driving a car. I don't see how Airbnb's are considered so bad. Moreover this is a correlation study in one city. The title implies a causal analysis which this is not.
Pretty easy to phack your way to whatever conclusion you want using correlations. Moreover what is the magnitude of increase? From 0.0001% to 0.001% . The article should show some absolute counts.
As a resident I despise rentals. I want them away from my neighborhood. I'm glad cities like Barcelona limit them, but I believe they should be, instead, completely eradicated from central or dense neighborhoods and be taken, if anywhere, to specific, well researched into, suburbs that could actually get a boost from the rental economy. That is, given such "suburban rental benefit" concept even exists...
Otherwise, this fantastic hack into the hotel industry just rips too deep too fast into the delicate, slowly threaded fabric of our tightly knit neighborhoods.
Editorial: This is one of things that led me to conclude that poverty is more than a financial condition. In fact, more and more I believe that poverty is a symptom of other "conditions." Conditions that aggregate to manifest and perpetuate poverty.
Maybe something implementing a few basic (naive?) rules:
1. A property cannot be listed for more than 120 days a year.'
2. One cannot list more than 2 properties.
So limiting to people that aren't actually making a business out of bnb's.
Uber & Lyft started off by saying they aren't meant for professional drivers, just folks looking to "rideshare" in their free time.
Etsy was for creative people sitting at home making some crafts as a hobby.
Airbnb was for people who wanted to make some extra money by renting out a couch or spare room in their house for the night.
Another example is Facebook. All about people and communities, and now a huge portion of it is business page management and advertising.
turns out the problem was money all along
Less friction in increasing supply is also not an unalloyed good. You can look at the commercial office market, which is much less restricted and has huge boom/bust cycles. And that's before we get to the externalities of rapid housing growth.
I'm actually for increased supply, but I'd rather we stuck with better arguments for it than helping Airbnb get off the hook for the reasonably forseeable consequences of their actions.
[0] San Francisco<->Milan Oct. 7-21: $522 on Lufthansa
$22/night, 4.93/5 Rating: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/19010312 : $432
14 nights in Milan + Air fare for <$1,000.
Eat in the AirBnb for, what, $25/day? and you've spent under $1,500.
It decreases the cost of housing for tourists by decreasing the supply of housing, and thus increasing its cost, for locals.
> This is, in my view, a positive.
There's many ways where increased travel can be considered a negative such the increase in greenhouse gas emissions. I'd also consider if that positive truly outweighs the negatives on the locals of an area. Hotels work just fine, and are accounted for in city planning.
> Often, in the weekend, It will be available the entire apartment in exclusive mode for the guest!
oh boy, a chance at "exclusive mode" is exactly what I want from my off-peak Milan vacation :^)
Developers were aggressively vocal in lobbying against this. Every excuse in the book. Not sure if it ever got through, but the developers shut up about it so maybe they won.
If you take an AirBNB house off the AirBNB market and put it up for sale, it’s like you just built a house for that community. Even better, the market for houses dips lower because of the increased supply.
I really wish rental housing was banned. There is no real gain in productivity from allowing rental housing other than some scummy landlord who lives three states away getting a bit richer off of the dime of the actual residents in the city.
Aren't you completely ignoring the customers of AirBNB in this picture? Namely, the people who only visit the city for short periods of time?
Also, it is not very clear from your phrasing, do you mean that nobody should be allowed to rent at all? Like even with leases of 1 year or longer?
People like renting their flats, people like not staying in motels, etc.
There will always be abusers in any system that substantially relies on good will. Go after the abuses.
But from a macro level, that would mean the city is getting more tourists, more business and job opportunities for its residents, ultimately leading to a more prosperous populace, right? Or are there other forces at play preventing locals from benefiting from more tourism?
More seriously, I’ve been very disappointed with Airbnb recently. I spent the last two weeks in Manhattan. Every night at the radio city apartments/hotel (a nice, if average, hotel right near Times Square, 49th x 7th) was cheaper than all surrounding Airbnb’s, with the exception of one, which for several days listed cheaper at $90/night. As luck would have it, that Airbnb was infested with bedbugs, and I got a full refund from Airbnb after documenting the photos with proof.
Years ago, it used to be both cheaper and often higher quality to book stays via Airbnb. Nowadays, the majority that are priced reasonably (ie within $100 of local hotels) feel like high-priced hostels.
Another issue: each listing will almost always include an exorbitant cleaning fee, to the tune of 20-X% of the actual listing (I saw multiple rooms advertised around $150-200 with cleaning fees of $100).
In my opinion, Airbnb came to disrupt the hotel market, but hotels have caught up, and now they’re just disrupting communities.
I have a suspicion this fee is just pocketed by hosts who just wipe down the kitchen/bathroom, give the toilet and shower a quick clean, change the linens, and then give the floors a quick vacuum. I still find tons of dust on shelves, dust bunnies on floors and in light fixtures, finger prints on mirrors, dirty dishes in cabinets etc. I am by no means super anal about this stuff but if you're going to charge me $200 bucks for just the cleaning I'd expect something more thorough.
On Booking.com - I have very rarely been extremely disappointed when I arrive at a hotel and it does not meet expectations. On AirBNB - it's like 50:50. Additionally, there wasn't much supply of entire apartments / houses on places like Booking.com a few years ago. Now there is plenty.
I avoid AirBNB now. It's just not worth the uncertainty for me. When I go on a vacation - the last thing I want is to be disappointed.
Same thing can be said for ride sharing platforms.
I am surprised that the market bears it for short stays.
It's a bigger problem for remote accommodation where staff are hard to find. I recently stayed in glamping tents in a national park where the operator had to drive 40 minutes each way on a rough dirt track to clean and reset the tents. Having to do that a few times a week would really knock down the enthusiasm.
Solve some of the cleaning problem and you have a huge market to disrupt.
As one example, beds and sheets and pillows and the like have barely changed in decades. Is there a workable format that would be quicker to deal with and acceptable to users?
Hotels normally don’t wash the comforter between each guest (gross), and only wash the 3 sheets which are quick to strip and replace for housekeepers.
The downside is that for stays longer than a few days the two sheets covering the duvet tend to come apart. So this is better for short stays which most hotels specialize in.
conscience.
That seems about right to me. The last time I had a professional cleaner clean my (at the time, 950 sq ft) home, around 5 years ago, it cost $100, plus tip. I'm sure costs have gone up since then, and IMO most Airbnb cleanings I've seen are more thorough than I remember that house cleaning being. I also expect cleaning costs have gone up due to COVID requirements.
As an aside, I think the percent-of-listing measure you're using doesn't make sense. It costs the same amount to clean a place if you stay there for one day or five. If the cleaning cost is going up as you add more days to a reservation, then that's weird and it sounds like the person managing the listing is doing something sketchy.
> In my opinion, Airbnb came to disrupt the hotel market, but hotels have caught up
I do think Airbnbs are still better than hotels in some situations. Hotels are just not all that fun if you have a bunch of friends who want to go on vacation together and hang out all the time, but common vacation spots will usually have plenty of rentals that sleep 8 or 10 or 12 or whatever (and will likely cost less than 4 or 5 or 6 hotel rooms).
Hell, even for a family of four, an Airbnb can be a much better experience. Sure, you can get a multi-bedroom suite at a hotel, but they're usually going to cost you more than an equivalent 2-bedroom Airbnb rental. Growing up, I remember my parents cramming all four of us into a small hotel room with two double beds, and it was not a pleasant experience at all.
When I'm traveling and am spending a week or more somewhere, I often enjoy cooking sometimes. Hotels usually don't offer rooms with kitchens, and those that do usually have crappy "efficiency" kitchens. Nearly all Airbnbs have a kitchen, and that usually doesn't add to the price like having a kitchen in a hotel room does. And even if I do go out for dinner, it's nice to always have a fridge to store leftovers, and a microwave or even stove/oven to use to reheat them. A hotel's minibar fridge is often not up to that task, and good luck reheating things.
> More seriously, I’ve been very disappointed with Airbnb recently. I spent the last two weeks in Manhattan. [...]
Definitely agree with you on Manhattan. For whatever reason, hotels tend to just be a better, cleaner, often cheaper choice there (I have a trip planned there that's coming up soon, and I've already booked a hotel). But I've done Airbnb in a couple dozen cities, both in and out of the US, and by and large the experience has been better than a hotel at the same price.
This is especially problematic because the authors find changes in Airbnb penetration are correlated with census tract characteristics:
For Airbnb density (Fig 3a), we see that census tracts in the urban center (northeast on the map) show relatively high Airbnb presence from the beginning, but that in recent years the tracts with the highest level of Airbnb penetration emanate further out into surrounding, more residential neighborhoods.
This can be addressed by controlling for the confounding factor. Alternatively, we can look at a specific scenario where Airbnb penetration changed for reasons that almost certainly couldn't affect violence, and use that variation to find out how violence responds to Airbnb penetration.
Unfortunately, the paper only controlled for median income in the primary specification and percentage of black/Hispanic residents and homeownership rates in the robustness check (these additional controls are not in the database). This paper simply does not do enough to eliminate potential other explanations for why Airbnb penetration may be correlated with violence in a census tract without causing it.
I'm not that familiar with the crime literature, but from a very brief look at the abstract of one random paper, factors like economic inequality, poverty rates, population density, and divorce rates could predict violent crime. All of these could affect Airbnb penetration, such as through property prices (another potential confounding variable) or through amenities for tourists.
For example, increases in population density could both increase crime and increase Airbnb penetration (more amenities or maybe it's easier to buy new houses than existing houses). Or maybe Airbnb penetration increases more in areas with higher income inequality because there are cheap units near areas with rich amenities, and it's higher income inequality driving crime and Airbnb penetration. It could even be something unrelated to Airbnb that just so happened to affect urban and residential areas differently over these years. For example, maybe these regions had different changes in police presence during that time.
Second, another major concern is the potential nonstationarity in violent crime and Airbnb penetration. Airbnb has a very clear trend of increasing over time, as shown in Figure 1 of the paper. You can imagine violent crime also having a very clear time trend where this year's value depends heavily on last year's value. Controlling for year and neighborhood fixed effects, both a regression of violence and Airbnb penetration on its lagged (prior-year) value finds a coefficient of roughly 1, which indicates the presence of a time trend (technically you need a coefficient greater than or equal to 1, but coefficients close to 1 also produce similar problems with short time series like this one).
When you regress any non-stationary data series on another, you will always find a strong relationship between the two. That's true even with non-sensical relationships like GDP in the US and total recorded rainfall in Cambodia since Jan 1, 1900. You can think of time as the confounder which affects both series. Here, time is increasing both Airbnb penetration and violence. Even if they have nothing to do with each other, a regression will find a strong correlation between the two.
To avoid spurious correlations due to time trends, the most common way is to remove the time trend by looking at the change in the variables rather than their absolute values. That cancels out the time trend and allows for proper inference. This is why studies in finance usually look at returns (changes in values) rather than asset values. If we do that for this data, we again find the coefficient on Airbnb penetration becomes insignificant. To conclude, the very least we can say about the results of this paper is that it is incomplete. Plenty of standard controls for crime are not included, which weakens the ability of the paper to argue Airbnb causally leads to more violence. Further, the authors did not properly handle the presence of non-stationary data.
We use difference-in-difference models (Eq (1)) to test whether a rise in the prevalence of Airbnb in a census tract in one year predicts increases in crime and disorder in the following year.
...
The models control for tract-level and year fixed effects. In order to make the parameter estimates that follow more interpretable, we note that the average census tract in the average year experienced 11.32 events of private conflict, 7.68 events of public social disorder, and 28.58 events of public violence per 1,000 residents.
I've not dug into the study enough to vouch for its quality as a whole - but it's clear the researchers are plenty aware of the differences between correlation and causation and are at least attempting to address them. This is actually often the case with scientific papers, even if it's lost in the media coverage of them.
"The large-scale conversion of housing units into short-term rentals undermines a neighborhood’s social organization, and in turn its natural ability...to counteract and discourage crime,"
and the research reeks of p-hacking and non-reproducibility:
Spain:
>"It encourages the concentration of tourists who, due to their characteristics, are suitable targets for victimisation," Maldonado-Guzmán said.
> The researchers found that there was a positive correlation between higher penetration of Airbnb properties in an area – for example buildings containing multiple Airbnb lets – and a rise in violence. However, crime types associated with rowdy visitors, like drunkenness and noise complaints, as well as private conflicts, did not increase.
> "It's not the number of Airbnb tourists who stay in a neighborhood that causes an increase in criminal activities," said Professor Babak Heydari from Northeastern University.
It's probably spurious.
It is not possible to be anonymous in AirBnB, to rent a flat they will ask you for multiple ID documents so they could confirm who you are, furthermore there is scoring system so anything fishy about guest or host will stay in the permanent record. I have used AirBnb a lot across the world, and overall I have not had any significantly bad experience.
Airbnb primarily relies on its review system to ban people. this unfortunately has nothing to do with what you do for a living (instead it's determined by the level of luxury you provide as host and/or whether you damage the place as a guest).