What Airbnb Did to New York City - Airbnb’s effects on the city’s housing market have been dramatic, a report suggests. And other cities could soon see the same pattern.

From Citylab

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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.

“There’s been a kind of increasing outcry from communities, from housing organizations, from activists, and from elected officials that short-term rentals are having a negative impact on housing,” Wachsmuth said. New York City is the third-largest Airbnb market in the world, and it’s also one of the oldest, so it could serve as a useful model for what smaller, newer markets might expect to see when home sharing takes off. “[New York] has been a big center of activity for a long time. When we look at cities that have much smaller markets, we’re seeing them grow in a way that already happened in New York before we started gaining the data. And we’re seeing the exact same process repeat, kind of in real time.”

Read more: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/03/what-airbnb-did-to-new-york-city/552749/

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Here in Toronto we are seeing the exact same thing. I currently overpay an inflated market rate to live in a Condo building rampant with short term rentals. The amenities are always broken because of the drunken tourists. This situation is not good for the residents of the city or the hospitality industry that is losing business. A very small few commercial mega operators are raping the rental market.

Luckily Toronto finally passed a law to crackdown. I'm hoping we see some change this year.

Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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