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Comment by ritchiea | Hacker News Reader

It's not just a lack of housing. Airbnb is changing neighborhoods by creating increased demand for vacation friendly activities and turning some areas into an effective full time weekend. It's taking popular neighborhoods like the Mission in SF or Williamsburg in Brooklyn or the Gothic quarter in Barcelona and turning them into 365 day a year tourist parties. Any neighborhood with a reputation for being hip, having art, music, bars etc. is now half populated by Airbnb guests at all times.

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And for many of us - we like having exciting nightlife options in Williamsburg or the Mission during the week. The solution isn't to stop neighborhoods from becoming lively and fun, it's to once again build more housing so that those who don't want to live in lively neighborhoods can move to another neighborhood.

> Any neighborhood with a reputation for being hip, having art, music, bars etc. is now half populated by Airbnb guests at all times

Why are there so few of these places?

That's a bit of a reduction. More like 'Any neighborhood in a world class city with a reputation ...' Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Kansas City could develop cool areas, but probably won't be overrun by AirBnB tourists.

They're generally unsustainable. Having a reputation means a deviation from the norm. Once their reputation is big enough, the number of newcomers to the culture will outstrips the ability for the culture to assimilate them.

Sustainability in the face of that requires whatever the culture is centered around to be the kind of thing that can both put up a facade that serve casuals and angry neighbors, while simultaneously maintaining an environment for the core that built it to retain momentum. And circumstance might just make that impossible.

There's a piece that covers this pretty well:

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

Last posted on HN 2 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17433487

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