Airbnb and Neighborhood Crime
journals.plos.org
journals.plos.org
The short term residents are willing to pay a premium in the form of AirBNB to remain in the neighborhood.[a] This can take the form of a young professional staying in an AirBNB for a month while looking for a rental, or a tourist staying in the neighborhood for a few weeks. This has 3 important effects: 1) AirBNB makes money, 2) an apartment that could have been a rental becomes unavailable to long term residents, and 3) the lister of the AirBNB, who is typically a wealthy long term resident of Bed Stuy, makes a profit.
The result of these 3 factors is a continuous squeeze on poor, long term residents of Bed Stuy. It comes in the form of an increase in price on their most demanding economic cost: housing. (1) and (3) incentive the continuation of this process. (2) contributes to the downfall of the neighborhood in the form of housing instability.
For those who doubt that housing instability contributes to violence, look at the most unstable housing in New York City: the public housing. The wait lists are years long, the applicants are supremely vetted, and felons are generally not allowed. Any yet crime proliferates around the public housing in New York, including in Bed Stuy.
edit:
[a] The flip side of this AirBNB housing premium is experienced by poor, long term residents in the form of rent increases.
You need more housing supply in Bed Stuy with or without Airbnb. It's reasonable to try to limit Airbnb so it doesn't get too out of hand, but it's definitely not the major driver of demand today. And you won't avoid gentrification by pretending that the demand is somehow not legitimate and can be easily controlled so that you never need to build anything new.
Who's complaining? My neighbors who have fantastic schools and pay trivial taxes?
We know more about gentrification than starting the discussion from scratch. What is your experience with the downsides of gentrification?
Their property tax laws are absolutely insane but good luck ever changing it.
I assume these people exist. And anecdotally, I'm 100% sure that the anti-gentrification protesters in my neighborhood include a lot of the young people you posit are the target of the anti-gentrification protests.
So, honestly asking:
- are we all just disagreeing on the basic economics that supply drives down prices at the neighborhood level?
- are young professional people in older rental apartments arguing that gentrification is _caused_ by the building of "high-end" units, which in turn price even _them_ out?
- something else entirely?
What would an intellectually honest, no-skin-in-the-game argument be?
Granted, I've never actually heard anybody say that, but that's an intellectually honest claim that seems in line with their views and that I think that is reasonably true. If they would say that, and they would commit to increasing supply in the long term in addition to proposing short term relief measures, I think we could have a much more productive debate.
The frustrating part is that what the vast majority of these people actually say, is that supply & demand have zero bearing on housing. And they've been saying this for decades. Failed progressive policies are a big part of why we have a housing shortage.
It's like if there was a small spark of a wildfire, and I were to claim that water won't work, we better just wait and see what happens. So we wait and let the fire keep getting bigger, and keep saying water won't work. At some point it actually becomes true that water alone won't work, once it is so far out of hand that there's possible way to deploy enough water to bring it under control. But the takeaway for the next time there are new sparks somewhere else should not be that water doesn't work!
s/rent control/more housing/ and then yes.
Or perhaps do both, even better use housing vouchers instead. But you'll never rent control your way to a functional, affordable city. It can be a better bandaid than doing nothing at all but it's too untargeted and has too many downsides. And it very much falls into that same trap of thinking that young people aren't real residents who also need housing.
Local council budgets are strangled enough as it is, and social housing is quite costly.
This sort of scale has to be driven at government level and the tories have a vested interest in keeping house prices as high as possible so that their voter base sees a return on their investment.
Also, “luxury” is just a nimby boogeyman and doesn’t mean anything. Older housing is still very expensive, because there is simply not enough housing. Even if new housing does come with a small premium over older, people move out of older housing into the newer housing freeing up space in the slightly less expensive older units for lower income residents, and the market as a whole gets less expensive as you build enough housing to meet demand.
The first wave of gentrification were college students because they are the group that would pay $1,000/mo per bedroom in a 4-bedroom house (which is a common way for developers to flip a property into a rental). They did not give two shits about the neighborhood, and would constantly litter, trespass, and be noisy at all hours of the night... and as the density of students living in the area increased, it got worse (careless landlords renting to them is also part of the problem). Apartments change hands every year, so you're not even consistently dealing with the same nuisance neighbors.
I agree that neighborhoods need to change, but they need to change in a way that isn't unbridled gentrification. We need diverse multi-generational communities of families, young people, and old people because we keep each other in check (same goes for race and class). In my experience gentrification creates waves of homogenization.
My friends just bought in Bed Stuy. If one of them hadn't worked for the city's planning department for a few years, there is zero way they would have gotten their paperwork approved in the timeline and cost envelope they needed. They would love to add a story to the building and rent it out, but that's impossible under their community board.
One of the most insidious unions in recent history is large landlords and anti-gentrification activists. Activists increase regulations and the cost of building and new entry. Landlords get asset appreciation while paying for "affordable housing. The latter creates multi-generational, heritable voting bloc to keep the whole mechanism in motion.
Without supply constraints, the existence of wealthy high-end housing demand subsidizes not competes with working class demand. That’s because the primary characteristic of high-end housing is newness. Today’s luxury housing becomes tomorrow’s middle class housing.
This isn’t just theoretical speculation. We know this is exactly how markets without supply constraints work because of the used car market. Rich car drivers who insist on new, luxury vehicles dramatically lower the cost of car ownership for everyone else by creating a robust used car market. There’s no such thing as “auto gentrification” because carmakers can simply create new and better supply to satisfy high-end demand.
Product quality improves continuously and the poor have access to 10 year old cars that are virtually identical to new luxury cars at a small fraction of the price. The used car market is arguably the greatest source of tangible wealth redistribution in the American economy.
The primary characteristic of high-end housing is the characteristic of being located in an already desirable neighborhood.
Let's say there was no short-term renting allowed in Bed Stuy. Then, would there be enough supply of affordable housing to meet demand?
What sort of obstacles do projects that introduce new housing supply face in Bed Stuy?
I don't understand what that means. Pressure on whom? Property owners paying down debt? Residents paying for an Airbnb or rent?
Also, I don't like that generalization. I stay at hotels when I travel, and actually so do most of the people I know who travel regularly. They prefer what they get with a hotel over AirBnB. So it's not quite as widespread as that, though I do agree, and will counter that that only exacerbates the problem. It's the entitlement of tourists to feel like they should live like the locals when they're not.
You keep talking about how this is bad for some people, but that just means a tradeoff is being made, and you're not making any argument that it's a bad tradeoff. Why are the tourists "entitled" but the locals somehow aren't?
(Honestly curious here - real estate economics seem to run by different rules and I've never understood why this is so bad)
This assumes basic free market economics is good in all cases, which is not something I agree with. Especially with something this is an essential need (living residences) and in a finite supply.
> Why are the tourists "entitled" but the locals somehow aren't?
I mean, the locals actually live and work there. The tourists don't. They come in, do what they want and leave. They want to live like a local while they're there, though, even though they're not locals. And them living like a local actually harms the real locals. It's the entitlement that they feel that they should live as if they're members of the community when they're not, and that it happens at the expense of the residents of the town.
I find it hard to believe someone is "entitled" to be able to live like a local in their own town.
> (Honestly curious here - real estate economics seem to run by different rules and I've never understood why this is so bad)
Because it destroys the housing market for the residents of the town/city. Driving up prices for them, and driving them further out of the city, etc. Lots of negative externalities come from it for the people who actually need to live and work there.
A beach town makes most of their money in the summer and it pays for services year round residents enjoy.
These places are better off for the tourism. Many people can continue to work locally because of tourist because locals are buying off the internet.
More and more people are coming to the US. Hanging a newcomers are not welcome here sign ignores that areas of New York start off as one group and constantly change as new waves of people come to the city. The city keeps getting more expensive.
The thing is, a lot of these are leaving. As the full-time residents move out of the city, the businesses that cater to them do too, and what's left is touristy things, making it harder for the few residents who do still live in an area overrun by short term rentals.
I'd also argue that visitors who only stay for a week or a month do not add to the culture of a town. They're there to take advantage of it without adding anything, and it ends up destroying it as all those who actually do create the culture get pushed out.
> Hanging a newcomers are not welcome here sign ignores that areas of New York start off as one group and constantly change as new waves of people come to the city.
That's not what I'm arguing. I'm not arguing that newcomers aren't welcome. I'm arguing that tourists who want to live as locals harm the area by forcing prices up for the residents of the town and forcing them outwards, as well as myriad other issues (e.g. coming home at all hours of the night loudly drunk while people are trying to sleep because they have to go to work tomorrow)
Tourist do add a lot of culture. They are happy to be there and they add people on the street. They make socializing in local bars / restaurants more exciting.
I honestly can't see a negative.
Your prices are going up because it's New York. New York doesn't sleep but it's not the tourists. Buffalo is a great town. At night the downtown is empty at night. The drunk homeless are usually local.
And the thing is those local bars/restaurants often move out once there's no longer locals around. Tourist bars and restaurants move in, as is seen in several neighborhoods in Barcelona. Tourists feeling like they have the right to live in houses that the locals need is the issue, not tourism itself (at least for this specific one).
I still disagree that tourists add much to culture. Culture of an area is more than just a transient thing caused by people being on the street. It's the festivals, customs, etc of the people of the place. Tourists don't contribute to this in my opinion (except, perhaps, in negative ways when they stumble back to their AirBnB in a residential neighborhood waking up all the people who live there and who have to go to work tomorrow and leaving the area trashed).
How is public housing unstable? Are public housing residents frequently forced to move? AFAIK that's the definition of unstable housing.
In 2015 the average length of stay was 22 years.
In general the idea that folks would wait years on a waitlist with the intent of leaving ASAP doesn’t pass the smell test.
tl;dr: the mean is almost certainly the wrong statistic.
This is one of those things that sounds smart but fails the common sense test.
Perhaps you're right that the gap between median and mean doesn't change the final conclusion. I can't really say at this point.
Could you provide support for that? I know many people suspect it and it's a well-known stereotype, but I don't know that it's true.
[0] https://maps.nyc.gov/crime/
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Housing_Authorit...
My buddy was a professional hockey player. He played most of his career in Europe and just recently moved back. Moved into a nice condo in the down town area. Four months after moving in, he's seeing ads for the many, many open condos in his building, which have been discounted some $20-$30K below what he paid.
We're now creating a deluge of high end housing that is now sitting empty and the owners/developers are having to compete side by side with each other for tenets now and its become completely cut throat. Add in businesses and people are fleeing the city and those owners are already starting to see the coming nightmare.
So yes, I agree we need to build more house, but FFS we need to build according to the needs of the community, not the developer who's in a "get rich" scheme to gentrify huge swaths of the city.
I don't know what better signal you expect than the fact that median sale price of homes in Minneapolis proper has gone up 45% in only 5 years and the time to sell is now 11 days instead of 21 days in 2016, according to Redfin.
Linking the housing projects to crime without rigorously accounting for all other factors is irresponsible. Perhaps housing projects are more heavily policed so more crime is recorded. What factors (ie poverty and low political capitol) led the housing project to be placed where it was.
Housing instability is a critical issue and increasing density and available housing stock is an urgent need.
If a young professional is willing and able to pay $3,000 a month for a unit, and a poor long-term resident is only willing and able to pay $2,000, renting to the former will lead to the more productive party gaining access to the high productivity neighbourhood.
If there is a 20% productivity boost from living in the high productivity location, and the young professional generates $12,000 a month in value, while the poor long-term resident generates $5,000 a month, allowing the young professional to outbid the poor long-term resident will lead to a $1,400 boost in monthly productivity.
That productivity boost in turn leads to more jobs created for more poor people.
So your take is that giving more money to the property owner will produce more jobs for poor people? As in trickle-down economics?
Not saying that isn't worth doing something about but there it certainly wouldn't be at the top of my list. End onerous and restrictive zoning and increase housing supply should be the first move.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/garybarker/2020/02/21/the-airbn...
The effect is relatively small (a few percentage points) compared to other factors, which bears out through empirical studies which are cited.
Much like in war, the people on the "frontline" experience direct disturbance to their way of life, while those who live far away from the "frontline" have their lives go on as normal even if they are aware of the problems nearby.
This is really lazy, unserious analysis.
Housing supply in cities across the entire western world shrank because people were working remotely and fleeing urban centers which were shut down and huge centers of spread.
So no. Not just Airbnb.
This is basically how a tourism economy works (granted the many people getting fleeced are doing it willingly) to normalize dishonest business dealing.
In the case of AirBNB and short term rentals you get an increase in crime.
I currently reside in a post-war suburb and it’s not really anything malicious, but there is still that dynamic here in some ways. It’s kept alive mostly by my 82 year old neighbor who is in everyone’s business.
I used to see these signs more often: https://nnw.org/sites/default/files/bpslr_150.gif
I think those are a relic of the early 90’s fears about crime and gang activity; not so common today.
In European cities it's so dense that you really don't care if people are here short-term or long-term, you don't know the people around you anyway.
And then when I investigated similar buildings in the same area of Brooklyn (DUMBO, Downtown BK), I found that a lot of the renters of these luxury apartment units are actually foreign university students especially from China and India. Nothing wrong with that. But now I wonder, are those students qualifying for that Brooklyn Bridge Park building because maybe they report no income and are "just college students"? And a junior web developer in NYC can't get qualified because they earn a salary that might be a little more than that? I don't understand any of this.
There was a cap on the number of rentals, but it was also discussed that not letting people rent would mean abandoned units, other risks, folks not paying their association dues. And nobody really wanted to shaft anyone who were already likely in a tough spot. So it was decided additional rentals would be allowed upon request.
But they had to go through a service that did a background check, no super short term leases were allowed (the rate of folks skipping out on those in the area was super high at the time) and etc.
The whole system was operated with much the same idea of the article "the large-scale conversion of housing units into short-term rentals undermines a neighborhood’s social organization".
It worked out pretty well in the end. Only a few foreclosures happened and the number of problem renters was fewer than the original units that were being rented out.
After a while those 'excess renting units' sold and things stabilized renting wise.
This keeps the building's occupants very stable, while still giving you some flexibility when life happens. It may also help keep housing costs lower by reducing investor appeal: co-ops are typically cheaper than condos in NYC, though they're also usually older buildings than condos, so apples-to-apples cost comparisons are tough.
Horror stories on sites like https://www.airbnbhell.com/ are remarkable. Clearly these aren't typical host/guest experiences, but they seem more societally acceptable at hotels vs houses.
For some neighborhoods, Airbnb do make up a much larger share of the finite housing stock. You are adding hotel capacity where there hasn't been any zoned, so you have to make that capacity out of the finite housing stock available, limiting housing available to people who are longer term members of the local economy. That's the fundamental issue with it.
The two are related. Airbnb makes owning investment properties more lucrative. You can generally make more money and you don't have to worry about tenant protection laws that make eviction and raising rent harder for traditional long-term rentals.
And, the numbers from the pandemic in Dublin show it's quite a decent amount: the supply literally doubled once all those short-term rentals went to long-term because lack of tourism. And that's likely just the more over-leveraged owners, so there's still a lot that's being used as AirBnB than for the locals.
Tourists shouldn't feel entitled to live like locals; they're not locals.
Getting rid of airbnb doesn’t solve your problem because some new service for finding short-term tenants will take its place.
Restricting short-term rentals by regulation does solve your problem.
And the issue is these aren't short term rentals. They're long term rentals that are being used for short term. That's the whole issue. These were never short term until AirBnB made it super easy to make them so. Without AirBnB, or some other similar service, this isn't as big of an issue.
Also, in several cities AirBnB allows owners to operate short term rentals illegally because they don't enforce anything or aid in much enforcement at all.
Emphasis mine — this is my point. The barn door is open; the horses are gone. Get rid of Airbnb and others will follow. Music piracy didn’t magically stop with the end of Napster.
Shutting down large public companies with many stakeholders who benefit is both harder and only gets what you want a little bit and only for a little while.
Centres of some popular destinations (e.g. Nice) are now almost completely short term rental. The knock-on effect is that, even for the few long term residents the city is becoming less liveable because supermarkets are moving out and tourist shops are moving in.
Essentially, short term rentals are turning many old city centres into something akin to Disneyland, an attraction park with nobody actually living there, because they can't afford to.
That feels very subjective. I’d rather live in lively city than a ghost town.
In my opinion, there is such a thing as overtourism and we have entered that territory right before covid. Narrow medieval streets stuffed chock-full of people (sometimes I wondered how no one gets trampled to death). So, so many tourist traps selling weird shit. Flocks of Segway riders dispersing pedestrians. Locals living there for decades were pushed out by short term rentals.
Plus, the unhappy fact that especially young British guys arrived with only one objective, to get monumentally sloshed on (relatively) cheap booze. Then fight the police or random civilians, puke everywhere etc. Oh the joy, straight out of William Hogarth's morality pictures, only with modern clothing.
Tourism makes money, yes. But it can be overdone. And I wonder what the effects are for further development of the country. If you have a choice between studying something hard (engineering) and getting your money from neverending flocks of tourists that come your way, the end result may be societal laziness.
This is an old industrial country, a former industrial hotspot of the Austrian empire. A few very old cities (Telč, Český Krumlov) really live off tourism and would collapse without it, but Prague is a modern metropolis and mostly lives off normal economic activity, just like any other major city in Europe.
Not to mention all the differences between hotels and apartments to begin with in terms of amenities and such.
ex: "Similarly, arguments against black short-term rentals often hinge" -> "Similarly, arguments against listing short-term rentals often hinge
> Instead, the results point to the possibility that the large-scale conversion of housing units into short-term rentals undermines a neighborhood’s social organization, and in turn its natural ability of a neighborhood to counteract and discourage crime, specifically violent crime. Further, the lagged effects suggest a long-term erosion of the social organization, which would stand in contrast to the more immediate impacts that the presence of tourists would be expected to have. We of course have not directly tested whether social organization is indeed the intervening variable, but it seems clear that the issue is not the tourists themselves but something about how the extreme transience of a short-term rental unit fails to contribute to critical neighborhood social dynamics.
I wonder if this is measuring a third factor: potentially neighborhoods which are more violent for some other reason are more likely to end up as Airbnbs because of a decreased demand for owner-occupation? Just my personal hypothesis.
> We find evidence that increases in Airbnb listings–but not reviews–led to more violence in neighborhoods in later years.
Has me hypothesizing that an increase in listings but not in reviews means an excess of offer. This could be an early indicator of local socioeconomic degradation that ends up with increase in violence as late-stage symptom.
The exodus of the well-off (and the listings that they leave behind) could be the missing link to investigate in further studies. One way to test this would be to contrast with the change in property sales and rentals. Some of those who are leaving ought to be selling or renting instead of listing on Airbnb. If only Airbnb listings are going up, then my hypothesis would most likely be false.
> neighborhoods which are more violent for some other reason are more likely to end up as Airbnbs
This doesn't look to be the case for me because there's a time interval between those. First the Airbnb shows up, years later comes the violence.
> First the Airbnb shows up, years later comes the violence.
I didn't necessarily mean that they happened in the order that I wrote, although I can see that was a reasonable way to interpret what I wrote.
I meant more along the lines of: a third variable put them on that path to violence whether or not they also became Airbnbs.
violence
third variable <
owners moving out -> airbnbsSkimming the content, it seems like they do attempt to eliminate potential causes, however I don’t feel convinced. it seems like they’ve just proven correlation better than anecdotal evidence.
I believe rentals do this in general. Perhaps short-term are worse. You can't meaningfully invest in a community in <5 years.
Airbnb should start a fund get the otherwise incapable into responsible home-ownership. Whatever the negative effects of some short-term units, I'd bet increasing the owner-class would have larger positive ones.
Anyone but Airbnb. Local governments, credit unions. Something with at least a bit of democratic accountability.
See what they’ve done in Singapore to achieve high home ownership.
https://www.shareable.net/public-housing-works-lessons-from-...
The problem with Airbnb running home loans is that the people running those programs have different interests than the community at large. They may focus on profit opportunity at the expense of equitable access or community stability. In practice this would for example lead them to pursue those with more wealth to give up rather than focusing on everyone including those in dire need of secure housing. And if the people have a problem with this there’s not much they can do except try to appeal to Airbnb’s customer base for a boycott.
My point is that you can have democracy without the state and that is what I am advocating. You might be fine with Airbnb running a home loan scheme but to me that sounds like bad news.
And more to the point it’s not what I want to support. I believe strongly in the value of collective well being and I want to support systems that support that. I don’t think hierarchical top down companies can bring us the collective well being I imagine.
That said if you do want to use the state to improve the situation, Singapore and Vienna are great examples for how to do it. Or we could learn from those examples and replicate them with voluntary credit unions. Either way it’s good stuff. I’d look up the many reports of bad outcomes when major investment firms buy properties to see what a home loan program ran by Airbnb would be like.
Being part of a community is about presence and interaction, not anything about deeds or contracts.
it's not hard to come up with alternative latent factor causations like this, which would lead to radically different conclusions than the paper, so I have to wonder if some sort of bias is leaking in -- I have no horse in this race either way, just skimming it seems like sloppy politicized inferences, and disappointed that reviewers didn't force that to be addressed. e.g., the authors came in with opening hypotheses / observations here, and instead of seeking to disprove them (good science), sought to support them w/ p-hacking (bad science). the correlations are interesting, so the science would be to try to break them somehow to narrow down the conclusions, and instead they promote 1 arbitrary interpretation and leave the analysis to future work
My observation based on people I know in Chicago who are renting out Airbnb is that rapidly rising crime and taxes have caused people to want to move, however the same factors motivating them to leave, ie crime and taxes, have made it impossible for them to sell their property. Unable to sell their apartments these people turn to Airbnb rentals to help fund their new homes since rentals to people who don't know the neighborhoods better are the only way to monitize properties in neighborhoods that were already falling apart before Airbnb thanks to Chicago's utterly incompetent and corrupt government.
Point being, Airbnb is a symptom of your neighborhood going to shit, not a cause.
Pretty much all the historical cities and tourist magnets around the world seem to be an exception, unless "becoming even more touristy" === "going to shit".
I'd say that the article doesn't get the relation backwards because there's a time lag. I'd say there's a confounding factor causing the capital exodus early on and increase in violence later on. The problem is whatever the rich are inconvenienced by that is making them leave, and it looks like whatever it is it predates reported violent crime.
Source? I know a few people who own AirBnBs and they all decided to buy new properties to rent out. I don't see a reason to expect most AirBnBs used to be residences that the owners fled.