1 - I'm proud of having cheated Airbnb out of their commission when helping me find housing so I could live like a hipster
2 - I hate living next to Airbnb hipsters
Needless to say: not a lot of coherent thought in that comment...
It ain't cheating Airbnb if the landlord is happy to cut out the middleman. And when I stay in a place I learn the language and live there and try to integrate into society. I'm not there to party for a weekend. What I'm referring to with the hollowing out of city centers like Lisbon, Prague, Amsterdam... people like me renting there for 3-6 months are not a threat to people who live and work there, because I'm negotiating close-to standard price for a furnished apartment (and the owner knows that the stability of being paid up front makes up for the extra they might make if their Airbnb were booked every day). So no, I wouldn't be treating the place as a tourist destination or undermining the locals, or partying and reducing their quality of life in their own places next door.
I've been a nomad for over a dozen years and usually find ways to rent medium-term, ex. 6-12 months (and in some cases, long-term). I do as you do, and integrate into society, speak the local language, etc. But even so, I am participating in taking local housing from locals because in some cases I know I'm paying an increased rate (vs local rate), or I'm using what otherwise would be used as an Airbnb for living.
I spent 5 yrs in Lisbon, while renting at local rates, as the city went from ungentrified to gentrified, so I considered it my home and loved the city. But I sat there and watched as it was ruined by tourism and the hoards of short-term visitors. That quality of life I loved so much was destroyed in front of my eyes. I even went back a few years later to try living there again and it was even worse than when I left. All I mean to say is that there is no winning as a nomad, either I'm greatly affected by short-term housing, tourism and gentrification or I'm helping it along.
Bottom line: I don't think it's necessarily destructive for people to go live in a foreign place, get to know the culture and try it out for the mid- to long-term. But I think that's in a wholly different category from tourists who use airbnb in lieu of hotels. And the tourist contingent is orders of magnitude larger and more disruptive to cities than long-term nomads who tend to spread out.
Just for instance; when we lived in Saigon, we lived way out in District 5. In Bangkok we lived in On Nut, at that time the end of the sky train. In both places we were the only farang we would normally see unless we went to the tourist areas for some reason. And in Europe, we lived mainly in villages of a few thousand people, not in cities. When staying somewhere for a few nights or even a few weeks, we stayed in hotels, not airbnb (I'm personally not comfortable with staying in airbnb's short-term because I don't like being in someone's private space, don't trust the quality, don't want to deal with individual landlords' rules and quirks, am wary of hidden cameras, etc., but that's just me).
There's no winning as a nomad, it's true. But I think most of us are keenly aware that we don't want to contribute to the destruction of the places we visit and live, and in fact tend not to cluster in the touristic town centers where housing is already scarce.
One of the most successful pushes against Airbnb taking over whole neighborhoods has been in cities which set a floor on the minimum number of nights. This at least changes the economic calculus enough to persuade landlords to consider long term local renters a little bit more.
They certainly do. Airbnb host here. Most of my tenants stay from 6-18 months.
AirBnb is basically another mean of accruing wealth in the hands of landowners, while people who don't own anything are now in an even harder situation, so I'm happy someone is stealing something from AirBnb, they negatively "disrupted" the lives of milions in order to create their market.
If you only have positive opinions about AirBnb, congratulations, you live in a bubble.
[edit] What I mean is, I don't see it as really accruing value for landowners either. I see a lot of short-sighted landowners making money from a system that is going to drive them to ruin in the long term when there is no functional city left in the place they own their property... ultimately the only people who profit from flipping the geography of a city into a hotel are airbnb investors and absentee landlords in the short run.
Property values don't matter when I get a return of 2-4x my mortage by using AirBnB.
The income you are able to generate through AirBnB is very enticing.
It's still somewhat possible here; for example, last month, a friend who's a 42 year old bartender and just had a baby finally bought a house only about 30 blocks east (east is cheaper); if he'd had enough money for a down payment 5 years ago we would be living on the same block. I make about twice as much as he does. I want him to be living on my block. That's the kind of city that I want to live in, that's why people want to live in Portland in the first place. That's why I decided to buy my house here.
Airbnb is extremely corrosive to a "working city" environment where people of different social / income classes are able to live and work in the same neighborhoods, because it encourages petit homeowners like me to take a paycheck to abandon our properties so the hoteliers extract rent. Yet it's exactly the mixture of working class life which made Airbnb's most attractive tourist cities like Madrid and Lisbon, Portland and Amsterdam so popular with tourists.
IMHO Airbnb is a blight for landlords and renters and there's a very good argument to be made that no property outside a city-bonded hotel should be rented for less than 3-6 months. I said this about taxis not being driven by civilians back when I was a cab driver and Uber showed up, so, I can see I'm on the wrong side of history...
Wait, in whose pockets did tourists's money end up before Airbnb? In the pockets of non-landowners? No, in the pockets of hoteliers, so still landowners.
Airbnb took a chunk of hoteliers' market (so good, right?) but also created a new market. A new market in which people who previously couldn't rent (because not enough capital to be a hotelier) can now do it and thus new market for tourists who previously couldn't travel (because less competition and possibilities).