Holiday rental giant Airbnb is
harming Amsterdam’s communities
Airbnb is becoming greedy. It needs
to invest in Amsterdam for the long-term benefit of its communities, not just
for short term financial gain, says Leiden University’s David Zetland.
3 april 2017
Airbnb is a popular service for connecting tourists who want
a cheaper place to stay in a city with ‘hosts’ willing to give them a room or a
flat to stay in. Oh, did I say ‘give’? Sorry, I meant ‘rent.’ Like Facebook
with its claims of helping you communicate with ‘friends,’ Airbnb uses ‘share’
in a way that replaces a child’s use of that word with an alt-truth definition
that means ‘rent.’ That distortion of reality is not a bug but a feature:
Airbnb co-founder (and billionaire) Nathan Blecharczyk made his first millions
spamming people’s inboxes while claiming ‘there were frankly no rules around
it’ in 2002. I don’t know about you, but I knew that spam was a plague well
before 2002, and I’m going to spend the rest of this post talking about how
Airbnb’s founders need to stop spamming and start helping the cities that are
making them rich. By the way, let me clarify that I love Airbnb’s service,
which I am happy to use as a host and guest. What I am not happy about is how
Airbnb seems to be taking the greedy route towards doing business by focussing
more on short-stays than strong (and attractive) communities. I say this as
someone who studies communities and how their ‘common spaces’ are built on an
intangible web of relations among neighbors more than a common postal code. I’m
from San Francisco (where Airbnb is based), but I live in Amsterdam, which may
be Airbnb’s most popular city. According to one source, 2-3% of all Amsterdam
residences (and perhaps 7% in popular neighbourhoods) are listed on Airbnb. In
many cases, Airbnb is driving a trend to replace affordable housing with
illegal hotels owned by investors. In most of Amsterdam’s neighbourhoods,
residents share common stairways, garbage bins and personal space. It’s not
unusual to hear each other through floors and walls as we go about our
business. In many cases, these noises are comforting because they represent the
‘metabolism’ of the building’s inhabitants, some of whom have shared stories,
assistance and common challenges for decades. Airbnb’s site and philosophy say
very little about the neighbours (the ‘community page’ is for hosts to swap
tips). Their focus on making deals may be appropriate for San Francisco but not
for Amsterdam, a city that has worked for centuries to balance the needs of art
and commerce, private and public, rich and poor. In 2014, Amsterdam and Airbnb
signed a memorandum of understanding in which Airbnb agreed to ‘notify hosts in
a powerful manner that they are obliged to offer homes for rent in compliance
with applicable rules.’ This mentioned 60-day limits on hosting, encouraged
hosts to ‘download the notice card for neighbours,’ and clarified that the
municipality was responsible for reinforcing its own rules. Not included but
mentioned, was an agreement for Airbnb to collect and pay the city’s 5 percent
tourist tax, which amounted to €5.5m in 2015. That amount implied that Airbnb
guests paid over €100 million to hosts, of which about 3% (€3 million) went to
Airbnb. Late last year, the city and Airbnb updated their agreement to provide
a ‘more powerful’ reminder of the 60-day hosting limit. Now, hosts are notified
of their total remaining days and told that they will not be allowed to use
Airbnb after the 60-day limit is reached. But that update has omitted two major
factors that are undermining Airbnb’s benefit to Amsterdam. First, Airbnb is not
reporting host income to the city (or government), data that it possesses and
already reports to American authorities for ‘high volume hosts.’ If Amsterdam
hosts are billing over €100m in charges, then the tax authorities should be
making around €40m (based on the 42% marginal tax rate that many homeowners
would face for renting their own place for less than 60 days). That money would
come in handy for a city forced to cut €25m in spending on garbage collection,
public spaces, youth programmes, and so on. Second, Airbnb is not doing very
much to help the neighborhoods that make its service so popular. Hosts and
visitors give each other ratings and feedback, but the neighbors are the ones
who must deal with banging bags, morning departures, and strangers who
contribute nothing to the neighborhood. Airbnb can address this problem by
allowing neighbours to leave feedback on guests. Although this system might
take a little while to set up, it’s obvious that Airbnb’s very clever staff
could help Amsterdam’s city staff with notifying neighbours and ensuring that
strangers would, in the words of Airbnb, ‘belong.’ Airbnb’s license to operate
in Amsterdam depends on whether it helps or harms the city. Airbnb can help
Amsterdam collect its fair share of taxes and guests fit into the community,
but it can also resist and damage Amsterdam’s quality of life. Let’s hope that
Airbnb invests in Amsterdam for the long run. David Zetland is an assistant
professor of economics at Leiden University College and resident of Amsterdam.
Thanks to Kim Zwitserloot and Joes Natris for their help on earlier drafts of
this post.
Read more at DutchNews.nl: Holiday rental giant Airbnb is
harming Amsterdam’s communities http://www.dutchnews.nl/features/2017/04/airbnb-is-harming-amsterdams-communities/
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