Airbnb and Affordable Housing Writing Assignment

Airbnb and Affordable Housing
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Airbnb and Affordable Housing
The home-sharing platform, Airbnb, has grown to be a significant player in the tourism industry. The company allows travelers to experience authentic styles of living in previously unvisited neighborhoods. Since its establishment in 2008, the company’s steady growth has raised several concerns in the hotel and accommodation industry. The company, alongside other organizations that provide short-term rental services, have had major impacts on cities and urban housing markets. Airbnb has over 6 million accommodations available in more than 191 countries worldwide (Airbnb, 2019). Airbnb forms part of a sharing economy, which refers to making use of underutilized goods (Edelman & Geradin, 2016). The internet-based peer-to-peer marketplace allows homeowners to share their available spaces, including an empty room or a basement to visitors to earn revenues. The use of better matching technologies eases the process of finding possible homes, which facilitates the business (Horton & Zeckhauser, 2016). Despite its benefit to homeowners, Airbnb has affected the economy and welfare of the residential housing market. Based on the strategic radar model, main environments that are affected by the issue of affordable housing are the competitor, economic, legal, and political. The company’s provision of affordable housing has greatly affected its competitors, mainly those offering long-term housing, hotels, and traditional bread-and-breakfasts. These adversaries argue that the company competes unfairly since it neither adheres to regulations nor pays hospitality taxes, which contribute to the high fees paid to long term rentals and hotels. The taxes that are required to be paid by the landlords of long-term rental houses make it difficult for them to lower their rates to the same level as that of short-term housing offered by Airbnb. To balance the two, municipals are looking towards establishing harsh policies against Airbnb, including making short-term renting of less than 30 days illegal in some cities (Nieuwland & Melik, 2018; Ferre-Sadurni, 2019). Such measures will affect the company’s operations and reduce their market outreach, which will affect its revenues.
The disruption of the lodging and long-term housing industry also affects the economy in that a few guests will opt for long term rentals, which will reduce the number of revenues collected from the hotels and eventually result in lower revenues collected from taxes in the hotel industry. From a legal standpoint, short term rentals are difficult to regulate, mainly because the houses are offered by homeowners and are not meant for commercialization. Airbnb’s affordable housing also results in the violation of safety laws and property violation. The rentals listed on Airbnb pay little attention to health and safety laws, which is a violation of the laws that govern the hotel industry. Politically, the government is also directly influenced by the affordable housing since it lacks a proper means of regulating short-term rentals. In New York, various policy discussions have been raised over the issue of Airbnb’s affordable hou...