Airbnb can add to our community. Or it can change it.
I’ve had some incredible Airbnb stays. My host in Chiang Mai, a sweet Thai grandmother, made me breakfast every morning and threw a huge dinner for me and all of her friends on the last night of my stay. I stayed with a Polish girl in Copenhagen who spent nearly two hours helping me plan my trip to Denmark.
Those were Airbnb experiences as they were meant to be, a personal interaction between local and tourist that encouraged cultural exchange and added to the local economy. These experiences informed my knee-jerk first reaction to proposed limits to Airbhbs in Raleigh: dismay.
The crux of the opposition to Airbnbs seems to be frustration over noise and traffic, and the City Council is ready to restrict short-term rentals to the point where they’re no longer an attractive option. Under the proposed regulations, homeowners would not be able to rent their homes out while they’re on vacation, as they will have to be present while renting certain rooms. They will only be able to rent out one or two bedrooms, and the bedrooms cannot have kitchen units attached.
While it’s true that guests don’t have the same level of responsibility to neighbors that owners do, the numbers show that Raleigh has had a very small number of issues with Airbnb guests; only 37 out of 42,000 Airbnb guests led to noise complaints last year.
Draconian regulations on whole-home rentals and mini-fridges might cut down on noise, but it also cuts off a potentially valuable service arbitrarily. Whole-home rentals are probably more attractive to the type of traveler Raleigh tends to draw (business, prospective residents), and it makes sense that members of our community would be able to rent out their entire home while they’re on vacation.
That said, there are valid reasons to be wary of too many long-term renters. Studies suggest that Airbnb contributes to rent increases by taking available housing units off the market. Another study by McGill University found that Airbnbs in New York raised rent by $380 per year and spurred gentrification by displacing lower-income residents. Alastair Boone of CityLab reports that the difference between which neighborhoods saw rent increases and which didn’t mostly comes down to whether or not the owner lived in the city.
The spaces in this kind of Airbnb are clearly not homes, and the hosts often live in other cities or states. Some people call these “investor units,” and they cause bigger problems than an occasional noise complaint. Not only are these hosts taking advantage of the platform by potentially skirting hospitality regulations, they’re changing the makeup of their communities.
Raleigh already suffers from a lack of affordable housing. The growth in our city is exciting, but it means that we need housing and shouldn’t allow investor units with absentee renters to take up needed apartments.
Scrolling through Raleigh’s Airbnb listings, I was able to find several hosts listing four or six different properties (although there was nothing like the couple in Asheville who have 21 rental properties listed in one of the country’s worst housing markets).
There are ways to minimize investor units. Boston has stratified Airbnb permit charges to correspond with the owner’s level of involvement, from $25 permit fees for hosts who share their rooms to $500 fees for owners who don’t live in their rental properties. And Raleigh Mayor Nancy MacFarlane’s suggestion of limiting the amount of time owners can rent out their whole house is a viable option, although it would require Airbnb’s help to enforce.
Raleigh won’t deal with a large volume of tourism, and most of our Airbnbs are in homeowner-heavy areas, which is good. But we should create reasonable limits on the number of properties owners can list and favor owners who are part of the local community.
I am confident that Raleigh can use Airbnb to add monetary and cultural wealth to our community, so we shouldn’t regulate them out of existence. We should, however, focus our regulations on making sure that Airbnb rentals work with our community to add wealth, instead of eliminating housing units and raising rents only to benefit people who might not live here.
Correction: An earlier version of this article said that a study by McGill University found that Airbnb raised rents in New York City by $380 per month. The study, which was commissioned by the Hotel Trades Council, found that Airbnb rentals raised rents by $380 per year.
This story was originally published December 16, 2018 at 12:00 AM.
