Airbnb has cost renters in New York City $616 million.
A new report from New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer detailing the website’s effect on housing affordability from 2009 to 2016 tried to isolate Airbnb’s impact by comparing what rent growth would have been without Airbnb listings to what rent growth actually was, according to Bloomberg.
The report says that when people put up their apartments for short-term stays, they are basically removing them from the rental market, lowering the housing supply and increasing the price of units that are still available. Rents per neighborhood went up 1.58 percent for each 1 percent of residential units listed on Airbnb, with Manhattan neighborhoods such as Chelsea, Soho and Greenwich Village seeing the biggest impact.
Airbnb responded to the report by saying that most Airbnb hosts are not permanently taking their units off the market. The organization told Bloomberg that the site’s users are “once again faulted for an affordability crisis that they have no part in — and one that they themselves face every day.” [Bloomberg] – Eddie Small