The article doesn't mention it - and I can't find it anywhere - but in any neighborhood what is the highest proportion of units that are short-term rentals. Five percent? Ten percent in the super touristy areas? I have no idea and even before the other flaws in the study I am skeptical than anything short of 20% would make an impact on any major attribute of an area.
I see one stat in the paper that "40% of buildings had airbnb listings in some tracts" but if the buildings had 10 units in them each this still may mean a relatively small number of total listings were from Airbnbs. In fact, even in Boston there are some tracts where I suppose that the average building must have 30+ units which would meant that if 60% of buildings had no listing the total percentage of listings that are Airbnbs is relatively small.
>higher levels of violent crime did not appear immediately after Airbnb listings became available to tourists, but rather developed over the course of several years, the researchers said.
Alternative theory. Every area had some Airbnbs. In neighborhoods that were being wealthier/more popular/had more jobs decided it was easier to just do long-term rentals. In areas where landlords had trouble renting them out to anyone long-term (because locals know if a neighborhood is nice or not) they turned more units into Airbnbs because outsiders don't know/don't care.
I feel like trying to attribute specific numbers to the article's phenomenon is sort of a waste.
It really only takes one individual who is significantly disruptive to change the perception of trust and safety in any given region. The only limit (where percentages and such start creeping in) is in the physical reach that individual has. Anybody who has lived in the same neighborhood as "that guy" knows this to be true.
When "that guy" becomes more, the physical area may not change, but the level of trust and safety might, and that itself can propagate to other areas through gossip, news coverage, etc.
I don't have much of a point, I just wanted to say that the upper limit of "number of people required to make a place feel unsafe" is exactly one.
I think it is a perception issue primarily and I think pretty hard to quantify though I can share my own experience: some time back neighbors sold and new owners came in and turned it into an airbnb.
Seeing constant different groups of people come and go has definitely made neighbors on the block uneasy. Who is to say someone staying in an airbnb is not scoping out the surrounding area for example?
As you said if there is a "that guy" in a neighborhood you'd feel unsafe and Airbnb is displacing those people. It's a trade-off. Its not like this about adding units to a neighborhood but specifically that there is less community if that's the case there are lots of Airbnbs (they said in the article that noise complains and crimes leading to rowdy behavior did not change).
If someone was on the fence about whether this community effect is real - after a single study - wouldn't knowing if 5% of units are Airbnb's are rentals versus 40% be enough to change your conclusions? My prior is that a community cannot be eroded by 10% of unknown people since that is standard for any tight-knit neighborhood anyway.
Knowing whether it was 5% or 40% makes no difference- either one could be enough to cause the negative consequences listed in the article. More studies would be needed to draw further conclusions.
You are beginning to create arguments that do not exist to justify your position. It is unfortunate that you resort to circular reasoning and logic to support a non-existant claim.
If you think that 5% bad neighbors is enough to ruin a whole neighborhood then it would be tough to blame it on AirBNB since most neighborhoods allow subletters in some form (ADUs in SFH areas, apartment subletters in apartment areas). Meanwhile, the only way to get to 40% is really by AirBNBs.
I don't see how one can say that a magnitude difference, and knowledge of what the baseline is without AirBNB, would not change your opinion.
People want to be data driven until the data goes against their feelings. You see the same in SF, the narrative was that crime has spiked during COVID and after seeing stats that it didn't, the new narrative is that the perception of crime is still important, the data didn't matter
> I am skeptical than anything short of 20% would make an impact on any major attribute of an area.
That's not how market pricing works for things like property since the supply is basically fixed. Changing the available supply by even 5% can easily cause the price to change massively.
Let's say there are 100 homes in an area and normally 95 of them are lived in and 5 are up for sale. Anyone wanting to move to the area has 5 homes to choose from, so competition will force the price down to some level acceptable to the sellers. Now let's say that instead of 5 homes for sale, 4 of the owners decide to keep them for Airbnb rentals instead of selling. Now there's only 1 home on the market so if you want to move there you have to pay whatever the owner is charging or else wait an indefinite period of time until another home opens up. So the price will rise to the highest level a would-be resident is willing to pay, even though we only changed the availability numbers by 4%. In effect, property pricing (including apartment rentals) is determined "at the edges" so to speak.
> but in any neighborhood what is the highest proportion of units that are short-term rentals. Five percent? Ten percent in the super touristy areas?
In the US you can get close to 100%, where the only residents are cleaners, shuttle drivers, handymen, and property managers. There are even new development communities that are solely designed and zoned for rental. This, at least, is the case around Disney in FL.
With regards to your "alternate theory" here's a relevant line in the paper.
> To further test the direction of causality for the results, we use a lag/lead analysis in the spirit of Granger [33, 34]. This method is used when the sample includes multiple years and uses both lead and lagged versions of the treatment variable (τ can be both positive and negative).
I don't have enough experience in econometrics/statistics to evaluate this technique. But I would assume they've determined that the increase in crimes lags behind the increase in AirBNBs.
Those types of analyses are informative, but have problems related to the appropriate timescale for the causal processes involved, and can't rule out certain types of processes.
For example, that type of analysis might suggest that the direct crime -> airbnb increase link is unlikely. However, it's possible that there's some other process that's more like simultaneous perceived neighborhood quality change -> airbnb increase and neighborhood quality change -> crime increase (basically third variable change).
Reading this paper I was persuaded that tourism per se is maybe not the causal factor (although not convinced because their measures -- reviews -- were a little odd). However, I'm less convinced that airbnb rental per seis the causal factor. Maybe more closely related to whatever the causal factor(s) is(are) but not necessarily it.
I’m curious. Why do you think anything less than 20% will not have an effect? Why isn’t that tipping point number, 0.01% instead of 20%, for example?
For example, gentrification effects in a community can be felt at much much lower numbers than that. In fact, it can take only a few handfuls of rich people moving into an area for it to start gentrifying because it completely changes the expectations landlords have. Suddenly landlords will greatly increase income requirements and rents and this leads to a feedback loop that makes people with an income above a certain level who wouldn’t even consider living in that area, to now make it an option.
The tipping point in gentrification, for example, isn’t caused by an increase in demand, but instead, an increase in expectations both on the supply and demand sides, which then leads to an increase in demands.
I probably articulated that poorly but my general thought is that in any urban area (the paper talks about Boston a lot) there is already going to be a fairly large amount of turnover/subletters. I've lived in ADUs in residential SFH areas and have subletted apartments.
The 20% is arbitrary but I guess my general instinct is that because the baseline for turnover/short-term subletter in any area that is somewhat urban (the focus of the paper) is going to be 5-10% minimum. The 20% I admit I pulled out of my ass, but its hard for me to fathom how a 3% usage in AirBNB would be more impactful than an area that sees 20% year turnover and a 15% subletter rate.
It only takes ~3% of short term rentals in theory to send prices skyrocketing.
If half the units that would be vacant in wait for a long term occupant are instead flipped on Airbnb, actual rental supply is flipped, even if in reality only 5% of units are Airbnbs.
I see one stat in the paper that "40% of buildings had airbnb listings in some tracts" but if the buildings had 10 units in them each this still may mean a relatively small number of total listings were from Airbnbs. In fact, even in Boston there are some tracts where I suppose that the average building must have 30+ units which would meant that if 60% of buildings had no listing the total percentage of listings that are Airbnbs is relatively small.
>higher levels of violent crime did not appear immediately after Airbnb listings became available to tourists, but rather developed over the course of several years, the researchers said.
Alternative theory. Every area had some Airbnbs. In neighborhoods that were being wealthier/more popular/had more jobs decided it was easier to just do long-term rentals. In areas where landlords had trouble renting them out to anyone long-term (because locals know if a neighborhood is nice or not) they turned more units into Airbnbs because outsiders don't know/don't care.