Short-Term Rental Platforms: Home-sharing or sharewashed neoliberalism?

Recent years have seen an explosive growth of online marketplaces for short-term rentals. This chapter provides an overview on the current debates on how these platforms affect urban life. Do they indeed enable “home sharing”, giving disenfranchised families access to an extra income stream, or are they better understood as vehicles for large-scale real estate capital? The chapter looks at evidence of who benefits and who bears the costs of these platforms, illustrated through large-scale Airbnb data. This evidence suggests that Airbnb lowers transaction costs of short-term rentals, enabling a small increase in cities’ tourism revenue. However, its marketplaces have become increasingly centralized, with a small fraction of renters now representing most of the revenue. These beneficiaries are disproportionately white and high-wealth households, while the costs - increased rents, reduced supply of long-term housing, and neighbourhood life outcompeted by temporary visitors - are disproportionately born by residents of low-income and disenfranchised neighbourhoods.