Airbnb has its shortcomings, as do its competitors in the home-sharing space. But the concept of online home-sharing is a very good thing. It has dramatically helped bring down the cost and improve the experience of both business and vacation travel. It’s made a tangible difference in my life.
I’ve used Airbnb at least a dozen times now and for both business and pleasure. Most recently, I used it to rent a nice home in coastal Maine, along with extended family for a reunion. Hotel accommodations would have been quite a bit more expensive and less comfortable for our group. Hotel rooms also would have been less useful and a whole lot less fun than our beautiful, large house where we could cook meals together, play euchre, and host other groups of relatives while letting everyone’s children run wild.
But lately, Airbnb has been singled out as a target by activists whose motives are … well, let’s just say I don’t think they’re acting from pure public-spiritedness. Between the hotel industry and its moribund unions, there has been significant effort to buy people up on both sides of the political aisle to spread the message that Airbnb is either going to ruin your neighborhood or take away your job, or make your rent go up, or any combination of those things, depending on exactly what your politics happen to be.
All this in the name of anti-homeowner and anti-property-rights ordinances designed to ban or curtail home-sharing — i.e., place very sharp and intrusive limits on what homeowners can do with their own property.
Yesterday, I received a hysterical email along these lines from “Airbnb Watch” containing a lengthy list of about 30 Airbnb incidents involving wild parties, deaths, murders, and other mayhem. “Obviously, the fatalities are tragic enough,” the release says, “but consider the neighbors and families whose once peaceful neighborhoods have been turned into war zones because of the influx of short-term rentals, like Airbnb. It’s becoming a major epidemic.”
Is it really an epidemic, though? Or is it two-and-a-half dozen incidents involving bad Airbnb renters out of tens of thousands of successful rental terms nationwide over the same period?
The nice thing about short-term rentals, from a landlord’s perspective, is that they are short-term. Even the worst renters are out of your hair within a week or two, as opposed to long-term renters, who can make life hell for you and your neighbors for years. There are always going to be bad renters, but you can also give them bad reviews, and you can stay away from the ones who have been blacklisted by previous hosts.
So yes, perhaps there was a case in Utah where a fight broke out in an Airbnb and a woman was shot. Sure, there was that case in Michigan where the renter threw a party with 300 people on site. And OK, yes, one of the stars of Jersey Shore had a domestic violence incident with his girlfriend at an Airbnb in Los Angeles, even getting himself tased and arrested before it was all over.
So yes, this could happen near you if one of your neighbors lets out his home. But so what? You can also just have bad neighbors who stay in their homes year-round. The implication that Airbnb is a breeding ground for this sort of thing remains statistically unsupported and depends on two logical fallacies — first, mistaking anecdote for data, and second, post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Lest you worry that your use of a home-sharing app will lead either to your own demise or tragedy for your guest, let me put your mind at ease by telling you that hotel guests are about 19 times more likely than the average person to die by their own hand, according to one study earlier this century.
Is it because their stay was that bad? Of course not. It turns out that a lot of people check into hotels with the explicit intention of committing suicide. In its own twisted way, it stands to reason: if you’re going to take the coward’s way out, would you rather have your loved ones come upon your lifeless body or leave that experience for some random hotel worker whose initial shock at least won’t be accompanied by devastation?
Suicides aside, hotels also appear to be great locations for overdosing on drugs — possibly by accident. John Belushi, Jimi Hendrix, Anna Nicole Smith, and Janis Joplin are among the many celebrities to suffer this fate.
Others who suffered death by hotel include John Candy (heart attack), Whitney Houston (drowning), and Oscar Wilde (bitterness with life).
So, do you feel worse about hotels now? You shouldn’t. Nor should you worry about a few dozen cases of Airbnb renters dying, starting fights, firing shots, or vandalizing property. There are always risks to letting strangers use your home. In the rare cases where such things happen — wild parties, shootings, and Airbnbrothels — we have police to deal with that, just like we do for everything else in life that can go wrong.
Yes, some people do rent other people’s homes on VRBO or Airbnb or HomeAway with bad intentions. Some people have bad manners, and some people have really bad manners. But that’s life.
At some point, you really do have to trust people. They’re grown-ups. And more than 99% of your life is possible only because of the faith you have that those around you can be counted on to behave reasonably. (Perhaps a reasoned faith, not a “blind” faith as I first put it.) There’s no law or government program that can guarantee that.
