Mapping The Dominance Of Airbnb On Athens

The world’s most popular short-term rental platform and how it is affecting our neighborhoods explained visually.

Airbnb has effectively created a new category of rental housing. This new category — called ‘short-term rentals’ — exemplifies a software-driven, platform-mediated market that occupies the gap between traditional residential rental housing and hotel accommodation.

A prime example of the corporate sharing economy, the American company operates an online marketplace and — with nearly 5 million listings in 81,000 cities and over 300 million check-ins — it has established itself as the world’s largest peer-to-peer hospitality intermediary. Guests benefit from the ease of use, decent rates, access to peer reviews, and a variety of housing options in neighborhoods not traditionally geared to tourism. Hosts benefit from the access to a huge audience, flexible living arrangements, and a steady flow of extra income in these times of economic crisis.

Nonetheless, Airbnb’s impact on cities and housing markets is not immediately obvious.

On the positive side, the company claims that the short-term rental market increases tourism and its economic benefits. It also provides additional income for hosts, particularly those who would not otherwise rent out their housing unit or rooms to longer term tenants, while benefiting neighborhoods that tourists traditionally do not visit, bringing additional customers to local businesses.

On the negative side, local communities and housing advocates point out that Airbnb is making it easier to illegally rent out apartment units to tourists, while taking those units off the market for full-time residents and driving housing costs higher, negatively affecting the quality of life in residential areas.

Accordingly, hotel associations are concerned that short-term rentals function as hotels but have an unfair advantage because they don’t pay taxes and violate safety and zoning regulations.

Attempts to regulate Airbnb, however, have encountered a significant pushback from the company, which summons a powerful weapon through disruptive business and lobbying strategies and by mobilising its community to protest proposed reforms and expand its political influence. While Airbnb and its defenders insist that these reforms must be updated to accommodate the new possibilities presented by the sharing economy, its opponents argue that Airbnb aims to avoid regulation and taxation, and threatens affordable housing in cities.

The company, which is based in San Francisco, was founded in 2008 as a way for people to easily list and rent out their spare rooms or their homes online. There has been a widespread concern, however, that a large amount of the activity on Airbnb is not ‘home sharing’, but rather a new form of de facto hotel that fuels gentrification and displacement.

In response to this concern, I set out to find how Airbnb is really being used in and affecting the Greek capital.