A few months ago, my partner and I found ourselves faced with a soon-to-be vacant apartment in our duplex, a dire need for more space and a tiny bit more cash, and what felt like a binary choice: to Airbnb, or not to Airbnb?

If you’d asked me a few years ago, the answer would have been unequivocal: never Airbnb. When I first bought my building, the term “short-term rental” directly equated in my mind to taking an affordable long-term rental off the market, possibly displacing a long-term tenant in the process, all in the name of greed.

But now my partner and I found ourselves with the need to move out of a too-tiny apartment, four tenants in affordable units who we didn’t want to displace so we could take their spot, and not enough money to buy a third building or rent. We didn’t even have quite enough money to maintain the buildings we had, at least not to the standard my partner and I had promised ourselves we’d stick to: sure, some people would say our properties looked fine, and we were definitely meeting the local building standards, but we had no interest in being landlords to tenants in need of affordable housing if we couldn’t also handle the costs of pulling the weeds, and regularly servicing the furnaces, and making it a safe, comfortable place where our tenants would be proud to live, not just tolerate.

We started to wonder: is the short term rental market the unmitigated evil that purists had made it out to be, or could we use it as a temporary pressure-release valve on our larger project of providing long-term affordable units? Were we letting the perfect be the enemy of the good?

And more to the point, I was thinking back on everything I’d learned at Strong Towns over the years: How adding or maintaining accessory dwelling units can be one of the gentlest ways to make a region stronger. How, in fact, homeowners have always used ADUs to alleviate temporary financial stress, letting the built environment flex and bend as their fortunes rose and fell—and that it’s actually a weird historical aberration that our era puts hotels in one neighborhood, homes in another, and discouraged property owners, legally or through cultural pressure, from using their home as leverage out of poverty or even temporary financial instability. Maybe if we ran it right, putting our second apartment on Airbnb would, paradoxically, be exactly the thing we needed to do to become the best affordable landlords we could be.

And I’d learned another thing from Strong Towns: the power of incremental implementation. We told ourselves we’d do the Airbnb thing for a month or two, see how it went, and then if it didn’t feel right, put the apartment back on the long term market.

Nurses, Locavores, and Dogs

So how has that two month experiment gone?



Reader: It’s gone really well.

Turning our previous apartment into a short term rental did exactly what we set out for it to do. It made it possible for us to move into our larger front unit—I’m writing this from my first-ever adult guest room/office, with the sun pouring through the front windows—while still capturing the same amount of income this apartment used to pull in, plus a tiny bit more. That tiny bit more, by the way, has been the difference between biting our nails and running spreadsheets before replacing the third water heater on the four family in a single year, and being able to assure our tenant confidently that we will get it done before she has to take cold showers. It’s meant that all four of our tenants stayed in their homes because we didn’t need to personally move into their units in search of a bedroom door to keep our dog away from our cats. It’s meant we didn’t need to take a big, risky gamble on a third property we couldn’t afford.