I find the spread of Airbnb to be as fascinating as it is controversial – I suppose I’m just not as excited about having complete strangers live in my house with me as some people. Anyway, in this post, I’ve taken data scraped from the Airbnb website (by Murray Cox in January 2015 – see data source) to show the distribution and prices of listings in New York City. Note that listing locations are inexactly geocoded; they can be off by a couple hundred feet to keep them anonymous. As such, the price maps should be interpreted more generally than by specific census tract. For example, some rentals appear in Central Park, though it’s very unlikely that they are actually located within the park. (Come share my zoo bench!) So take the geographic accuracy with a grain of salt.

I find it interesting that the kernel density distribution, which is itself a spatial generalization and thus less prone to the effect of inexact locations, does not mimic the population density of New York (http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/pdf/census/census2010/m_pl_p2_nta.pdf). The highest densities of Airbnb listings are in the Lower East Side/East Village, Upper West Side/Chelsea/West Village, and Greenpoint/Williamsburg.

Data source: http://insideairbnb.com/new-york-city/