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Airbnb offers free accommodation for 20k Afghan refugees

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Re: Airbnb offers free accommodation for 20k Afghan refugees

#111

Post by strogonoff »

kbos87 wrote: post #55
eat_veggies wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think this is some gotcha (you can't help with Afghan refugees during a crisis until you've solved homelessness ?) then you never cared about the homeless in the first place, and are using them as a pawn when it's useful to dunk on the middle east.

I don’t think that’s fair. I drive past hundreds of homeless people who are already here in the US every day. I applaud Airbnb for this move, but I also can’t ignore the fact that it’s a moment in the news cycle that determines these people are getting help and these ones aren’t.

Why does Airbnb offer free stays to refugees in Afghanistan, but not homeless in the US?

First, Airbnb is very host-centered. The host can pick their guests, make changes to their reservations, etc. I think if they said “your house will host homeless, but don’t worry we will pay you anyway”, they’d lose 70% of US hosts regardless. The shelter is only part of the problem with homelessness, going hand in hand with at least mental health care.

Second, it may have to do with prices. I imagine a night in Kabul cost $15–25 for an apartment (prior to the withdrawal, at which point they probably lowered further); now compare to prices in say Washington or SF area. Imagine Airbnb declares a plan for fighting homelessness, and has to pay actual market rates to its hosts in major US cities.

All in all it looks like it could be an interesting idea for a non-profit, but it doesn’t seem to make sense as a long-term tactic for a business like Airbnb.

This could be a good question to ask companies like Booking.com though, where hosts are generally not expected to be able to choose whether to accommodate the name on the booking.

Re: Airbnb offers free accommodation for 20k Afghan refugees

#112

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #48
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an idea: If you want to convert a dwelling to short stay accommodation you have to also make it available for x days per year for crisis accommodation.

Or we could just, y'know, produce enough homeless shelters or crisis housing ourselves, through the government + taxes. Trying to twist the private sector's arm into doing this themselves is stupid, it's not their wheelhouse, just tax their profits and have the government do it.

Well, with all due sarcasm: that seems to be working.

Re: Airbnb offers free accommodation for 20k Afghan refugees

#113

Post by remarkEon »

ggm wrote: post #107
remarkEon wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>This is an old, understood, persistent process in the US. Which apparently failed quite dramatically for my interpreter since he still holds views that clash with the mean understanding of what's politically acceptable in the United States. Perhaps that's my fault. To that end, no I don't think everyone "understands" this.

If he only wanted to avoid being killed by the Taliban but otherwise retain his religious and culturally acquired views and behaviours, Probably the US was never the right place to settle. It's possible Iran, or Pakistan, or Malaysia or something was going to be a better "fit". I doubt they wanted to be the final destination any more than any economy does, but possibly, the outcome would be more congenial for him if…

I agree with everything you said, and your inference is correct, he is Hazara. Settling him in Iran probably would've been the best possible outcome (ignoring the geopolitical reasons for why this can't happen for a moment), and not just for cultural reasons. There's enough local Islamic identity for him there that any lingering issue with him working with the US probably would've been overlooked given the on-going intra-Islamic conflict across that part of the world. It's weird, I read all of these articles by supposedly smart people and they're just wrong on so many parts about how resettling Afghans will or should work. I sent him an email tonight but I doubt he'll respond any time soon. He did create a LinkedIn profile during the pandemic (probably to look for other truck driving jobs) and linked me so perhaps I'll reach out there.

Re: Airbnb offers free accommodation for 20k Afghan refugees

#114

Post by jkestner »

hourislate wrote: post #59
coding123 wrote: post #3

I think there are about 500K Homeless in America, would it make sense to first offer about 20K of them some free housing?

Can you imagine if America spent 2 trillion (cost it spent trying to help Afghan people) on its homeless and poor. Could barely get them a fucking $1200 check after shutting down the economy for a year.

Wish it had even gone to the Afghan people:

  “Between 80 and 90 percent of outlays actually returned to the US economy.”
  Your tax dollars went to pay defense contractors, construction firms, anyone who pounced on an opportunity.
https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/international/mission-accomp...

Re: Airbnb offers free accommodation for 20k Afghan refugees

#115

Post by MichaelGroves »

unmole wrote: post #67
eat_veggies wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you think this is some gotcha (you can't help with Afghan refugees during a crisis until you've solved homelessness ?) then you never cared about the homeless in the first place, and are using them as a pawn when it's useful to dunk on the middle east.

> dunk on the middle east. So, the Middle East includes Afghanistan now? I swear the borders seem to advance every year.

The Middle East 'grew' in the early 00s, for the reasons you probably expect. The Bush administration needed a euphemism for Muslim nations.

> The Greater Middle East, is a geo-political term, introduced in March 2004 in a paper by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as part of the U.S. administration's preparatory work for the G8 summit of June 2004, denoting a vaguely defined region that includes the Arab world plus Afghanistan, Cyprus, Iran, Israel, Pakistan and Turkey.[1] The paper presented a proposal for sweeping change in the way the West deals with the Middle East and North Africa.[2][3] Previously, by Adam Garfinkle of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Greater Middle East had been defined as the MENA region together with Central Asia and the Caucasus.[4]

> The future of this Greater Middle East has sometimes been referred to as the "new Middle East", first so by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who in Dubai in June 2006 presented the second-term Bush administration's vision for the region's future. Rice said would be achieved through 'constructive chaos', a phrase she repeated a few weeks later during a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert when the 2006 Lebanon War had broken out; the meaning of this phrase and the Bush administration's vision have been much debated since.[5][6][7] The efforts to achieve this new Middle East are sometimes called "The Great Middle East Project".[8][9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Middle_East

Re: Airbnb offers free accommodation for 20k Afghan refugees

#116

Post by nostromo »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #104
shimon_e wrote: post #99

Airbnb doesn't own the properties. They should be giving credit to the hosts.

Presumably Airbnb is paying for the stays. The hosts are doing a nice thing too I guess, but it's also not too different from regular business, since they're, y'know, getting paid.

I don’t know the details of this program - but in the past Airbnb has asked hosts to “donate” their space for special causes - like medical workers during early Covid.

In that case it was definitely the hosts making donations, not Airbnb.

https://www.airbnb.com/d/covid19relief

Re: Airbnb offers free accommodation for 20k Afghan refugees

#117

Post by ggm »

remarkEon wrote: post #113
ggm wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If he only wanted to avoid being killed by the Taliban but otherwise retain his religious and culturally acquired views and behaviours, Probably the US was never the right place to settle. It's possible Iran, or Pakistan, or Malaysia or something was going to be a better "fit". I doubt they wanted to be the final destination any more than any economy does, but possibly, the outcome would be more congenial for him if…

I agree with everything you said, and your inference is correct, he is Hazara. Settling him in Iran probably would've been the best possible outcome (ignoring the geopolitical reasons for why this can't happen for a moment), and not just for cultural reasons. There's enough local Islamic identity for him there that any lingering issue with him working with the US probably would've been overlooked given the on-going i…

One of the Afghani refugees here in Australia spoke of how confusing it was to be welcomed into a completely secular western culture, and then have to cope with Sunni dominated mosques and expectations of behaviour. The Sunni imams were a bit distressed they weren't showing up, noting that if you didn't live close to the mosque here, and hadn't yet learned to drive, (drive: She was functionally illiterate, and dealing with a 6 month old baby with a hole-in-the-heart who was born in refugee camp. what a nightmare) that was .. hard. (because we don't somehow welcome mosques as much as we might, and they wind up being in bush locations, away from public transport, and only do Shia-imam stuff on alternate tuesday afternoons type things)

It sounded like a next to impossible balancing act. Somehow, a lot of them wound up in construction: specifically tiling. I wondered if the "silk road" building culture of decorated tiling had paid off, as a work model for them or if this is just that one lucky Afghan who gets a job and then hires his friends, to make a "thing" happen.

I was also told the whole Fasi/Dari thing was really funny from the Farsi side of things. The Dari speakers sound like they're enunciating olde-english, chaucer style, to modern english ears (if you see what I mean) -and the Afgans said that the Farsi interpreters were often mis-interpreting things which made for horrendous Immigration problems.

Re: Airbnb offers free accommodation for 20k Afghan refugees

#118

Post by narrator »

Igelau wrote: post #86
narrator wrote: post #21

Would you prefer to stay in a hotel or a refugee shelter? That's what this campaign says to me at the gut level. Might be nice and altruistic, but it's kind of lousy brand marketing.

Hotel. I don't quite understand the point you're making.

By turning Airbnbs into refugee shelters people will make the association between the two.

Re: Airbnb offers free accommodation for 20k Afghan refugees

#120

Post by remarkEon »

ggm wrote: post #117
remarkEon wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with everything you said, and your inference is correct, he is Hazara. Settling him in Iran probably would've been the best possible outcome (ignoring the geopolitical reasons for why this can't happen for a moment), and not just for cultural reasons. There's enough local Islamic identity for him there that any lingering issue with him working with the US probably would've been overlooked given the on-going i…

One of the Afghani refugees here in Australia spoke of how confusing it was to be welcomed into a completely secular western culture, and then have to cope with Sunni dominated mosques and expectations of behaviour. The Sunni imams were a bit distressed they weren't showing up, noting that if you didn't live close to the mosque here, and hadn't yet learned to drive, (drive: She was functionally illiterate, and dealin…

>I was also told the whole Fasi/Dari thing was really funny from the Farsi side of things. The Dari speakers sound like they're enunciating olde-english, chaucer style, to modern english ears (if you see what I mean) -and the Afgans said that the Farsi interpreters were often mis-interpreting things which made for horrendous Immigration problems.

I definitely see what you mean, and he said similar things when we talked about language diversity in Afghanistan. Him being a native Dari speaker caused multiple misunderstandings amongst the local Pashto speakers, through accent but also Pashto is just a totally different almost guttural language compared to Dari. That discussion was the first time I think I felt resentment for how American education does not demand fluency in multiple languages at a young age.

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