Airbnb raises violent crime rates in cities as residents are pushed out

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt here and treat this like a genuine question. I say this because this argument has become so prominent in recent years as a means of defending the indefensible. It's often referred to as "butwhataboutism".

There are a few variations of this. For example:

- Arguing against legislation because it leaves some problems unsolved. This applies to literally all legislation and an improvement is typically better than nothing. The problem is that those making these arguments typically know this and don't want any change;

- Why prosecute person or company for X when some other person or company does something vaguely similar? Well is there sufficient evidence for the prosecution to proceed? If yes then the "but what about X" argument is simply being used as a means to stop a prosecution where there's a vested interest. Because otherwise it's like saying "because this person over here wasn't charged with murder then we shouldn't charge anyone with murder".

I really hope that people develop the critical skills to see through this for what it is: a means of manipulating people. So the next time someone tries this stop and ask yourself why they're bringing up a new topic rather than addressing the existing one. Who are they trying to manipulate and why?

I think a lot about cleaning solutions because of this. You can't have shortstay accommodation without cleaning, you can't currently clean without human involvement, labour costs, etc. $100 works if you're exit-cleaning after a three month rental, but every 1-2 nights, it's insane. And Airbnb properties don't have the efficiencies of hotel cleaning teams (who will have targets/policies like 20 minutes to clean a room, no transport costs, etc).

It's a bigger problem for remote accommodation where staff are hard to find. I recently stayed in glamping tents in a national park where the operator had to drive 40 minutes each way on a rough dirt track to clean and reset the tents. Having to do that a few times a week would really knock down the enthusiasm.

Solve some of the cleaning problem and you have a huge market to disrupt.

As one example, beds and sheets and pillows and the like have barely changed in decades. Is there a workable format that would be quicker to deal with and acceptable to users?

Sigh. This appears to be one of those cases of media exaggeration for eyeballs. The study says:

> the effect on violence was only consistent visible for the measure of Airbnb penetration–or the extent to which buildings in the neighborhood have one or more listings (and for the measure of density, or the listings per household in the two-year lags). It was never present for overall usage, or the estimated quantity of Airbnb guests

And

> A second and related concern could be the potential bias due to omitted variables. Though the DID models control for the initial conditions of neighborhoods, they do not necessarily control for trends in these variables that parallel the increases in both Airbnb presence and crime. For example, there is some evidence that gentrifying neighborhoods experience increases in certain types of crime

And

> we have tested this hypothesis in a single city

So there's apparently a correlation between a single metric and a single class of crime in a single city, and there's a multi-year delay in the effect. The author speculates that erosion of social fabric is the culprit, but doesn't actually back this theory up with either data or references. One would at least expect some references to some other study about the correlations on emigration and violence (my two cents here is that it feels more likely that the former is caused by the latter, if a correlation exists at all). They even acknowledge that the correlation could be due to a factor that isn't being accounted for.

But then the article writer drops all nuance and blasts a title pegging blame squarely on AirBnB, even though it isn't even established that correlation is consistently true everywhere, let alone causation.

I mean, yeah, I get that people don't like predatory real estate renting, and want to hear that there's a neatly convenient evil entity to blame, but come on now.