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It’s not a good time to be a renter. I’m not sure there’s ever a good time to be a renter. Renters pay more than most homeowners per month but have nothing to show for it after twenty years of renting. But that’s just the usual punishment of not being part of the capitol class.
What’s new is that the world has found a way to vacay on a budget. Big Tech giveth and Big Tech taketh away. If you own a house or rent an apartment with a spare bed room you can make some money renting out for a weekend to some stranger on the internet. That’s a nice way to make some extra money, a way for someone to save some money by not getting a hotel. Everybody wins, right?
Except that gigs expand. Instead of a few hours a week, many Uber drivers drive full time. In that sameway people realize they can make more money using their apartment as an Air BnB destination than the cost of their rent. Suddenly residential renting zones are now commercial enterprises. And rentals are therefore not really rentals at all, making it that much harder for the working class to find affordable housing.
As an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute found “The ‘Airbnb effect’ is to some extent remarkably similar to gentrification in that it slowly increases the value of an area to the detriment of the indigenous residents, many of whom are pushed out due to financial…
