A fresh report claims that Airbnb has restricted the number of long-term rentals of New York leading to an increased median rent throughout the city and this has also promoted gentrification.
The report that revealed this fact was entitled ‘The High Cost of Short-Term Rentals in New York City’.
It is authored by a research group from the McGill University School of Urban Planning. But it was funded by the hotel workers union that was ‘politically influential’ as per one of the leading news media agencies.
The report has also found that in the study period of September 2014 through August 2017 Airbnb has been able to potentially remove about 7,000 to 13,500 units of housing from the long-term rental market of New York placing additional pressure on a city that was already squeezed for housing.
Out of those 13,500 the report found that 12,200 entire-house units were quite often rented in the last year of the study.
In this study, ‘frequently rented’ is defined as housing units that are available for 120 days and occupied for half of those days. David Wachsmuth, the researcher found that the units might have all been removed from the long-term rental market and at the least they are certainly at a high risk of being removed from the housing market.
Airbnb however has refuted the claim.
It has stated that the methodology of the study is flawed as it relies in nights that a home is listed for rent instead of nights that it is actually rented.
The study claims that the typical listing in New York is rented for only 47 nights, that is well below what Airbnb found to be the break-even point of 172 nights for it to make sense for an apartment to be taken off the long-term rental market.
