‘Making ends meet’ by renting homes to strangers

Abstract

Created to help its founders pay their rent during a housing crisis, Airbnb promotes its services as a supplemental income strategy to ‘make ends meet’ by renting their homes to strangers. This article compares Airbnb ‘home sharing’ to its historical precursor of taking lodgers and boarders in early industrial North American cities, an important form of supplemental income for women and one of the few remaining alternatives to wage income. Historicizing Airbnb shows that this source of supplemental income cannot be separated from gendered and racist ideologies that value certain practices while stigmatizing others. Such ideologies shaped labour markets as well as the housing policies that responded to the crisis of social reproduction in the industrial era, with repercussions still felt in the context of platform urbanism. Thinking the city through this work highlights the interrelation between household economies, housing strategies and the division of labour in the period, with implications for how we analyze short-term rental platforms like Airbnb.

Keywords:

• platform urbanism
• short-term rentals
• housing
• gendered labour
• platform labour
• social reproduction
• urban commons
• enclosure
• urban history

Acknowlegements

The author would like to thank Michelle Buckley, Lia Frederiksen, Maartje Roelofsen, Nick Lombardo, the participants of the sessions “Querying ‘the Future of Work’’’ at the AAG 2019 in Washington D.C. and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on previous versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Wilcox and co-authors (2020) note that it is not appropriate to call violence between Airbnb hosts and guests ‘domestic violence’ although it may take place in a domestic space, as ‘what makes an aggressive act “domestic” is not where it occurs, but who initiates it’ (6).

Additional information

Funding

This article was supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes on contributors

Kiley Goyette

Kiley Goyette is a PhD candidate in Human Geography at the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto. Email: [email protected]