Airbnb’s dual mission of belonging, displacement
Everyone I know who has rented out a room or an inlaw unit on Airbnb has a horror story. There were the Russians who ignored their hosts’ no-smoking rules and were still contentedly puffing away in their basement room when the owners returned home, overstaying their welcome and refusing to leave. There was the French couple who stuffed so many used baby wipes into the toilet of their guest cottage that the sewer line clogged, leading to an extremely unpleasant eruption in the bathroom of the main home, which required the hosts to spend thousands of dollars on cleanup and repairs. There was the absent-minded guest who left the shower running in the host’s vacation house after locking up and leaving, and by the time a caretaker visited the property days later it looked like a flood-ravaged home in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
And then there was the young, mentally disturbed woman who was looking not just for a room to rent for a few days but for someone to take care of her. The woman rented a room in the home of my friend Cindy Alwan, a freelance fashion designer in Berkeley who makes ends meet by renting her oldest son’s room on Airbnb when he’s away at college. When Alwan spoke with her guest, the woman would often break down crying. After her stay was over, she appeared again on Alwan’s doorstep, barefoot and wearing nothing but a coat. “Do you want to go out to dinner?” she asked Alwan, who declined the invitation.
“It’s like she wanted to connect with a family,” Alwan said. “I felt so bad for her, but I didn’t know what to do.”
The situation grew stranger when the young woman
found the key to a neighbor’s backyard cottage that was also listed on Airbnb and made herself at home. The hosts later found her, naked in bed, and when they asked what she was doing there, she got up and left.
An Airbnb customer service representative expressed shock when informed about the odd incident, telling Alwan and her neighbor that it was a first for the company and offering to change the locks on their doors. “You want to have faith in humankind,” Alwan said. “Most times people are usually fine. But sometimes they’re not.”
And when they’re not, their presence in your home suddenly looms large and intrusive. Airbnb spokesman Nick Papas told me company horror stories are very rare. “We’ve booked over 170 million guest arrivals so far — and the overwhelming number of those are positive experiences for everyone involved.”
Airbnb markets itself in expansive terms. It’s more than just a platform for commercial transactions, Airbnb global strategist Chris Lehane insists, it’s an earth-shaking “movement” with the power to democratize capitalism and help solve the economic inequality crisis. Lehane, a sharp-elbowed political operative who honed his skills in the embattled Clinton White House, has become an aggressive evangelist for the shortterm rental giant, building clubs in more than 100 cities around the world to help fight opponents who see the company as a Godzilla eating up the urban housing market.
I’ll have more to say on the politics of Airbnb in my Tuesday column. But today I want to focus on the $30 billion startup — a valuation that makes Airbnb worth more than global hotel chains like Hyatt — as a social phenomenon.
Most tech startups get dazzled by their own hype, but Airbnb has raised marketing to mystical new levels. Chip Conley, a former communications guru for the company, announced that it was only a matter of time before Airbnb won the Nobel Peace Prize. “I kind of laughed — I thought he was out of his mind,” Brian Chesky, the 35-year-old co-founder, told business journalist Brad Stone. “And then suddenly you hear stories and you’re like, ‘We’re not completely crazy after all.’ ”
Chesky and his stunningly wealthy young business partners are the subjects of a new book by Stone, “The Upstarts,” as well as one by Fortune magazine’s Leigh Gallagher, “The Airbnb Story.” Gallagher’s breathlessly adulatory book tells the story of how Chesky and company created not just a tourist booking exchange but a “mission.” And what is that higher purpose? It’s bringing together people from all over the world.
“Belong anywhere” was Airbnb’s new mantra, Chesky announced in 2014. “It meant venturing into neighborhoods that you might not otherwise be able to see, staying in places you wouldn’t normally be able to, bunking in someone else’s space,” Gallagher explains.
Smoothing world travel in this age of borders and fear and suspicion does indeed seem like an enlightened corporate mission. And Airbnb is only too happy to advertise all the happy hosts and guests whose lives have been enriched by logging on to the platform. But let’s not get too misty-eyed here. Putting aside the commercial landlords who are Airbnb hosts, I suspect the great majority of those who advertise rooms in their homes do so out of pressing economic necessity, not out of some desire to broaden their horizons by inviting complete strangers into their homes.
Everything is for sale in today’s global marketplace — not just our labor, but our most intimate spaces, our havens from a heartless world. If tourists are allowed to “belong anywhere” — even in your bedroom and bathroom — then where do you belong? Airbnb’s corporate visionaries refuse to acknowledge this, but their mission is not just about belonging, it’s about displacement.
There is nothing “sharing” about a commercial transaction. You “share” your home on Airbnb only in the sense that you share your wedding ring, if you pawn it, with whoever buys it.
This accounts for the strangeness of the Airbnb visit for most hosts and guests, even when it doesn’t devolve into madness or clogged toilets. Aside from the larger issue of uprooting people from their homes so landlords can turn them into Airbnb hotels, there’s a kind of psychic displacement that occurs in the Airbnb transaction.
We now belong anywhere, and therefore nowhere.