NAACP teams with beleaguered Airbnb
Civil rights group will encourage minorities to use the rental site
The NAACP is trying to help Airbnb be less white.
The civil rights organization says it has joined forces with Airbnb to reach out to minority communities to encourage more people of color to use the home rental service. Airbnb says it will share 20% of its earnings from the partnership with the NAACP.
The partnership is an opportunity “to focus our attention on African-American homeowners in areas where they can utilize this tool for their personal revenue,” say Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP.
“We have seen across the country many African-American homeowners are beginning to lose their homes, particularly individuals on fixed income, so we see an economic driver for those individuals,” Johnson told USA TODAY.
Local NAACP chapters will work with Airbnb to launch a grass-roots campaign with the aim of getting more people of color to host guests or to be guests themselves. The NAACP will create a portal for the referrals it makes to Airbnb, which has been plagued by allegations of discrimination by its hosts.
Airbnb declined to provide information about the demographics of its hosts or its guests.
Research shows that relatively few blacks use home-rental services such as Airbnb.
According to Pew Research, 5% of blacks have used these services compared with 13% of whites. Blacks are less likely to travel overnight from home for work or personal reasons, but even among those who do travel on occasion, whites (16%) are still far more likely than blacks (5%) to use Airbnb.
A Harvard University study that surveyed hosts from Baltimore, Dallas, Los Angeles, St. Louis and Washington, D.C., found 63% of hosts were white and 8% black.
Airbnb says the partnership would benefit communities of color because 50% of guest spending occurs in the neighborhoods where guests stay.
According to Belinda Johnson, Airbnb’s chief business affairs officer, the company’s fastest-growing spots in major U.S. cities are in minority communities.
Having more African-American homeowners on Airbnb will be “part of the fix” to discrimination on the service, Johnson says.
“It won’t completely fix the problem,” he said. “Airbnb is keenly aware it needs to do other things to fix the problems.”
Airbnb upended the hospitality industry by giving people the power to rent their homes and pick their guests over the Internet. In the process, it unwittingly enabled people to act on their biases, undercutting its “belong anywhere” slogan.
Criticism of Airbnb began with the 2015 Harvard study that found it was tougher for guests with African-American-sounding names to rent homes through the service. That criticism gained national attention with firsthand accounts of people denied lodging because of race, shared on social media using the hashtag #AirbnbWhileBlack.
Airbnb, which has consulted civil rights leaders, has launched initiatives to combat discrimination such as making user profiles less prominent and increasing the number of “Instant Book” listings.