FLIGHT OF THE ADVOCATOR
Glover says Airbnb helps communities
Long before he was a world-famous actor, Danny Glover was working for his community.
And in Airbnb, the oft-criticized home-rental service, he sees a community-building opportunity.
While a student at San Francisco State University in the 1960s — after he helped to lead a five-monthlong student strike on campus — he was a community worker for the City of San Francisco.
He had grown up in the city, but it wasn’t until he started working for his community that he realized how temporary housing can be.
The San Francisco he knew then is certainly not the place it is now. What was once a cosmopolitan mishmash of cultures from across America and abroad, with working-class neighbourhoods and wealthy neighbourhoods and everything in between, is no longer so.
It’s now one of the most expensive cities in America, with stories galore about working-class people being forced to commute for hours to The City by the Bay from homes far outside city limits.
Glover, who first visited Vancouver in 1983 as an actor in the film Iceman, knows many of the same kinds of changes and the same kinds of struggles with affordability are here, too.
“‘How do we live in cities?’ is the question we have to answer in the 21st century,” he said Tuesday.
He was in town on behalf of Airbnb, which he started working with in August as a diversity adviser. In Airbnb, he sees an opportunity for people who are hoping to push back against the gentrification of their community. Glover’s an optimist. He’s a believer in building communities, in building the public good.
“Fifty-eight per cent of hosts in Vancouver are women, that highlights something important,” he put forward as an example.
Data supplied by Airbnb that suggests 11 per cent of their hosts in Vancouver are from the “creative” community — read artists, actors and more — is another.
Glover’s very aware of the criticisms Airbnb has faced, that homes that should be rented out to families have instead been taken out of circulation and are now being used more like hotels.
Cities like San Francisco and New York have pushed back against the company, which calls its service “home-sharing.” In both cities Airbnb has agreed that renters must be registered with the city and won’t be able to list more than one property using the service.
There have been similar calls in Vancouver to ban units being used as full-time Airbnb operations.
Glover, a longtime union advocate who supported Bernie Sanders during the outspoken senator’s push to be the Democratic party’s candidate for president, said he wouldn’t have signed on with Airbnb if he didn’t believe they were committed to helping communities.
“They know the statistics,” he said. “They’re right on top of it. And they’ve been proactive in finding remedies.”
Airbnb also partnered with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) earlier this year, hoping to add more African-Americans as hosts. There’s a connection to Glover here too: his parents, both postal workers, were heavily involved in the NAACP’s work in pushing for improved civil rights in the Bay Area.
And while the current U.S. president, Donald Trump, may not share his ideals, Glover believes his country — and working people the world over — will persevere.
“The bottom line for human beings is a struggle for good,” he said.
“The encouragement of doing good outweighs the other things.”