Airbnb in the core

 

Czech Village, Cedar Rapids

"The beef I have with the airbnbs in my neighborhood is EXTREME," tweeted a friend and civic stalwart who lives in the Oakhill Jackson neighborhood in the core of Cedar Rapids. This came mere days after I started noticing fancy doorways like the one above in Czech Village. A friend who lives just outside of Czech Village adds that there are two Airbnbs on his block, one directly across the street (though, like most Airbnb spaces, they come without labels on the doorways).

Airbnb, the online marketplace for short- or long-stay housing, has arrived in a big way in the emerging core neighborhoods of Cedar Rapids, and perhaps your town, too. This summer I've been pondering the center of town--including downtown, the planned New Bo Extension, Czech Village and New Bohemia--but I hadn't pondered this trend. As it turns out, a lot of people around the country have been pondering this very thing.

Airbnb, similar to Uber, began as a way to help people clear a bit of cash by renting spare rooms or even their entire house or apartment if they weren't using them. The website facilitated the meeting of buyers and sellers who might not otherwise meet each other. Jane and I frequently used Airbnb when we visited our son in St. Paul, Minnesota, whose entire collection of motels is on I-35 miles from where we wanted to be. Airbnb put us in a variety of comfortable houses in and around the Macalester-Grande neighborhood. They were more convenient and even more comfortable than a motel, so they were clearly filling an unmet need, which is how the economic marketplace is supposed to work.

Market innovations, however ingenious, can bring market failures. (See Kemmis 2022 and Fallon 2022 for examples of disappointed buyers and hosts, respectively.) Even when both buyer and host are happy, there can be externalities. Loud parties can be annoying to fellow guests at hotels, but are even worse to experience when you're at your actual home; Airbnb recently announced an algorithm to try to reduce such incidents, which has reportedly been effective in Australian trials (Braga 2022). There have been complaints that hosts don't pay taxes hotels do (Sheppard 2022), or comply with regulations faced by traditional apartments (Cortright 2019). Particularly in tourist areas, conversions to lucrative short-term rentals can raise real estate prices overall, and price people out of housing. (See Lemke 2022 for the math in Seattle, and Frishberg 2022 for an effort to counteract this in Sedona, Arizona.)

In an interview with US News and World Report, Breonne DeDecker, program manager at a New Orleans housing nonprofit, asked: 

One of the big questions that we have is, 'How much of an outsize role do we want tourism to have in our city--do we really want just to turn the entire city over to like basically being a simulacrum of New Orleans? How much are we asking of our residents to give up in order to make space for these tourists?  (Bach 2019) 

The markets for real estate and tourism in Cedar Rapids, like most American towns, is nothing like that in New Orleans or New York City or Sedona. Yet we have a stake in the future of our city center, including the ability of a cross-section of people to reside there. The oldest neighborhoods in town went through the typical 20th century trajectory until it was suddenly interrupted by the 2008 flood. As an urbanist, I'd like to see walkable, mixed-use, mixed-income development rise from the muck, but that may not be where private investors see the highest return. It may not be in housing at all. What then? Drive-to urbanism for shoppers and tourists, far flung mobile home parks and apartment complexes for the struggling, car dependence for the rest of us?

Czech Village mixes housing and shops in historic structures

Kea Wilson of Strong Towns reminds us that Airbnb is not a monolith; the properties offered represent a variety of circumstances and opportunities (Wilson 2019a, Wilson 2019b). She and her partner listed one part of their St. Louis duplex on Airbnb, using the fees to pay for an improved office and more space for their dog. Some Airbnb rentals fund other good things, like keeping this historic New Bohemia house viable:

211-213 13th Av SE

It's likely that the Czech Village Airbnbs help maintain the rest of the funky apartments on the block, a sharp contrast to the condos in New Bohemia and Kingston Village. Other Airbnbs surely displace residents, although Kea Wilson reminds us that some of that may be forced by public policy. 

If you're in the area, join Corridor Urbanism to discuss the complexities of this issue at our next gathering, Wednesday, September 17, at 6:30 p.m., location to be announced. (Watch our Facebook page, or request in the comments section to be added to our e-mail list.)