AirBnb can be really useful sometimes

In the past several years I've seen a number of posts attacking the company AirBnb, which is fine, but often they go further and attack the general concept of short-term housing rental outside of hotels. These posts have struck me as oblivious at best, and sometimes even callously indifferent. I rarely hear arguments in favor of short-term housing rental outside of travel industry promotion, so I wanted to give my entirely uncompensated argument for why I like them.

This is not an argument about the merits of AirBnb or any other company, or of tourism in general. It's about why short-term housing rental should be allowed wherever hotels, long-term rentals and vacation home ownership are allowed, and should not be restricted as a kludge to limit tourism overall.

I've stayed in plenty of hotels, inns, bed and breakfasts and youth hostels, and they can be great, but they're not always enough. Sometimes there simply are not enough hotels in a town, or a neighborhood.

Let's use the city of Northampton, Massachusetts as an example. There is exactly one hotel in downtown Northampton: the Hotel Northampton, a classic institution, almost a century old, with 106 rooms. That's a tiny amount for a small city with a college, a hospital and a large number of tourist attractions. There are at least two smaller hotels, three motels and a bed and breakfast within the city limits, as well as six across the river in Hadley and five in Amherst.

You could say that the people who can't afford the Hotel Northampton simply pay with longer trip times. That's not fair to begin with, but beyond that, only four of the other hotels are within a comfortable walk of the city center and Smith College. I believe they are all on bus routes, but those buses do not always run frequently, and there are some times when no buses run at all, such as early Sunday morning. Many of the motels, particularly in Hadley, are in areas that are dangerous and hostile to pedestrians.

Thus the price structure of the hotels discriminates against people who pay less, not just by imposing a time penalty and the cost of taxis when buses are not running, but by imposing a higher risk of death or injury.

If we look at AirBnb, there are rooms and apartments for rent near downtown, but they're available at rates comparable to the motels in Hadley, or even cheaper. No cost penalty, no time penalty, no car or taxi or extra bus trip required.

There are some towns that have no hotels at all. If someone wants to visit those towns, the only hotel may be miles away, with no transit at convenient times. But those towns may have a few short-term rentals where a visitor may even be able to arrive by transit and walk to their destinations.

Another benefit I've gotten from short term rentals is the experience of staying in a house or apartment that's integrated into a residential neighborhood. Sometimes it can be nice to stay in a hotel in a commercial or entertainment district, but those districts are often empty on weekends.

Many short-term rentals are in architecturally interesting places, and staying there overnight can give visitors a better opportunity to appreciate them. It can also allow visitors to live like locals in ways that hotels don't offer.

There are costs and risks to short term rentals. I don't want to dismiss them. I'm just frustrated with discussions of short term rentals that talk exclusively about the downsides without mentioning the reasons why people might choose them over hotels, or why they might even help people make trips that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

I'm often surprised when people don't mention these positive aspects. Have they never enjoyed staying in a quirky apartment in a quiet neighborhood and shopping with locals? Have they never been stuck in some shitty motel in a strip mall in the middle of nowhere, where they can't get to a restaurant without driving? Or paying through the nose to get snotty treatment from a stuck-up desk clerk at a downtown motel in an office district that's deserted on a Sunday night?

Summer Streets: What else you got?

In August of 2011 I wrote a series of posts about Summer Streets. The first one focused on how the program just left me wanting more, and made requests that were mostly about expanding it. The second focused more on "small things" that affect my enjoyment of the program.

Thirteen years later, there's a lot of good news! A lot of other people made the same requests, and the City government has actually addressed a lot of them. There are a few remaining, and I have one more to add. First, the scorecard:

From my August 10 post:

1. Extend the reach. ✔ 2022
2. Widen bottlenecks ❌
3. Extend the hours ✔ 2024
4. Extend the days 🤷🏼‍♀️ 2023
5. Cater to people-watchers ✔ 2020

From my August 23 post:

1. Framing ("open") ❌
2. Practice what you preach ✔
3. Be flexible with space ✔
4. The Park Avenue Tunnel ✔ 2024
5. Brooklyn Bridge conflicts ✔ 2021

A lot of these requests have been fulfilled! In 2020, the City drastically expanded sidewalk and roadway dining. They've cut it back this year, but there are still a lot more places to sit and watch people. In recent years, volunteers seem to be a bit less strict about where in the roadway people are cycling, as long as they're not crowding walkers and runners. I've noticed that recently there seem to be less of the golf carts and full-size cars that invaded the space in past years.

In 2021 the City opened a two-way year-round bike lane on the Brooklyn that allows cyclists to continue over the Brooklyn Bridge without conflicts with crowds of tourists on foot. In 2022 they extended Summer Streets to 109th Street, and in 2023 to 125th Street and Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. This year they extended the end time from 1pm to 3pm, and opened the Park Avenue Tunnel to northbound cyclists!

I didn't ask for this at the time, but Citibike has worked really well with Summer Streets. Last year there were a couple of malfunctioning docks that led to shortages, but overall there have been plenty of bikes and plenty of docks.

And there's still more we could do! Here are three things I still want from Summer Streets, plus two new ones:

1. Really extend the days. It's nice that the City has added two days where there are car-free streets outside Manhattan, but it's hard enough to do one of them in a day. Each borough should have its Summer Streets on its own day.
2. Don't use avenues with bike lanes. I get why they put Summer Streets on the Grand Concourse and Eastern Parkway, but it's kind of a cheat to put them on boulevards that already have bike lanes. One of the things that makes Summer Streets in Manhattan so special is that Park Avenue is such a miserable, dangerous experience any other day of the year. How about Westchester Avenue in the Bronx, Yellowstone Boulevard in Queens, Eighth Avenue in Brooklyn and Victory Boulevard in Staten Island?
3. Widen the bottlenecks. Summer Streets is always crowded between Petrosino Square and Union Square. It should be split between Spring and Fourteenth Streets, with either southbound people on Broadway or northbound people on the Bowery and Third Avenue.
4. Framing. Stop telling me you're going to "open" the streets when it means you're going to allow people to speed through with multi-ton vehicles and make it unsafe for me to be there. Just say, "Cars will be allowed from 3pm on."
5. Train the cops. Cyclists are allowed on every part of the Manhattan route 365 days a year, except the Park Avenue Tunnel and the Grand Central Viaduct. But when the staff is getting ready to allow cars back on the route, the NYPD officers routinely tell cyclists to get off the roads, and even, and I quote, "on the sidewalk." Last week I was walking on Central Park North and had to dodge cyclists directed there by the cops. All they have to say is "We're letting cars back in, be careful!"