Airbnb Costs New Yorkers Millions In Extra Rent, Report Finds

NEW YORK, NY — New York City renters have paid millions of dollars more for rent as Airbnb listings have taken over their neighborhoods, a new report says. The vacation website created price pressures that forced tenants to pay an additional $616 million for rent in 2016, with certain parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn bearing especially big burdens, according to the study City Comptroller Scott Stringer released Wednesday.

"Airbnb has grown exponentially at the expense of New Yorkers who face rising rents and the risk of being pushed out of communities they helped build," Stringer, a Democrat, said in a statement.

Stringer's office gathered data on Airbnb listings and rent rates for 55 neighborhoods to evaluate the service's effect on housing prices from 2009 to 2016. The listing figures came from AirDNA, a website that scrapes Airbnb listings each day, while the rent numbers came from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey.

New York City rents spiked about 25 percent, or $279 a month, on average over those eight years as Airbnb listings exploded from 1,000 in 2010 to more than 43,000 in 2015, the report says.

The study attributes about 9 percent of the citywide rent increase to Airbnb's presence. Areas with more listings saw bigger hikes — rents rose 1.58 percent for each percentage of a neighborhood's residential units that were listed on Airbnb, according to the report.

That means Manhattan and Brooklyn, home to about 87 percent of all the city's listings in 2016, have taken some of the biggest hits. Airbnb was responsible for about 20 percent of the massive rent increases in neighborhoods where listings are most concentrated, such as Chelsea, Clinton and Midtown Manhattan, the study says.

The "Airbnb effect" is most pronounced in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, where Airbnb listings were responsible for $123 of the $659 spike in average rents over the eight-year period, the study says.

The report notes that most of the listings likely violate city or state laws — a 2014 report by state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman found 72 percent of all short-term rentals on Airbnb appeared illegal. Hosts who list rentals in multi-unit buildings for fewer than 30 days when they're not home face fines of up to $7,500 under a 2016 state law.

Airbnb contests many of Stringer's findings. The majority of hosts on the site are sharing their own homes with guests, not apartments that could go to permanent tenants, Airbnb spokeswoman Liz DeBold Fusco said.

An Airbnb listing would have to be rented 216 nights out of the year — more than triple the typical number — for the host to make as much money from short-term guests as a long-term tenant, Fusco said, citing New York University research.

Hosts also reap benefits from sharing rooms on Airbnb. the company argues — the typical New York host earned more than $6,700 last year, money that many say they to avoid eviction or foreclosure.

"Even if the Comptroller’s methodology for determining the impact of Airbnb on long-term rents was sound — which it is not — his failure to consider the clear, objective benefits of home sharing for middle class New Yorkers is a significant error in analysis and judgement," Fusco said in an email.

(Lead image: Photo by ArthurStock/Shutterstock)