Who Wins & Who Loses When Airbnb and the IOC team up?
In November, the Olympics and Airbnb announced a nine-year partnership, sounding the alarm for anyone with a hint of what either can do to communities. This compounding of horrors has been sold as a “win-win,” but behind every promise of a “win-win” is almost certainly a less equitable material reality.
So with this new unholy union, we ask what we always ask: who wins and who loses when the IOC and Airbnb are shacking up?
What the deal is actually about
IOC President Thomas Bach said “the Airbnb deal will allow cities to avoid building new hotels, saving tens of millions of dollars in construction costs.” Giant spoiler: LA has already given out close to a billion (with a B!) dollars in tax credits for hotel construction, with multiple hotel developments evicting, displacing, and removing rent-stabilized housing from at-risk neighborhoods.
The deal is meant to be a win-win, extending a PR umbrella from Airbnb’s soft-sun-washed brand of carefree capitalism over the IOC’s horrendous record in city after city, while juicing Airbnb ahead of its $30+ billion IPO.
For the IOC
The Olympics constantly require fresh injections of PR to wash their record with lofty words about sustainability, fiscal prudence, and humanism. With a history of displacement, gentrification, police brutalization, environmental destruction, displacement, corruption, and athlete abuse, they have to. See our Resources for a taste of how consistent and intentional these outcomes are, regardless of decade or continent.
For Airbnb
It is of course by design that the deal covers Airbnb’s largest markets totaling more than 200,000 hosts (that the company’s private equity owners hopes to substantially expand) over the next five Olympic Games, next in Tokyo, followed by Beijing, Paris, Milan, and Los Angeles. Paris, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, and the entire country of Japan have passed some of the strongest rules against Airbnb, and this deal is a move to garner goodwill and regulatory capture by “providing sustainable” rooms and experiences.
Airbnb is also in desperate need for a rush of good PR as it has a gun to it’s own head in the form of promises made to employees regarding equity payouts. Airbnb’s IPO has to be executed perfectly, but a series of unicorn IPOs have recently gone south (WeWork, Endeavor, Aramco, Peloton and SmileDirectClub) requiring extra diligence and help. And after a series of regulatory losses (read: cities like Jersey City saying “No!”), global scams, and journalism about how Airbnb turns cities into Instagram wastelands devoid of local people, it needs a spotless public record.
Airbnb laughably claims that it “will also work with the IOC to help refugees.” But what about the refugees Airbnb creates through displacement? We charge that many of Los Angeles’ 60,000 internally displaced houseless were made so with the indirect help and incentive of Airbnb’s rush for monetization and exploitation. Indeed, researchers have found that the largest profit opportunities for Airbnb occur in gentrifying neighborhoods. So will Airbnb pay for their Hosts or the City to house the homeless that they helped create?
Airbnb speaks out of both sides of its mouth saying “[we] started by renting out spare rooms in our apartment, but it’s grown to entire apartments, homes, castles, boats, even private islands.” The leap to neighborhoods is not that far from castles, and the company still refuses to acknowledge the consequences of that growth: displacement, decimation of culture, monetization opportunities for wealthy commercial operators, and playgrounds for wealthy tourists. The city is being bought and sold, and you’re not part of the transaction.
What Airbnb Does to Cities and What it Wants Now
Despite regulations, Airbnb has turned vast parts of areas deemed touristy like Hollywood into new hotel districts: entire blocks of homes and apartment buildings are Airbnbs, and it is in the companies financial interest that as much of a city is ‘open for business’ and devoid of long-term renters as possible. It is not just Los Angeles that is facing this: Paris, Barcelona (also a veteran Olympic host), New York, and other global cities have faced the consequences of Airbnb’s “platform” and its obstinate refusal to provide data, follow laws and rules, provide data or moderate its own role and side effects.
So while it pushes PR about “mom and pop” hosts who supplement their income through renting spare bedrooms, what Airbnb actually abets is conglomerates buying and converting homes into seas of informal hotels covered with lockboxes. Without strong rules Airbnb’s very existence is an incentive for rampant speculation, displacement gentrification, and supercharged policing to keep areas and “experiences” clean and acceptable for tourists and their “hosts.” Even worse, the next stage of growth for Airbnb is providing “regular” experiences for business travelers (they recently purchased HotelTonight and are quietly opening their own hotels! and buildings) who don’t want idiosyncrasy, shared rooms, or experiences, but easy entry, payment, parking, access, and frictionless visits in and out.
We ask that you remember all of this when Airbnb and its photogenic blue shirt-wearing “Hosts” show up to city council or on ads asking for changes to rules that have not even been enforced yet to open loopholes that will be ruthlessly and predatorily exploited, not by “mom and pop” but the amoral and well-financed machines of exploitation that don’t care about stability, communities, or neighbors.
LA officials are already trying to roll back Airbnb regulations. On December 18, LA officials will be hearing an attempt to give Airbnb access to RSO buildings. This is galling, and we are organizing against Airbnb’s current attempts to unravel tenant protections.
We reject the notion that everything in our lives should be valued and maximally extracted – particularly cities, neighborhoods, and communities. Airbnb promises to expand economic inclusivity for the average person but opens neighborhoods to be mined by people with the fewest ties and the most money.
So when you see that Airbnb talking about providing curated Olympic experiences, remember who those lockboxes keep out as much as who they let in. Like the Olympics, Airbnb exacerbates LA’s housing, homelessness, and displacement crises. The only way to make LA a habitable place is to expel Airbnb and the IOC.
