Home in the Sharing Economy: An Ethnography in Washington D.C., San Francisco, and Boston

Abstract

Short-term rental (STR) corporations like Airbnb advertise themselves as expanding tourism accommodations while helping STR hosts afford to live in expensive cities. This framing obscures the STR property’s potential to be a highly profitable form of urban displacement. Displaced city residents, non-profits, unions, corporations, and legislators responded by calling for the legislative regulation of STRs. My dissertation investigates how STRs generate competing visions of economic justice. I trace how actors on different sides of the debate for regulations navigate this new monetization of housing. I argue that their claims are intertwined with larger political-economic structures of race, gender, and class. My dissertation unfolds in five chapters. Chapter one argues that STRs arose alongside racist urban development and the 2008 financial crash. I contextualize the rise of STRs within the shifting meaning of the “home” in my three cities. Chapter two explores how political coalitions motivated similarly situated residents to their side through appeals to different visions of economic justice. The third chapter argues that STR hosts in Boston replicated xenophobic narratives by wrongly displacing the harms of STRs solely onto foreign Asian investors. Chapter four theorizes the role of STR platforms in perpetuating colonial racial capitalism. In addition to a wider exploration of urban economies and platform profit-making, it follows how Black STR hosts push Airbnb to remove baseless racist user reviews of their stays in D.C.’s majority-Black Ward 7 and 8. The fifth chapter explores how activists resisted racialized development through community walking tours that highlighted STR buildings that evicted residents of color. The conclusion discusses the future of STR debates as STR corporations pivot to multi-month stays in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.