Study claims Airbnb is great for your neighborhood’s economy, if it’s predominantly white

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Airbnb guests staying in predominantly white neighborhoods are more likely to shop around at local businesses like restaurants than guests staying in neighborhoods that are mostly black or Hispanic, according to a new study from researchers at Purdue University.

People who use the home-renting platform to stay in a big city, like New York, for example, tend to eat at local neighborhood restaurants close to where they’re staying. But this effect doesn’t hold true when more than half of a neighborhood’s residents were black or Hispanic, according to the study’s authors.

'Airbnb has made repeated claims that it helps the local economy in black neighborhoods, especially in New York City,” said Mohammad Rahman, a Purdue University professor and co-author of the study, in a statement given to The Washington Post.

His team pulled data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census, and Airbnb for 42 neighborhoods across New York City — the most visited and active Airbnb city in the US — along with 10 years’ worth of Yelp reviews for 34,000 of the city’s restaurants. The goal was to see how trends in home sharing stacked against trends with local restaurant employment. They found that the promised economic spillover didn’t hold up across racial lines.

Neighborhoods with a booming population of Airbnb guests typically did see a growth in people working for local restaurants, along with a surge in the share of Yelp reviews, which was a measure the researchers used to reconfirm their employment findings. But these findings didn’t carry over into the neighborhoods that were predominantly populated by people of color, even if Airbnb rental numbers were just as high.

The reason, as Rahman told The Washington Post, might be because an “uncomfortable reality” is that some visitors might be less inclined to walk around and check out the local businesses in these neighborhoods, even though they might be drawn to how affordable the housing is. Instead, Rahman added, they might just use the Airbnb as a place to sleep at the end of the day, while ride-sharing services like Uber and Lyft allow them at travel to other neighborhoods and avoid exploring the one in which they’re staying. Though this first study was done only in New York, they subsequently expanded it and found similar patterns in Austin, Chicago, Portland, and San Francisco.

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