Airbnb Seeking Charity Donations for Short-Term Rental Landlords From Guests
Richard Moorhead
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Short-term rental app Airbnb is soliciting donations for the ‘hosts’ of its rental system, hoping that former guests on the platform will bail out the professional landlords who have lost income due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The comfortably named digital ‘Kindness Card’ includes three different solicitations for money from renters to landlords, going so far as to guilt its users to bail out the app ‘hosts,’ many of whom have collected properties in already expensive metropolitan areas with the hopes of a constant lucrative income.
Airbnb has been criticized by driving up the costs of living and travel in many communities, and encouraging real estate developers to hoard residential properties purely for commercial use, restricting the use of housing on the part of community members and families.
The San Francisco-based app company has stringently lobbied for mass immigration, refugee resettlement, and open borders, seeking to boost their profit margins at the expense of the middle-class Americans by jacking up the cost of housing.
Now that market conditions are adverse for the company’s questionable and reliably neoliberal business model, they’ve become a charity case, lobbying for special federal stimulus measures to bail out its short-term landlords.
Should the highly provisional business model of its landlords fail, it’s likely that the housing they own would be sold to middle-class Americans at greatly reduced prices for use and occupancy as homes, as opposed to conversion into hotels that evade the conventional regulations typically applied to such entities. An outcome the multibillion dollar company is fighting intently to avoid.
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