Brian Chesky, the wide-eyed, crew-cut, 33-year-old co-founder of San Francisco-based internet hotelier service Airbnb, is visibly on guard during last week's 2014 TechCrunch Disrupt conference. That's understandable. The week prior, Airbnb was hit with a class action lawsuit from tenants in a Tenderloin residential hotel who accused the company of helping illegally convert rooms into temporary vacation squats. Meanwhile, San Francisco supervisors were weighing new legislation that would regulate Airbnb and similar short-term rental companies.
And now a TechCrunch journalist is suggesting, in front of an audience of hundreds, that Airbnb's logo looks like a vagina.
"I think —" Chesky says, knitting his brows as an assistant projects pictures of the unabashedly sapphic Airbnb symbol behind him, "I think it's an ear." He later corrects himself: "We wanted to come up with a symbol that means 'belonging,' and I love this one because it's a heart upside down."
But at a time when San Francisco residents are blaming Airbnb for helping despoil their once-bounteous, once-affordable housing market, vagina jokes are the least of Chesky's problems.
On Sept. 3, two longstanding residents of the Sheldon Hotel, a 62-unit, single room occupancy complex in the Tenderloin, sued Airbnb in San Francisco Superior Court, claiming the platform had helped convert residential rooms at Sheldon into tourist or transient hotel rooms. Plaintiffs Danielle McGee and Louis Gamache said they'd noticed scores of strangers coming and going in the hallways. A quick Google search unearthed the Sheldon Hotel's Airbnb profile, which advertised "clean, convenient," newly renovated rooms with mini-refrigerators, free cable TV, internet service, and private bathrooms.
"Overall it was wonderful," a user named Kong wrote in his guest review. He added: "One thing I didn't like was the smell of the room, but once the windows are opened it will go away."
Incidentally, the Sheldon Hotel also has profiles on Priceline, TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Booking.com. It's apparently common for Tenderloin SROs to hawk their services that way. The Ambassador Hotel at 55 Mason — which was the subject of a 1994 documentary film about neighborhood poverty — appears on both Expedia and Yelp (where it's garnered 3-and-a-half star reviews). The Elm Hotel, which in early 2000 was named one of the city's 10 worst residential hotels by the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection, has listings on Yelp and Yahoo Travel.
For an international traveler who might, understandably, not comprehend the meaning of "single room occupancy," these online listings could present an easy ruse. Even a quick survey of TripAdvisor shows how many people have been duped over the years, says San Francisco lawyer Tyson Redenbarger, who is helping represent the plaintiffs in the Airbnb case.
"Many of the SROs are advertising through [these] sites," Redenbarger explains, adding that some of these buildings are in pretty bad shape, and the living conditions could be harmful even for short-term visitors.
Yet the problem of a few flophouses and firetraps passing themselves off as bed-and-breakfasts, or of European tourists unwittingly shacking up with the city's indigent, is small compared to the larger legal snarls that peer-to-peer hotel platforms have created. There is, in fact, a city law that prohibits the owners — or tenants — of residential hotels like the Sheldon from converting their units into temporary vacation stays unless they get special approval from the Planning Commission.
And though it's illegal to adapt any residential dwelling for tourist use without obtaining special permission, the practice appears to be routine: According to the Airbnb complaint, some 5,000 residential properties (mostly apartments and houses) are peddled as illegal short-term rentals, which puts a huge strain on an already-sparse housing stock. Many — perhaps most — of these fly-by-night hoteliers don't collect taxes, which makes them even more of an economic burden.
Airbnb enables these rogue rentals by partnering with the hosts. It provides them with a well-publicized listing, professional photography, cleaning services, calendar scheduling software, pricing guidelines, a correspondence platform, review forums, payment processing, 24-hour support, and an insurance plan that supposedly covers up to $1 million in claims, giving hosts a "false sense of security," according to the court complaint. All of these amenities are grist for what Chesky calls a "people-powered economy," meaning one in which ordinary citizens can market their own resources, abetted by what might be considered the Master Host.
He's not just talking about ordinary citizens with tony, air-conditioned condos in nice parts of the world's best cities. During the World Cup, Airbnb made itself the largest hospitality company in Brazil, renting out rooms in the notoriously crime-ridden favelas to desperate attendees. If the internet platform can turn barrio dwellers into bootstrapped innkeepers, it seems only natural that it would also catch on among Tenderloin SROs.
Attorney Probal Young, who represents Sheldon Hotel owner Kamran Ardebilchi in a concurrent lawsuit filed by the same plaintiffs, says that while he doesn't have an opinion on Airbnb per se, he believes it's legal for residential hotel proprietors to shill their vacant spots. San Francisco's administrative code allows them to use up to 25 percent of the inventory for tourism between May and September, he says. So, Airbnb is just promoting legal forms of competition in a fierce hospitality market.
Chesky, who shares this sentiment, would prefer to cast his company as a giant, feel-good social network, rather than a form of raw capitalism. When he and Joe Gebbia founded Airbnb in 2008, they called it a "sharing economy" service, adapting the word "share" to mean "sell." At TechCrunch Disrupt, Chesky introduces new terminology that acknowledges Airbnb's for-profit aims, but preserves the illusion of being populist and grassroots. Airbnb is a giant "community," he says. It's a partnership of hosts that serves 400,000 people a night — offering the housing stock of a decent-sized city. It's a harbinger of the new "1099 world," in which anyone with a room can be a go-it-alone entrepreneur. And of course, it's a symbol of sharing and belonging, as evidenced by the vagina-heart logo.
In San Francisco the company is widely reviled, both by conservative condo owners who dislike all the tourists tramping through their buildings, and by liberals who accuse it of squeezing the city's housing supply. Whether the company's model is legal remains a point of contention. The Board of Supervisors might soon hash all of that out; on Sept. 15, its Land Use and Economic Development Committee held a hearing on new Airbnb legislation proposed by David Chiu. In the meantime, vacationers in downtown San Francisco can still book a room at the Sheldon — just $150 a night, per the hotel's Airbnb profile.
Clarification: The Ambassador Hotel is on Yelp.com; however, the hotel's owner, the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation, says it did not create the listing and is not open for tourists.
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