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Ren’s presence more Airbnbs it can be associated with more crime in a neighborhood, but not in a way that you think.
Researchers at Northeastern University have analyzed data in Boston from 2011 to 2018, with growing growth in Airbnb listings and growing concern about crime. Some violent crimes (fighting, robbery, reports of someone carrying a knife) were on the rise in a neighborhood after an increase in the number of Airbnbs in a year or more – the researchers said – a sign of a weak social order.
“You’re basically eroding a neighborhood’s natural ability to handle crime,” says one of the authors, Dan O’Brien. It was research published on Wednesday in PLOS One, An open access scientific journal published by the Public Library of Science.
Curiously, the investigators found that reports of crime did not increase as the number of Airbnbs in a neighborhood increased at the same time, and suggested that tourists staying in these rentals did not commit crimes or attract crime.
“The visitor himself isn’t the problem, but you took a bunch of units that would normally work, helping members of a community outside of the social network,” O’Brien says.
In addition, investigators found that other types of crime, such as reporting noise, public intoxication, domestic violence, and landlord-tenant conflicts, did not increase because more neighborhood units were listed on Airbnb.
Airbnb considered the methodology and implications of the study. In a statement, a spokesman said the investigators had reached “erroneous conclusions that the evidence does not support.”
The spokesman questioned whether the researchers controlled for other factors, such as the construction of new homes and general economic conditions. The spokesman expressed concern about the generalization of the findings from a single city to a larger national trend.
The spokesperson also said that the researchers had flaws in the methods of tracking new Airbnb listings because they were based on when a user “logged in” to the platform. The spokesperson said that someone can register as a guest on the site, but not become a host for a few years, which makes it difficult to keep track of changes in the lists over time.
To measure the impact of Airbnb, researchers looked at the overall number of neighborhood lists to what extent they were collected in specific blocks. They divided the “crime” into three categories: social imbalance, private conflict, and public violence.
Social disorder refers to noise complaints, public intoxication, and the general crowd often associated with tourists. O’Brien hypothesizes that Airbnb may have little impact on this definition of crime because many social imbalances occur near bars and restaurants, usually in the center, not in neighborhoods or residential areas where Airbnb lists pile up.
Private conflict refers to domestic violence or landlord tenant disputes, anything that indicates disturbances within the home. This was also not investigated during the period under study. But the third type of crime, public violence, yes. There are fights, robberies, reports of someone carrying a 911 knife, and so on.
The article focuses on existing sociological theories of social organization: the idea that a community of close neighbors who trust and trust each other establishes and enforces its social norms, reducing crime. Essentially, researchers have found that the increase in violence is not the presence of tourists or visitors, but rather the presence of absence long-term residents integrated into the community.
It is important that this dynamic takes time to emerge. If the problem was just the presence of rude tourists, crime would increase at the same time along with the number of visitors. Instead, the researchers found a delay; the violence rose a year or two after the lists were added.
“Every time we look back, it really has a bigger impact,” O’Brien says.
This “wear and tear” eventually spread from the public to the private: two years after investigators noted that private violence had increased and lists increased.
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