On Tuesday 28 April Danielle was invited to speak as a respondent to Dr Aline Cruvinel; architect, urbanist and researcher, and Murray Cox; founder of Inside Airbnb. Inside Airbnb is a mission driven project that provides data and advocacy about Airbnb’s impact on residential communities. The event, held through the Henry Halloran Urban and Regional Research Initiative Sydney, was titled From Inside Airbnb to Housing Justice: The Role of Civic Urban Technology, and hosted by Dr Claire Daniel.

Left to right: Murray Cox, Aline Cruvinel, Jack Moon, Danielle Hynes and Claire Daniel. (Photo by Greta Werner)  

Aline and Murray presented their recently published report on the threat of short-term rentals to housing, available here. The report takes a global data approach, connecting different spatial scales and assisting in explaining how short-term rentals operate at a global level, and the threat they pose to housing. This approach allowed Aline and Murray to identify the global impacts of Airbnb’s network, and argue that it ‘connects local housing markets to global tourism flows’ in a way that threatens long term housing. The report states the number of Airbnb listings per 10,000 inhabitants for many countries – demonstrating just how prevalent the platform is in many places, and analyses the impact of large events, such as the Olympic Games, on numbers of Airbnb listings.  

Murray went on to outline the origins of Inside Airbnb and some of the impact it has had, tracing in particular the case study of New York City, which has been relatively successful in effectively regulating Airbnb. In NYC registration has been introduced. Requiring hosts register assists regulation enforcement. This is combined with platform accountability, where Airbnb is fined for hosts who are not registered. This, along with other legislation, has dramatically reduced the number of whole premises Airbnb listings. Murray argues that platform accountability is essential for effective regulation for short term rentals. This puts the onus not only on hosts to follow the rules, but on the platforms to ensure hosts are doing so.  

Jack Moon then discussed his work analysing evictions in New South Wales (NSW). Jack is Data and Research Coordinator at the Tenants Union of NSW, a network of tenancy specialist legal centres operating across the state. Jack has been looking through court listings to identify how often community and public housing providers use termination proceedings (aka evictions), and which landlords do so most frequently. This work is open source, and those interested can check it out here.    

Finally, Danielle discussed the work of the Community Action Tenants Union eviction database group, particularly the work that went into the report and website, launched last year. Danielle gave a brief overview of publicly available evictions data in Ireland, and the work of the eviction database group in scraping and mapping legal and illegal evictions across the country, and pointed to the difference in available data in Ireland, compared with NSW (where only tribunal listing data is published). Danielle also briefly mentioned CATU Galway’s current ‘Break Up with Airbnb’ campaign, Inside Airbnb is supporting CATU in some of this work.  

Across all of the projects discussed at the event, both data, and those with the knowledge, skills and capacity to work with that data are essential to translate it into a comprehensible format that can make change in the world. This is a constant challenge in civic tech projects, where people are often working unpaid, fitting project work in around other commitments. Creating a broad group of people who are invested in seeing whatever the project is through to fruition, and maintaining it in an ongoing basis is an important consideration for this kind of work.  

Thanks to Claire Daniel, Nicole Gurran, Greta Werner and Jacqueline Tyrrell for organising an excellent event.