Despite vocal opposition from the NIMBY’s, the decline in either desire or demand of home-sharing seems, at least for the foreseeable future, quite unlikely.[1] After all, home-sharing can be used as a financial means towards achieving the Great American Dream: Homeownership.
The fact is, the economics of home-owning don’t add up the way they used to. The discrepancy between wage earnings and home prices is greater than ever before, signaling a desperate need for change in the status quo.[2]
AirBnB has demonstrated that we might have our homeowner cake and eat it too. Like it or not, the home has become a good to be bought, sold, flipped, traded, etc. [3] If we come to terms with this realization, home-sharing simply allows for further flexibility, a way to break up the commodity into commodities. It becomes a means to utilize excess during times of economic scarcity, and a way to maximize space during times of growth and stability. In effect, home-sharing has merely shifted the unit of commodity from the house to the room.
So what’s the fuss? I’m familiar with the complaints: about crime, privacy, the loss of the “neighborhood,” etc. And often, I can’t object to these concerns. But perhaps the problem is not the new domestic, but rather the architecture that accommodates it. Whereas AirBnB attempts to overlay a new organizational system (i.e. resident/nomadic) on top of pre-existing housing types, perhaps a new building type will emerge, one that truly formalizes this dual organization. Through the careful consideration of circulation, entry, frontality, interiority, and other criteria, it’s possible that we might address the many issues bellowed from the balconies and backyards of our impassioned NIMBY’s.
Home-sharing is indeed a means to more affordable homeownership…if we can get it to work. The question then becomes: What is the architecture of this new domestic paradigm?[4]
[1] Shatford, Scott. "2015 In Review - Airbnb Data for the USA.” AirDNA, http://blog.airdna.co/2015-in-review-airbnb-data-for-the-usa/.
[2] Karunakar, Rahul and Hari Kishan. “U.S. House Prices to Rise at Twice the Speed of Inflation and Pay: Reuters Poll.” Reuters.com, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-property-poll/u-s-house-prices-to-rise-at-twice-the-speed-of-inflation-and-pay-reuters-poll-idUSKCN1J20G3, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/04/four-charts-which-should-worry-you-about-rising-house-prices-and-inequality/
[3] For further reading, see: Madden, David and Peter Marcuse. In Defense of Housing: The Politics of Crisis. (New York: Verso, 2016), and Space Caviar, ed. The Quantified Home. (Zurich: Lars Muller Publishers, 2014).
[4] A few initial studies regarding this topic were investigated in the author’s series: Formalizing the Home-Sharing Paradigm, which can be seen in the accompanying images.
