What is lost when a house becomes a working site of capital

by King Rax

I found my late father’s house on Airbnb. It was like nothing.

Recently, while looking for an Airbnb in my hometown for an upcoming visit, I found my late father’s house.

Perplexed, I scanned the list. Could this really be the same house where I had scrambled eggs for him every morning and watched his favorite movies on TCM every night? The new owners had stripped the place of its misery, although I wondered while reading if they could have done the same with its termites. Back when I lived there, an unusually cheeky mouse ruled the kitchen, where one side of the fridge rested on bricks because otherwise it tilted to the left due to warped tiling. When the mouse startled me one day, quietly eating an English muffin on the counter as I went to make coffee, my dad rolled his eyes at my scream. “It’s Mr. Jingles,” he said with exasperation. “Be nice.”

The house was not a “castle”, as the title of the ad claimed. Each of his pieces was a quarter of the size that the wide-angle photos made him look like. Photos of the kitchen neatly cropped the lower left corner of the fridge where the bricks supported it. Yet, illuminated by a ring light and stuffed with the same West Elm bric-a-brac that furnishes every Airbnb, it did look like a plausible getaway. “No one lives here full time,” the ad boasted. “You can make yourself at home” for $145 a night.

“No one lives here full time” – this went against the whole philosophy of Airbnb as it once was, when it presented itself as a cheaper alternative to hotels and a win-win solution for anyone who were using it. Founders Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky say the idea for Airbnb came to them when they were struggling to pay rent for their apartment in San Francisco in 2007 – they piled on a few air mattresses and charged guests $80 a night to sleep on them. A year later, they turned their “Air Bed and Breakfast” into a business.

Supposedly, the idea was always for the experience to be somewhat personal, both on the host and traveler side. Travelers could see a new location from a manned home base which gave the trip a local flavor; hosts could earn money with their spare rooms while offering a little hospitality. But as Airbnb’s popularity exploded, so did its problems. Highly touristy neighborhoods became Airbnb hubs where long-term residents could no longer afford to live. Landlords converted rental units to more profitable Airbnbs and stopped renting them to tenants. Attempts by cities to regulate app presence have proven hard and weak. And, of course, as more homes became full-time Airbnbs, those Airbnbs got worse.

The average Airbnb was once friendlier than a chain hotel room. The aggressively bland watercolors and impossible-to-open windows of a hotel gave way to the warmth of a real home. But a real home also comes with real hassles. Hotel guests can leave the room as messy as they want; Airbnb guests should clean up after themselves and leave the place pretty much as they found it, even though hosts charge a “cleaning fee” on every booking. The hassle was only worth it as long as Airbnb remained the cheapest option.

And while in 2022, the data suggests than Airbnbs are even cheaper, the gap is rapidly closing, and not just in terms of cost. For the anecdote, Airbnbs has lost all personality for years. My late father’s house – correction, my late father’s “castle” – resembles the “artists’ studios” and “loft shops” that proliferate in every town on the app. Add some moose antlers to a wall and it could be a “peaceful ski lodge”; throw in a hammock and it could be ‘beach house paradise’. But such hifalutin terms don’t justify Airbnb’s price hike. When guests pay $145 a night to stay at my father’s castle, do they coo at the brass-plated vases on every surface, or shout at the sight of its longtime resident, Mister Jingles?

Along with the lack of spendthrift of these units, trouble continued to mount. Because people really lived in most early Airbnbs, they were stocked with basic cooking utensils and amenities. The hosts who actually lived in their units also knew them intimately and could answer questions about what to do with a sticky key or if the cat was allowed on the fire escape. The increasingly impersonal nature of Airbnbs has made them hotels without the amenities of a hotel and even more scrutiny. Paranoid about their responsibility for everything from accidents during the family barbecues of their guests at ability of long-term clients to assert squatter rights, the hosts took shortcuts and set unreasonable limits. For example, I am currently writing this from an Airbnb with a washer/dryer in the unit that is padlocked to prevent guests from using it.

Airbnb remains the most plausible option for guests who will be staying somewhere for a while and need a place to cook, or for people looking for a place where traditional accommodation is not. possible. Even towns that aren’t very touristy and don’t have many hotels usually have at least a few Airbnbs available, like the one where my dad used to live. Her “castle” is one of a dozen Airbnbs in her far suburbs, and it’s by far the most expensive. In more remote places like this, Airbnb sometimes retains some of its old charm. But in the case of the castle, I scroll through photo after photo of the beige furniture and wonder what is lost when the houses are turned into the working sites of capital.

My father passed away in 2018 and I enjoyed visiting his house on Google Earth in the months after his death. I would drag the photo of the building in circles with my cursor, trying to look out the windows. It was there that he held my head in his lap after I left my husband, patting my hair until my mucous sobs died away; Here I missed our meatloaf dinner and he laughed, said we could go to Popeye instead. I imagine we were in the Google Earth photo, tucked away in this sweet run-down cottage with our junk food and mouse, watching a movie, out of sight of the camera but well at home.

Google posted photos of the place in 2012 when he lived there, a month after his death in 2018, and in 2019. Over time, the little pink house seems less and less loved. The vivid azaleas and neatly trimmed dogwood trees that lined the front driveway in 2013 gave way to a hostile overgrowth in 2018, all to be abandoned to a completely bare lawn by 2019, when the home’s current owner took over. The dogwoods and azaleas are long gone now, seemingly not only cut down but obliterated by the roots of the earth. The grass is perfect. The house is no longer pale pink, but of a whitish color which is not one at all. It has been transformed from a house into a chateau for rent.

It could be an Airbnb in Vancouver, Woodstock or Miami. It could be anywhere, could belong to anyone. No one lives there full time. You can make yourself at home.