Airbnbs are devouring housing at a rapidly escalating rate and kicking locals out on the street. It’s time to face the obvious: the industry has to be destroyed or the city will be unlivable

Above: a close-up of Airbnb’s impact on Asheville, from Inside Airbnb. Each red dot is a whole home/apartment that’s been turned over to tourists.

As I’m sure the vast majority of our readers have noticed it’s getting increasingly difficult to live in this city. Housing costs are through the goddamn roof, wages are paltry and the gap is so bad that a Stanford study rated Asheville as the least affordable city in the country.

Now like most evils this one certainly has many causes: the ’90s gentry’s obsession with keeping out new working-class housing, bidding wars by wealthy transplants, creepy corporations buying up as many properties as they can.

But there’s a massive driver of our city’s housing crisis that’s getting off entirely too easily, even as it devours entire streets, even as it kicks locals out and jacks up the price of housing on a downright staggering scale.

Airbnb.

Really, the short-term rental industry as a whole, which takes perfectly good houses and apartments that locals could make a life in and hocks them out to the waves drunken tourists who make everyone else miserable. But the Blade has and will deploy airbnb as a useful shorthand for the entire rotten business, the same way kleenex stands in for snotty tissue. It works even better because the company still holds the lion’s share of the STR market.

This is not a new problem; we’ve reported on it almost since our inception. Literally every single person I know has a horror story about airbnbs kicking out themselves or their friends and neighbors. We know people who have had to live on the street or their cars because their landlord wanted to give tourists another party house. Airbnbs are right up there with hotels as the most widely-hated industries in town.

But recently the problem has gone from very bad to catastrophically worse. Last December, despite many warnings Asheville city council voted 6-1 to relax key restrictions on airbnbs in the middle of a housing crisis. Predictably the industry has grown rapidly. At the start of this month Asheville hit a grim milestone: over 3,000 airbnbs in the city and its immediate outskirts.

Now measuring the scale of airbnbs has always been notoriously difficult, so one might ask how we know this. Back in 2016 the Blade had to do a months-long project digging through city zoning citations to get some sense of who airbnb owners were (spoiler: not locals simply renting out a room for extra cash). In 2017 it was revealed that airbnb had consumed a greater percentage of the housing supply here than in any other city in the country.

Since then, however, things have changed. The invaluable site Inside Airbnb gives a detailed, regularly updated tally of how many airbnbs there are, and what kind (private rooms or whole homes/apartments). It even delves into which landlords are running the highest totals of airbnbs in a given city.

A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words.

Not shockingly the vast majority of Asheville’s over 3,000 airbnbs are whole homes/apartments — places where people used to live. They show up as red dots on the map above. Since council relaxed local airbnb restrictions this has shot up by 18 percent in less than a year. The growth has come entirely from whole homes and apartments being turned into airbnbs. Indeed Inside Airbnb’s numbers reveal that private room airbnbs here actually declined during the same period.

That means nearly 400 more households struggling to find a place to live, kicked out of the area or onto the streets, all so tourists can have yet another place to party. The growth of airbnb means the severing and destruction of communities of friends and neighbors.

It is far past time to face the obvious. Airbnb is an evil, predatory industry run for the benefit of the greedy, entitled and deceptive. The excuses offered are just that. Either it is destroyed or Asheville — and countless other cities — are.

The hollowing of the city

It’s worth delving a bit more into what Inside Airbnb reveals. Since I first became aware of the site I’ve periodically checked to see the spread of the industry’s damage to our city.

This year it started out bad and got way worse. In Spring of 2022 they measured 2,626 airbnbs in town, with 2,211 whole home/apartment airbnbs. By Summer that total had shot up to 2,714 then, as Fall opened, to 3,009.

Again, that growth has entirely come from more whole homes and apartments being turned into airbnbs.

Their maps also reveal a good deal more about where airbnbs are, confirming research done by the Blade and others. Downtown, Southside and the heart of West Asheville are the hardest hit neighborhoods. In some neighborhoods they’ve seized so much housing that when viewing Inside Airbnb’s map it’s harder to see what isn’t being rented out to tourists than what is.

Contrary to the talking points of the industry the vast, vast majority of Airbnb landlords aren’t cash-strapped homeowners looking to make a little extra money by renting out a guest room. Instead they’re the already-wealthy getting wealthier. The largest airbnb “host” in Asheville, Towns Property Management, operates a stunning 117 units. The runner-up, Yonder Luxury Vacation Rentals, operates 56. Indeed Inside Airbnb found that fully half of Asheville’s airbnb landlords and companies offer multiple listings. Mom and pop this ain’t.

Indeed as soon as one does a google search for more information on the industry’s influence in our city you’re bombarded with ads for such companies willing to manage whole home/apartment airbnbs for their wealthy clients. “Short term rental management – leave the stress behind. There’s never been a better time to join the vacation rental market” blares one ad for Evolve Vacation Rental Management, which oversees 19 properties in Asheville. It’s based in Denver.

These are full-fledged big business companies, with offices, staffs and huge portfolios. Their job is to sell our city even if it means selling out the people who live here.

If one thinks about it for five seconds this reality is obvious. Rich tourists are always going to be able to pay more per night to party than working class locals can to live. Those tourists don’t want private rooms in someone’s house, supposedly the only thing Asheville’s rules allow — they want places where they can be as intoxicated as they wish (that is, after all, what Asheville markets) — with no pesky locals in their space.

Inside Airbnb’s data also throws cold water on the city’s claim that they’re controlling the industry in any way that matters. In addition to the number of private room airbnbs falling far below the number of homestay permits issued by city hall, whole home/apartment airbnbs are clearly running rampant.

In many ways airbnb is the elephant in the room on many of Asheville’s woes. Now tourism will not just take your culture, kick out locals’ amenities and clog the infrastructure; they’ll evict you too.

Want to know why so many Black locals are forced to move out of town? Airbnb’s a major culprit. Want to know why all those government-backed “affordable housing” developments never seem to make a dent in the problem? Airbnbs kick far more people out far more quickly than the small number of not-really-affordable units those initiatives create. Why can’t locals find a place to live? They’re all turned into airbnbs.

There’s your housing crisis. Imagine how different the city would be with nearly 3,000 more housing units available for locals.

Again, this is not new. It wasn’t new in December of last year when council decided that, of all groups in pandemic-struck Asheville, it was airbnb landlords who needed a break.

Opening the floodgates

In 2018, following an outpouring of public anger about the industry, airbnbs were de facto banned throughout the vast majority of the city. Except for airbnb landlords themselves no one defended the industry.

But while that might seem to have resolved the question, the city hall bureaucracy in charge of enforcing the bans had other ideas.

Remember the city’s rules distinguished between “short-term rentals,” which are whole home/apartment airbnbs, and homestays, supposedly private rooms. The former were what was almost completely banned, with an exemption only possible with a full vote of city council.

But since the start “homestays” have, as we’ve seen, just served as a loophole to allow whole home/apartment airbnbs with official sanction.

Indeed the Blade‘s 2016 investigation into the industry we found that illegal airbnbs were frequently able to evade fines they’d already racked up by getting a “homestay” permit from the city. But while this was supposedly for just renting out a private room, the houses in question continued to be advertised as whole home airbnb rentals on the site.

Back then we asked city officials about this seeming violation of their policy they never responded. They still haven’t. Seven years on the use of “homestay” permits to give a legal veneer to illegal airbnbs is a widespread, open secret.

Again, according to Inside Airbnb, there are just 385 private room airbnbs in the city and its immediate surroundings. Contrasted with the over 700 current homestay permits issued by the city that means, not shockingly, that hundreds of airbnb landlords are lying.

They would have a far harder time doing so without city officials — the same people in charge of enforcing these rules — bending over backwards for airbnb landlords.

The Blade‘s 2016 investigation revealed city staff taking a deferential, almost obsequious tone with illegal airbnb owners. In plenty of cases they not only refused to seriously fine them, but gave the operators months to clear out their bookings and rake in the ensuing cash.

Compare this with how the city treats a downtown worker with an overdue parking ticket or locals trying to give food to the unhoused, and it’s clear who local government’s for and who it ain’t.

In 2017 city staff tried to sneak in a provision to a Haywood Road zoning code change that would have allowed whole home/apartment airbnbs nearly everywhere on the corridor. It only failed after locals spotted it and raised the alarm, leading council to drop it.

It’s worth noting that occasionally staff would actually fine a particularly flagrant airbnb landlord, but usually when it was someone they already had issues with. But he sizable growth of whole home/apartment airbnbs during these years despite a seemingly near-total ban is a testament to how much of a farce city hall’s enforcement usually was.

Undeterred by council’s refusal, they tried again and a long attempt to “revise” the homestay rules to more openly allow whole home and apartment airbnbs was hatched. To do this city staff started working directly with the Homestay Network, a group of airbnb landlords to draft up new rules.

Letting airbnb landlords rewrite the airbnb rules had a predicable effect. They would redefine “homestay” to allow for separate kitchens and bathrooms. Meaning, of course, that plenty of whole home/apartment airbnbs could then be legally counted as homestays, as space with its own bathroom, bed and kitchen is a full-on housing unit.

Again, outside of those landlords themselves the bureaucrats didn’t find any real support. Locals remained averse to anything that allowed more airbnbs. When an early version of their proposal came before a council committee the members — perhaps mindful of their political careers — balked at relaxing the restrictions. Normally things should have stopped there and staff should have brought back a version without the airbnb-friendly changes. Instead they plowed forward anyway.

In December 2021 council sided with them. The staff memo recommending the approval of the new rules is telling. Nowhere does it mention the impact of airbnbs on housing prices. Instead its explicit purpose was to “support the tourism economy” and give landlords “the greatest flexibility to move between short-term lodging and long-term living with the least amount of disruption.”

Despite warnings from the public, council passed the measure 6-1. Mayor Esther Manheimer voted for it. So did council member Kim Roney, who would later challenge her in this year’s mayoral race.

The excuse city staff gave — and council went along with — was that the giveaway to airbnb landlords would be balanced by new, supposedly tighter restrictions limiting homestay permits to one a property owner, just on their primary residence.

That has, of course, not happened. It wasn’t seriously meant to. Inside Airbnb details a long list of Asheville landlords and companies that own or run multiple airbnbs. Remember that the companies enabling this have prominent offices in public locations, so they should be pretty easy to find and fine. Somehow the city’s inspectors have never bothered.

In the 10 months since 400 more housing units in Asheville have become airbnbs, a rapid 18 percent increase that has come entirely from more whole home/apartments being turned into destinations for tourists.

The “greatest flexibility” means when units “move” from long-term housing to airbnbs the tenants living there get kicked out. When city officials said “least amount of disruption,” they meant to landlords’ profits not actual people’s lives.

Those who profit

Who are those landlords? If you’d believe Airbnb lobbyists, they’re hardscrabble locals just a lost paycheck away from losing their mortgage who have no choice(!) but to rent a room out to survive.

This is, to put it politely, a crock of shit.

In seven years investigating airbnb I’ve never seen a landlord who wasn’t outright lying about their supposed financial straits. When they’re tried to portray themselves as such a minimum of investigation reveals that they’re not just liars but incompetent ones to boot.

A far more typical airbnb landlord came to town recently at Archetype Brewing, to let Asheville’s property barons in on a new scheme to exploiting tenants by “renting the room not the house” leasing out single, nigh-unlivable bedrooms. This new trend among landlord scum, known as “co-living,” also recently received a go-ahead when city council gave tax incentives to a downtown “co-living” development.

The airbnb baron was Sam Wegert, whose bio — posted by the Avl Meetup group who hosted his session — bragged that he’d set up a successful martial arts chain with a mere $15,000 from his parents. Then he moved into airbnbs.

It gets worse:

“Throughout his martial arts career, Sam joined an exclusive millionaire mastermind group called GoBundance and began to invest in real estate through short-term rental and co-living properties. He partnered with his wife; they now own 8 short-term rentals and 115 co-living beds, generating over 100,000/month in gross rental income.”

Keep in mind this bio was written to appeal to those who would attend this seminar.

Lest this gets dismissed with the old dodge that local business owners are somehow magically different, it’s worth reviewing a smattering of some of Asheville’s more public airbnb barons.

In the early fights over airbnb there was Brandee Boggs, who portrayed herself as a working class leftist despite owning three properties and openly advocating that Asheville airbnb owners work with the far-right legislature to overturn local restrictions. When pushed on this she claimed opponents of the industry didn’t appreciate all the money required to buy and maintain those properties. Such poverty.

Then, when council was considering the 2018 airbnb ban they heard the tearful pleadings of Angie Rainey, who claimed she had no choice (!) but to turn half the North Asheville duplex she owned into an airbnb.

“The only way for us to afford our mortgage is for us to live in a duplex and get income from the other half of the property,” she pleaded.

But Rainey didn’t have a mortgage. The duplex in question was transferred, for free, to her and her husband in 2017 by a trust owned by his parents.

The proper response to these kind of landlord gripes is “tough shit, quit whining, we all know you’re lying.” Because they are. It’s not like they don’t have other options for making money (renting to a tenant or selling a property) to make money.

At a late 2017 council meeting Mike Butrum, representing the Land of Sky Association of Realtors, came right out and said what airbnbs landlords wanted: to get rich without restraint and to kick out tenants in favor of tourists.

“When you ask those who manage these properties there’s far greater problems with long-term rentals than short-term rentals.” He meant that tenants occasionally demand more rights, oppose gentrification and have some minimal legal limitations on how quickly they can be evicted.

Remember that the majority of people in Asheville don’t own their housing. It takes money to buy property, or generational wealth to inherit it, and the people of this city are notoriously badly paid. But among homeowners in Asheville the more working-class or fixed income generally don’t have the time or desire to have tourists tromping through their home. They often don’t even have the extra space to host them.

They’re also not going to have the type of airbnb tourists really want: a whole home/apartment to themselves. Remember: despite Asheville’s searing hot tourism market the number of private room airbnbs have actually declined.

Who does that leave? Those who own larger homes and properties (enough to have a basement apartment or side unit) and — especially — those who own multiple properties. Even among homeowners these groups are a slim, well-heeled minority.

By definition these aren’t just people with some money, they’re those with a lot of it. Enough to buy/own multiple properties, to hire others to manage and clean them. Then they take the wealth they earn from that and buy more properties, kicking out more tenants and taking more housing away from, well, housing people.

Airbnb landlords aren’t people struggling to survive in an expensive town, they’re the well-off assholes making the town expensive in the first place.

Breaking airbnb

“’I’ve lived here my whole life, in the last year I moved five times,’ she said. While the first time had been due to a changing roommate situation the ‘second time that house was sold out from under me to become a whole home short-term rental, the third time also sold out from under me, to become a whole home rental.’

The fourth time the only place she could find was as the ‘live-in cleaner’ at a whole-home Airbnb where she was allowed to stay in the house only ‘about two nights a week’ when visitors weren’t there.

‘I was basically living in my car.'”

— Local Moira Goree, calling for an airbnb ban at a 2018 council meeting, from Blade coverage at the time

Plenty of Asheville’s airbnb landlords live out of town, but the local landlords aren’t any better. Whether the wealth goes to a Charlotte company or a mansion on Kimberly Avenue make little difference to the locals that end up on the street.

In many ways tourism is the third major extractive industry to hit Appalachia, after timber and coal. This isn’t new either, it goes all the way back to residents, especially indigenous people, getting kicked out to create a “pristine wilderness” for visitors in the 1920s and ’30s.

Tourism’s damage may initially be a little less visible, but like its predecessors it makes areas unlivable and kicks out locals to make money for a handful of elites. Like them it’s allowed to run rampant under the excuse of jobs and the economy while visiting generational destruction on communities.

In that context airbnb is best viewed as the equivalent of clearcutting or mountaintop removal: the most exploitative edge of an exploitative industry. While a profusion of hotels and tourist traps can take years to drive working class locals out of a neighborhood, airbnbs can do it in months. Regulated, sustainable airbnbs are as absurd an idea as sustainable fracking.

But while formidable the industry is far from invincible.

So, how could airbnb be stopped?

Key to thinking about this is remembering who airbnb owners are: the well-off and wealthy. Despite airbnb landlords’ insulting and racist analogies equating restrictions on their industry to the drug war, these are not people breaking the law because they’re poor and desperate.

They have things to lose.

So the obvious answer is that if this city is made utterly hostile terrain to airbnbs, if running one is a risky enough endeavor that it’s not worth the profit, then we’ll see a hell of a lot less of them.

Ironically for all that they hand-wring about how difficult the industry is to stop, if Asheville city government actually wanted to do something about this they could.

It would start with those in charge of enforcing the current ban. City hall staff are notoriously pro-airbnb, something seen constantly from their indulgent attitude towards enforcement and their repeated rewriting of rules to be friendlier to airbnb landlords.

In response to going after the airbnb industry I’ve seen some people advocate regulating things along the lines of the restrictions Atlanta’s city government recently passed. But as Asheville’s experience has shown development staff always sympathize more with the landlord and property manager than the locals getting pushed out. As long as they’re in charge of enforcement airbnb will run rampant.

So if the elected officials were serious they’d take enforcement out of development staff’s hands entirely and into a new group whose purpose was just to attack the airbnb industry. If the city wanted to get creative and make up for the immense amount of harm airbnb’s done to our communities, they’d prioritize hiring people who’ve directly lost housing due to the industry. These locals won’t lack for motivation.. Give them all a generous salary — take some of that giant pile of money freed up by all those departing cops — and some training in online research to find airbnbs (it’s not horribly hard).

This would have to go along with an actual ban on the industry. Returning to the pre-December 2021 restrictions would be a start but the “homestay” loophole was still too large even then.

So the city would need to ban airbnbs period and refuse to renew any homestay permits when they expire (they require annual renewal). Any airbnb would need council approval, which even this band of right-wingers is reluctant to do because it’s wildly unpopular. When it can be proven that the permit was a farce in the first place (which is also not horribly hard) hit the landlord with back fines. Remember that Inside Airbnb’s stats show that most homestays are actually for whole home/apartment rentals.

But what about those 385 private rooms? Honestly, they can deal. Remember these are property owners. They have other options. Most homes that have enough space to turn a room or section into a mini-hotel can take on a tenant instead.

If some “compromise” was necessary only allow 100 homestay permits for the entire city (for a room, not a unit with a bathroom and kitchen) with the owners having to present extensive proof of a fixed or limited income. With that small a number it should be easy to monitor.

Then comes enforcement. No more delays or deferrals. If a landlord’s found to be operating an airbnb someone shows up at their door with an immediate fine. This is, after all, similar to how city hall already goes after impoverished tenants with an overdue water bill.

Indeed if it can be proven (and it’s usually not difficult) that a property owner’s been operating the same airbnb for years then hit them with back fines. The fine for an illegal short-term rental is $500 a day. So if they’ve been running one since 2015 someone can just show up at their door with a notice demanding $1.2 million.

If they can’t pay? Seize the property. Then turn anything seized over to local land trusts.

Other than passing a strong de facto ban this wouldn’t really require much more from city hall and it’d probably drop that 3,000 airbnb number down real, real fast. While airbnbs outside city limits are also a very real problem (Buncombe County’s government doesn’t really regulate the industry at all), the vast majority are in Asheville itself and that’s where they’ve done some of the worst damage.

But governments are, well, governments. The above policy would be incredibly popular and benefit the vast majority of people living here. But the gentry getting rich off this industry would scream bloody murder. So there’s almost no chance in hell city hall would — minus some massive upheaval — do it.

Fortunately, history’s full of examples of people taking matters into their own hands.

Multiple times over the years when I’ve talked to those who clean airbnbs they’ve mentioned that hosts will leave instructions for the guests not to reveal they’re staying at an airbnb because of how widely the industry’s hated.

Social exile would be a wonderful place to start. “I run an airbnb” needs to treated like someone saying “I dump toxic waste on endangered species for the republican party.” Airbnb owners fake poverty and make up endless excuses for a reason; they know they’re part of a widely-hated industry. If operating an airbnb sees them kicked out of spaces and heckled many of them will stop doing it.

Along with this, though, more people need to stop making exceptions. I know it’s an occasionally unpopular idea in this accountability-averse city, but individuals are actually responsible for their actions when they directly hurt others and the wider community. “It’s a systemic issue” doesn’t mean “it’s no one’s fault and no one should ever face consequences.”

Anyone who has the property and space to rent to a tenant who’s instead chosen to turn it into an airbnb is responsible for the housing crisis that’s devastating our town. So are plenty of others, but they have done their share of the damage and shouldn’t be allowed to escape the price. They can stop being airbnb landlords any time they want.

There is, in Asheville right now, zero excuse for running an airbnb. It’s a decision only driven by greed and privilege, and those who decide to repeatedly make it are greed-driven scum. Nothing more.

As the police department’s plummeting numbers show, social backlash matters. If damn near everyone in an area hates someone for doing something they’re more likely to quit doing it.

There also needs to be a concerted effort to identify and publicize the locations of airbnbs along with who’s running them. To borrow the environmental movement’s classic line: those killing our city have names and addresses.

Beyond that it will depend on whatever tactics different neighborhoods or communities favor. That said, I don’t think the vast majority of locals will care if they see a “cozy getaway” covered in graffiti. If residents fill the sidewalk in front of one of those “rad pads” and make noise until the tourists staying there leave, they’d get widespread approval.

So don’t be surprised the day a crowd breaks down the door of an empty airbnb and moves their evicted neighbors back inside. It will only be justice, long overdue.

—

Blade editor David Forbes has been a journalist in Asheville for over 15 years. She writes about history, life and, of course, fighting city hall. They live in downtown, where they drink too much tea and scheme for anarchy.

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