Airbnb Is Gobbling Up 20 Percent of Apartments in Popular Manhattan and Brooklyn Neighborhoods

As if it wasn’t challenging enough to find a reasonable apartment in New York City, Airbnb is now taking up 20 percent of available units in popular Manhattan and Brooklyn zip codes, reports the Daily News. According to a study from New York Communities for Change and Real Affordability For All, the East Village is the most affected, with 28 percent of its apartments being rented as illegal hotel rooms on Airbnb. Additionally, the 20 most popular neighborhoods on the room sharing site “have lost 10% of their available housing units to Airbnb.”

The study relied on U.S. census data and listings on the actual Airbnb site. A spokesman for the company called the research “lies, fuzzy math and faulty stats” and said that “the notion that 1 in 4 apartments in the East Village is rented via Airbnb is not just ludicrous, it is also not supported by a single piece of data.” However, the analysis found that close to 60 percent of the 27,000 listings on the site were for entire apartments or houses, meaning they’re illegal. This supports similar claims made by Capital New York back in February and just last month by the new mapping tool Inside Airbnb, which plots every listing in NYC. Furthermore, the most recent study found that the average rental was available for 247 days a year renting for roughly 109 nights, which backs up the criticism that landlords are actually using Airbnb to run illegal hotels.

[Via NYDN]

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