A natural history of short-term rental lodging

The rise of AirBnB and VRBO reflects a relationship between communities and nature

The first time I stayed at a vacation rental, a proto-AirBnB, it was 1996. AirBnB and VRBO didn’t exist; the World Wide Web was barely functional. I was visiting a small town in Alaska. I walked into the Chamber of Commerce visitor center, looked at a typewritten list of accommodations, and used the Chamber phone to call one of them. Ten minutes later I met my host at her property.

            As I recall, she was a nurse. She lived in an unremarkable house in a drab neighborhood. She’d given her basement a separate entrance, and outfitted it with a bed, TV, coffeemaker, and microwave. It was a very basic setup, but it struck me as a wonderful new thing.

            Here was what I loved about living in a small Western town: friendliness, entrepreneurialism, lack of pretense, and the fact that no place is far from the wonders of nature. I didn’t need fancy décor or formal procedures, just a place to sleep between outdoor adventures. I was like an old-time cowboy: roaming the trail all day, then sleeping at night in no-frills lodging, the equivalent of a bunkhouse.

            My host explained that with tourism increasing, the Chamber faced a choice. Should it recruit a national chain motel to build a featureless building on the edge of town, hire some low-wage clerks and chambermaids, and skim off the profits? Or should it encourage locals to pursue side-hustles using existing infrastructure? It decided to keep more money in the community, and keep community members happier.

            To my mind, the solution also reinforced what tourists (should) love about small Western towns, the sense of community. All these years later, I remember my host giving me tips about local hikes, more than I remember the hikes themselves.

This isn’t exactly the neighborhood of my 1996 visit, but it captures a flavor (Wikimedia photo)

In other words, it felt like a natural story about to unfold. The heroes of an intrepid community, armed only with spare bedrooms, solve a crisis brought on by lack of capital and a conflict between the values of industrial tourism and their small town. The solution ends up tightening local bonds, developing local leaders, and encouraging responsible ecotourism.

            Did the story play out that way, or not?

            AirBnB argues that it did: “Two-thirds of US Census tracts are home to Airbnb listings but no hotels,” and 44 million stays in those locations since 2022 are driving economic activity, it said in June 2023. Guests “stay and spend in local diners, shops, tours, museums, and attractions across these smaller cities and towns.”

            Yet the experience of people who live in tourist destinations argues the other way. Whether it’s a small mountain town, a funky urban neighborhood, or something in between, locals are getting priced out of the great places they helped create. (Unlike tourists at all-inclusive resorts, tourists at in-town vacation rentals are benefitting from a sense of community, which their necessarily-transient presence necessarily degrades.)

            There’s a housing crisis in much of the country. And it seems obvious that, if we would stop re-purposing houses as hotels, we could ease that crisis. It also seems obvious—a natural story—that corporations in their thirst for profits would seek to thwart the desires of heroic community-based affordable housing advocates.

            Thus we live amid a clash of natural stories. Natural story in the sense of feeling inevitable. Also natural story in the sense of implicitly dictating a lot about how you define nature, where you find it, and how you experience it.

Anti-AirBnB sentiment often centers on historic neighborhoods (Wikimedia photo)

            When I reflect on resentment toward short-term rentals—the sense of hopelessness and powerlessness in the face of huge corporations degrading local community and self-determination—I think about that Alaska trip, and a sense that its ideals were betrayed. I also remember 1996 as a high point of community-based conservation. The previous model for preserving biodiversity had been top-down: a government would establish a national park or wildlife refuge and prosecute anyone who violated it. In contrast, a community-based approach could more bottom-up, allowing rural people in biodiverse areas to participate in shaping solutions.

            When it arose in the 1980s, this philosophy was especially needed in places like Africa, where Indigenous people were still being displaced from their homelands to create national parks. But a version of it also became popular in pre-Internet small American towns, where it offered non-Indigenous people like me more autonomy and democratic idealism than the old model.

            You don’t hear much about community-based conservation these days. I think that’s because the threats now feel bigger than any one isolated community could handle. The climate crisis is global; the extinction crisis is global. The Internet has spurred global migrations, empowered global capitalists, spread the influence of global ideologies, and called into question the cohesion and even the meaning of local communities.

            Like the low-tech lodging model I encountered in 1996 Alaska, labor-intensive development of local conservation policies could never scale up enough to make a difference. We need the equivalent of lots of efficient motels. And that higher-tech, faster-scaling model necessitates a more top-down approach. Big platforms, big repurposings, big markets, Big companies and big governments. Big policies for big solutions. Not much room for the little guy, the individualized natural story.

            I remember, on that Alaska trip, reading historian Patricia Nelson Limerick’s extraordinary book The Legacy of Conquest. It argued that the history of the American West—which we’ve always wanted to be a set of romantic individualized stories of “the frontier”—was actually driven by hardheaded, big-scale economic questions. As much as we crave natural stories, our fates are often shaped by demographics and economics and technology. Little did I know, as I read Limerick’s words, that I was simultaneously experiencing another iteration of her point.

Discussion:

• In the moment, one of my favorite books on community-based conservation was Balancing Nature and Commerce in Gateway Communities. By contrast, here’s a later scientific paper arguing that the approach was oversimplified.