Selling black places on Airbnb: Colonial discourse and the marketing of black communities in New York City

Abstract

Airbnb has recently become a growing topic of both concern and interest for urban researchers, policymakers, and activists. Previous research has emphasized Airbnb’s economic impact and its role as a driver of residential gentrification, but Airbnb also fosters place entrepreneurs, geared to extract value from a global symbolic economy by marketing the urban frontier to a transnational middle class. This emphasizes the cultural impact of Airbnb on cities, and its power of symbolizing and communicating who belongs in specific places, responding to questions of class, gender, and ethnicity—and thereby potentially driving cultural displacement. Coming from this perspective, this paper uses computational critical discourse analysis to study how white and black hosts market black-majority neighborhoods in New York City on Airbnb, and how guests describe their consumption experience. The analysis shows how white entrepreneurs attempt to attract guests through a form of colonial discourse: exoticizing difference, emphasizing foreignness, and treating communities as consumable experiences for an outside group. White visitors, in turn, consume these cultural symbols to decorate their own identities of touristic consumption, describing themselves in colonial tropes of brave white adventurers exploring uncharted territories: glorious conquests no longer over gold and ivory, but over sandwiches at a local bodega. This situates Airbnb’s marketing at the urban frontier in a longer history of colonialism and racialized expropriation.

Short-term rentals as a new urban frontier – evidence from European cities

“…In recent years, scholars have stressed that individual hosts are usually white, middle-class, and highly educated people (Mermet, 2021; Roelofsen, 2018), who possess substantial cultural capital and ‘cosmopolitan capital’ (Ladegaard, 2018) and that, in turn, renting on Airbnb reinforces the process of income inequality as only a minority of people benefit from the platform (Schor, 2017). For instance, in cities in the United States, it has been found that in predominantly black neighbourhoods, Airbnb landlords tend to be white individuals, and disruptions in the housing market tend to be more likely to affect black residents (Hoffman and Heisler, 2020; Törnberg and Chiappini, 2020). Semi and Tonetta's paper (2021) in this issue explores STR suppliers in a peripheral, gentrifying neighbourhood of Turin, Italy, and applies a social class perspective to understanding why middle-class homeowners become STR providers.…”

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