When Tourists Move In: How Should Urban Planners Respond to Airbnb?

By Nicole Gurran, P. Phibbs. 2017

457 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Problem, research strategy, and findings: The online accommodation platform Airbnb has expanded globally, raising substantial planning and regulatory concerns. We ask whether Airbnb rentals generate significant neighborhood impacts like noise, congestion, and competition for parking; reduce the permanent rental housing supply and increase rental prices; or provide income opportunities that help “hosts” afford their own housing. We focus on Sydney, the largest region in Australia with 4.4 million people in 28 individual municipalities, which has experienced both rapidly rising housing costs and exponential growth in Airbnb listings since 2011. Airbnb’s growth has raised concerns serious enough to result in a formal Parliamentary Inquiry by the state of New South Wales. We analyze stakeholder submissions to this inquiry and review local planning regulations, Airbnb listings data, and housing market and census statistics. We find that online homesharing platforms for visitor accommodations blur traditional boundaries between residential and tourist areas so Airbnb listings may fall outside of existing land use regulations or evade detection until neighbors complain. Our findings are constrained by the difficulties of monitoring online operations and the rapid changes in the industry. Takeaway for practice: Planners and policymakers in cities with increasing numbers of Airbnb rentals need to review how well local planning controls manage the neighborhood nuisances, traffic, and parking problems that may be associated with them while acting to protect the permanent rental housing supply. Local planners need to ensure that zoning and residential development controls distinguish between different forms of short-term Airbnb accommodation listings and their potential impacts on neighborhoods and housing markets.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Management Information Systems, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5e0a763d5098d271bb16c10f0bc5c3182f44cd34

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Automotive Engineering

1. C. Michael Hall
2. S. Gössling
3. Antonello Romano
4. Filippo Celata

In Management Information Systems

1. S. Gössling
2. C. Michael Hall

In Marketing

1. S. Gössling
2. Antonello Romano
3. Filippo Celata
4. C. Michael Hall

Citations in the corpus

• Overtourism and online short-term rental platforms in Italian cities (2020, background): “Since lodgings advertised through platforms such as Airbnb are predominantly residential apartments, they are not subject to ad-hoc planning regulations, and the instruments available to monitor and regulate the phenomenon are very weak if not non-existent (Gurran and Phibbs, 2017; Ferreri and Sanya”
• Sharing versus collaborative economy: how to align ICT developments and the SDGs in tourism? (2019, background): “Guti errez et al. (2017) confirm that AirBnB offers are significant in terms of bed numbers and spatially close to hotels (see also Ram & Hall, 2018).”