paula vidal mohr

Yesterday I was in Austin, TX to announce the Airbnb Housing Accelerator, a $250 million commitment to help get more homes built. Airbnb started because of a housing problem. My roommate and I couldn’t afford our San Francisco rent, so we rented out airbeds in our apartment. Today, housing is unaffordable for millions of people around the world. If you step back and ask why housing has become so expensive, the biggest problem is pretty simple: we don’t build enough of it. America is short more than five million homes, more than all the housing in New York City and Los Angeles combined. We build fewer homes today than we did in 1950, even though the population has doubled. Airbnb has been part of the housing debate, and we understand why communities have concerns. Dedicated Airbnb listings are a small share of the housing supply—about 0.5% here in Austin and 0.3% across the U.S. Restricting short-term rentals is an understandable response, but the evidence shows it doesn’t address the underlying problem. New York City effectively banned Airbnb, and rents have risen about 30% since then. Austin took a different approach and passed reforms that made it easier to build more housing. Rents there are down 18%. Every city is different, but Austin is a clear success story. We believe building more homes is essential to making housing more affordable. So we asked ourselves: what can Airbnb can do to help? We found a few places where we can. Today, around 750,000 homes in the U.S. are ready to break ground, but are stuck because they can’t get the final piece of financing. That’s where we can help. We’re doing four things: 1. Putting $250 million behind housing projects that unlock $5 billion in development. 2. Supporting local housing advocates working to modernize zoning, speed up permitting, simplify building codes and reduce unnecessary costs. 3. Creating a $5 million Housing Innovation Prize for technologies that can make homes faster and cheaper to build. 4. Launching the Airbnb City Index to make it easier to see which cities are building housing, becoming more affordable and adopting policies that work. Our first project is in Austin. We’re investing $6.4 million to help build 201 affordable apartments in St. John, a neighborhood where the land has sat empty for nearly 20 years. The community fought to turn this lot into affordable housing and won. But construction stalled for nearly five years because the developer was a few million dollars short. Airbnb came and played a small part to unlock this project. None of these Austin apartments will ever be on Airbnb. Short-term rentals aren’t permitted. We’re investing anyway, because the goal is simple: help build more housing. We’re starting in the U.S. because it’s the market we know best. I want to prove this works here before taking it further. But housing affordability is a global problem, and I hope we can eventually take what we learn here and apply it globally. This is new for us. We’ll get some things wrong. And $250 million won’t close a five-million-home gap on its own. I know there will be skepticism about this, and that's okay. Airbnb only works if communities trust us and feel good about our presence in them. We can’t ask people for that trust. We have to earn it. The best way to do that is to help solve problems in the communities where we operate. That’s what the Housing Accelerator is about. Brian