Introduction

    Here, we are studying the impact of Airbnb on Los Angeles neighborhoods and their respective subcultures. Los Angeles is comprised of over a hundred neighborhoods, each with its own environment, set of the demographic population, heritage, and even issues. Other than its decades-long rich history, tourism is one of the most crucial industries in its monumental economic changes and the implementation of the “sharing economy”. The rapid growth of Internet usage fuelled the sharing economy as a new paradigm and people became more aware of big corporations profiting from transactions and started to prefer obtaining tangible benefits from small businesses, peer-to-peer lending, and much more. Thus, with the introduction of digital peer-to-peer tourism companies, such as Airbnb, there are resulting shifts in the socioeconomic characteristics of these neighborhoods. Adjacent neighborhoods within Los Angeles are experiencing huge economic disparities and housing prices will continue to rise within the neighborhoods with more Airbnb listings and higher prices. In order to analyze and interpret this phenomenon, we are utilizing open-source data from Inside Airbnb, which is a key resource in knowing information such as the number of listings per neighborhood, home type of each listing, reviews, and more.

    Through our literature review, we found that scholars generally agreed on the negative impacts Airbnb has on communities. These impacts include distortion of the housing market, reducing the affordable housing supply, and undermining labor unions. While Airbnb is far from being the sole cause of the issues, it continues to aggravate them. Evidence has also been found to support the claim that the introduction of listings within a neighborhood can even result in the erosion of a neighborhood’s ability to protect itself from crime. Where scholars contradict is in the ways Airbnb’s impact is evaluated, with differing measures of occupancy and/or average daily rate. This is an important distinction as it results in differing perceptions of how impactful Airbnb is within these key communities. Questions that still remain include: Is there any statistically significant relationship between Airbnb density and the socioeconomic status of local communities? How does Airbnb foster under its user-representative model and how do they continue to affect socioeconomic changes in multiple neighborhoods? Do city residents suffer from Airbnb zoning laws and rising local housing costs?

    The digital world is rapidly and continually shaping the physical world around us. Airbnb has lasting impacts on the neighborhoods and cultures that have been fostered for hundreds of years. Due to the novelty of Airbnb and sites similar to it, there is much under-regulation of the companies' practices. Thus, many potentially negative impacts go unnoticed and unrecorded. We are working on visualizing the data of factors such as listings, crimes in the area, rent and listing prices, and more to represent how Airbnb has shifted neighborhood cultures differently and disproportionately within Los Angeles.