Is Airbnb good for the black middle class?

www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/is-airbnb-good-for-the-black-middle-class




In the Bedford section of Bedford-Stuyvesant, the black cultural capital of Brooklyn since the early nineteenth century, African-Americans have become a minority for the first time in more than 50 years. From 2000 to 2010, the white population in the area increased 633%. Meanwhile, across the country, the homeownership rate among African-Americans has been steadily falling. Last year, it dropped below 42% for the first time in twenty years. (For whites, the rate is around 72%.) How have Brooklyn’s remaining black homeowners made ends meet? Some, particularly older, college-educated retirees, have cashed out and returned to the South, part of a trend that researchers have called the New Great Migration. Others have retreated farther east into Brooklyn, where home prices are cheaper. And then there are those who have turned to Airbnb, the popular home-sharing platform that launched in 2008, and is perhaps a modern version of the improvisation that Baraka wrote about.