The sharing economy aka Uber and AirBNB depends upon high social trust. Certain peoples are more trustworthy than others.
Growing up in Australia, people rarely locked their homes or cars because Australia was safe.
* If an AirBnb guest refuses to leave, it can take 2 months or more to evict him. You have to be very wary who you rent to, much more than a hotel.
* Are Black guests more likely to trash the place, clog up the toilets, and or steal items & furniture from the Airbnb houses and apartments that they vacation at?
There has to be a reason why Black guests on average have a bad reputation in the world of Airbnb.
If Black lives matter, than Black manners should also matter.
* How close are we to shaming people for racial and sexual discrimination on “dating” apps?
If a white woman has never accepted any black men on Tinder, isn’t it in everyone’s best interests that she be exposed as a racist?
“Racism somewhere (including a bedroom) is racism everywhere” – MLK
* I wonder which racial and ethnic groups on average make for the best Airbnb house guests? Meaning they don’t leave your place in a pigsty when they leave and they didn’t steal anything.
* I wonder if Uber drivers are discriminating against hails from MLK Boulevards across the country?
* I just can’t imagine having strangers in my house. Irritating relatives are bad enough. Not a snowball’s chance in hell some tranny is staying for a couple of nights.
* Tragedy of the Privates:
Renting properties to vibrant houseguests may have (foreseen) consequences.
Shots rang out at a rented Lynnfield mansion last month, and dozens of party guests scattered.
Officers who raced to the gated property tried to intercept the fleeing crowd just after 3 a.m. May 29, but no one would stop. Some hurled expletives at police as they jumped into cars or ran from the party at 8 Needham Road.
Inside the gates, officers found a man lying face up near the pool. Keivan Heath, 33, had suffered two gunshot wounds to the chest and was left for dead.
* Can you demand a certain credit score like owners do when they rent apts?
It might take you longer to rent the room but it most likely will give you a better renter.
* I am willing to bet sex discrimination is even more prevalent than race discrimination. A single woman would likely be wary of sharing her home with an unknown male. I think sex discrimination is perfectly reasonable.
* Was 1964 before 2008?
Because, as far as letting strangers rent rooms in your home, I recall, as a boy, seeing numerous small “Room to Let” signs in the windows of houses along highway 41, which was then a major north/south arterial from Duluth to Miami.
Evidently back then, people had few qualms about renting rooms to transient long-haul truck drivers. I wonder what’s changed?
Mmmm, what was that message I saw earlier today on the Telescreen right after the Two Minute Hate?…..Oh yes, “Diversity is Strength, Every One is Everyone, My Home is Your Castle”…hmm, I’ve got to remember to take my pill, now where did I leave them? It’s getting so hard to remember things anymore…..
* Eventually we’ll be back to colonial days, when you couldn’t refuse lodging to anybody the king sent you.
* Speaking of B&E, I am a host, and after 4 years had my first B&E this weekend. Guest checked out, but kept his key and came back in the next night and passed out drunk on the couch after checking if his room was available at 3am. It was not.
I won’t go into all the details, but to make a long story short, the guest was still drunk in the morning and refused to leave for a while as he made phone calls. He complained to his girlfriend who complained to me that my wife was “behaving badly” and that’s why after offering to pay for this additional night, he rescinded his money.
I am going to try to make them pay for new locks for the entire building and 4 sets of keys for 45 units–several thousand dollars. As he is Turkish, I will try to lock him out of the country forever if it comes to a court case.
My larger point on race and AirBnb was going to be this. I’ve hosted about 1000 people over the last 5 years. I’m a pretty trusting and friendly person or this wouldn’t be possible. Despite the story I lead with, I’ve had very few negative experiences and quite a number of especially positive ones.
But I will tell you this. With White guests, I have problems about 1 in 50 guests. With Black guests, I have problems with half of them. Roughly half. And there are some rather funny stories out of those. Quite a few who never got through the front door as they started off with a story of how their suitcase was lost and wallet stolen and needed a place to pay in cash cause they were just in town for their father’s funeral (and apparently had no one to stay with–not even the “dead father’s” empty bed, I guess.) For six months already, I have been keeping a file of positive reviews from Black guests so that I have a case when I am inevitably accused of treating the group who causes problems 50% of the time from the group who causes problems 2% of the time.
I can tell you this with experience of 1000 guests. When I book a straight, white male, I shout hallelujah. Never a problem. Never ask for a discount. Friendly and courteous. If I had to choose from a foreign country, I would say that French are the meekest, Swedish are the most self-sufficient, Dutch are super easy.
In my experience, 1000 guests, probably 5% black (I mostly keep them at bay by being priced out of their range in Manhattan), here is what the problems are:
1. Asking for a discount (Israelis are worse, though, and I try to avoid them just as bad).
2. Some totally unreasonable request: Can I bring 12 friends over, they’ll be out before bed, so they’re not staying as overnight guests (this is in a shared 3-bedroom apartment).
3. Some sketchy pity story that I know is a set-up for something worse: my credit card was stolen, can I pay you in cash?
4. Mistakes: Didn’t realize it was a shared apartment. Got the dates wrong. Came home drunk and left pizza in the oven and it caught fire.
5. Surly. Just surly.
6. Accusing you of discrimination.
7. Scams. One kid, looked about 17, shirt-off with a neck tattoo in his profile pic and a confrontational gesture to the camera. He did Instant Book, the only time I requested to cancel an automatic booking. I called him back with the name he gave, but changed the last name and he confirmed that it was his last name. I don’t know what he thought he was going to do when he got into my apartment, but I wasn’t going to let it happen.
You do judge people by their photos and their language. There are some whites (and Israelis) that get the boot right off the back. But Blacks are subject to extensive background checks, and sometimes, when I just don’t have the energy, I decline straight off the bat.
* It is absolute lunacy that a business can’t discriminate however it wants, including race, religion, sex, age, sexual disorder, etc. The fact that the government outlaws it is in violation of natural law. Sheer lunacy, I say.
The 14th A. really needs to be repealed. It has long been used by the left to promote nonsensical discord and misery.
* We are constantly involved in the War on Poverty.
And the War on Racism.
And the War on Inequality.
And the War on Terror.
So we are always in a time of war . So—presto!—the government can now just pass a law and stick a soldier in everyone’s home. To keep us safe, of course.
And don’t think this idea isn’t being bandied about in lefty legal academia right now.
* Univision appears to be doing the job that American journalists just won’t do. After seeing this guy’s apartment, I now believe he was gay. He has a perfume collection worthy of Liberace.
Notice how his concealed carry license is right there on the kitchen counter.
His father, an apparently failed perennial candidate for the President of Afghanistan, has a pretty sweet fleet of cars. I spot what looks like at least two Mercedes and one BMW. Where does the money come from for these cars? Might he be a protected intelligence asset? Otherwise, if this is the lifestyle that one can afford as a cornball Youtube crank in St. Lucie, Florida LARPING as a Presidential candidate for one of the poorest countries in the world, then maybe I need to move down there.
The shooter’s former lover is straight out of Brian DePalma’s Body Heat.
* This is like San Bernardino when the cops didn’t secure the killers’ apartment.
And now they say the FBI has lost track of Mateen’s widow, who may be guilty of abetting him.
As someone noted on Twitter, losing the widow would avoid an embarrassing trial of her.
* I’m sure the Airbnb people understand exactly why this is happening, and also understand that any serious pressure to make people accept guests they don’t want in their own homes will simply lead to hosts bailing out of the service. They also know that they have to be seen to be saying the right things, and hiring the right sort of people–especially since they can’t actually do anything effective about it without destroying their business.
There are probably a couple cushy executive-chair-of-diversity jobs and some nice donations to the right sort of political foundations ahead, as well.
* Maybe Noor Salman is in an AirBnB somewhere.
She is officially missing, per Loretta Lynch today at her presser. Clips from that presser are all over the news but not the tidbit about Noor, widow of Mateen:
https://news.grabien.com/story.php?id=364
Attorney General Loretta Lynch admitted today that the FBI is unaware
of the whereabouts of Omar Mateen’s wife, Noor Salman.
Salman has indicated she suspected Mateen was about to commit a
terrorist attack, and even accompanied him to buy the weaponry he used
to carry out the massacre. She insists, however, that as he left she
tried to hold onto his arm so he wouldn’t leave.
If the FBI believes she was aware of the impending attack, she could
be prosecuted.
“Has the shooter’s wife left the state of Florida?” a reporter asked
Lynch during her press conference Tuesday.
“Right now, I don’t know exactly the answer to that,” Lynch candidly
replied. “I believe she was going to travel but I do not know exactly
her location now.”
* I just looked at airbnb.com for the first time. The revolving home page has a smiling, young black female as the presumed guest of a smiling, clean-cut, White male welcoming her into the home.
* AirBnB is like a newspaper – the law prohibits them from publishing explicitly discriminatory listings, but since they do not control the decision-making with respect to accepting guests at any of given property, they are not liable for any discriminatory decisions the landlords make. Though if a particular landlord is sued, they could be compelled to turn over records relating to him.
And the law for landlords is that one can discriminate as much as one likes if the rental is a space within the dwelling unit actually occupied by the landlord, but discrimination is prohibited when renting out self-contained units.
I vaguely recall hearing about a four-unit rule, but it’s not in the federal statute. It could be that as an interpretive/enforcement matter if you own a building with four or fewer units and live in one of them you can treat the other three self-contained units as part of your own occupied dwelling (that is, allowed to discriminate), but I don’t know if that’s still current practice in the Obama administration. Federal mortgage programs traditionally treated owner-occupied buildings of four or fewer residential units like single family homes, so it could be a category holdover from that area.
AirBnB is still well advised to get out ahead of the bad press by hiring the right insiders and making the right political donations, of course. The usual sort of low-grade corruption found in over-regulated economies.
