‘Making ends meet’ by renting homes to strangers

Created to help its founders pay their rent during a housing crisis, Airbnb promotes its services as a supplemental income strategy to ‘make ends meet’ by renting their homes to strangers. This article compares Airbnb ‘home sharing’ to its historical precursor of taking lodgers and boarders in early industrial North American cities, an important form of supplemental income for women and one of the few remaining alternatives to wage income. Historicizing Airbnb shows that this source of supplemental income cannot be separated from gendered and racist ideologies that value certain practices while stigmatizing others. Such ideologies shaped labour markets as well as the housing policies that responded to the crisis of social reproduction in the industrial era, with repercussions still felt in the context of platform urbanism. Thinking the city through this work highlights the interrelation between household economies, housing strategies and the division of labour in the period, with implications for how we analyze short-term rental platforms like Airbnb.