AirBnb is the worst thing that ever happened to affordable housing so I am glad to hear that in the end providing a full time living space for someone worked out the best for you and you have found a purpose greater than monetary enrichment, I am sure your tenant needs a friend.

In my home town realtors profiting from turning former first homes into Airbnbs are now coming to the rescue of “ the workforces” (modern day term for proletariat) by creating a new non-profit called the Boothbay Region Housing Trust, which, despite its legal purpose statement, is targeting the “professional” classes only, and its model for our town is Martha’s Vineyard. It doesn’t have a website and just uses the header from its Martha’s Vineyard mentor instead.

The mentor organization is the Island Housing Trust – the solution for “affordable workforce housing” in a community that had over 600 airbnbs in 2017, is to convert a former inn onto what is branded as “affordable workforce housing” and described as “apartments” for what would have been called a “room for rent”during the twentieth century , and the workforce is not just any workforce but the most essential workforce during this age of covid- hospital workers, and the landlord is the hospital in a clever financing deal arranged by the non-profit housing trust. I would compare this system to feudalism but under feudalism the noble’s actual provided a service to the serfs- protection, in the twenty first century system, no service- just control by having your housing depend on your employer.

The Martha’s Vineyard model of “affordable workforce housing” should be the model for homeless housing, which these days includes the workforces, and Airbnbs should be regulated instead of allowed to expand the homeless classes everywhere, as they are. My niece feels really lucky to have finally found a real apartment to rent-but that is only until the warmer weather when she will have to move out to make way for the Airbnb rentals. Airbnb should just be called Evil.inc.