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Airbnb Announces Its Plan To House 100,000 People In Need (backchannel.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the lend-a-helping-hand dept.

New submitter mirandakatz writes: Airbnb has just unveiled its Open Homes Platform, a home-sharing site for hosts motivated by goodwill instead of profits -- and for guests motivated by need rather than wanderlust. Specifically, Airbnb is going to begin by connecting refugees with hosts in Canada, France, Greece, and the United States. Ultimately, refugees will be just one group that the site aims to help: Site visitors can also nominate other groups of people for temporary placements, and the platform will expand to include them eventually. At Backchannel, Jessi Hempel dives into the home-sharing platform's latest effort, and places it in the context of the company's broader business strategy.

11 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. temporary by turkeydance · · Score: 2

    until it's not

  2. I dunno by fluffernutter · · Score: 3, Insightful

    At first I thought this was a gracious gesture by a corporation, until I realized that AirBnB isn't really offering anything at all. How many properties will they be offering on their own? How many people have an extra property to volunteer to someone who may not even feel the need to use a bathroom?

    --
    Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
    1. Re: I dunno by Reverend+Green · · Score: 2

      Alternatively, his bigotry may result from his experience of dispossession. Being driven into destitution while foreign "guest workers" are imported to take one's former job is surely a traumatic experience.

      Some who live through that experience may curl up in a ball and wait to die. That's what the baizou elite like to see. Others who have been disposessed, like the GP, may turn in anger to bigotry and counter productive hatred of their fellow workers.

      Yet others may remember that all men are brothers, regardless of color or culture. They may come to recognize that all workers are exploited by the money power, the system of database-driven exploitation, that our fathers called capitalism and we call financialism. They may even begin to think about serious alternatives to that system. May try to imagine a new form of communism that throws off the chains of capital, while avoiding the well-documented shortcomings of Soviet-style authoritarian socialism.

  3. refugees so I can be an accessory to ISIS with Air by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 2

    refugees so I can be an accessory to ISIS with AirBnB pointing to there EULA sticking be with the legal bill.

  4. Refugees? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    We have unemployed, homeless people right here that need housing...

    1. Re:Refugees? by stephanruby · · Score: 2

      When there is an earthquake or a hurricane, everybody wants to help the people who've been made temporarily homeless by the disaster.

      But if we're talking about chronically homeless people, people with mental problems, health problems, criminal convictions, and/or substance abuse problems. People are much less willing to put them up in their guest rooms. It shouldn't be that way, but it is.

      And even among refugees, charities do not treat them all the same. The families and the highly educated usually get preferential treatment. After all, which would you rather have living in your extra guest room? A former doctor? Or a former taxi driver?

      Ultimately, this 100,000 figure for so many countries is just a drop in the bucket. That's just less than 2 per thousand if we assume a transitory refugee population of 60+ million worldwide.

  5. I Nominate The Homeless by EzInKy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Far too many people can be found wandering around cities at night without places to go, and that leaves them at the mercy of dope dealers and others who are looking to profit from their misery.

    --
    Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
    1. Re:I Nominate The Homeless by PPH · · Score: 3, Funny

      They aren't wandering aimlessly. They are looking for dope dealers.

      --
      Have gnu, will travel.
  6. Re: An exemplary comment thread by Reverend+Green · · Score: 2

    You mean arrogant elitism, looking down your nose at your countrymen who were driven to destitution by the very system responsible for your own prosperity, and patronizing fetishization of "exotic" foreign cultures and peoples? Yeah, that attitude among the bourgeoisie does tend to enrage the plebs.

  7. Re: refugees so I can be an accessory to ISIS with by Opportunist · · Score: 2

    Really? Wow, where does this happen? I mean, outside your mind (where you obviously also are).

    --
    We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
  8. Re: Comments not very Christian by gravewax · · Score: 2

    perhaps . Or perhaps you are just reaching to justify your mythology.