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Airbnb Will Start Designing Houses In 2019 (fastcompany.com)
Airbnb is reportedly planning to distribute prototype buildings next year. Yesterday, Samara, a futures division of Airbnb meant to develop new products and services for the company, announced a new initiative called Backyard. The initiative is described in a press release as "an endeavor to design and prototype new ways of building and sharing homes," with the first wave of test units going public in 2019. Fast Company reports: The name "Backyard" might imply that Airbnb just wants to build Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), those small cottages that sit behind large suburban houses and are often rented on Airbnb. [Airbnb chief product officer and cofounder Joe Gebbia] clarifies that is not the case. "The project was born in a studio near Airbnb headquarters," he says in an interview over email. "We always felt as if we were in Airbnb's backyard -- physically and conceptually -- and started referring to the project as such."
Backyard is poised to be much larger than ADUs, in Gebbia's telling. Yes, small prefabricated dwellings could be in the roadmap, but so are green building materials, standalone houses, and multi-unit complexes. Think of Backyard as both a producer and a marketplace for selling major aspects of the home, in any shape it might come in. "Backyard investigates how buildings could utilize sophisticated manufacturing techniques, smart-home technologies, and gains vast insight from the Airbnb community to thoughtfully respond to changing owner or occupant needs over time," Gebbia says. "Backyard isn't a house, it's an initiative to rethink the home. Homes are complex, and we're taking a broad approach -- not just designing one thing, but a system that can do many things."
Backyard is poised to be much larger than ADUs, in Gebbia's telling. Yes, small prefabricated dwellings could be in the roadmap, but so are green building materials, standalone houses, and multi-unit complexes. Think of Backyard as both a producer and a marketplace for selling major aspects of the home, in any shape it might come in. "Backyard investigates how buildings could utilize sophisticated manufacturing techniques, smart-home technologies, and gains vast insight from the Airbnb community to thoughtfully respond to changing owner or occupant needs over time," Gebbia says. "Backyard isn't a house, it's an initiative to rethink the home. Homes are complex, and we're taking a broad approach -- not just designing one thing, but a system that can do many things."
In the UK house prices are already absurdly high due to net immigration that has been around 350,000 to 400,000 per year for the last 20 years. Hardly any new houses have been built, so this has simply lead to huge house price rises and considerable declines in living conditions. The rise of buy-to-let mortgages have also pushed house prices up massively and tenets end up paying to mortgage for wealthy landlords, along with some extra to cover expenses and profit. The landlords then use the profits to buy more houses, pushing prices up further. Now we have the Airbnb scum encouraging more people to buy houses so they can "share" them, where sharing simply means offering them for short-term rental.
Both political parties are a waste of time. Labour are obsessed with multiculturalism and want to bring in as many immigrants into the country as possible, while the Conservatives want to bring in cheap labour for their corporate friends. Furthermore, neither party says anything about reining in buy-to-let or Airbnb. They make occasional references to people "left behind by globalism," but what they mean by "left behind" is 'thoroughly screwed'. At some people people's tolerance will run out and it won't end well. It seems to be already happening in France and rioting will likely spread. Most of western Europe has been massively mismanaged and there will be a price to pay.
Sharing/gig economy companies were driven forward by the last recession, and are more likely to succeed as the economy slides back into a recession. Desperate people willing to do anything or let people use their stuff are the primary driving force.
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Agreed. Please avoid using anti-semitic companies like AirBnb. It's not even been that long since the Overland Park shootings. They're no need to encourage these people.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
What's weird is that subletting rooms in your house was pretty normal, say up through maybe the 1950s? I mean people did have full-on rooming houses in some larger homes.
I think it was largely the post-war economic prosperity that got many families into single family houses and a lot of lower income single people either out of their parents' homes or into their own apartments vs. something like a rooming house or the really old-school residential hotel where rooms were let by the week.
I often can't help but see a lot of this as just the arc of middle class prosperity slowly winding down and people reverting to the economic systems -- like rooming houses -- of the pre-prosperity model.
From a restaurant, sure. From a grocery store, it can easily get cheaper than the gas when the cycler gets cheap enough. Also, if you're working 80 hours a week, you really might not have time.
You assume they own a car, and use Uber for convenience. Alternatively, you may be able to afford an Uber, but not a car payment.
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AirBnB are to be commended. Nothing has changed in building, industry or technology. Maybe they can move the course of History. I see men who want to follow in the footsteps of Jesus - a carpenter. I meet engineers whose ideas are vaguely similar and unchanged since the pyramids. Technology isn't even comparable to the Romans, since our concrete used today could not remain standing the test of time as have the great works.
Being built today will be razed, dumped and reused structures that have no intentions of providing anything more than cashflow, temporary shelter and marketable value for resale in 8 years time. Laughingly, I see Billionaires waste their treasury on this shit, only on a grander scale not grandeur. Already, we have multi-million dollar estates dropping by 50% their value in the markets. It is a joke.
Manufactured housing likewise has become an economic reality for folks who can't afford built housing on-site. Manufactured is the new trailer housing; albeit better, nicer still its cookie-cutter gingerbread and gold-plating.
Looking where it went wrong begins immediately after adobe building and no other category added to the canon thereafter rises to sustainable, affordable and utility since. The house you grew up in will be gone in 100 years consumed by time, weather and natural decay of the material from which it was made.
First principles is solving that rubric of sustainable, affordable and utility. Kudos AirBnB attack ' utility' design elements as its " Backyard" campaign addresses land use. I'll follow whether they're cash-flow driven mission can also tackle sustainable. Otherwise, Backyard simply add to the trash heap of History another architectural form of rubble making.
It's posts like this that make me wish for an "upvoting" system on Slashdot.
Considering that Backyard started in California, perhaps they could design houses that are less vulnerable to fire. People whose houses were burned in the recent fires could benefit from replacement dwellings that are done better than cheap wood frame.