About Inside Airbnb

Inside Airbnb is a mission driven project that provides data and advocacy about Airbnb's impact on residential communities.

We work towards a vision where communities are empowered with data and information to understand, decide and control the role of renting residential homes to tourists.

Contact

For any questions about the site, the data, or for comments, please contact info@insideairbnb.com.

For media inquiries, contact media@insideairbnb.com with a brief about your story, the publication, and your deadlines*.

* We generally cannot respond to interview requests made within 48-hours of your deadline, especially those for broadcast, so please plan your stories accordingly.

Collaborators

Inside Airbnb relies on the kind contribution of a variety of collaborators and partners. Read more about collaborating or partnering with Inside Airbnb.

• Murray Cox. Murray is a community artist and activist who uses data, media and technology for social change. He is the founder and current chief data activist of Inside Airbnb.
• John Morris. John, an artist and designer, was a founding collaborator who designed and re-designed the website, and is the creative producer of the project's major reports.
• Taylor Higgins. Taylor is working on her masters in Florence, Italy at the Scuola di Economia e Statistiche (School of Economics and Statistics) at the Università degli Studi di Firenze with a focus on designing sustainable tourism systems. Taylor is working to build and organise the data and activist communities of Inside Airbnb.

Past Collaborators

• Alice Corona. Alice (ah-lee'-cheyh) brought her data journalist skills to the project and helped to create new detailed data stories and visualisations for Venice, and a framework for other Italian cities, including linking to local housing data. She has represented the project at conferences and used the data in local, grassroot community workshops. Alice has always been a trusted friend and advisor to the project. Alice is also a member of the advisory board.
• Luca Lamonaca. Luca is a researcher with an interest in human-centred design and the human nexus. He has been an activist for housing and education rights in his native Italy, and studied urban economics and planning. Luca translated the site to Italian and actively maintains a community of activists in Italy and elsewhere.
• Michael "Ziggy" Mintz. Ziggy is a fixture in the civic and housing data community in New York City. Ziggy worked on automating the scraping for Airbnb.
• Anya Sophe Behn. Anya was an early collaborator of the project. She spans the technology and art worlds and provided support in grounding the project to its mission, stablising the scraping code and moving the project to the cloud.

Advisory Board

Inside Airbnb has a voluntary, independent advisory board that assists to build sustainability for the project and provides expertise, experience and accountability to help achieve its mission and vision.

Meet the members of the advisory board:

• Alice Corona. Alice is an Italian data communicator and researcher, currently serving as an Adjunct Professor at the Department of Statistical Sciences "Paolo Fortunati" at the University of Bologna. She is a co-founder of Batjo, a project at the intersection of journalism, data and digital fabrication. She collaborates with Dataninja in spreading data literacy and is also a data activist with OCIO, a local grassroots watchdog on housing rights in Venice, and has collaborated with Inside Airbnb.
• Claire Colomb. Claire is Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London (UCL). She is a social scientist and urban planner by background, with a first degree in Politics and Sociology from Sciences-Po, Paris and a PhD in Town Planning from University College London. Her research interests include international and comparative planning; urban sociology and urban politics in European cities.
• Peter Phibbs. After a career teaching planning students at the University of Sydney and Western Sydney University, Peter was the Founding Director of the Henry Halloran Trust (2013-2021). He resigned from the University in 2021. He is still an active researcher with a particular interest in studying the impact of short term rentals on housing markets. He is also engaged with the Planning Institute of Australia delivering his course Planning for Non Planners. Peter spends some of his time supporting the planning profession, particularly in debates about housing affordability.
• Sito Veracruz. Sito is passionate about cities, urban innovation and sustainable mobility and is a Project Manager at EasyPark and a co-founder of Fairbnb.coop.
• Thorben Wieditz. Thorben is an urban geographer and campaigner who works at the intersection of labour and community. He helped establish regulatory frameworks for companies like Airbnb in Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa via Fairbnb Canada, helped end Sidewalk Labs' bid to develop Toronto's waterfront via #Blocksidewalk, and is currently involved in establishing rules for Uber/Lyft via RidefairTO in Canada's largest ride-hailing market.

History

Inside Airbnb was founded by Murray Cox, an artist, activist and technologist who conceived the project, compiled and analyzed the data and built the site.

John Morris, designer and artist, designed and directed the user experience.

Acknowledgments:

• The early seeds of the project were sparked while Murray was working with Clarisa James, the Executive Director from DIVAS for Social Justice over the summer of 2014, where he co-taught youth of Central Brooklyn about gentrification in Bedford-Stuyvesant using mapping, data and visualization. He also experienced the impact of community maps on the public with the students' work on exhibition at Weeksville Heritage Centre during Creative Time's Black Radical Brooklyn exhibition.
• The Ellis Act Evictions by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project provided inspiration about about how community housing issues could be mapped.
  
• Window into Airbnb's hidden impact on S.F. by Carolyn Said from the San Francisco Chronicle was insightful about Airbnb's role in the community and led to questions about what information was available in New York City.
• Jason Clampet of Skift wrote an article Airbnb in NYC: The Real Numbers Behind the Sharing Story which had some great data and statistics, yet offered a challenge to take it further.
• Veralyn Williams and Mark Winston Griffith, community organizers and investigative journalists from the Brooklyn Movement Center / Brooklyn Deep provided some early feedback, advice and a neighborhood perspective of how Airbnb was being used in Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights, as well as the impact of Airbnb on legitimately licensed Bed and Breakfasts like the Akwaaba Mansion in Bedford-Stuyvesant (which is proudly People of Color owned).
• Noel Hidalgo from Beta NYC, a civic hacking organization, provided enthusiasm and encouragement, and others from the Beta NYC community responded to technical questions.
• Dennis George, the Principal of George Architect with information about the zoning laws of New York State.
• Paula Z. Segal, Esq. from Mohen and Segal / 596 Acres offered inspiration with her own community mapping and open data projects, and helped talk through some aspects of the project.
• The following friends and supporters provided invaluable feedback and testing:- Samantha Box, Jason Brathwaite, Chris Carter, Andrew Cox, Juny E. François, Esq., Mark Winston Griffith, Noel Hidalgo, Chris Hwong, Clarisa James, Harvir Kaur, Joanne Miguel, Nicole Salzano, Paul Smullen and Veralyn Williams.
• The Get the DATA button was made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com.
• John Morris donated many hours of his wordly skills, and is a good friend and gentleman. He also schooled me on American English grammar.
• Last, but not least, Samantha Box provided support during the many hours of coding and analysis, and helped resolve key questions about the issues, data and how best to tell the story. She also provided Christmas cake, doubles and mean Sazeracs.
  

Technology

The site uses the following Open Source technologies:- D3, Bootstrap, Python, PostgreSQL and Google Fonts.

Maps are designed in Mapbox with OpenStreetMap data and hosted via Mapbox.

The site is served by an Amazon S3 "bucket".