The signs appeared to reference Airbnb’s tone-deaf ad campaign against San Francisco’s Proposition F, which the company scrambled to destroy a day after the ads appeared around the city.
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A San Francisco ballot initiative that would limit short-term rentals has prompted Airbnb to shell out more than $8 million in a campaign to defeat the measure in Tuesday’s election, Reuters.com reported Sunday (Nov. 1). One of the most significant allocations has been spent on the company’s initiative to partner with David Binder Research to conduct a poll study, sending 400 volunteers from house-to-house to ask whether they plan to vote against the measure.
Billboards sponsored by the No on Proposition F campaign, largely bankrolled by Airbnb, allege that Proposition F will lead neighbors to file frivolous lawsuits against one another, while proponents of the proposition have written op-eds in the San Francisco Chronicle saying that if it weren’t for neighbors complaining, the city wouldn’t do anything about rental violations.
Airbnb used the battle to craft its playbook for other political challenges, said Chris Lehane, its global policy chief.
“It will inform us of not only how we work in San Francisco but around the world”, said Lehane, a political strategist who managed scandals during the Clinton administration.
Activists, mostly from the Coalition on Homelessness, began a protest at noon Monday at the San Francisco Airbnb headquarters. Ought to comparable measures be introduced elsewhere, nevertheless, the company might face critical monetary consequences.
Another issue a few have with Proposition F is it requires owners to disclose how many nights they stay on their own property. Although it is headquartered in San Francisco, it only has 5,000 rentals in the city, as compared to approximately 20,000 in New York and 60,000 in Paris.
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Proposition F reflects the broader issue of affordable housing, or lack thereof, in San Francisco. New York City residents are faced with a similar problem of rising rents: the median home price in that city has jumped almost 30 percent to $587,000 since 2010, and the median rent in New York City is roughly $2,300, according to data compiled by Zillow.
