Opinion: Why we should fight for ‘hard-won’ housing protections

Nearly 10 years ago, I stood before my community and made the case for Airbnb. I believed what their lobbyists told me, that allowing Airbnb to operate in New York City would be a lifeline for the Black and Brown New Yorkers I have dedicated my life to speaking up for. But instead of empowering our communities, I have watched as the leadership of this company that claimed to have our best interests at heart has embraced MAGA Republicans, adopted outright racist values and turned their back on us.

As a reverend and the head of the Brooklyn chapter of the National Action Network, I worked alongside Airbnb under the belief that legitimate and regulated home-sharing could open doors for Black and Brown working-class families who had long been shut out of economic opportunity. Now, Airbnb is trying to rewrite the rules for its own benefit, exploiting New Yorkers’ very real fears about affordability to push deceptive legislation that would deepen the crisis it helped create.

Let’s be clear: these bills are not about helping homeowners, they’re about helping shareholders. At a time when our city is facing a severe housing shortage, Airbnb is trying to turn our homes into hotel rooms, our neighborhoods into tourist zones, and our housing crisis into their business model.

These aren’t the values that I once stood up for when I advocated alongside Airbnb years ago. We believed creating a registration system for homeowners to safely and securely rent their spaces would improve economic conditions for homeowners, provide stability for the city, and make our neighborhoods safer. And in 2021, after years of negotiations between the city and homeowners, we reached a truce that secured a pathway for legal short-term rentals. Today, thousands of legal Airbnbs operate fairly and responsibly in New York City.

Airbnb is trying to claim that it stands with small homeowners, but its actions tell a very different story. Instead of respecting the city’s registration system and supporting the homeowners benefiting from it, Airbnb has walked away from the very compromise it helped to create. For the last two years, Airbnb has spent millions lobbying politicians to roll back the progress we fought to deliver. Now, with just weeks before the end of this Council’s legislative session, Airbnb is racing to force through two bills, Intro 948 and Intro 1107, that would dismantle our city’s hard-won housing protections, upend decades of settled building codes and change the very definition of what it means to have a home in New York City. The consequences would be catastrophic. These bills could take tens-of-thousands of homes off the rental market, drive rents even higher and make it harder for working families to stay in their homes. On top of this, even the small homeowners Airbnb claims to champion would be left vulnerable to corporate investors eager to buy up their properties and turn them into Airbnbs ahead of the World Cup.

Airbnb knows their toxic rebrand won’t work in New York City, which is why they’re funding made-up organizations and openly misleading the Council into handing them a win at the expense of everyday people.

I was proud to stand for legitimizing short-term rentals years ago to promote economic opportunity for vulnerable New Yorkers. Today, I’m even prouder to stand up to Airbnb and expose its attempts to profit off those very families it has claimed to care about. Our lawmakers have made real progress to deliver a fairer, more affordable city. The best way to honor and maintain that progress is to reject Airbnb’s cynical attempt to drag us backward.

With just weeks before the end of this legislative session, we cannot afford to even consider such a dangerous bill. The Council must reject Airbnb’s lies, defend New York’s tenants, and fight to keep our city livable for everyone who calls it home.