Photo by Raysonho | CC0 1.0 Public Domain
Vacation rentals site Airbnb announced that it won’t allow hosts to list units for rent where municipal officials say an eviction has occurred once the federal eviction moratorium ends in two weeks.
The ban only applies to units where the previous tenant was evicted for nonpayment of rent and where the tenant had been protected by the Centers for Disease Control’s moratorium. The ban will remain in effect until the end of the year, at which point Airbnb said in a statement that it would review the policy “including seeking input from cities.”
The company is asking cities and towns to contact it to set up information-sharing systems that will help it identify properties whose landlords try to convert them to short-term rentals at evictionshelp@airbnb.com. Airbnb also said it had appointed an executive, Senior Policy Development Manager Andrew Kalloch, to coordinate the initiative.
Across the country, including in Massachusetts, state and local officials have struggled to get billions of dollars of federal rental assistance into the hands of tenants who lost jobs or income due to the pandemic, and their landlords. Massachusetts’ programs, while simplified from their forms at the start of the pandemic, are still being criticized by landlords and tenant activists as too cumbersome and overly bureaucratic to meet the challenge. The state still has hundreds of millions of dollars of rental aid money to give out.
“By working with cities to prevent landlords from using our marketplace to profit from removing a vulnerable long-term tenant from their home based on non-payment of rent, we believe we can send a strong message that will help keep people in their homes at this critical time,” Airbnb said in a statement. “In addition, we invite competing rental sites to join us in this effort, to ensure industry-wide action to help safeguard the communities most at risk from the expected wave of evictions.”
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, local officials in Boston and elsewhere in the state criticized Airbnb hosts for converting apartment buildings into de facto hotels.
