Life as an Airbnb host: This changes everything

The writer, of St. Paul, specializes in environmental topics.

Airbnb is to short-term rentals what Post-it is to sticky notes. The brand name has become synonymous with the product. Breakthrough products often work that way. "Short-term rental" used to refer to hotels and later to motels, many of them mom-and-pop operations that gave way to the economies of scale: chains like Motel 6 and Marriott. Innovation is once again threatening the short-term rental landscape, and, as usually happens with innovation, there's been some pushback.

What is now Airbnb.com began as three air mattresses in the founders' Bay Area apartment — hence the name. In just nine years, it has become a $25 billion global company. Yet it remains mysterious, even bewildering, to those who've never experienced this kind of short-term rental. An Airbnb is not a floating bed-and-breakfast. It is a website that might be described as a newfangled way to return the hospitality trade to mom and pop.

Airbnb enables any homeowner to monetize a valuable asset that also happens to be a home. Airbnb hosts welcome complete strangers into their houses just as Uber drivers do with their cars. Each Airbnb "experience" is as unique as Holiday Inn is reliably not. My guests don't mind creaky stairs or an overly friendly schnoodle. I don't take offense that those of a more fastidious bent will prefer to book the place with a lockbox and photos suggesting they could eat off the floors.

I opened for business in June of this year. I thought of Airbnb as a short-term solution to a cash-flow problem. I'd flirted with selling my big old house, but couldn't get my head around the fact that today's buyer wants new construction inside and out. I also know myself: I am not a sensible person. I am a gardener, and I love my house. I don't want to "pass it on" to the nice single family for whom I'd pretended I'd gutted the second floor and enlarged the kitchen. I was proud of my work (yes, I was the lead carpenter) and wanted to show it off. I wanted to fill my house up with more people, preferably strangers, than it had sheltered since 1880, when One Crocus Hill opened its doors to half-starved Irish girls who were paid to clean, as well as to impoverished aristocrats like my great-great-grandfather, Dillon O'Brien, who'd lost his own fine mansion during the potato famine.

I opened my Airbnb just as troubling rumors of Airbnb-related rip-offs in New York City and wild raves in L.A. began spreading to flyover country. A guest from West Des Moines, Iowa, broke the news to me that her town had banned short-term rentals outright. The city of St. Paul began smelling trouble where there was none (not yet, anyway), but, thankfully, it smelled money, too.

A new ordinance offers a compromise (as does one enacted in Minneapolis). Operators will be required to pay taxes like any commercial business, plus an annual license fee. Airbnbs will be inspected for safety and must conform to existing zoning rules. Operators in single-family neighborhoods will have to live in the houses they rent.

Before Airbnb, single-family zoning didn't restrict short-term rentals in people's houses, only long-term rentals. Many people in my neighborhood had tenants whose units either had been grandfathered in or simply were not disclosed. One longtime neighbor raised four children in her home and instead of moving out when they grew up clandestinely advertised for tenants, one of whom lived on her third floor for 21 years and another of whom was on her second for 12. This landlady kept records and paid taxes on her rental income.

Commercial establishments with signage and so on (B&Bs, hotels and motels) were prohibited in single-family neighborhoods, but not this other thing we call Airbnb. Why? It didn't exist. Why did single-family zoning exist? To spur homeownership. Such rules are, in my view, behind the times and a needless impediment to the new rewards of homeownership, one of which ought to be to allow people to monetize what for a growing number of Americans is their only asset, with the stock market being off-limits for many, pensions a thing of the past and savings accounts earning no interest.

Times have changed. Back in the booming post-World War II years, the nuclear family was supposed to replace the extended family as the bedrock of civil society. Even grandmother apartments became illegal under the new zoning established in the 1950s. What was good for mom, dad and the kids was good for America and, it was hoped, the world. It was also good for the building trades, as single-family homes sprouted like dandelions. Anything else, including kibbutz-style day care centers, smacked of socialism — that is, until two incomes became the only way a family could afford all this nuclear living.

Mansions on Summit Avenue and in Ramsey Hill were spared the zoning frenzy. Many were converted to multiunit condos, wedding venues, college clubs and the like. Big old houses came back into vogue in the 1970s. Pendulums swing. It wasn't zoning laws but low-interest loans that spurred that round of urban renewal. The whole Historic Hill District prospered regardless of the degree of "commercialization" a particular street or block allowed.

Airbnb guests trend young. They book my house because it's romantic, as they are, situated as it is in an old neighborhood near public transit and one-of-a-kind shops, bars and restaurants. A couple from Cambridge, Minn., celebrated their wedding at Bad Weather Brewing on W. 7th Street, then took an Uber to my place to spend their first night married.

Airbnb may be short for short-term rentals, but it does not have a monopoly on them. It is competing with other platforms, all of which are inventing this business as they go. The unscripted enthusiasm on the other end of the phone line when I call with a problem comes from the employee's knowledge that every decision sets a precedent. No detail is too small when you're on the cutting edge of a paradigm shift. No employee is insignificant when the company is growing faster than the speed of light.

Airbnb hosts share in the thrill of collaboration. It's contagious. Guests do, too. They are encouraged to leave positive comments and suggestions. The tone is invariably thoughtful and appreciative. Hosts review guests in the same spirit.

Airbnb is part of what millennials call "the sharing economy." It represents business conducted from the bottom up, not the top down. It thrives on local energy, not global power; on individuals, not robots. Examples run the gamut from bartering blogs to farmers markets to bike sharing. The sharing economy will transform the "old economy" if anything can, by allowing people to survive financially through their own creativity and resourcefulness.

Clean sheets may be all you have to offer as a host or all you can afford as a guest. Such people will find each other on Airbnb. No one is excluded on the basis of race, color, creed or net worth. There is a place for every kind of personality, too. Hospitality isn't one-size-fits-all. I make good money without feeling put-upon by a tyrannical boss or stuck in a bureaucracy or a dead-end job.

What the ordinance restricts is what bothers me, because the restrictions are based only on what-ifs, and all of them are negative. This smacks of parochialism. My Airbnb has been falsely accused of creating traffic problems, and I've been falsely accused of hosting wild parties and rabid dogs. These accusations reach the ears of City Council members who are less fearful of change than of the wrath of voters who are terrified. I think it behooves us all to examine our fear before surrendering to it.

If living in a historic home makes you happy, then why shouldn't it also make you happy that your neighbor invites curious strangers to spend the night? They're just people, after all.

Moreover, our city needs the money, and our houses can help. Airbnb gives the old neighborhoods a way to thank us for our tender loving care. If our homes can lower our property taxes even as they help pay for affordable housing and better public schools and all the other amenities that make life livable in a vibrant community, why don't we let them?