Perhaps you remember the tale, told in our Apartment Sadness column, of an Airbnb situation gone totally haywire on Telegraph Hill. The gist: Some tenancy-in-common (TIC) neighbors have a long-running feud that partially involves one neighbor renting out an apartment in the building full-time on Airbnb, and in order to destroy that neighbors' life or whatever, the other feuding tenant poses as an Airbnb guest, staying in the unit and eventually establishing his own tenancy there after his 30-plus day stay.
Basically, this is the nightmare along with the scenario of your next-door apartment becoming a full-time tourist party pad and one that perhaps in the future can be avoided if angry neighbors like these can communicate and mediate their concerns through Airbnb itself. And now Bloomberg reports that the San Francisco-based company will do just that, beginning to collect neighbor feedback (which will undoubtedly consist mostly of complaints) about hosts, guests, and properties. That's all coming soon here, within months probably, but it's starting in... Japan.
Airbnb is huge in Japan, and as such it's also contested. The country, after all, has the fastest-growing market for inbound visitors, a situation that's creating a hotel room shortage and bringing on more Airbnb listings to compensate.
“One of the most important issues facing the sharing economy is how the people choosing to take part in it co-exist with those that aren’t,” Bloomberg quotes head of Airbnb Japan Yasuyuki Tanabe speaking at a government forum this week. "Our first step in this direction is to give neighbors the opportunity to comment or complain.”
There in Japan, the system will start next month with an online form for neighbors, but so far we don't know much about how that will work. Will neighbors have to disclose their name in giving feedback? Will their identities will be shared publicly or with the hosts on whom they comment/tattle? And also, can San Francisco's NIMBYs really even handle this?
Airbnb's purported fear with regard to the rejected Airbnb ballot measure last year was that battles between neighbors, or even spying between them, could easily become a widespread litigious problem. Well, maybe the new system will allow Airbnb to sort all that out internally, or at least have a chance to.
And you'll have recourse, besides calling the cops a few times, on your asshole neighbor who bought an apartment just to rent it out to hard-partying Eurotrash playing shit like this until 4 in the morning.
Related: Airbnb's Listing Of Israeli West Bank Settlements Incites Protest