Stay Here: Rent Gap, Airbnb, and the Neoliberal City

[00:00:00]this video is sponsored by surfsharkvpn click the link in the description to get 83 off for two years plus three months for free the city is man's most consistent and on the whole his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart's desire the city is the world which man created it is the world in which he is therefore condemned to live thus indirectly without a clear sense of the nature of his task in remaking the city man has remade himself it's a super exciting time to be part of the vacation rental industry because it's predicted to be worth about 198 billion by 2020.

[00:00:47]hey everyone some of you may have noticed that lately i've been doing a bit of a let's call it a series where i've sort of been combining my love of sociology left-wing politics and terrible terrible reality tv shows like after my cooking show video i had a bunch of people recommend that i watch nailed it the cooking show where home cooks try and fail to recreate unbelievably complicated desserts and i'm just like no no that's not trash i'm only interested in the kinds of shows where it's clear that the people who made it had no regard for the safety well-being or dignity of anyone involved in the show like i'm only interested in talking about shows where just the fact that it was allowed to be made is itself an act of violence and so this month i'm going to be turning to the world of home renovation tv in this video i'm going to be talking about a little show called stay here but you can't stay here [Music] [Music] stay here is quite possibly the most satanic show i've ever seen travel design experience profit stay here as i said it's a home renovation show but the twist is that all the houses they renovate are meant to be rented out on airbnb now i will admit that i'm not very into renovation shows but even still i feel pretty confident saying that this is a bad one specifically what i think makes stay here so uniquely trash is that unlike any other generically bad renovation show and make no mistake this show is extremely generic and bad but at least with those other shows it is just nice at the end to see a family move into their new home but on stay here you don't get that instead you just get people being like yeah sick going to make a ton of money off of this like there are even a few episodes where the owners are just like damn wish i lived here let's just rent out the house and we'll live here i'm jealous that i don't get to steal this you're i'm jealous of our guests yes i'm totally jealous of our guests because that place is sweet there's even this one episode where this guy owns this whole building and he lives in this amazing apartment and then rents out the other apartment that kind of sucks and the hosts convince him to move into the shittier space you're a young guy not married nope no kids nope you got to suck it up and you should move into the other apartment and we should fix this place up and rent this out for short-term rental right like the episode ends with the guy living in a worse place than where he started but it's played as a happy ending let me real quick tell you about this video's sponsor before we get back into ripping on this show this video is sponsored by the vpn company surf shark and right now if you follow the link in the description or go to surfshark.deals we're in hell and use the promo code we're in hell all one word you'll receive 83 off for two years and three extra months for free if this video has put you off of tourism but you still want to i don't know see what netflix is like in japan surfshark is great for tricking streaming services into thinking that you're in another country so you can get region-locked content also i doubt i'm the only one who could and should do a lot more to secure my online privacy and a vpn is a great tool for doing that they essentially create a private internet connection which prevents malware trackers and those snakes over your isp from knowing what you're up to surf shark has great security and a firm no logs policy to ensure that they aren't tracking what you're doing either i've been using them for the last like month and a bit and i find them super fast easy to use they aren't constantly updating and they have a clean web feature that blocks ads and trackers which is pretty sick i'm not at all an expert in this stuff and they are paying me but i've used other vpns before and i will say that i do like this one better so if you need a vpn and would like to support the channel click that link in the description or go to surfshark.deals we're in hell and use that promo code we're in hell all one word to tell them that i sent you you'll get 83 off for two years and three months for free so anyway back to the video also just the way the show is produced is brutal whenever they do a transition they either show the kind of like stock drone footage you'd probably expect or more often they show a bunch of very unnatural pictures of the two hosts doing touristy stuff in this dumb scrapbook collage effect that looks like it came with imovie and i know what you're gonna ask don't worry the answer is yes of course these transitions are accompanied by the worst music you've ever heard [Music] [Music] changes everything changes everything speaking of the show has two hosts the first is genevieve garter an interior designer best known as one of the original designers on trading spaces while basically everything about this show is baffling genevieve does and this is one of the nicest things i'll say about anyone involved in this show she makes sense she handles the interior design and renovation and is just a friendly seeming lady who dispenses pretty solid interior design tips something is too perfect people don't feel like they can touch it so if you're gonna put cheese out always leave a few crumbles when things are more vertical they move your eyes up the wall and away from that tiny footprint so it gives the illusion that things are actually bigger than they are when you need a polish or you have a little watermark in any of your tables or surfaces mayonnaise is your best friend i also don't want to be too mean to her since i believe she was cursed by a vengeful spirit so that everything she touches takes on a hideous pinterest aesthetic now you have a guidebook in your common room and all of your guests are going to take pictures in front of this [Music] kind of a king midas if he was your quirky aunt situation in almost every episode genevieve paints the exterior of the place black and the interior white the exterior has gone black and the interior has gone white to give it that modern scandinavian design aesthetic we have made some serious progress on the build to deliver the feel of an upscale boutique hotel at the beach we're painting the exterior of the house a chic dark peppercorn color to hide its imperfections then spices things up with some local art which generally means geometric designs appropriated from some form of indigenous artwork and it just looks like absolute [ __ ] i love this i found you because i wanted to make a special door and i definitely wanted to include some of the native patterns of washington the totem poles being so prolific here so you've got the whole aztec blanket pattern mapped out on the pool house you know i love this work because it brings the outdoors in but in a really modern contemporary sort of abstract way door is a jewel a real native american aesthetic it's kind of that ultimate backdrop and i think it's gonna set this whole pool area apart from the competition definitely nobody has this anyway speaking of vengeful spirits the other host is peter lorimer peter is a real estate agent with a blog who used to work in the music industry that's all it's not really clear why he's on the show but he gets presented as like a real estate guru and handles the business side of things while it's not within the scope of this video to opine on what manner of creature of the night he is i think it's extremely clear from the show that whatever peter is he absolutely hates humans and delights in our suffering he got a management company so good job there but the management company's considering dropping him is that what's happening yeah oh he's in trouble huh well he's gonna be really in trouble because i've invited them to the property anyway the show is very boring and every episode plays out the same so i'm just gonna run through the basic formula here at the beginning of every episode peter and genevieve arrive in a new city and then say something about it that makes them sound like martians trying to pass as tourists what i love about malibu is it's a place where celebrities and surfers define a one-of-a-kind luxury lifestyle uninterrupted rows and rows and rows of brownstones that's what i love about brooklyn this is as new yorkers what we need the most we need nature they then bring up the statistics that happily report how much money short-term rentals make in that city i was digging through the numbers and brooklyn alone brings in 309 million dollars a year in home shares airbnb vrbo there are approximately 6 200 vacation rental properties in austin last year they brought in about 250 million dollars in revenue for owners and then they're off to meet the person they're there to help and [ __ ] all over their house i just feel like there's no style or personality it's just very disjointed there is no design this is frat house everything totally frank right nothing about this room says that you care at all there's two kind of messed up things that happen here for one thing the before and after shots that they'll use are hilarious dishonest like in the first episode they just show big boxes lying around the living room and it's like sure they probably didn't have amazing photos of the place beforehand but i doubt they just had ikea boxes lying all over the place in their promos in another episode they rip on this guy for having a messy office even though he makes it very clear that when he rents the place out he locks that door there's a bedroom that's being used as an office which for me it's a big no-no the last thing i'm gonna do when i'm on vacation is go sit in someone else's half-imagined office that's actually an office and i also use it for storage and lock it off when guests are here but also they use this phrase throughout the series which i think is so dark they tell everyone that they need to de-personalize the place this could mean a guy getting rid of his hookah collection we've got what look to be like devices that you smoke pot in so what if a family's checking in and the first thing that their kids see well i've collected these from all over the world the depersonalization of this home is something that we have to work or in the second episode telling a woman to get rid of all the pictures she has of her and her recently deceased husband my husband had the house and unfortunately he passed away a year and a half ago sorry and um it's been a difficult time for me right everywhere i look i see you feels like sharon's party pad yes rather than luxury it needs to be de-personalized that episode is so [ __ ] too because the woman only wants to rent her place out six months of the year and live there the other six which she's doing while they film but peter keeps ripping on her for things like having an exercise bike in her room you have a gym in here too i do here's the thing that troubles me i'm flying here from europe yeah i'm dropping 1500 a night yes i walk into my master suite you're reminding me of how fat i am when i walked in here before i was reminded of how fat i was because there was a cycling machine or worse having food in her refrigerator all right can i open your fridge uh it's full of half eaten nothing about this fridge makes me even want to eat anything in it no offense yeah but when you have people you kind of leave an empty fridge would that be correct you would have water it is also pretty funny just who goes on this show well i would say that airbnb and short-term rentals are just bad full-stop which we'll get to that soon enough but they present everyone very sympathetically we're meant to feel for these poor people who are trying their best but just can't seem to succeed at turning their second home into a source of income that can put their kids through college but as much as i personally think that landlords should get a real job i can obviously still sympathize with this woman who can't pay her bills because her husband just died but then peppered in are just absolute [ __ ] who were meant to have equal sympathy for like that woman's husband dying is supposed to be just as sad as this third-year-old who can't get his investment property off the ground my name's alex i'm 30 years old i live and work in new york city i initially purchased this house in 2016 for 355 thousand dollars but it's just been costing me money every single month that it sits here uh it's just a money losing investment anyway after the house has been roasted genevieve then designs the new layout by entering her mind palace so let's start with this living room in between these two windows is your king-sized bed bedside tables laundry all goes back here they then sit down with the owners to have a frank discussion about their finances this is a subtle thing but i think these scenes are some of the grossest the owners tell peter and genevieve what their financial goals are and then peter tells them that based off of what the owner's competition is charging they'll be able to meet all of their goals if they rent the property x number of nights a month a number that he seems to pull out of nowhere but promises them that if they do whatever he and genevieve say they'll be able to meet it in summary what is your goal monthly we want to cover all the expenses associated with this boat so that is mortgage mortgage pump out and then we also want to cover little rosie's child care so all together that's about four thousand dollars for me the art of pricing is to make yourself competitive and i think by the time that jen and i are done we can get you to 250 unite and about 16 nights a month which will get you to your 4 000 a month and a total of 48 000 a year what's so [ __ ] up about this is that it's never explained who's paying for the renovations and like first of all if it was the show paying for it i feel like they'd mention that and secondly there's a couple of people who seem really worried about agreeing i know that all of these changes seem expensive and they are this is not a cheap renovation at all if this was my property i would be so confident in it go for it yeah all right good i feel better like that doesn't seem like the response you would have if you were getting your place renovated for free right i've tried looking into it and haven't been able to find any solid answers it seems like the show does definitely pay for some of it but not all and we don't know how much which i feel like this would definitely be a very different show if they were open about that for instance at the end of each episode they post a new ad for each property the copy gets read out loud while they swipe through the new photos and then it just cuts to credits now we need to go live and launch the new property listing the vintage ranch of paso robles is the epitome of a romantic getaway for weddings wine tasting and country living enjoy nature under the magnificent 250 year old grand oak tree no follow-up no here's how they're doing now i looked it up and six out of the eight properties featured on the show are still up on airbnb at time of recording but still definitely very weird right also when i say they need to do whatever peter and genevieve tell them to do that can often mean things the owners don't want to do but get pushed into doing to maximize profits like the guy in episode six wanted to rent out the bottom four of his house as a retail space and peter and genevieve are like nah [ __ ] that you can see that it would lend well to something of a storefront maybe an art gallery or something like that or a great vacation rental look i know that you were thinking about this as retail but as a businessman i see this as a potential place to have another sleeping area you open up your windows you're eating with your family people are walking by you maybe have a few rocking chairs whatever i love this indoor outdoor thing and part of why he wanted it to be a retail space is because it's tiny so when they turn into another room to rent it looks completely [ __ ] where's the bed go this is my bedroom living room area okay very much a studio apartment this was your retail space your retail garage yeah it was to see it like this the business guy in me goes okay now this is a business it can be rented to change your changes and the nice thing is you now have a little kitchenette in another episode they make the guy who had that office they didn't like turn it into another bedroom and then they see that he has a shed in his backyard and are just like hey why don't you make this your office what's in here tv boxes snowmen the thing i like about this right off the bat this could be your storage for sure you could even put a little desk in here and work in here we put money in your pocket by turning that into a bedroom which i think is key like that just sounds so shitty i love it just the only home makeover show where a guest leaves the show with his office moved into a pool supply storage area anyways after the owners sign their souls away the show's pretty boring construction starts and while that's happening genevieve takes them shopping for new furniture and appliances again no mention of who's paying how are you guys doing dishes now by hand yeah right not sexy more expensive doesn't mean more stuff in fact it means less stuff higher quality like this is kind of a minimal style bed but you know immediately when you see the texture this is expensive peter explains some aspect of business or marketing i want to talk about the headline for me everything starts with a hook two bedrooms victorian with private pool it isn't grabbing me i would probably have something like three-bedroom pool oasis when installing security cameras at your short-term rental it is common courtesy you've got to let the guests know and so that the owners can have something in their guidebook to tell guests to check out they all go out to eat somewhere authentic usually a cooking class but it's presented in such a way where the hosts tell the owners that this place is now their favorite authentic local experience it's time to introduce them to a romantic dinner experience they must guide their guests to give it a good sort of push you don't need to twist or burrow oyster shucking class this is a great perk because it's obviously one of the number one restaurants in seattle so to help build brett's guidebook we've curated a very special texas barbecue cooking class so brett we have a true authentic texas barbecue experience we can't wait for you to show your guests first of all it's so creepy to tell someone what their favorite restaurant is but also it's incredibly funny that that restaurant is just an oyster shucking class like i'm sure they do regular service too but i love imagining this family taking the same class every week like this is the best place in town now there's two episodes in particular that i want to talk about with this and i'm pretty sure those are also literally the only episodes where we see anyone who isn't white the first one is honestly [ __ ] from start to finish it's set in brooklyn and starts with peter and genevieve going to look at a mural of biggie near the property and peter gets really weirdly emotional oh wow this is major with notorious b.i.g he was one of my heroes before getting into real estate i was a successful record producer and international dj biggest influence on me and music as a whole was massive real i'm that girl who listens to gangster rap on her way to the farmer's market energy happening here the property they're looking at in this episode is basically a hostel and gordy the guy who owns it honestly seems like the best person on the show he's very clear with them that he does not want to raise the prices at all because he wants it to stay affordable my goal is to keep the price the same i want to keep it affordable this is a working-class community we want working-class folks from all over the world to come back into it i love it and enjoy it and live locally this is something that peter and genevieve completely ignore it's kind of nuts in every other episode it's like a big thing how they make everyone turn any spare rooms into bedrooms so they can maximize guests so the profit that you're gonna get is directly linked to heads in beds we absolutely need to change this into a bedroom so the thing that jumps out to me heads and beds is how you fluff up the numbers but here they get rid of all the bunk beds and even tear out one of the bedrooms so they can expand the kitchen so my first thought is that we need to take out that wall take out this wall all the way back all of it frantic so we're gonna open up this whole ground level wait wait wait wait wait wait wait you mean a room taking a room i'm making a room disappear but you gain a lobby um i didn't which not really sure how you can do that without raising the prices and if we go over to airbnb to look at this place oh look it tops out at over a thousand dollars a night oops just your typical affordable youth hostel for only the children of ceos anyway while the construction crew gets to work taking affordable housing off the market peter takes gordy and his young sons who help him run the place out to talk business now at this point in all the other episodes the owners either go furniture shopping with genevieve or to a fancy restaurant where peter talks about seo or tells them to start a blog so in your case i would probably recommend seo search engine optimization oh okay pay per click blogging when it's done in an authentic vulnerable genuine way is the most powerful tool a marketer can have when people see that you're real people on a real farm engaging with your guests in real experiences it makes them feel like they know you i gotta start taking more pictures and saving them and sharing them instead peter takes gordy and his kids to meet a woman who i think is just a maid at a hotel and she teaches them how to make a bed so this is my friend marcia she is a luxury hotel bed specialist let me show you how we make a hospital corner you lift and spread tuck the sheets at the top you sweep and then you tuck again i lightly spray okay cool like that feels pretty [ __ ] racist right like did a guy who owns a hostel business really need to have the concept of making a bed white splained to him and like i want to be clear that all the beds in the before shots looked perfectly fine i just wonder what it is that makes gordy different from the owners in every other episode also i like how he says that she's his friend like oh yeah you guys hang out at the biggie mural now might be a good time to stop and mention that airbnb has a pretty massive racism problem a paper from 2016 found that airbnb hosts were much more likely to reject black guests even when it would hurt them financially airbnb responded to this by releasing a report of their own boasting that they were actually helping to fight racism because in that year usage of airbnb had risen most in black neighborhoods which first of all that's not relevant the issue the original paper pointed out was that hosts were discriminating that'd be like if a movie theater refused to serve black people but then we're like no no no it's cool we aren't racist some of our janitors are black but also airbnb saying they've seen increases in black neighborhoods isn't good since that's just evidence that they were gentrifying those neighborhoods by taking affordable housing and long-term rentals off the market also even in those black neighborhoods white hosts consistently earned way more than their black counterparts i don't say this often but it genuinely would have been way less racist if airbnb had just said we have a black friend anyway there's also the last episode and this is the one where stay here actually tries to address race the episode is set in washington and for their tourist location they go to this historic chili dog place which seems super legit it's been a place where a lot of very famous people have visited everyone from chuck berry to barack and michelle obama have gone out of their way to visit this specific location and become a part of that history as well they sit down and talk to the owner who's this awesome old lady who's been there for over 50 years at one point peter acts like they're doing her a massive favor by sending guests to her restaurant we want to bring guests into dc and specifically the shaw neighborhood so they can get to learn the history they can meet you and they can experience dc and live like a local which like they do kind of talk like that to every business but it still kind of rubs me the wrong way like obama ate there i'm sure she doesn't need their help or want to talk to every tourist this [ __ ] brings to washington but then she mentions that martin luther king used to eat there and then very much out of nowhere the owner of the property says this can you tell us a little about what happened in the martin luther king assassination the riots that followed which seems pretty [ __ ] weird right like i'm a bit of an awkward guy i can relate to being in a group not knowing what to say and winding up putting my foot in my mouth but i don't think i've ever interrupted a conversation to abruptly ask someone to recount a traumatic event like that yeah we're doing six weeks so it's getting pretty exciting um we decided to go with uh jennifer you know after mom um you know i just wish she was here to see all of this but like you know not to get all like i don't know spiritual or whatever but like it in a way it kind of feels like she tells about the night she died i'm sorry what the night she died you found the body right yeah um anyways after he says that she tells him about the day mlk was assassinated it was just tears tears everywhere everybody everybody that came in was just crying it was really very very emotional and then it cuts to the owner of the airbnb saying everyone wants to feel the same way that i felt when i walk into ben's chili bowl everyone wants that experience what the [ __ ] is going on i've watched this clip so many times and the way he delivers that line still weirds me out so much but it just gets so much more deranged from here i had to edit this clip to make it a bit shorter so that youtube doesn't de-monetize this video but i need you to know i didn't change anything to make this weirder here's what happens immediately after he says that virginia i'm a massive massive obama fan hey can you show me where he sat and ate his chili dog and may i sit there please of course oh one two three beautiful gotcha everything about this interaction is [ __ ] unbelievable like peter just interrupts his story about mlk to brag about what a huge obama fan he is i think this scene is amazing too because it just works on so many different levels on the one hand it's insane and hilarious but it also is just so in line with the other things peter and the host have been saying what kind of people could an endorsement from this horrible show bring to this restaurant people who are massive fans of obama whatever that means who want a picture in front of this shitty sign what kind of experience does the owner of the airbnb think people want one where the woman relating this powerful story is packaged up and sold as a feature of this short-term rental business a real nice diner um i think my favorite thing on the menu is uh this old woman's involvement in the civil rights movement that are the chili fries by the way in this episode the property the guy is renting out is a [ __ ] historical building that was once washington's first all-black fire station there's one part where they go to the like firefighter museum or whatever so that genevieve can get ideas for how to make the place look like [ __ ] after our visit to the museum we also decided to create a timeline of the firehouse's history and apply it to the tall window in the living room that is so heavy 2017. i love that the firehouse is renovated and listed as a short-term rental guests can now sleep in a piece of history it was a windless old bedroom and now it's the firehouse lounge this is gonna help tell the story of the firehouse and the neighborhood before it looked like a frat house and now it's finally a family-friendly firehouse and there's this moment right where they get a tour of the museum from this old firefighter who i guess works there and they tell the guy that the host owns the building that he owns and the firefighter just goes mike owns the old firehouse lucky you thank you and there's just no interrogation as to why this actually pretty significant historical building should now become a short-term rental so this guy can turn a profit so at this point i should probably come clean about something i think that airbnb and the short-term rental industry as a whole are bad glad i got that off my chest there are a lot of reasons not to love airbnb for one thing there's the discrimination i mentioned earlier as well as less safety since they are essentially unregulated hotels it's also worth noting that every landlord would rather be running a hotel since they could charge way more per night airbnb allows them to do this taking housing off of the market while also avoiding a lot of regulations there's also this issue where since tourism is concentrated in certain areas a disproportionate amount of the city's resources and services get allotted to those areas which is a part of a process called international gentrification personally i prefer to keep my gentrification locally sourced gentrification is a process where a poorer area becomes more desirable as new wealthier residents and businesses come in this usually results in the displacement of poorer long-term residence what often makes this particularly unjust is that the people who are displaced are often at least partially responsible for the area becoming desirable but since they're more often renters they don't see any of the profits from the rising property values international gentrification is when this takes place on an international scale where poorer locals are pushed out not to make room for wealthier people who come to live there but instead through tourism and international investment properties this basically serves to throw fuel on the fire since while normal gentrification and local financialization of housing is bad gentrifiers who move into a neighborhood at least can interact harmoniously with the long-term residents at least more so than tourists can but also this can lead to a kind of housing crisis that cities can't just build their way out of well again this is not excusing the very serious problems that are gentrification and investment properties it's one thing to have housing prices set by the local demand it's another for them to be set by global demand airbnb is also different from other forms of gentrification because of an economic idea called rent gaps rent gap is basically just the gap between where rent currently is and where it could be the theory goes that rents tend to remain relatively stagnant while property values tend to rise and so the gap grows rent gap theorists have used this as a model to explain gentrification they argued that the way it worked was that to close a rent gap you need to redevelop the property which costs a lot of money and so wouldn't be done until the gap got big enough to justify the investment short-term rentals changed this not only did they create a new rent gap overnight but they created one that doesn't require any development now this wouldn't be a leftist video if it didn't all come back to neoliberalism it's become a bit of a meme where anything and everything gets blamed on neoliberalism and to be fair here neoliberalism is the economic paradigm we currently live under it's the air we breathe and so its consequences are legitimately far-reaching however the term does get overused and misused a lot the worst i think is when people act like neoliberalism is just when corporations or politicians cynically use progressive talking points also it's kind of a tangent but like you ever notice how edgewards will now say basically the same dumbass talking points now as they did in like 2015 but just switch out the word sjw for neoliberal that sucks neoliberalism is not when corporations are woke it is and this is a fairly simplified explanation but when the government comes to primarily function as a tool of capital intervening in the market on behalf of capital to facilitate the extraction of profit and minimize losses while it was born much earlier the mid-70s can in a lot of ways be thought of as the point when neoliberalism moved off to college to go and make it on its own a big part of this was in 73 when a cia-backed coup overthrew the socialist government of chile and installed the fascist general pinochet but around the same time something else happened new york city went broke throughout the 60s american cities were [ __ ] by a decline in manufacturing jobs and white flight to the suburbs to combat this the federal government got cities to create jobs by expanding their social services this works great if the cities are well funded enough to pay for those jobs however they weren't as a result new york started borrowing money from the banks banks loved it and even started advising the city to take out more sophisticated loans it worked out great for everyone until it didn't in 75 the banks abruptly stopped lending to the city and from here they were basically able to completely take over a corporation called the municipal assistance corporation or mac made up mostly of bankers was established to manage the city's finances the mac prioritized repaying bonds above any social services which completely [ __ ] the city if you've ever heard about how new york used to be this disgusting cesspool this is why but now the banks had a problem now that they effectively owned the city they needed to find a way to make it profitable after they received a cash injection of saudi oil money they set to work rebuilding new york or more specifically manhattan instead of trying to go back to manufacturing or expanding the public sector the banks instead focused on building new york city's economy around finance and tourism since those two industries were focused almost purely in manhattan when the city got around to rebuilding their public services i'm talking about like basic things like police firefighters garbage collection that kind of thing guess where all of those services were brought back to the city invested in public services in order to serve the financial class and tourists while the poorer boroughs were left to burn and this ultimately became the road map for the neoliberal city we see today the reason i bring all this up is because it ties into one of the most subtly unnerving things about stay here the way they talk about the culture of the cities they go to for many new yorkers like me we just love hudson because it's an easy two hour train ride from manhattan it's a very popular weekend getaway for antique shoppers art collectors foodies design lovers like myself uninterrupted rows and rows and rows of brownstones that's what i love about brooklyn throughout the show the hosts always gush about the city they're in but in this creepy way that just feels so gross a mural of biggie isn't just cool it's valuable our house is literally down this walk right here yeah you can have coffee with biggie every morning i bet his competition doesn't have piggy a city having a thriving art scene isn't seen as good in and of itself or even because it allows guests to go experience cool art and music but because it means lots of places for people to take selfies south congress is an artist community the street is filled with great artwork and murals that travelers frequently post on social media in a way the focus on selfies is kind of ironic because this is a show for vampires while this feels at least to me like it goes completely counter to how any of these things should be enjoyed it actually fits perfectly within the model of the neoliberal city i just discussed as sharon zucchin discusses in her book the culture of cities as cities across the world compete with one another to attract business and tourism a city's culture comes to play a bigger role since culture is one thing that can't be relocated but it can become modified now i want to be very clear here that i'm absolutely not coming out against cities having a culture industry or nice destinations nor am i saying that you shouldn't travel and see the sights that said i think that when we talk about these things we should also ask who is a city for here in toronto covet has exacerbated our already brutal housing crisis and as a result encampments of unhoused people have been springing up in lots of local parks over the last summer our increasingly militarized police force along with a small army of private security guards have been conducting violent raids on these encampments in order to evict the residents two things worth noting about this are one these raids are meant to evict as few as like 10 or 15 people people who could easily be housed with the money spent on the massive police force that's used to evict them and two the raids have been justified by claiming that the unhoused people were dangerous or preventing people from using the parks for leisure this is first of all untrue but also the encampments aren't gone now they're just moved to less touristy places including much smaller parks where you actually couldn't really use them for leisure anymore since they are now just completely filled with tents the point of these evictions and the subsequent violence committed against the people who tried to stop them i think is to send the message that these parks and the city as a whole aren't for those kinds of people rather it's for tourists and the white collar class people like peter and genevieve on the bright side though cities have been trying at least to fight back against their short-term rental industry both through fairly toothless government action as well as in the case of berlin through the work of renters unions while even still there's nowhere near enough regulation and enforcement to prevent illegal short-term rentals one of the things that a lot of cities have been at least able to ban on the books has been so-called ghost hotels properties the owner doesn't live at and that are purely for renting out i find this pretty funny since throughout the show peter constantly tells the hosts to think of their property as a hotel which is explicitly the exact thing so many governments have tried to ban is this a vhs it's sweet we took the a track out it has to go it feels like your spare room as opposed to a small business which is separate to your residence now your home is not just a home it's a business it's like owning a hotel you need to get into the mindset of being you're a general manager of your own small boutique hotel that said it is absolutely an uphill battle that we have ahead of us and ultimately what i think is so interesting and also just brutal about watching stay here is that it's a piece of media that endorses so much of the shitty cynical aspects of the short-term rental industry that they've carried into every part of the work when we look at all the little things i've made fun of or complained about the music the editing the bad designs the awful hosts it seems kind of weird and out of place from the standard netflix high production aesthetic but for a show about gentrifying a show that views all art as an opportunity for selfies what could be a more fitting look to me i think that what's so chilling about stay here is that the sanitized generic aesthetic of the show is kind of a perfect representation of what cities are becoming if people like peter and genevieve have their way thanks for watching [Music] hey everyone thanks so much for watching if you like the video and would like to support the channel consider hitting that surf shark link in the description or better yet becoming a patron like all of the amazing and frankly beautiful people whose names are scrolling past right now especially christopher tubbs happiness vincent lee jacob mcdonald star star ben snow strawberry pup tart selma al aswad jasmine wellner robin acid summer kelly flynn scarebank eric walker shaun t veggie oxblood ben levitt victor adrenochrome junkie shane cooley michelle hamilton tyrio brian e black jr dennis deans ak bean the ruse isaac slatten dormitory fedora rome les brown serena sinclair marius teltard mikko akita fishikiyama robbie kraft room for cream neener calvin krist stew jawala corey royal road thomas d wynn alphabet 89 brain aderkob adrica xander 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