Not in My Neighbor’s Backyard

Downtown Nashville is the kind of place where, when you climb to the top floor of the Florida Georgia Line bar (FGL House if we’re being specific), Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” can transition into David Lee Murphy’s “Dust on the Bottle” with no one skipping a single awkward gyration. On a mild Friday night in October, probably the last warm weekend of the year, hundreds of people are clogging the streets of Broadway, ambling in and out of the bar and a dozen other wood-paneled, honky-tonk variants. Literal boozemobiles known as pedal taverns inch down the streets under the propulsion of their passengers’ drunken legs. A bachelorette party is usually within eyesight or earshot — scuttling out of a bar in matching flapper costumes, getting a shout-out from a country band singing to “all the girls getting married,” encircling their newly betrothed friend as she throws back drinks in a veil and cowboy boots.

I catch one such bride-to-be, Sam Goodling, amid the Broadway bustle as she saunters out of a karaoke bar. She’s just finished a searing rendition of Bonnie Raitt’s “Something to Talk About” and is beaming with pride in her bridal costume, veil and all. I sense, from her commanding presence onstage, that the performance wasn’t spontaneous. She traveled all the way from Pennsylvania to Nashville for this moment. “I wanted to go somewhere that I’ve never been,” she tells me. “I love country music, and I’ve always wanted to come here.”

Goodling drifts away mid-interview to board what I assume is a party bus, but I still have the attention of her friends.

“Where are you staying?” I ask.

An Airbnb rental near Vanderbilt University, complete with a hot tub and a backyard. It’s “unbelievable,” one of the young women says before they disappear into the night.

These are the people — not just the bachelorette parties but the guys getting into fights in line for the club, the woman being held up by two friends as they help her to an Uber car, the youthful horde dancing to a house version of “Sandstorm” on the sweaty dance floor of FGL House — that some Nashville residents don’t want returning to their quiet neighborhoods once the bars close. Just a few years ago, these revelers would have largely been corralled into expensive hotels in Nashville’s downtown or cheaper lodging on the outskirts of the city. But thanks to home-sharing platforms, Nashville’s tourists are now weekend neighbors with the city’s long-term inhabitants. Conflict between the two groups has reached a boiling point.

Nowhere is the temperature hotter than in East Nashville, just across the Cumberland River from downtown’s nightlife district. The community, a constellation of rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, has an antique charm thanks to its century-old houses and modern hipster amenities brought in by boutique businesses. (Thrillist helpfully deemed East Nashville the Brooklyn of Tennessee in 2015.) What East Nashville doesn’t have is hotels, but tourists find ample lodging in the area thanks to the explosion of short-term rentals on platforms such as Airbnb, VRBO, and HomeAway. The city has issued more than 450 short-term rental permits to homeowners in East Nashville, second only to the downtown district. And hundreds more rentals are thought to be operating illegally in the area. All told, Nashville is estimated to have more than 4,500 such rentals throughout the city — Portland, which is similar in size, has just 3,000.

More than a thousand homes in the city that could house long-term residents have instead been registered as full-time short-term rentals, sometimes hosting bachelor parties, bachelorette parties, and other potentially rowdy groups. The bachelorette scene, in particular, has become a well-documented phenomenon, landing Nashville on plenty of “Hottest Party Destination” lists and spurring a cottage industry of bach-planning services. Bachelorettes, Airbnb, and Nashville have become so inexorably linked that a developer is planning a 210-guest hotel in East Nashville that will accept bookings exclusively through the rental platform. The name? Bridal Suites Hotel.

Critics of the short-term rental explosion say it’s caused a tear in the fabric of their neighborhoods. While the “party houses,” as they’re derisively called, attract the most ire and eye-catching headlines in the short-term rental debate, many in the area argue that the problem with Airbnb goes beyond the most salacious stories. They say they’re experiencing a fraying of their community when neighbors are replaced with a revolving door of tourists.

Airbnb and the hosts who use its platform argue they’re aiding Nashville’s tourism boom, helping local residents earn money from their homes, and ably managing unruly guests when problems arise. They’re attempting to broker a compromise in Nashville that will allow short-term rentals to flourish while increasing enforcement against bad actors. But some residents, especially in East Nashville, have had enough. They’re backing a competing bill that would ban non-owner-occupied short-term rentals outright in residential neighborhoods by 2021.

What’s going on in Nashville is just one example of the battles Airbnb is now waging worldwide as local governments push back against the idea that the sharing economy must be allowed to grow completely unfettered. In New Orleans, the company negotiated a deal that allows for widespread use of short-term rentals across much of the city, a model it hopes to emulate elsewhere. But other cities, like Seattle and Denver, have either passed more stringent short-term rental laws or are seriously considering them. And San Francisco and New York, the original Airbnb battlegrounds, continue to extract more legal concessions from the company.

Airbnb is no longer a startup. It’s a nine-year-old, $31 billion corporation that is starting to behave more like a hotel operator or real estate developer than a do-it-yourself platform for regular folks to share a spare room. As the company leaves its wholesome home-sharing origin story behind and grows into a global tourism juggernaut, the question remains: At what point does the technology-given right to “live like a local” start to impede on the lives of the people who actually are locals?

“A lot of people are pissed off at Airbnb,” says Nell Levin, a longtime resident of East Nashville. “It’s become a dirty word for some.”

Victor Luckerson

Airbnb isn’t exactly a dirty word to Levin. In fact, she’s been a host on the platform since 2010. For just $75 per night, she’ll welcome you to the second-story bedroom of her charming maroon Craftsman, just a short walk from East Nashville’s lively commercial district. She’ll show you her music room, adorned with paintings of Louis Armstrong, Mississippi John Hurt, and Billie Holiday. She’ll drink coffee with you on her back porch and tell you about the cheap restaurants and hidden bluegrass joints of her longtime neighborhood — “some stuff that they’re not going to find on the internet,” she assures. Levin might even pick up her cherished fiddle — she first came to Nashville in the 1970s to play in a band called the Buffalo Gals — and play a song or two. According to Levin, more than 600 guests from as far away as Japan and Australia have stayed with Levin and her husband, who have earned top marks in all six of Airbnb’s review categories. In 2015, Airbnb named Levin a Superhost, an accolade that rewards “experienced hosts who are passionate about making your trip memorable.”

But Levin draws a clear distinction between the way she uses Airbnb and the short-term rentals she says are damaging her neighborhood. She books guests only when she’s at home in the city, and she has her short-term rental permit hanging just outside her spare bedroom. Thousands of houses and apartments are solely occupied by short-term rental customers or are rented out on weekends when their owners aren’t home. Some of these residences have permits, but many do not. Nashville’s Department of Codes and Building Safety estimates that there are more than 2,200 short-term rentals operating illegally in the city.

“To me, it’s just not fair that there are so many illegal operators,” Levin says. “There are a lot of people who are gaming the system, who are not paying the taxes.”

It wasn’t always this way. When Levin arrived in East Nashville in 1996, the district was hardly a tourist destination. Her ZIP code was almost evenly split between black and white residents. “It was more of a working-class neighborhood,” she says. “We had more people of color here. It was considered ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ by a lot of people on the west side of Nashville.”

Things began to change in 1998, when an F3 tornado cut through the district, damaging around 300 homes. A deluge of insurance money into East Nashville neighborhoods spurred investment in both homes and businesses. A decade later, Nashville weathered the Great Recession without a dramatic collapse in its housing market, giving it an economic advantage over worse-affected cities. And another natural disaster, a 2010 storm that dumped more than 13 inches of rain on the city and caused flooding, was used as an opportunity to replace ravaged low-income communities with upscale housing.

These events set the stage for a nationwide fascination with Nashville’s music, its food, and its tourist-friendly brand of Southern culture. Levin and other local residents cite a 2013 New York Times article declaring Nashville America’s “‘it’ city” as an inflection point for its turbocharged tourism industry. The television drama Nashville, which has cast a glamorous light on the city’s country-music scene for five seasons (a sixth debuts in January), didn’t hurt either.

Nashville’s population swelled from 600,000 to 660,000 between 2010 and 2016. The number of annual visitors to the city grew from 10 million to about 14 million over the same period, according to the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corp. And East Nashville, in particular, saw a surge of hip restaurants and modernized houses tailored to the young and affluent. Levin’s ZIP code was about 62 percent white as of 2015. That year she wrote a song called “Displacement Blues” about the changes to her block.

Nashville’s transformation coincided with the rise of Airbnb. Conceived in 2007 as a way for founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia to rent out air mattress space in their San Francisco loft, Airbnb quickly became a poster child of the “sharing economy.” According to proponents of the turn-of-the-decade buzzword, the sharing economy would let regular people sell their unused resources (like a spare bedroom or a seat in a car) at a lower cost than overpriced corporate services (like a hotel or a taxi). Cities would win, too, as sharing platforms would create a larger market for lucrative tourism dollars. When hosts, guests, and the broader community are benefiting from Airbnb’s presence, the company describes it as “win-win-win” scenario.

That’s the vision Brett Withers had in 2015 when he began representing East Nashville in the city’s Metropolitan Council. He took on the role shortly after the council implemented a new law legalizing short-term rentals so long as they had a permit. “It was about home-sharing and helping our musician neighbors generate income while they’re on the road,” says Withers, whose bushy mustache and penchant for bow ties make him easy to pick out at a council meeting. “The concept was primarily about, ‘We’re helping people stay in their house or generate extra income or rent out a room.’”

Airbnb insists that this remains its primary function in Nashville. In a housing report released earlier this year, the company said that 79 percent of hosts in the city are sharing space in the home in which they live, and 51 percent use Airbnb income on their household expenses (the company did not disclose the actual percentage of rentals that are owner-occupied; investor-owners often manage multiple listings). Laura Spanjian, one of Airbnb’s public policy managers, says that while the company is excited to work with cities on appropriate regulations, it also wants to “allow our hosts to be able to do this thing that they think is wonderful, helps them make ends meet, pay for their kids’ school, or pay for their mortgage, or help improve their home.”

But Airbnb does little to ensure that its hosts are abiding by Nashville’s regulations. The city’s rules regarding permits have been in place for more than two years, yet a host doesn’t need to present one to post a listing on Airbnb. The city’s codes department, which investigates suspicious listings, is overwhelmed by a massive backlog. Employees must often resort to using Google Maps to pinpoint precise addresses, since Airbnb hasn’t provided the city with information on its hosts. Overwhelmed by the volume of illegal short-term rentals, Nashville recently signed a $975,000 contract with a Silicon Valley startup called Host Compliance, which helps local governments enforce regulations on platforms like Airbnb. “It’s probably the single issue over the last five years that’s taken most of our time,” says Bill Herbert, Nashville’s zoning administrator.

“What no one anticipated was that we would have thousands of them and that the majority of them would be non-owner occupied,” Withers says (about 39 percent of permits issued in his district have been for non-owner-occupied homes). “It’s one of those things where it takes a while for the problems to really emerge, and then you start to realize, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s almost nothing we can do about it.’”

Withers now supports the bill that would phase out non-owner-occupied short-term rentals in residential neighborhoods by 2021 (the ordinance has been deferred multiple times and will be revisited in January). It’s not hard to find constituents of his in East Nashville who also want the bill to pass. LeighAnn Rodd, who moved to the area in 2013, didn’t think too much about the implications of Airbnb until the house next door to her was transformed into one last summer. She recalls coming home with her newborn baby and 3-year-old son on a Saturday evening to find three couples “in various states of undress” engaging in sexual activity around the swimming pool next door. She and her family could see and hear their activities from their living room window. “Ever since then, it was like, ‘This is not what we signed up for,’” she says. “We wanted to plant roots. We wanted the place where we imagined the kids will learn to ride bikes in the street. Now it’s not that.”

Patricia Slade, who owns the Airbnb property where the episode occurred and who lives on the same street, says Rodd and her husband didn’t notify her family of the lewd activity in time to react. Rodd says Slade’s family was contacted the next morning. “My neighbors will attest that we would never allow any behavior we all find offensive to continue,” Slade said in an email, noting that the pool sex was the only untoward incident at the property. “We have taken every opportunity to screen renters so we only have families that do not cause problems or upset the neighbors. We do not accept wedding/shower/bachelor or bachelorette parties or anything that appears to be party groups.”

Not everyone who lives near a short-term rental thinks it’s a nightmare. Kevin Hinson, an 18-year resident of East Nashville, has lived across the street from a full-time short-term rental for three or four years. The occasional rowdiness doesn’t faze him, though he says he might feel different if he lived directly next door. “For the most part it’s a nonissue,” he says. “They add flavor to the neighborhood. It’s fun to meet people from other areas.”

Raunchy anecdotes aside (naked blow-up dolls and inflatable penises have also been put on display at short-term rentals), Rodd says the problems with living next to an Airbnb are more fundamental. She calls it “death to quality of life by a thousand cuts” — a slamming Uber door at 3 a.m., a street crowded with out-of-town vehicles, a person you don’t know watching you do morning chores from the porch next door. “It feels uncomfortable all the time because you don’t know what to expect,” she says. “If you can imagine the house that was next door to you [growing up], where you probably literally borrowed flour and sugar. What if that wasn’t there and that was a hotel? Would you have wanted to grow up next to that?”

Few people are coming to Nashville with the express goal of wreaking havoc in neighborhoods. They’re coming to have a good time at a low price, and Airbnb makes that easier than it’s ever been.

I spent a night in a so-called “party house” just a few blocks from Rodd’s home, on a particularly touristy drag called Fatherland Street. The home across the street and another two houses down were both short-term rentals as well, according to Nashville permit data. The four-bedroom, 19th-century house had a curated rustic charm that seemed tailor-made for Instagram rather than a living, breathing family. The vinyl collection, tucked beneath a functioning record player, included Neil Diamond, the Supremes, and two LPs by Reba McEntire. The decorators doubled down on the Reba theme with a framed tour poster on the living room wall. Kitschy books like Don’t Squat With Yer Spurs On! A Cowboy’s Guide to Life and You Are So Nashville If … dotted the den. On the fireplace mantel sat a free bottle of wine; a fully stocked bar could be found in the kitchen. No wonder this place had a five-star rating on Airbnb.

I never met my generous host — a keypad lock on the door allowed me to enter and leave without interacting with another human being. And though I communicated with a woman named Lauren via Airbnb’s direct-message system, the listing was technically hosted by a company called Atlas360.

Atlas360 is a short-term-rental management company that “offers professionally designed homes with the most modern, high-end amenities,” according to its website. The startup operates at least five houses in East Nashville. The location I rented is owned by a man named Kevin Gan, who bought the home for $352,000 in 2015, according to Nashville housing records. Now he’s charging more than $600 to book the room for a weekend night during the summer. Gan’s address is listed as an upscale apartment building with views of Manhattan’s Lincoln Center. A two-bedroom home is currently on the market there for more than $2 million.

When I tried to contact Gan about his experience as a Nashville Airbnb host, my call was returned by Eda Levent, a cofounder of Atlas360. I sent her a detailed list of questions about the company’s operations in Nashville, but she offered only this prepared statement: “We pride ourselves on providing our guests with an authentic, local experience and do our best to instill respect for the neighborhoods we inhabit. We believe in supporting the local economy and our ground team is comprised of a local staff.”

No matter how luxurious Atlas360’s houses may be for visitors, they underscore a common criticism of Airbnb — that it is enabling a flood of outside investment into hot markets, accelerating gentrification, and limiting local residents’ access to affordable housing. Nashville is in the midst of a dire housing crunch. The city projects that it will have a shortage of 31,000 affordable rental units by 2025 if it does not change its policies.

Some recent research backs up the claim that Airbnb’s presence raises housing prices. A recent analysis of 100 U.S. metro areas by researchers at MIT, UCLA, and USC found that a 10 percent increase in Airbnb listings in a ZIP code increased rents by 0.4 percent because Airbnb took potential long-term rentals off the market (the study is preliminary and hasn’t been peer-reviewed). Another study, in Boston, found that more Airbnb listings led to higher rents. But Airbnb points to research it commissioned in New Orleans and its own studies in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., to illustrate that it’s not having a negative impact on affordable-housing availability. The company also notes that its whole-home listings comprise only 1.1 percent of Nashville’s housing stock.

James Fraser, an associate professor specializing in urban and environmental geography at Vanderbilt, is conducting a study commissioned by Airbnb on the company’s influence on long-term rental pricing in Nashville. He couldn’t share the findings of his research without Airbnb’s permission, but he said that the prevalence of short-term rentals in wealthy parts of East Nashville could have a knock-on effect in other parts of the city. “If these investor-owned short-term rentals were not in my neighborhood in East Nashville, would those units of housing then be affordable for people with low and moderate incomes? I don’t think they would,” he says. “[But] if the amount of units for rent for more affluent populations is decreased by short-term rental, then it’s very possible that they’re going to go down a rung and start renting units that could be affordable to people at lower income points. … Not speaking about Airbnb but just as a housing policy person, there’s got to be a filtering effect.”

Airbnb spokesman Ben Breit said in an email that the housing study has not yet been completed. Whatever its findings, the presence of corporate hosts like Atlas360 on the platform undercut the company’s feel-good marketing, like a recent television ad in Nashville that highlights a lifelong city resident who’s also an Airbnb host. Airbnb appears to be changing faster than it’s willing to redefine itself. But there’s no denying it’s a different company than it was just a couple of years ago.

“We don’t want to be the problem,” Airbnb’s Spanjian says. She acknowledges that the company should have been more proactive in helping Nashville keep short-term-rental growth under control last year. “Absolutely we should have addressed things sooner, before it got to this place. Unfortunately, it did get to a boiling point.”

Now the company says it is ready to introduce a suite of new tools that should help Nashville crack down on problematic listings. Airbnb wants to implement a registration system like the one it’s brought to New Orleans, through which hosts would be able to apply for short-term-rental permits directly through the platform. People without permits would be delisted once the registration system is in place. The company also says it is willing to share data such as listing addresses with the city (subject to user approval) to make enforcement easier and directly collect hotel taxes from hosts, which it now does in hundreds of cities. Airbnb has also offered tentative support for a Metro Council bill that would force non-owner-occupied rentals to operate at least a quarter mile apart.

The company’s conciliatory tone marks a sharp contrast from its previous tactics. This is the same outfit that spent $8 million to defeat a San Francisco ballot initiative, then sued the city the next year when it tried to impose fines on Airbnb for its unregistered hosts. The company filed a similar suit in New York. Even in Nashville, Airbnb initially tried to usurp the local government’s power by lobbying for a state bill that would have restricted Nashville’s ability to regulate short-term rentals and barred the city from banning them outright.

Airbnb is playing nice now because it wants to go public soon, and protracted legal battles around the world are a risk factor that could discourage would-be investors. Like Uber, its ridesharing doppelgänger currently staring down a ban in London, the company seems to have accepted that its size and influence now require collaboration with cities rather than combativeness. And Airbnb knows that it’s rich and popular enough to bend many local governments to its will. Spanjian told me that the company wouldn’t be able to provide vital tools like the online registration system if Nashville bans non-owner-occupied rentals in neighborhoods, even though the city would still have thousands of owner-occupied rentals and apartments in need of regulation.

“Airbnb has always had the ability to limit listings to people who have permits. They could do that today,” says Withers, the Metro Council representative. “For a company that is as good as getting around laws as they are, they can figure out how to follow the laws.”

For now, Withers’s headaches are on pause. The city has issued a moratorium on issuing permits on non-owner-occupied rentals as it weighs its legislative options. With help from Host Compliance, the codes department has begun issuing cease-and-desist letters to illegal hosts. And the weekends are colder, pushing the city’s drunken mayhem indoors. Bachelorette party season is over.

But there’s little reason to think that Nashville won’t be an even more popular tourist destination come next spring, or that Airbnb’s growth won’t continue if left unchecked, or that East Nashville in particular won’t bear the brunt of the disruption. Once you’ve commoditized cool, as this area has done with its pricey bars and walking food tours and Instagram-ready wall murals, you can’t stop it from being sold to the highest bidder. “As the demographics of this neighborhood have changed, people are much more concerned about property values and things like that than they are about moral issues like low-income people and people of color being displaced,” Levin says. “I don’t think that’s very high on a lot of people’s agenda anymore in this neighborhood.”

Back on Levin’s street, I met Iva Garrett, the self-described “granny” for the block. She’s lived in her East Nashville home for 13 years and can tick off the names and stories of every family that surrounds her house. The boys who lived down the street now mow her lawn as adults. Levin’s husband, Michael, brought her water during the 2010 flood. When she had a stroke the same year, her neighbors knew something was wrong because she didn’t cut off her porch light that night. “We just do stuff and look out for each other,” she says.

She gestures toward a squat, gray house on the corner as she washes one of her many flower pots. The building used to be rented by a mother and daughter who were well known on the block. In 2016 it was purchased and converted into a short-term rental, advertised on Airbnb as “East Nashville Chic.” Garrett recalls seeing a bottle of whiskey on the sidewalk in front of the house and hearing the occasional loud party. Mostly, though, the building sits empty. The mother and daughter who lived there moved to Whites Creek, a neighborhood on Nashville’s northern outskirts. (Ashley Bosshart, the owner of the building when it was listed on Airbnb, said she recently sold it and it was being converted back to a long-term rental.)

As we talk about how her street has changed over time — Garrett says she’s now the only black person on the block — a family arrives home two houses down. Garrett waves excitedly at the two young boys. They wave back. “How y’all doing? You have a good day, Dylan? You have a good day, Mason? Aw, he’s got a package! Yay!”

She looks back at me, once again serious. “That’s what I’m talking about. Neighborhood.”