One of the weirder things about where I live is learning just how much of your building is AirBnBs

It is kind of stunning just how much bank you can make by basically doing nothing, I guess

For context, I live in the middle of downtown Toronto. The one bedroom 54sqm (580sqft) flat I live in is 1900 CAD/mo. Which is already a lot, mind you

I'm the first and so far only resident, but they did buy it early when it was still under construction when housing prices were lower, so you can kind of imagine the profit margin they're already making off of me

For now though just keep in mind of a one-bedroom flat like mine goes for about 1900/mo in this building, and checking the listings checks that out

Checking the building on AirBnB I find a studio unit available. Alright unit, balcony could be cleaner, but you get that cool south view looking over Yonge Dundas Square and modern-if-Ikea furniture to boot

For a night though? That's $113/night. Over the course of a month, that's $3390.

Yep.

Like, yes, this is assuming full occupancy (though, judging by the nosie in this building and the constantly changing listings, doesn't seem to be an issue even during the pandemic) but still. Nearly $1500 a month potential over what my landlord is earning off of me.

I should reiterate that this is a tiny studio unit (pictured below), not a 1LDK thing like the one I live in. Current listings for studios in my building are a few hundred lower than what I'm paying right now

This isn't even the worst building in downtown, the harbourfront between the stadiums and in front of the CN Tower is notorious for basically being just all airbnb

In a 2017 article written for the zine Heterotopias, Gareth Martin describes how the cityscapes in Mirror's Edge: Catalyst exude a sort of urban terror by being highly modern, polished, clean, and designed for habitation by the city residents who are never there

While Martin notes that this is likely due to engine limitations and just not wanting to put civilians in the way of you beating up cops, he likens it to the nature of modern cities in the West, where the skyline is dominated with architecture for and by the rich.

Specifically, Martin brings up the example of The Shard, a "comically megalomaniacal" glass tower that overlooks central London like the Dark Tower in Mordor, yet still stands empty of any residences who have chosen - or can choose - to call it home.

This is not unique to London, of course, as is here in Toronto, One Bloor's top-floor penthouses sit largely unsold, even after construction finished four years ago.

The thing about Martin's assessment is that not only do I agree with it, I also find it incomplete. He focuses much on how this new development is built and then never occupied or sold, but I find the nature of residences being wholesale converted into hotels more insidious

Sure, the sight of dozens of giant downtown penthouses with more space than most people can imagine even using fully is...stark, to say the least, but often the mechanisms of more pervasive societal divide are more subtle than that

My landlord doesn't even live in a downtown condo; she lives in the suburbs on the periphery of Toronto. Most of the land owners here are probably the same.

Even before the pandemic, there's always been a stigma with living downtown in the West, contrasted with the equally mechanical and sterile but at least garden-walled suburbs. The kinds of people who own property here, wouldn't even want to live here in the first place

They're converted into AirBnBs and short term stays, directed at business travellers with jobs that afford them to spend nights out of town, and holidaymakers who can afford to spend their trips in places like these.

It's rich people residences, built by the upper class to be sold to other members of the upper class, owned and operated by the upper class, to be inhabited by travelling members of the wealthy class who don't live here. You don't have a part in this equation

You can come up with any number of theories or excuses: you can blame it on the pandemic (even though this was true long before, and will be true long after), or you can blame it on foreign investors (as they have been for the past 40+ years), or students, or aging, etc

They'd have you believe that people are somehow becoming more and more disconnected, insular, less kind, and less willing to know their neighbours, all on their own accord.

The truth of the matter is that no one talks to their neighbours because there aren't any to begin with.

They'll blame the internet or social media or "phones" or Netflix or whatever comes next, but really, you don't have any neighbours. They've all been bought out.

I think I only know one person on my floor who actually lives here, the rest of the units I've never seen anyone leave or enter and out, or at least anyone who hasn't done so without a large number of travel suitcases in hand.

They're all airbnbs or vacant units built for and by people who are incomprehensibly more wealthy than you can hope to be; in such an environment, you basically do not exist, much in the same way you don't think about ants or mosquitos in your daily life. https://twitter.com/DreamerHyena/status/1362445553456599045

It's not merely that vast amounts of pristine material wealth gets created only for it to sit unused face of human suffering, that is an unfortunate accident that much of Toronto is empty, but rather that the mechanisms of our society that consciously pursues and creates this

It's easy to compartmentalise this and frame it as a merely urban phenomenon, that living rural or suburban is what people should do anyway, but barring other discussion about transit and environmentalism, they will eventually come for your neighbourhoods too.

It's not like AirBnB limits itself to inner city condos.

It's also easy to just dismiss my worries as just me "not getting it", that I just don't /get/ the housing market or that this is actually normal operation or even just a blip because pandemic makes urban life less attractive

But the cold hard truth is that the downtowns of the world somehow do stand empty, or are dominated by short-term stays that defy imagination. A million hotels that are perpetually empty yet somehow defy logic by getting more valuable as the years roll by.

Modern downtown is ever empty, yet still ever more expensive, and still where ever more residences to serve the 1% of society are being built to become ever more expensive and ever emptier.

It's never been about "education", or "foreigners", or "modern architecture", or the pandemic, or whatever - it's always about a billion dollars of infrastructure put in place so that a handful of people who will never know or care for you can make a billion more.