Is it Time to Curtain off the Living Room…

And rent the bedroom as an AirBnB?

When we traveled to Barcelona, Toledo, Granada, Sevilla, and Lisbon earlier this year we stayed in AirBnBs in every city except Granada where we stayed in the quirky, wonderful Hotel Posada del Toro because it included a day pass to the Alhambra.

That was back when I was employed and even then we felt a twinge of guilt about “living” for two or three days in apartments that, because of us and millions like us, weren’t available for people to call home. Fast forward to, well, today and here I am still unemployed after numerous interviews, including recently making it to a third-round interview at the organization which laid me off in the first place.

For now, we’ve got a few resources including my, ahem, earnings on Medium.

Sitting pretty, I know.

One night recently AleXander noted that if things got worse and we exhausted our few resources we could always curtain off the living room and put our bedroom on AirBnB.

How is this possible?

Living in one of the top destination cities in the world helps. Our one-bedroom apartment in an elevator building is two blocks from the 2/3 subway line and two blocks from Central Park. And contrary to past conventional wisdom, Harlem is not a place to be avoided and hasn’t been for years now. In fact, European tourists love Harlem.

AirBnB has become a way for people to keep their apartments in a city where rents are often more than half a tenant’s income.

My friend, Amy, regularly rents out her entire apartment as an AirBnB down near Hell’s Kitchen and stays with friends for two to three weeks a month while she tries to find work. It can be done although her method pushes into a gray area in New York. For several years now there has been a legislative tug of war between the city and companies such as AirBnB in an attempt to regulate their activities.

There’s no way to count how many apartments are essentially off the market now due to the unethical and illegal activities of some very bad actors in this city. Not people like Amy but people who scoop up multiple apartments, sign leases and then rent them out through AirBnB or other “home-sharing” apps.

This brings me back to our trip to Spain and Portugal

When we were planning our trip last May we were ambivalent about using AirBnB to rent entire apartments. Giving our business to AirBnB was keeping apartments off the market and yet we did it anyway in Toledo, Sevilla, and Lisbon. We’d been saving aggressively for this trip and even so would not have been able to afford hotels for the entire trip.

In Barcelona, we decided to be ethical and stayed in the spare bedroom of Maria and her family the El Raval neighborhood. It was awkward AF. The apartment was tiny and we clearly had the nicer room complete with a tiny balcony. Maria spoke no English and our Spanish is only enough to get us by in New York. We relied on Google translate and managed well enough but living in someone else’s home, negotiating the use of the only bathroom, and being careful to come in quietly late at night all made for a very long five days.

It was a relief to arrive in Toledo where we had the whole apartment ourselves and it felt the same in Sevilla and Lisbon. To be able to have complete access to the entire apartment, bathroom and all, and not worry about disrupting our hosts' daily lives was the height of luxury. To do so for under $75 per night was, yeah, well criminal.

And yet the day may come when we open our home to AirBnB in order to keep the rent paid.

We could use moveable office partitions and curtains to wall off the living room, get rid of the couch and replace it with a daybed and clear the bedroom of our stuff. Would people actually rent our bedroom? Oh yes, indeed they would, and we’d get used to having other people in our space. And our visitors would have such delightful hosts: a couple of fascinating old hippies with stories to tell and suggestions of the most interesting places to go in the city.

We’d clean up!

But that day hasn’t arrived yet. I could still find work. This article could go viral and get picked up by Human Parts and rocket to the top of everyone’s list. I could get hired to write for a multinational conglomerate, touting their humanitarian good works. AleXander could get commissioned to create art again by someone coordinating a white paper in another country. We could hit the lottery!

Pigs could fly.

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