A BEDTIME STORY

The Hyper-commodification of Edinburgh

by David J Black

IT SEEMS, on the face of it, almost benign. Airbnb connects budget travellers with home owners, rakes off a commission, and everybody’s happy. Well, maybe not everybody. New York City, for one, has had a few concerns about an unregulated agency which links stranger with stranger, and undermines a Big Apple hotel trade subject to strict regulation and State and Federal taxes. In London, Mayor Sadiq Khan has even issued an edict directing that householders should be constrained from letting their rooms through Airbnb for more than 90 days a year.

Could it be that the ‘sharing community’ business model of global rental agents Airbnb is not so much the openingsalvo of a socialist dawn as yet another way for smart entrepreneurial types to become rich? One hates to spoil a good party, but when Airbnb investors are buying up flats as assets to be sweated, rather than homes to be lived in, the problem of marketplace distortion arises. This certainly applies in Edinburgh’s Old Town, a once pleasant area full of archaic charm and quaint closes, but now rapidly degenerating into a Hieronymus Bosch theme park of indescribable hedonistic vulgarity thanks to its relentless commodification by its cash strapped council and its marketing advisers.

Now rapidly degenerating into a Hieronymus Bosch theme park of indescribable hedonistic vulgarity

The reality is that the Scottish capital’s greatest asset – a historic centre with a living community – is being sapped by A triple curse perfect storm of an out-of-control corporate hotel business catering for mass tourism, a lucrative private sector academic rental business building barrack blocks for incoming students (80% of whom aren’t even Scottish) and an Airbnb and holiday letting onslaught which any self-respecting economic historian would instantly rumble as a variant of the 1637 Dutch Tulip Craze.

The strain is showing. Thanks to a legacy of failure which includes a £1.3 billion (including interest) airport tram link, a £91m blowout on a new ‘Waverley Court’ council headquarters which breaches its own building height code, and a property repairs scandal which unravellers of the Schleswig- Holstein problem would have difficulty comprehending (those being just the highlights) our pauperised council is now desperately doing the administrative equivalent of boiling granny down for glue. It has even sold off part of its council chambers to become managed apartments. Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall, by comparison, seems like a model of prudence and efficiency, not to mention refined good taste.