Airbnb already helps those that have to have a little bit more. If you live in a tiny, crappy apartment, you can’t host — you don’t have the space. But if you live in a modern three bedroom in a nice area … you can sit back and watch your disposable income multiply.

Now it seems that this was the case more than we knew.

We’ve all been getting better at holding digital upstarts accountable, from Uber to Twitter to Airbnb itself. To counter the narrative Airbnb presents to us in multicultural subway ads and Super Bowl commercials touting equality, the organization Inside Airbnb has appointed itself as an Airbnb watchman, claiming that it is “adding data to the debate” about the rental website’s merits.

Curbed and The Real Deal report that Inside Airbnb found 74 percent of Airbnb’s hosts in 72 majority-black New York City neighborhoods are white. The white population of these neighborhoods stands at 13.9 percent.

White hosts in the study’s neighborhoods have taken home a total of $159.7 million dollars compared to the $48.3 million earned by black hosts. This means that 73.7 percent of all income Airbnb generates in these predominately black neighborhoods goes to a small white minority.

The neighborhood with the starkest disparity is unsurprisingly one often mentioned in the gentrification debate: Bedford Stuyvesant. 74.9 percent of Bed-Stuy Airbnb hosts are white. Only 7.4 percent of the area’s residents are white, however.

The report also addressed gentrification, claiming, “the loss of housing and neighborhood disruption due to Airbnb is six times more likely to affect black residents.”

As Airbnb does not collect information about hosts’ races, Inside Airbnb used facial recognition software on hosts’ profile pictures to determine their race.

Airbnb spokeperson Peter Schottenfels called Inside Airbnb’s findings a “so-called report” that was “nothing more than selective racial profiling.” Airbnb also countered the report’s claims — weakly — by saying that the use of Airbnb grew by 78 percent in black neighborhoods in 2015.

This last claim certainly seems supported by Inside Airbnb’s study; it would have been nice if Airbnb profits grew by 78 percent for black residents in 2015, though …

Airbnb is no stranger to these sorts of reports. (Although it does seem a stranger to actually doing something about them.) A Harvard study in 2015 found that customers whose names “sound black” were 16 percent less likely to successfully book a room than customers with European-sounding names.

If you’d like to read Inside Airbnb’s study in its entirety, you can find it here.

The Real Deal

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