Cities Reshaped by Airbnb: A Case Study in New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles

In the last 10 years, Airbnb has rapidly grown from a simple, online bed and breakfast operation to a leading global hospitality service provider. Scholars have been using different spatial analysis tools to study its potential impacts on cities. To better understand Airbnb's impact this featured graphic applied a cartogram processing tool to reshape census tracts based on Airbnb listing intensity in three major US cities (New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles). Results showed that different cities have different patterns of Airbnb listings. Census tracts in New York City became completely unrecognizable after the analysis, which indicted a highly skewed Airbnb distribution in the city. Compared with New York City, we saw less and least deformation in Chicago and Los Angeles, respectively, where Airbnb was more evenly distributed. The results showed that Airbnb listings were very evenly distributed in the large US cities. Airbnb would impose completely different impacts on different neighborhoods based on their locations.