Airbnb has removed 2,570 illegal listings from NYC, but housing advocates say it's not enough

Airbnb's efforts to comply with New York City regulations have resulted in the removal of around 2,570 listings in a little more than a year.

NYC housing advocates say that's not enough.

New data released by Airbnb on Tuesday shows that the company continues to remove listings that violate its "one host, one home" policy. In the past month, the company has removed 337 more listings from its site throughout all New York City boroughs.

In total, New York has 23,937 Airbnb listings for entire homes and another 20,940 for space within someone's home.

Airbnb released similar data through June 2016 last month, showing 2,233 listings removed, and updated those numbers for the next month.

"It doesn't change anything," Murray Cox, a strong critic of Airbnb who runs the monitoring site Inside Airbnb, said of this month's additional purged rentals. "It's only 400 out of 20,000 entire home listings."

Critics say entire homes rented on Airbnb —as opposed to single rooms rented in someone's primary home — take away from housing supply that could otherwise be part of New York's increasingly expensive housing market, helping to drive up the cost of existing housing stock.

Airbnb has maintained that its listings, with appropriate monitoring, don't take away from housing available in New York.

"On a broad level, Airbnb listings represent a fraction of the housing stock in New York City," the company said in its report. "Census estimates indicate that there are 275,955 vacant housing units in New York. Many of the 3,144 listings that we initially focused on are not vacant, but even if we assumed they are vacant, they would represent only 1.1 percent of all vacant units and 0.1 percent of all housing units in New York City."

The 2,570 total listings removed is a growing number that began with 1,500 New York listings that Airbnb quietly removed from its site last November before presenting public data about its hosts, according to Cox.

Since then, Airbnb has continued pruning its listings to add to that number. Its report last month included listings removed from June 2015 to June 2016.

Any listing that is not for someone's primary home, and could otherwise be part of New York's long-term rental market, is disqualified by Airbnb. Some secondary properties that wouldn't be available for long-term housing anyway — whether because they are operating as a bread & breakfast outside Airbnb or are managed on someone else's behalf by the Airbnb host — are allowed.

The problem is most pronounced in midtown Manhattan, where 39 hosts have six or more active listings for entire homes, according to Airbnb's data. In Staten Island and the Bronx, for comparison, that number is zero.

A report from the housing advocacy group Housing Conservation Coordinators in June found that 90 percent of New York Airbnb rentals were concentrated in Manhattan and Brooklyn, with most further clustered within five macro-neighborhoods.

And while the number of hosts with multiple listings does matter, a more important metric can be the number of nights per year a home is rented on Airbnb. In its data, Airbnb provides only the median of that number — 43 nights per year for entire home listings — obscuring the high end of the spectrum.

"Their move is to get rid of double listings," said Sarah Desmond, executive director of Housing Conservation Coordinators in New York. "I don't know if that gets rid of enough full-time listings. If you look at the number of days booked, we find it's similar if not more than corporate."

Airbnb's continued elimination of corporate listings from its site shows where the company's priorities are headed in New York, Cox said.

"The fact that Airbnb is continuing to remove multiple entire home listings is not surprising. They've decided to sacrifice this now small community of commercial hosts, but ignore the thousands of host that have just one — or appear to have just one — entire home listing," he said.

The New York Attorney General's office, which has taken action against Airbnb's short-term rentals and issued a landmark report on the company's New York presence in 2014, declined to comment on the new data.

Airbnb continues to say it supports a "one home, one host policy" in New York, and that supplemental income from Airbnb can help many renters stay in their increasingly expensive homes.