Respectfully: if you're going to attempt to co-opt a political framing to which you are less than familiar, drawing a transparent parallel between the fundamentally consumerist nature of tourism and needing a place to live that lets you get to your job, and then attempting to tag it as nativism--let alone an "extreme version" of it!--is probably not the least disingenuous way to do so.
You are describing something functionally on the same scale as to the "extreme blowback" rich people get when people make fun of them on Twitter for, say, burning untold amounts of dead dinosaur goop to make an NFT or to not quite go to space as a personal stunt. It is somehow, however, though not the "economically just circumstances" of the hand-to-mouth mom. Which is a situation to which I will confess some confusion, but whatever.
Where's the threshold of badness here, though? Sure, if 75% of residential units are up for short term rental, it's gonna be really hard for the remaining residents to form a strong community. But if it's more like 5%, or even 10%[0], is that really a big detriment to a "strong community"? That just seems like an easy "no" to me.
[0] And I would expect those units to not be evenly distributed around a city; there will probably be higher concentrations in the more touristy spots where this community stuff matters less, and lower concentrations in the more "sleepy" residential areas.
I’m not sure what exactly you mean by “strong community” here, but that is a phrase often invoked for nativist and exclusionary impulses which I would rate as quite a bit less legitimate than a desire to see the world.
The social consequences to a tourist going to a hotel instead of an Airbnb are nowhere even near the social consequences of an even modest increase in rents.
Only if you ignore the difference between immigration and tourism.
A tourist is fundamentally there for temporary and consumptive reasons. They don't have any long term interests about the place they visit. They are accommodated as guests. As such, it is only rational that they don't receive the exact same consideration as the residents who have their skin-in-the-game of that same place.
When I moved to New York for a job, I spent over a month in an Airbnb while searching for more permanent accomodations. My roommates in the Airbnb were all in a similar situations, needing a place to stay for 1-6 months.
Without the Airbnb, where would we have gone? A hotel? But a hotel with a useable kitchen and good wifi would have been too expensive for any of us renting one of those rooms.
Historically, there was a type of lodging that seems almost perfectly suited to this situation: a boarding house. At least in my southern US city, the last of the ones here were legislated out of existence in the 80s and 90s as part of the war on drugs.
Not sure if NY has this, but when I first moved to the bay area in 2004, I lived for three months in a studio apartment, in a building that catered to shorter-term stays, before finding something more permanent (I was on a 3-month contract and wasn't sure I'd be offered a full-time position). Chatting with the property managers, I learned that my use case was pretty common, as well as people only intending to stay in the area for a few months, as well as your use case of needing some time in the area before finding something more permanent. If we'd had Airbnb back then, it would have almost certainly cost 2-3x what this place cost.
Tourism isn't always good. Places get trashed, many "tourist" destinations are starting to regulate because people come in, trash the place, and don't give a fuck and leave. It's sad
No one said they aren't. Some people just don't want their next door neighbor renting out their home/apartment to a bunch of tourists who don't care about how disruptive they are to the people who actually _live_ there.
