Our research focuses on Airbnb’s influence on the housing markets of Los Angeles, with an emphasis on its housing availability and gentrification. This helped to guide our selection of sources, which consists chiefly of scholarly journals and articles from credible national news outlets. The topics of the readings focused largely on the effects of short-term rentals in Los Angeles, with additional supporting material about Airbnb in other cities. Our articles largely discussed the role Airbnb played in tourism and gentrification. One source discussed how the creation of Airbnbs in Los Angeles correlated with tourism, in turn creating rent gaps, driving gentrification and displacement in the city (Wachsmuth, 2018). Our articles revealed how the growth of short-term rentals directly affected wealth gaps on Los Angeles properties. We also learned more about state-wide laws that have enabled the Los Angeles boom of Airbnbs. Introduced in 1985, the Ellis Act was introduced to help landlords exit the rental business and repurpose property for another venture, but has now been used instead to evict tenants to make way for more short-term rentals (Belasco, 2021). The state law informs how rental properties in Los Angeles are able to be converted into Airbnb, and reveals how the lack of regulation has displaced tenants. In our timeline, we referenced additional articles that offer contextual insights into Airbnb’s history and practices, which details its rise in popularity and its stake on the tourism industry. Overall, our selection of secondary sources for this project is extensive. Not only did we cover information about Los Angeles, but we also found information that has enabled Airbnb’s business practices,, with correlations to housing availability and gentrification. This information is directly tied to Inside Airbnb’s 2023 Los Angeles data set, allowing us to reinforce our research with strong data points.
The data set acquired from Airbnb was accessed through “Inside Airbnb” was very extensive. We download the
.csv file directly from the Inside Airbnb website. Though large, it was concise and thorough in its
presentation. To simplify the interpretation of data, we reorganized the data set by owners, location,
neighborhood, price, minimum and maximum number of nights, licenses, and price on an Excel sheet. We deleted
other categories that were impertinent to our topic. We imported this Excel sheet to Tableau and visualized
our data points on a map of Los Angeles. We carefully examined the density of Airbnbs in a given neighborhood,
and what factors might have influenced the large densities. After plotting our data points, each group member
explored how best to represent the data, keeping in mind that “exploratory data visualization…yields
meaningful initial analyses, as well as potential correlations” in our data sets (Yau, 2013). We then cross
referenced categories that affect one another, such as average price and neighborhoods, and represented them
on different graphs, deciding that bar graphs were best for our data.
Our analysis of Airbnb's
impact on Los Angeles was grounded in a comprehensive dataset that required careful organization to focus our
exploration. Key factors such as owners, location, neighborhood, pricing, and licenses determined how we
created our data visualizations. Utilizing Tableau, we visually mapped Airbnb density across Los Angeles, and
delved into factors that influenced these concentrations. We applied the principles of exploratory data
visualization before finalizing our representations.
Our website development process involved creating it on Figma and then hosted our final version on HumSpace,
provided to us by the University of California, Los Angeles. Starting with Figma, our team created a user flow
chart. This strategic blueprint outlined necessary pages and subcategories required to present our research
and data. The user flow chart serves as a great foundation for our low-fidelity mock-up, the skeletal
framework of our site. This preliminary mock-up allowed us to conceptualize content placement and navigation
to ensure an intuitive and user-friendly experience.
We aimed for a clean website design. Our key
sections—Introduction, Timeline, Narrative, Data, Sources, About, and Overview—were strategically organized to
convey a cohesive story. By prioritizing this order, we ensured a streamlined user experience. Emphasizing
aesthetics, we crafted wide margins to prevent visual strain and aimed for an overall visually pleasing
presentation. As we progressed to the high-fidelity stage, our website began to take shape with the
incorporation of site branding, custom designs, icons, and visuals—all thoughtfully created by our team. All
that was left was to export our HTML and CSS files to be hosted on Humspace. Figma played a pivotal role not
only in facilitating collaboration among team members but also in streamlining the iterative design process.
The final product hosted on HumSpace reflects not only the technical proficiency of our team but also our
commitment to delivering a visually appealing and seamlessly navigable platform for users to explore and
engage with our curated data.
In our final presentation, we slightly reversed the branding of
Airbnb, swapping the prominent white color with a dark gray. This was done figuratively to represent looking
at the Airbnb brand from a different perspective. Following this color scheme, we created illustrations that
suited Los Angeles to represent the areas and issues we are discussing. In our narrative, we kept in mind the
role of power between the socioeconomic classes of Los Angeles, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot denotes, “Power does
not enter the story once and for all, but at different times and from different angles” (Trouillot, 1995). We
also went back to our visualizations, streamlining them by removing extraneous points and were related to our
research.
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