I had been backpacking for 11 months when I was running low on resources and decided to go back to the tech industry.

I had look at places that needed roommates, but the good ones filled up by the time I called back and the others were not places I wanted to live. I ended up paying a premium for having my own place.

http://khanism.org/perspective/minimalism/

Looking back, I didn't want to share after spending much of that time in hostels and shared spaces. But months later, I realize the benefits I've lost. I have too much stuff once again and am desperately trying to cut down. I'm in a city that's filled with cold an unfriendly people, and thanks to having my own place, allows me to be more of a hermit.

I plan on buying a car again at some point and downsizing to less than a car full of stuff. Big salaries are a kind of death trap. It can get people addicted and justify jobs that many of us hate. I'd rather have the small salary and only have enough stuff that I only take up one room; where I could easily pack up and leave.

One of the AirBnBs I crashed at when I was between permanent residences was a 2 bed apartment operated by a lovely Polish couple. They rented out both the bedrooms and had converted the living room into a permanent bedsit for themselves in order to make ends meet living in a reasonable part of London.

I'm not sure whether the ability to do this truly empowered them, whether the life with it is better than the alternative. Clearly they judge it to be.

On the other hand was a chap renting out his spare room who loved being a host, chatting to the people he met etc etc. He was definitely happier with it.

The danger is that the experience of your London hosts becomes normalised and the market rent rises to match it.

That's not how market forces work. If you increase the supply, the price goes down, not up.

You're probably overlooking the change in the quality of the good. Demand in London is highly elastic. If a lot of new sleeping units come on to the market, they will be filled easily because lots of people want to live there.

Now suppose we divide old units of accommodation priced £ in two (halve the slope of the supply curve). The price of a new unit will be close to £. But an old unit then costs nearly 2£. So you have a choice between slum housing and coughing up double the rent.

But banning AirBnB seems unlikely to improve your salary, and while it may actually lower your rent, it probably shan't do so by very much at all.

> But banning AirBnB seems unlikely to improve your salary

I have nothing against AirBnb itself, I was generally talking about the bigger and bigger disconnect that has formed between the middle classes (who have seen their real wages stagnating for the last 10-15 years in the Western world) and the holders of capital, presumably because the latter have accumulated more and more wealth also because of those stagnating wages for the middle classes.

We both know that without VC money (which in the end comes from holders of big capital) companies like AirBnb and Uber wouldn't be where they are right now.

The solution then is to heavily incentivize the middle and lower classes to acquire capital other than owner-occupied housing.

renting your place out on AirBnB allows a middle income person to receive income from capital assets.