Political move or not, I think this is an excellent thing for society. It lowers the bar to providing your home as a resource to disaster victims, and makes it easier for disaster victims to find recovery havens.<p>This is a good thing.
A smart move for everyone involved.<p>FEMA trailers for Katrina were a boondoggle. Costing $15,000 each, most were never used.<p><a href="http://i.imgur.com/kdzzG8U.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/kdzzG8U.jpg</a><p>But that's just the tip of the iceberg. The total cost of ownership for many of the trailers ended up being north of $100,000 or even $200,000.<p><a href="http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08106.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d08106.pdf</a>
I'm curious whether other organizations like Couchsurfing could hop on this bandwagon. Even without a city-wide natural disaster, sometimes there's an immediate need for local relief and people have excess capacity.<p>Here in Baltimore there was a street that collapsed a few months ago and residents were sent to hotels way outside the city with no way to get to their jobs, schools, etc. Luckily a week or two afterwards they moved them to hotels closer to their homes, but Airbnb, Couchsurfing and other organizations could provide relief for minor crises like that, too.
I know this seems like a good move, but I live in a part of Louisiana that wasn't directly affected by Katrina or Rita that the victims of both retreated to. I've gotta say I'd never do it, the amount of problems that resulted from that was too high. Just imagine anything and everything trashed or vandalized.
Yeah, but what happens when all of the police officers and fire fighters have been priced out of San Francisco and can't get into the city from the East Bay during the event of a major earthquake?
How does this mesh with legal efforts trying to shut down Airbnb? Is the service being endorsed by the federal government while being banned by state and local governments?