THEY'RE styled as funky, friendly ways to travel, but short-term apartment rental sites like Airbnb are sparking debate in the US over how they affect affordability for residents, not visitors.
On one side are tenants such as Audrey Smaltz, who say landlords are illegally turning their homes into de facto hotels by renting apartments to high-paying tourists instead of full-time residents.
In New York state, it's generally unlawful to rent an apartment for under 30 days unless the apartment's resident also stays there.
But Smaltz says an entire floor in the midtown Manhattan building where she has lived since 1977 has been diverted to short-term rentals for much as $US600 ($A650) a night while the number of rent-stabilised apartments has dwindled.
On the other side are tenants and homeowners such as Lee A Thomas Jr, who started renting out a guest cottage on his Queens property via Airbnb last year after cancer treatment forced him to stop working and sapped his savings. He doesn't want permanent tenants at his home, and he says he was able to make a needed $US19,000 last year renting out the cottage an average of four or five days a month.
"It was because of this that I was able to get by and survive," Thomas, who now does freelance work in finance, said.
Airbnb and similar sites have become a focal point for discussion about whether and how to regulate the growing "sharing economy", and whether it represents an innovative, person-to-person business model or an unregulated, unruly upstart.
The question of whether such services undercut or help housing affordability also has bubbled up in San Francisco, Portland, Oregon and elsewhere, but it's perhaps most pointed in New York.
The number of New York City apartments and private rooms rented through Airbnb rocketed from about 2650 in 2010 to 16,500 early last year.
AAP