The Romantic Anti‐Capitalisms of Short‐Term Rental Hosting.

This article focuses on how Airbnb hosts in the Boston metro, San Francisco, and Washington, DC respond to legislative short‐term rental (STR) regulations. I trace how hosts justify their multiple STR practices by way of the civic good all while foreclosing a debate about the potential negative effects of their monetisation. I show how hosts displace the displeasing aspects of STRs onto the abstracted category of the "Investor Host", a stand‐in for foreign investment capital and indifferent corporations. I argue that STR owners replicate what Iyko Day calls "romantic anti‐capitalism", a mode of critiquing capitalism that valorises the local and concrete uses of capital while displacing capital's destructive effects onto an abstracted and racialised other. I build on Day's theorisation by demonstrating how there are multiple genres of romantic anti‐capitalism that function differently based on a person's structural position within settler‐colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]