This Tuesday! Shareable and SPUR Explore Policies for a Shareable City
Photo Credit: Ah Zut
At Shareable we love exploring how best to create shareable cities. Whether it's hosting SHARE SF or our Policies for a Shareable City series, we love a good conversation that looks at the social and economic benefits, challenges, and even tensions between public policy and the rise of peer to peer, collaborative marketplaces.
So, we are pleased to invite you to an event this Tuesday April 3rd, at 6pm, that will explore the intersection of the sharing economy and urban planning and policy here in San Francisco with our partners SPUR, sf citi, The City and County of San Francisco, and Tech Central SF . We will engage in conversation around this timely topic with panelists:
- Leah Busque, Founder and Chief Product Officer for TaskRabbit
- Jessica Scorpio, Founder of Getaround
- Joe Gebbia, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer for AirBnB
- Jamie Wong, Founder and CEO of Vayable; and
- Jay Nath, Chief Innovation Officer of the City and County of San Francisco
We hope you can join us! If not, we will be live tweeting using the hashtag #collconspolicy, please follow along and send us your questions and comments!
Click here to REGISTER
And as a bonus to our readers, the first three people to leave a comment below about what types of policies they would like to see created, or a question or topic they would like to see addressed during this conversation will receive a free ticket to attend this event!
Comments
Emily, Utter wrote on 04.02.12, 6:33pm:
I would like to see policies that protect our ability to share our homes. I'm concerned that property owners may begin to alter rental leases to prohibit tenants from using services like AirBnb.
Seth Schneider wrote on 04.03.12, 10:06am:
Great point, Emily. I wouldn't be surprised if many property owners already have clauses in their lease agreements that prohibit tenants from renting out the home or apartment. I managed an apartment building many years ago and I know that the lease we used didn't permit tenants to sublease or rent out their apartments -- and that was pre-Airbnb.
Seth Schneider wrote on 04.03.12, 10:26am:
Great questions, Adam! My vision -- inspired by what I read in Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers's book -- is that heavier usage of shared products will lead to a demand for more durable and longer-lasting products as opposed to the planned obsolescence that we have in many products today. That will lead to conservation of materials and less energy used to produce the products.
I don't have an answer to the income question. In the short term you're correct that the sharing economy provides more disposable income. However, as Randy Scott White has pointed out in Shareable's Community Blog section, that income will accrue to people who have more assets, more wealth. So the rental issue doesn't address existing economic inequalities.
There's still a lot to figure out and I'm curious what other people think about these issues.
Matt wrote on 04.03.12, 2:53pm:
I would like to see sharing practices actually integrated into city management and planning policies, and I hope the panel can address the real nitty gritty of why it's hard to implement things like participatory budgeting or crowd sourcing some public services. What are the real hurdles? Liability for the city? An inflexible contracting process? Union agreements? Certain federal laws? Or softer things, like lack of leadership or lack of political acceptance?
At some point, if the goals of a shared economy are realized, will there be a dramatic rise in prices for products that no longer scale? Will the benefit of a shared economy be mostly in the form of gains in conservation of raw materials and space or as a way of creating more disposable income? The answer has to be both for the short term, but I am wondering how people think it will affect the larger economy in the long term.