Can Airbnb, Taskrabbit, And All The Other Sharing Economy Companies Save The Day In A Disaster?

San Francisco (where else?) has launched a new plan to deal with disasters using collaborative consumption. Will they actually be able to make a difference?

After superstorm Sandy ravaged the East Coast, entire swaths of New York City and New Jersey were left without housing–either temporarily or permanently, depending upon the location. In New York, home-sharing service Airbnb stepped up to help, quickly creating a platform for users to share their homes for free. In the end, 1,400 hosts volunteered, leaving much-needed space open in traditional shelters and proving that the “sharing economy” can be instrumental in disasters. Now imagine what would have happened if Airbnb had that disaster response platform up and running before the hurricane struck.

The city of San Francisco took a cue from Airbnb’s Sandy experience and this month launched a disaster preparedness partnership with BayShare–an advocacy group made up of sharing economy companies like Lyft,Yerdle, TaskRabbit, and Getaround. The organization will get a seat on San Francisco’s disaster council, and ultimately, the city hopes to aggregate all of its resources that could be useful in a disaster on the SF72 website (a new “gathering place for emergency preparedness,” designed by Ideo).

TaskRabbit could create a free disaster relief skill-sharing hub. Getaround could let people share transportation without charging a fee. And so on.

In the meantime, Airbnb has launched a separate disaster preparedness site, called Airbnb Disaster Response. The next time there’s a disaster in any city, hosts will be directed to the site, which will connect guests with nearby homes. “The way the tool works is our engineers draw a polygon shape around the geographical area–the affected area and the area around it where people could potentially help out,” says Molly Turner, Airbnb’s director of public policy. “The goal with our tool is to shelter people as close as possible to where they live.”

Initially, San Francisco had asked the company to create a special disaster site just for the city in the event of an earthquake, but Airbnb thought “we might as well create something that would work anywhere,” says Turner. Actually getting the site (or any sharing economy solution that requires cell phone service or a wireless connection) to work in all disasters will be a challenge.

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