The San Francisco Chronicle did a story called Airbnb’s Impact in San Francisco— that covered the effect Airbnb has in the city.
The report attempts to show at least 350 homes listed on Airbnb appear to be full-time vacation rentals and the service removes scarce housing form the city’s limited inventory. The story consists of 5 parts and a series of graphs to help explain the numbers proving Airbnb’s impact in San Francisco.
Throughout the text appear different graphs to support the story about San Francisco listings from Airbnb. In one of the illustrations, Aaron Williams and John Blanchard measure the company’s activity in the city by neighborhood. You select a neighborhood from the drop down selection tool and then a listing of 2014 and 2015 shows the amount of entire homes, private rooms, and shared rooms. I think this graph did a great way of showing the amount of homes Airbnb has used without automatically illustrating too much to confuse a reader.
The same section includes three bars where you can select: price, locations or reviews. Once you select one of the three it includes statistics on the neighborhoods. Easily I can find out that in Richmond District on average an Airbnb price increased from 2014-15 from $157.17 to $179.23 with an increase from 233 to 262 locations and an increase in reviews within the year.
In second section about the total listing and cost a graph appears to show how the local listings increased by a certain percentage over the past years. Just by looking at the graph you can see the increase within the year under each type of rental. I think this was another good display of to show increase and with the total average the sections are label within.
In part three under the reviews per property the graph becomes more complicated and in my opinion it’s harder to understand. The graphs have too many numbers to describe the casual usage accumulated with the company. For example in 2014, one section has 387 but then has 26-50, which can be too much to read and understand right off the first look.
In the last part (five) comparing the rental services, I find it easy to read and understand this. There was a fine line between the number of properties and average nightly prices in the illustration that help compare the Airbnb listings for rooms or shared rooms, HomeAway and Flipkey listings for entire residences.
Overall the story has good illustrations that get straight to the point they are trying to prove. Majority of the graphs are not confusing and a reader can easily recognize the increases, decreases or differences between Airbnb’s impacts within a year. I would use this story as an example of how to use graphs to help explain the story. I also like how each section with several numbers shows an illustration for the reader.