New York, NY – $100 Gets You Bed on Top of Williamsburg Building

Williamsburg, NY – Just my luck. It rained buckets on the night I decided to sleep on the rooftop at Hotel Toshi in Williamsburg.
Luckily, the hotel had put up a tent.

“It only keeps out some of the rain,” said Robert (Toshi) Chan, founder of Hotel Toshi, who rents the roof of his South Eighth St. building for $100 a night.

That’s for sure. The tent was bigger than an average hotel bedroom, but leaky. Water seeped in around the corners where the tent met the wooden deck. Still, it stayed pretty dry inside.

Chan is one of hundreds of New Yorkers, and others across the country, trying to make a few bucks by using a San Francisco-based Web site called AirBnB.com to sublet odd spaces such as couches, boats, cabins and even rooftops.

He said a Web site developer from Maine slept on the roof for six weeks last summer while looking for a job.

Chan said about 10 guests have rented the roof since he put it on the market in May.
He lets guests use the bathroom in his apartment.

He also rents travelers a collection of 50 apartments he’s leased in Williamsburg and Manhattan through AirBnB.com, on which renters and owners around the world also offer conventional apartments for rent, for a night or longer.

AirBnB co-founder Nathan Blecharczyk, 26, said he and two friends came up with the idea in 2007, when they realized they could rent out spare rooms in their San Francisco apartments to attendees at a big design conference held there.

Business is booming, fueled by residents hoping to make extra cash and visitors in search of bargain digs, he said.

AirBnB’s biggest market is New York, Blecharczyk said. The site has some 800 listings in the city, with as many as 50 new ones put up each week.

“New York rents are really expensive,” he said. “This is allowing people to hold on to their places.”

And for travelers, $100 is a pretty good deal for a night in a New York penthouse, even if it’s just a tent on a rooftop.