The apartment sublet market does not really mean people inviting strangers into their homes. Instead, it looks something like the following: you had to rent an apartment by the year, and you had to put down enough advance money to insure that you couldn’t profit by breaking the agreement; and according to your convenience, you physically left a few months early, taking with you those of your belongings which you did not propose to abandon, and you don’t ever propose to be back. This leaves you with a kind of “businessman’s interest” in the apartment. Limits were traditionally set by the fact that people could not always find a sublet tenant. If you were a student, most of your friends were also students, and just as you were leaving in June, to take up a job, and were stuck with a lease running until September, they were in the same position. Social Apartment Lending tends to become a vehicle by which these undervalued “businessman’s interests” can be monetized. This tends to create a problem for the neighbors, because there are unknown strangers sharing their space, and in a big city, that is threatening. Inevitably Social Apartment Lending is going to be legislated out of business.

If you want to visit a giant city like New York or London with modest means, thing to do is to remember the rule, “when in Rome, do as the Romans do.” That means that New York and London have very good trains. People who aren’t rich, and don’t want to live in a slum either, use the trains to commute from some place they can afford. So, insofar as possible, if you want to visit a city like that, you should do the same thing. Find a reasonably priced motel somewhere on the outskirts of New York, convenient to a train station, and take the train in.

In 1972, when I was fourteen years old, my family visited England and spent a month there. As it happened, we had friends at the University of Sussex, who had come over to the University of Cincinnati as exchange faculty a couple of years earlier. They lived in Lewes, the old, sedate county town of East Sussex, rather than in Brighton, and, by way of repaying old favors, they arranged to rent a trailer in a local holiday trailer camp (*), the kind of place where the lower-middle-class Englishman went to visit the sea. This camp was more or less across the road from a BritRail station, in the country at a place called Bishopstone, but with two small towns, Newhaven and Seaford, within walking distance. We did things like walking along a public footpath across a cow pasture to one of the towns to visit an Indian restaurant, and taking the train home again. We took the train to visit our friends in Lewes every so often, and every so often, we took the train up to London, about an hour’s ride, and visited the various museums, and saw the sights. This, of course, was the kind of thing an ordinary American tourist could not have done– one needed a friend on the ground, who knew the territory, and could make arrangements for one. I doubt the campground landlord would have had any idea of how to take a reservation from America, but our friend could physically drive over to take care of the matter.

(*) I think this was before the Butlin’s company “McDonald-ized” that kind of thing.

The advantage was a higher level of experience than one could get, staying in a hotel in London. This was during the time when the Vietnam War was winding down, just as the war is Iraq and Afghanistan is winding down now, and of course, in England, it was hard to judge the state of affairs. English people saw television clips of American politicians demanding that the war be expanded, that the United States Army should invade China and dictate peace terms in Beijing, and that, to this end, say, five million men should be sent to Vietnam, to fight to the last man. Englishmen did not have the local background to know that this particular American politician was a famous windbag, not to be taken seriously. At the age of fourteen, I was about six feet tall, and looked a couple of years older than my age, especially to someone not accustomed to “reading” the fine details of American teenagers. I looked more or less conscription-age, in other words. What I remember is the rough sympathy of middle-aged, working-class Englishmen. These men, who might well have gone ashore on Normandy Beach in June 1944, looked at me, and saw, in effect, the Somme, circa 1916, the death of a generation, so to speak. Of a typical group of ten young men in 1914 (say, a school class, or a sports team), nine were dead by 1918. I didn’t understand this at the time, of course, but it meant that years later, when I was studying history, I had a certain personal experience to compare the books against. I could emotionally understand that the scars of the Somme were so deep that they were still raw in the 1970’s. It also meant that in 2004, at the beginning of the Middle East war, I understood the limits of European commitment in ways that George W. Bush did not understand, and could never understand. People like that travel a lot, but they always stay at the best hotels, and consequently, they never meet the working-class, and never understand the root of a country.

Now of course, there are computer applications you can do, to assist a tourist in “doing as the Romans do.” For example, you can create an Iphone app which tells you how to get from one place to another on the New York Subway, one of the most complicated in the world. The system can likewise incorporate data on buses, and on New York’s three different commuter rail systems. I believe people have done this, but there is no real money in it.