When Precious Price bought her first home four years ago in Atlanta while working as a marketing consultant, she took advantage of her frequent business trips by renting out her house on Airbnb during her absences.

“I knew I wanted to use that as a rental or investment property,” she said. “I began doing that, and it was honestly very lucrative.”

For Price, 27, and other young entrepreneurs of color, online short-term rental platforms like Airbnb and Vrbo represented a path to building wealth on their own terms. With an excellent credit score and minimal startup capital — a primary barrier for people in this demographic — a professional Airbnb host could amass a stable of apartments on long-term leases, then turn around and rent those properties on a nightly basis to vacationers.

Some of these entrepreneurs see it as a more equitable alternative to corporate America, with its legacy of institutionalized bias and inflexibility toward caregivers and working parents. Others are motivated by the desire to cater to Black travelers, who say they still face discrimination even after platforms including Airbnb promised to address issues like documented cases of bias.

Price became an evangelist of sorts, establishing social media channels to teach other would-be entrepreneurs how to follow in her footsteps, and churning out a digital library’s worth of videos, tutorials and advice using the handle @AirbnbMoney.

The irony was not lost on Price that her grand real estate ambitions were propelled by the 296-square-foot “tiny house” she spent nearly six months building for herself in her backyard. When the pandemic slammed the brakes on travel, grounding her road-warrior lifestyle and evaporating her supplemental income stream virtually overnight, her tiny house allowed her to continue renting out her primary home and making a large profit.

She even added to her portfolio, buying a second house and renting several furnished apartments in Atlanta’s popular Midtown neighborhood, and she eventually left her consulting job to manage her rental business full time.“It was a freeing experience at the time,” she said. “I’m making a ton of money that most of my family has never seen in their lifetime.”

Price was earning as much as $12,000 a month and deriving a sense of purpose from her work on social media helping her peers achieve financial security.

Then the distressing messages started to come. First one or two, then too many to ignore: a litany of increasingly distraught calls and emails from people who didn’t want her Airbnbs for a weekend away — they were in desperate need of a place to call home.

Price realized she was on the front lines of a housing crisis. By renting property to tourists rather than long-term renters, she and others like her were exacerbating the nation’s housing affordability problem, as she related in a 2022 TEDxAtlanta talk.

“I started to realize that conversation began happening across the country,” she said.

The pleas and stories of financial precariousness hit home for Price, the oldest of five siblings and a first-generation college graduate. She went to business school at Indiana University.

“When I started to get these calls from single mothers and students, I started to realize that’s the identity of some of my family members,” she said. “And I’m realizing the connection of how I’m not very far removed at all from that.”

She began to reexamine her values and walk away from the lucrative vacation-rental business. She stopped listing properties on short-term rental sites, and over the next several months, she shed her rental portfolio.

“Everyone has their own ethical compass and for me, mine felt just off with what I was doing,” Price said.

The few remaining tenants she has now are on long-term leases, and the rent she collects is enough to cover her costs, with maybe “a couple hundred dollars left over,” she said. She supplements that income with freelance consulting and public speaking gigs. Although she is earning a fraction of her former income, she is more fulfilled and no longer feeling burned out, she said.

The number of affordable houses has plunged: Only 10% of new homes cost less than $300,000 as of the fourth quarter of 2022, even as mortgage rates have roughly doubled over the past year.

These challenges have a cascading effect that has driven up rents as well: Moody’s Analytics found that the average renter now spends more than 30% of their income on rent.

Price’s experience with the tiny house in her backyard inspired her to search for another way for people to add housing — and for homeowners to generate rental income. These units, known colloquially as tiny homes or granny flats and identified formally as accessory dwelling units, can take the form of tiny homes, guest cottages, or apartments that are either stand-alone or attached to the primary house. More policymakers are hoping these units can take some of the pressure off the tight housing market.

“She’s working on a pressing problem: the lack of housing supply across the U.S.,” said Praveen Ghanta, a technology entrepreneur who began the Emerging Founders program, a startup incubator for Black, Latino and female founders in Atlanta. Price, a participant in the program, is working on a startup she named Landrift, a resource hub so that homeowners — particularly homeowners of color — can increase the value of their properties and generate income by building their own tiny homes.

“We can make a meaningful impact, particularly in markets like Atlanta,” Ghanta said.

“Sometimes I think people get fixated on the notion of affordable housing and that it has to be nonprofit,” he said. “The reality is there’s a lot of both money to be made and housing to be supplied, even within market rate constructs.”

Price has reoriented her social media platforms away from the management of short-term rental properties and toward the promotion of small-scale development of ADUs.

“At this point I do want to begin acquiring other properties,” she said. She is looking for houses with enough land to accommodate a tiny house while building a second ancillary structure — a guest cottage — on her first property.

“My plan is to get a property I would be able to do some kind of housing on so I’m not just taking housing but would be able to make more housing,” she said. “The American dream is real estate.”