In the wake of several recent studies concluding L.A. is the least affordable city in the country for home ownership and has the ninth highest rents, a new paper published in the Harvard Law and Policy Review argues that short-term rentals, like the kind available through Airbnb, are exacerbating L.A.’s housing crisis.

In times when demand for housing is outstripping supply, the L.A. Weekly reported Friday that graduate student Dayne Lee, the paper’s author, found that Airbnb, “decreases the supply of housing and spurs displacement, gentrification, and segregation.”

One study conducted by Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy (a union-funded advocacy group) cited in the paper suggested that short-term rentals in Venice Beach were hogging 12.5 percent of the market.

The paper also points out that Airbnb listings, “are concentrated in just seven of the city’s densest, most expensive neighborhoods: Venice, Downtown, Miracle Mile, Hollywood, Hollywood Hills, Echo Park, and Silver Lake,” and that in 2014 “rents in these neighborhoods were 20 percent higher, and increased 33 percent faster, than rents citywide.”