Perhaps it's me living in an area that used to be mostly boarding houses, but I do understand the concerns that hotels and homes have different impacts on a neighborhood and community. Zoning laws exist for that reason and many, many others.
He didn't need to say it. It was obvious the hotel industry was going to react this way, due to there being less supply, and, presumably, approximately the same amount of demand for temporary lodging in NYC.
Higher hotel prices are not necessarily bad, especially for the local residents.
I had an Airbnb spawn across the mews behind my building they have a pretty large open balcony and there were parties literally every night during the summer here in London, they stopped only fairly recently when the season changed and I'm expecting the hell to resume when we get closer to the holiday season.
Across the street on the front of my building there is a pretty nice hotel (actually there are a few of them on the street and around it) and they are quiet because the hotel staff keeps the guests behaved.
After 10 PM you'll see the porter or the front desk telling guests to be quiet even if they are talking on their phone a tad too loud while having a smoke.
And as far as calling the cops goes, this doesn't work, noise complaints especially on the weekend are pretty low priority I'm hardly the only one bothered by it and it's pretty futile.
Before that there were about 3-4 weeks of an Airbnb in my actual building, it's a small mid 19th century building with only 6 flats and there were tons of complaints including loss of mail and packages so the trust that owns the building had a vote and banned short term rental.
It looks like abuses like the mews behind your building were the intended target of the legislation. Airbnb failed itself and its investors by failing to address this problem. I'm glad you're free of that nuisance; it sounds pretty awful.
Hotel room prices are related but aren't a strict function of the niceness/care of a hotel room. I've paid hundreds for a crap hole in a great touristy location (and with no crowd control as you describe it).
Since AirBNB so many times matches prices of hotels in busy spots, people rent on Air because it has less rules and regulations. - hey let's throw an all booze/drugs loud music party.. where? at Cesars'. Are you insane you want to get us arrested and banned for life?? Versus: hey let's rent on AirBNB and have a reckless party, I mean what bad can happen to us?
Too bad AirBNB was busy writing complaints to Cuomo and basically threaten him with lawsuits based it baselessly on 2nd Amendment violations, instead of re-working their "behavior guidelines" for rentees.
I'm in a similar position - I live in a 19th century ten-flat building, all privately owned. We had one flat rented out all summer on Airbnb and it turned me from being 'meh' about the idea to being totally against it.
None of the other owners/residents were consulted or told about the Airbnb, so the first thing I knew was a group of Germans at my door asking me questions about their stay, and whether I could give them a bottle of olive oil. Fortunately for them I was bemused enough to help them out rather than to think "well no, I've been at work all day, and nobody's paying me to be your concierge".
Then there was a family who stood in the communal, enclosed hallway and smoked every night. And the group who partied until 3am all week; and people who slammed the main door rather than closing it gently (it's old and a bit fragile).
I can't blame the visitors, because they were here for a cheap holiday and knew no better. And the people who rented out their flat are really nice (I'm otherwise on good terms with them). So it's hard to blame anyone but Airbnb and their business model.
This isn't what I signed up for when I bought my home; I want to live among a community of neighbours, not in a cheap hotel run for the benefit of others.
> I can't blame the visitors, because they were here for a cheap holiday and knew no better. And the people who rented out their flat are really nice (I'm otherwise on good terms with them). So it's hard to blame anyone but Airbnb and their business model.
You can have an otherwise good relationship with someone while still holding them responsible for something they did.
I think your missing the subtleties of British English, "can't really blame them" means that you hold them responsible but that you also see their side of things.
> I can't blame the visitors, because they were here for a cheap holiday and knew no better.
It's fair to blame them, though. We all know Airbnbs are rented out by real people in residential buildings, with real neighbors. It's basic etiquette to treat the apartment as if it were your own and respect the people around you, no matter how much you're paying for it (and Airbnbs aren't always that much cheaper than hotels). I've stayed at a few Airbnbs and that has always been my #1 concern.
Guests being assholes is an issue that's certainly hard to deal with, but it doesn't sound impossibly hard. Maybe if Airbnb had a program to approach the representatives for each building an Airbnb is rented out at, giving them a way to be informed about guests and leave feedback for them... perhaps include some form of shared compensation with the host, at a smaller %. I can see buildings being pro-Airbnb if there's a fair system behind it.
>Guests being assholes is an issue that's certainly hard to deal with, but it doesn't sound impossibly hard. Maybe if Airbnb had a program to approach the representatives for each building an Airbnb is rented out at, giving them a way to be informed about guests and leave feedback for them... perhaps include some form of shared compensation with the host, at a smaller %. I can see buildings being pro-Airbnb if there's a fair system behind it.
That would take effort, most hosts won't do it and Airbnb won't do it because they would be told to go and lick a power socket by most buildings.
Having a revolving door in a small building without a porter isn't nice, noise, loss of security and theft can be a real problem.
The building getting 1% (per falt) out of the stay is really honestly nothing say you have some really nice flat to rent and you rent it for 600 a week, do you think anyone would accept this nonsense for the price of a coffee and a muffin at Starbucks?
Even if they manage to have 100% tenancy it will mean that each flat will see about 300GBP, sure no one will throw away 300GBP but this is likely less than 1 week of rent for most decent locations in London this isn't what is going to make the difference.
Zoning laws and regulations exist for a reason, sure you can have a building with a bad tenant but this is a single point issue which can be resolved through the police, council or the building trust.
And while not to sound too obnoxious when you are paying a premium for the location and accommodation you expect a certain demographic whether it's young professionals or more established families it doesn't matter, you don't expect 7 drunk dutch girls partying all day and all night that is for sure.
Sure 10 or even 5 years ago I might have liked it, but not now, I don't think it's unreasonable to not want to live in what effectively can become a hostel come summer just because people can now pay for the upgrade to first class with Airbnb.
I also don't think it's unreasonable to think that people should not be allowed to effectively build purposely built party flats with a huge bar in the living room and a balcony which was turned from a picnic table and a few benches into a dance floor just so they can ask for double the price while advertising it on ABNB or w/e.
Absolutely blame the people who are renting out their apartments. Bring it up at the association meeting. I'm in favor of AirBNB but rules within the building you own is legit.
Problem is that there's no association - every flat is owned freehold and there is nobody who manages the building. However, any action that three households agree on becomes legally binding for every occupant. (This is just how it works in Scotland!)
Also, if you got organised with a few other residents you would have a lot more sway and probably be able to get councillors involved. It depends on how much effort you're willing to put in.
High hotel prices are a real downside to business in NYC.
In Los Angeles (and most other U.S. cities) you can find a place that is pretty nice around $120 a night. In NYC you are talking about at least twice that.
That's a big reason why whole industries have left the city over the last 30 years. It's an awesome place for sure, but has a high cost and hassle factor.
I picked a random weekend in November. There are 228 hotels listed on Orbitz for < $125/night. Midtown, Chelsea, Times Square, etc. Are people only picking the one single hotel right across the street from where they need to be and extrapolating from that?
I'm sure the hotels will charge as much as possible, but since they pay taxes that assumably (since it was illegal) AirBnB hosts didn't, sounds like a win for the City Government of NY.
Just an observation, I don't really have much of an opinion either way. I currently live next to a couple resory rentals and depending on the people it can be between "not noticeable" and "Holy crap, I wish those drunk idiots would shut up and go to bed". Since there are multiple issues on all sides, they might need some zoning for "short-stay resort" dwellings, so people can choose to live in a possible party place or not. Might also give renters some piece of mind, ala the A ratings restaurants have to post.
What happens if your long term neighbors are drunk idiots? I fail to see how term length is relevant since it's not like neighbors vet new long term tenants for alcoholism and IQ.
This is something some people don't understand. Gentrification and things like it aren't only a racial issue. Sometimes you move into an area simply because the unemployed drunks and drug addicts can't afford to move there with you. I know I felt relief moving out of an all white trailer park into a suburban neighborhood. Nothing is worse that neighbors who have nothing to do all day but make noise.
Well, one could argue that automating away the jobs and producing those Unemployeds and then complaining about them, constitutes as worser. But i understand your point of view, i helped a friend to move out of a flat that was near a living complex mainly inhabited by collaps-cascading community members.
Anyway, constructive criticism, how to prevent such self-destruction? Boarding schools for ghetto children, to avoid prolonged contact with negative examples and behavior?
Honestly, I'm not automating anyone out of a job yet. I work in pretty low level IT at the moment. Trying to start my own business.
I don't know how you reach people like that. It isn't the majority of them also. Is it mental illness? Addiction? I don't know. Often they come from a long line of people who behave the exact same way. Cops around here jokingly profile on last name, "Oh, your Franks son? We'll be keeping an eye on you" and to be honest I can't really blame them.
The best solution I have is simply provide a better ladder of opportunity for everyone. If people feel that they can advance in the world, they might actually attempt to do so.
I guess you would need something counter cultury, that only they have, something like the equivalent in math/science/programming to HipHop.
It would need brag-prestige attached to it and the pride of beeing better at it then those looking-down outsiders.
There's lots of solutions:
1) forcibly sterilize poorer people so they can't have children
2) ban poorer people from raising their own children, and instead seize them and have the State raise them in institutions (like in "Brave New World")
3) boarding schools for poorer children (you mentioned this)
4) send poorer people to re-education camps to teach the "positive" behaviors and values
Obviously, these solutions are not very palatable to most people. If you want solutions which aren't severe human-rights violations, there really aren't any, except subtle, long-term things such as maybe taking control of popular media and using it to slowly indoctrinate the population into "desirable" behaviors and values.
Ah, the merry go round of crime and shame has reached the high point, where all the previous attempts are completely forgotten and requested anew. Three generations, and all the memory is gone.
It's about expectations, you might want to not live next to a rental. Beyond drunken idiots, unknown people coming and going, dragging luggage through shared halls etc.
Sure, a worst case long term neighbor can be worse, but the average case long term renter is more desirable to most people.
I am willingly living next to resort rentals, I knew it when I moved in. Having it foisted on mw would not be the same. And yes, people can generally do what they want within the confines of their property, it's the shared space or spilling in to neighbor's space that is an issue.
Hotels not only pay taxes, they provide direct and indirect employment for a lot of people, they have standards to meet, they provide insurance for their guests and many other things.
Airbnb is no longer a thing where you rent your house during your yearly family vacation; people invest in properties specifically for short term rents.
This increases the revenue from the property considerably driving up the prices further and in many places you see them buying up properties that no one would be willing to live there for more than a few days.
At least in London it's not uncommon to see 1 bed/studios that don't meet regulations e.g. no white appliances, no kitchen, smaller than the minium size being pretty much dedicated to Airbnbesque type renting.
These flats are often purposely developed from larger properties to be split up as much as possible while still technically being classified as an apartment.
This puts even more stress on both the rent and buy prices in a city which is already driven beyond any reason this isn't a bubble anymore this is some goddamn superdimensional membrane manifold.
Why rent a flat to some one for 300GPB a week when you can get 600+ from Airbnbers that won't complain that there isn't a dryer and a washing machine, a dishwasher that the heating isn't good and the shower is moldy.
> Hotels not only pay taxes, they provide direct and indirect employment for a lot of people, they have standards to meet, they provide insurance for their guests and many other things.
And they can be held accountable for the behavior of their guests and their effect on their neighbors. That is a big deal.
Do appliances in London need to be white? Or does that mean something else? I can't find anything on Google for "london white appliances", other than places to buy white appliances in London.
"White goods" is a British English phrase for major household appliances (fridge/freezer, washing machine, tumble dryer etc). "White appliances" seems to be a slight corruption of that.
White goods don't have to be white, but it is still the most common colour.
That's correct I had a twist of the tongue between the US/Global term and the local British speak.
White Goods are called that because they tended to have a white finish usually white formica, small appliances are sometimes still called "brown goods" because early electronics like radio's TV's etc either used wood or bakelite and had commonly a brown(ish) finish.
Major or domestic appliances like fridges or washing machines are also called white goods, white appliances is a mix of both terms. See Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_appliance
I've never used Airbnb in NYC, but I have paid some kind of "hotel tax" on the invoice when staying in Canadian cities. Also their hotel registration form was prominently posted. n=2
To be only slightly facetious, the key word is "Canadian." I think the one and only time that someone has not only asked permission to use one of my photos posted on Flickr but actually insisted on paying for it, it was a Canadian magazine :-)
I found this law problematic because it was written to make enforcement easy, not to address actual issues with serial short-term renting. The intent of the law was to bring serial short-term rented units back into the market for long-term renters. The intended outcome was to make more housing available for prospective renters and to reduce nuisances involved with serial short-term renters.
The outcome is to further sclerotize and limit the rental market. Now students cannot effectively sublet their apartments on Craigslist while out on summer break or study abroad, for a summer intern working at a company in the city. Now a couple can't rent out their apartment for the week while they go to Disneyworld.
To some degree I have fallen for the populist message in this article; the hoteliers are clearly reaping the most benefits from this legislation. However, in the long term, everyone in the city is harmed by unnecessarily restrictive laws.
The outcome is going to be a drive of this activity underground, as we have seen in alcohol prohibition and the formerly wild west of off-meter (or "gypsy") cabs in NYC. At least with Airbnb, there was a rating system and an escalation/authentication path.
Airbnb's failure was twofold: that of not spending as much capital and time as Uber/Lyft in changing the minds of lawmakers; and failing to address the targets of the legislation: serial short-term landlords. If Airbnb had addressed this issue, the hoteliers would not have had an argument for the public benefit.
I disagree. Airbnb has always had a really really simple solution to all of this: make it so people can file complaints about specific addresses without being involved in the Airbnb system. Airbnb lost the public support because they ignored externalities: so many people were adversely affected by living next to people who irresponsibly rented out their Airbnb. Personally in one building I had my lobby and elevator destroyed by Airbnb guests, as well as many loud party nights in an otherwise quiet building. In my next building I've dealt with noise and partying again. But I have effectively no recourse.
A system like this would vastly limit Airbnb's market: it would make it so landlords could easily tell when people were Airbnbing their apartments out, and thus would vastly shrink Airbnb's market.
I like Airbnb a lot. I use it when I travel, my friends use it when they visit me in NYC. But I am happy about this law because Airbnb chose short term profit over long term sustainability. The zoning laws that support hotels are there for a reason. And there was room for innovation there, but Airbnb has not been successful in traversing the space between the economic inefficiency and the zoning issues.
None of this even touches on the macro issue that Airbnb demonstrably increases rent prices.
I know there's an Airbnb in my building. Didn't really care until a guest puked in the elevator and broke a beer bottle in the lobby. I don't know which apartment it's in.
"I found this law problematic because it was written to make enforcement easy, not to address actual issues with serial short-term renting."
Those two things are very much related. It's all well and good to propose an exquisitely tailored law that only forbids exactly what is socially negative and nothing else, but if it is totally unenforceable as a practical matter then what good is it?
"At least with Airbnb, there was a rating system and an escalation/authentication path."
That's great for AirBnB's customers -- both guests and owners (or leasors), but did nothing at all for the rest of us living in NYC.
All other things being equal, I'd be happy with lower hotel prices in NYC. That's good for tourism, which is good for NYC. But I sure as heck don't want to trade off not being able to rent an apartment and be assured that the apartment next door isn't an unregistered hotel room used by a rotating cast of drunk tourists every weekend. If those are my choices, I'm voting for higher hotel prices every time.
> Now students cannot effectively sublet their apartments on Craigslist while out on summer break or study abroad, for a summer intern working at a company in the city
Incorrect. Sublets of 30 days or more are still legal, as they have been forever, and in fact are highly protected under NYC rent law, which requires landlords to allow sublets.
So your narrative is fiction. The law, which existed before the founding of Airbnb, and subsequent flaunting thereof, prohibits short term transient rentals. The only recent change is the prohibition on actively soliciting this illegal activity, not the already-illegal activity itself, thus making enforcement easier.
We can have a healthy debate about the short term sublet laws. Many NYC residents, myself included, will support the ban on transient rentals and improvised hotel arrangements, because it has severe negative externalities to other residents of the buildings in question, negatively affects the rental market, and violates community principles of land use and zoning.
Others, perhaps including yourself, will take the opposite view. And via democracy, following that debate, the law against short term subletting can be amended or retained. Needless to say if you're promulgating these views from San Francisco your preferences on the matter will be disregarded.
The only thing that's happened here is that the other strategy, the Silicon Valley end-around of just breaking the law and seeing what happened, has proven to be an ineffective means of changing policy. Good.
Thanks, I didn't remember the amount of days right; I thought it was a ban on longer rentals also. I'm glad that sublets aren't affected; that significantly changes my perspective on the law. It basically invalidates Airbnb's business model but changes nothing for preexisting common arrangements, such as month-long sublets. I appreciate your response.
> The only thing that's happened here is that the other strategy, the Silicon Valley end-around of just breaking the law and seeing what happened, has proven to be an ineffective means of changing policy. Good.
I think the outcome is a bit more nuanced than that. The lesson to be learned in this situation is that Airbnb provided terrible curation of its service while being instrumental in renters breaking the law. I don't think it's universally a bad idea to break laws one doesn't agree with, especially if they carried no significant consequences for all stakeholders involved.
Because Airbnb failed at its curation, the state of New York added teeth to the existing law. I still maintain that the primary use case for Airbnb, the sporadic rental, is a useful one for both guests and owners. The Airbnb rentals I've used in the past were mutually beneficial. Maybe I'm an outlier because I used the rental for non-malicious purposes.
As I read it, there's a point you made in the final paragraph that is kind of missed in the first paragraph.
> the state of New York added teeth to the existing law
> It basically invalidates Airbnb's business model
The rentals that AirBnB was listing that are illegal now were illegal before. The business model was predicated on that the fines were less than the cost of doing business illegally that AirBnB facilitated.
As I understand it, it shifted the scales to making fines more expensive, but that AirBnB in NYC was not necessarily a valid business model before the adding of teeth.
The business model priced in the risk of fines and the amount under the old regime; it was profitable. Now all the city has to do is scrape the frontend (or API, if there is one) and tally up the fines.
Not taking a position here, but just to answer the question on the face of it. Yes, AirBnB is in the same market as hotels.
The market is short term rental property, not property management services. Supply chain is how one obtains inventory of product to sell into a market, it does not define what the market is. Owning and managing real estate that can be resold as a short term rental is just one supply chain solution to sell into the market. AirBnB uses a different one.
OK, but this article is talking about significantly higher hotel prices ("big boost in the arm"), while any estimate of the fraction of housing units allocated to airbnb implies insignificantly lower housing prices, so your desired tradeoff is not happening.
Travel is a luxury, housing is a necessity. I stay in a hotel maybe 8-10 times a year and the other times it's paid for by work. I can afford modestly more expensive vacations, but housing prices are much more of a concern for most.
Meanwhile, renters celebrate slower price growth, because they no longer have to compete against AirBnBers renting out apartments for twice their market value?
- The ability to rent out their home when they go away for a long weekend or take a couple weeks of vacation somewhere, most likely financing a good portion of their rent or vacation.
- Affordable ways for family to visit, especially nearby to where they live (e.g. When my family comes into town to see their grandchildren, there aren't even really any hotels nearby, let alone affordable ones. AirBnB was a good, affordable way for them to be nearby when they visit, since like most people in NYC, we don't have a guest bedroom).
What many renters would really celebrate, would be an end to many of the restrictions on building that are enriching the owners of the properties at the expense of renters. Much of NYC suffers from height restrictions, historical building laws, and an expensive process to build anything new (and neighbors who will do anything to make sure their properties don't have new competition that might lower prices).
> The ability to rent out their home when they go away for a long weekend or take a couple weeks of vacation somewhere, most likely financing a good portion of their rent or vacation.
They never had it. Rentals under 30 days have always been illegal in NYC.
> Affordable ways for family to visit, especially nearby to where they live...
Out of town friends and family aren't renters. I'd love it if my neighbours would subsidize my out-of-country family's travel, too, but for some reason, this doesn't seem to be their top priority.
> What many renters would really celebrate...
Yes, they would celebrate that very much. In the meantime, every little bit helps.
Renter in NYC here (looks like you're one as well).
* I didn't lose the ability to rent my apartment out - that was always against the rules/law. My LL just put in new electronic locks in on my building to make sure it was significantly harder to lend apartments in the building out on Airbnb.
* As far as affordable places for family, I've always dissuaded them from renting from a largely unregulated market where quality can be difficult to determine in advance and the pitfalls of renting something unsavory could be bedbugs or worse. I live in a neighborhood well served by fairly affordable hotels nearby (in Manhattan!) which can be price competitive with Airbnb, and significantly more regulated.
I view this as a positive - this law did not change anyone's ability to rent out a bedroom in an apartment or house that they are also staying in, and stays over 30 days are still legal. It feels like a win/win to me.
I would imagine that it uses a keyfob system that is harder to duplicate than just getting a key cut and easier to revoke access to than changing a lock.
Like goatsi said below, it makes it much harder to duplicate than a metal key, and tracks the times and fob IDs of everyone using it to get in the building. Instead of being able to run to Home Depot and get a key copy for $3 that you can hand out to whomever you're lending the apartment to, you'd need to copy your fob or lend them yours.
This makes it fairly trivial to lock a single fob out, and there are timestamps that can be corroborated with the camera in the building lobby, to see who was using the fob to get into the building.
Of course, cursory Googling when they were handed out shows that it's not that difficult to clone the model of key they handed out, but it's still a big 'win' over everyone having the same key.
What about companies who's sole source of business is illegal activity? Ones that produce negative externalities they don't have to pay for? Do we applaud them, too?
We're not talking about protecting a political activist. We're talking about illegal rentals.
This seems to be the meaningless complaint du jour right now. If you don't like a business or product, just accuse it of introducing negative externalities. No evidence needed!
Whatever negligible externalities are introduced by Airbnb, they are vastly outweighed by positive effects like making travel more affordable and busting up the hotel oligopoly.
I felt compelled to point how ridiculous this is. There are tons of lodging options. You can see for yourself with a casual search on any price comparison site.
I travel quite a bit for work, and I've stayed at 30+ hotels over the last 2 years. All of them, with the exception of a couple independents in NYC, were owned by Marriott or IHG.
> Whatever negligible externalities are introduced by Airbnb...
NYC is a dangerous city. Many buildings have doormen to keep transients out. AirBnB introduces transients to our buildings. Please value the safety of children, the elderly, and women.
A Priceline search of Union City, NJ shows hotels for $60 per night. Union City, NJ is 15 minutes from Times Square by transit.
Just guessing but I sense that you are neither a child, elderly, or a woman.
The city is less safe for them than a non-elderly adult male.
The homicide rate in NYC is 3 times per-capita than London. There are also other forms of violent crime and property crime.
Since you've been in NYC for years then you know that many residential buildings that keep people other than residents and their guests out. We value our safety and that of our children, elderly and women who are at higher risk of crime than men.
A quick google search didn't find the results specifically for NY city, but nationally you're 3.5x more likely to be the victim of murder or attempted murder as a man. 2x for robbery. 2x for aggravated assault. Women are generally much safer everywhere than men.
In that study 1 in 21 men reported being forced to penetrate someone, 4.8%. A further 1.4% of men reported being raped which is defined only as being penetrated, not being forced to penetrate. That's a stupid definition of rape. So it's really more like 6% of men have been raped, which puts the stats at women being about 2x more likely to be raped than men (only 11.5% of women experienced a completed penetration attempt).
Fear is an important thing and we do need to address it, but public policy should be based on factual risks, not irrational fear. Only 7% of rapists are strangers. That means those transients at the AirBnB are the less likely to rape a woman than basically anyone else they know.
We don't want strangers on our apartment buildings which have doorman or intercom systems to offer some protection. There is violent crime. This is a large city with violent crime. We want our apartment buildings to be safe without strangers. There is the alternative of using hotels in nearby Union City NJ. Please respect my desire and that of other New Yorkers for safety in our apartment buildings.
Honestly I don't care what you do with your city's zoning laws, but virtually everything you've said here is irrational and/or just factually incorrect. Okay, you don't want strangers in your apartment building. I bet you don't even know 10% of the people in your apartment building. They're almost all strangers today. There's some rational arguments to be made for limiting short term rentals, but you haven't made a single one.
Only 31% of rapes and sexual assaults against women are committed by strangers. [0] An estimated 10% of female murder victims were killed by a stranger. 29% of male murder victims were killed by strangers. [0]
But sure, move the goalposts again. I'm confident you can find a good factoid to support keeping the "wrong sorts of people" (if you know what I mean!) out.
Usually a "think of the children" argument made in favor of restricting adult rights puts the hair on the back of my neck right up. Luckily, my haircut yesterday removed those hairs.
People in this thread keep stating things about how AirBnB provides affordable hotel-like space in NYC as if there is no clean, safe, convenient low-cost alternative.
I wonder why they keep disregarding the safety of NYC residents when they can go to Union City, NJ?
"For clean, affordable, convenient, hotels when visiting NYC, don't use AirBnB, use the hotels of Union City, NJ"
Not even the attorney general claimed that Airbnb's sole source of business is illegal activity.
But regardless, if an attorney general asked The Pirate Bay or Mega for all personally identifying user data, I imagine people would be singing a different tune. Or, similarly, if an attorney general asked Google for everyone who had searched for "piratebay" or "mega".
> The site has 225,000 users in the city, but only data from those who rent out their place is being sought, according to sources. That would affect only about 15,000 of New Yorkers.
> The legal strike comes just days after AirBnB CEO Brian Chesky tried to appease state lawmakers by agreeing that its users should collect the normal hotel occupancy tax and promising to work with pols to root out bad hosts.
The appropriate summary is: AG specifically wants information about people who actually owe hotel occupancy taxes. They aren't trolling for every AirBnB user.
The difference compared to your hypothetical examples is that merely visiting the sites doesn't necessarily constitute illegal behavior. Searching for "mega" in and of itself is not an illegal activity, just like how searching for "marijuana" is not illegal (especially now that certain states have legalized recreational use). The true analogy is asking the torrent trackers to release IP information for connections pertaining to a specific torrent.
That's a very easy way to put it. By their own admission, they knew their users were breaking the law ( attorney general claimed 50%, airbnb claimed 15% ).[1]
You can claim "users rights" all you want, but knowing people are using your service to break laws, and just refusing compliance, well gets you to exactly the position they are in.
I bet 15% of Google users have used the service to break some sort of law. In fact, I bet it's much higher ("piratebay","where to buy pot","offshoring","visit Cuba")
That wouldn't convince me that Google should turn over thousands of user records without a fight.
It's important that prosecutors have some sort of burden or proof before obtaining personal information, not after. I hope all companies push back on such requests, even when it's not in their financial interest to do so.
The difference is that you're not directly breaking the law using Google when you visit a torrent site, and there are ways to remove certain information from Google, like Chilling Effect. However, on Airbnb users were directly using the platform the flout or break the law, which is why they're in trouble.
Sure. But if it's illegal to rent an apartment short term, and you post an ad to rent an apartment short term with reviews of people who did rent an apartment short term in the past, that burden of proof is met.
Only they provided data. But they didn't spend much time anonymising it, instead removing commercial offers in a single Röhm-putsch, falsifying it for any independent analysis:
But companies that earns a substantial portion of the revenue from their users' illegal practices either need to actively participate in the investigation and enforcement of those laws, or expect that new laws will be created to work around them.
AirBnB didn't want to solve this problem, so NY solved it without AirBnB's help. It's a predictable outcome, and one that AirBnB was hurtling towards once they stood in the path of any other solution.
It depends. If they do it knowingly, then usually yes.
But eBay profits from people selling stolen goods.
A telco profits when people conspire to commit crimes via email or phone.
A pharmaceutical company profits when an addict buys drugs under a fake prescription.
But the companies aren't specifically commit a crime just because those things happened and the company received income from it.
Companies are expected to do take reasonable steps to limit those sorts of activities, and to appropriately assist law enforcement when they seek to investigate or curb such occurrences.
eBay can't check the source of a 2nd hand item to discern if it is stolen.
Surely if there were landlords renting out entire apartment buildings then the sequential addresses would show up in AirBnB's data as mystreet 1a, mystreet 1b, mystreet 1c and so on? It must have been pretty obvious to the point that a routine check against illegal activity should have carried out.
>They knew individuals were renting whole apartments 100% of the time, and did nothing.
While this certainly goes against the spirit of Airbnb and probably against their terms and conditions, if there is demand for this kind of short rentals, why wouldn't they be allowed?
(Not directly replying to your comment, just opening up a related discussion)
they are in many places just not nyc. if you are against that, and i agree your point has merits, try to change the law. don't actively work to break the law.
To be fair, they're 'just' following the Uber playbook of breaking the law in the most public way possible with the hope of changing the law in their favour
No, not really, because AirBnB puts transients in apartment buildings that threaten the safety of people who live there. AirBnB seems to have little regard for the safety of New Yorkers: there are children, the elderly, and women who should be able to feel safe and be safe in their own apartment buildings. Many, many buildings have doormen in NYC have doormen who keep transients out.
People are free to take Uber and it does not threaten the safety of New Yorkers. In fact, it has been helpful to help reduce taxi-like vehicle fares in NYC for New Yorkers. AirBnB does not benefit New Yorkers except those who rent out their apartments.
To the extent that AirBnB increases tourism to an area, or reduces the cost of lodging, leaving a propensity for tourists to spend more locally (and have the same total cost of their stay), the local merchant community benefits.
Well, if this is the goal, then the merchants could advertise the low-cost hotels in Union City, NJ ($60 Priceline) 15 mins from Times Square. This way the merchants benefit without the harms to NYC residents. Of course, the businessmen hotel/motel owners in Union City benefit as well. Win-win-win (NYC merchant, NYC resident, Union City merchant).
If I'm a deli, pub, pizza, or dinner place in Manhattan, I benefit WAY less from someone staying in another state than I do from someone staying in my neighborhood.
Union City, NJ is 4 miles from Times Square (Apple Maps). People live there are far beyond and commute to NYC every day for work. While technically another state, it is much closer to Times Square than much, if not most, of NYC.
Most New Yorkers could care less that people are using AirBnB to save money. We do care about transients being in our apartment buildings.
People who are visitors to any city or country should show respect to those who live there.
4 miles and crossing a river is a pretty long walk for pizza, beer, or dinner. I doubt you'll find a pizza place in Times Square who wants to advertise for people to go stay in New Jersey in hopes that that advertising will be net profitable for them.
It's obvious you don't like AirBnB's prior operations in NYC; I can respect that. I started out commenting how AirBnB can in fact benefit a New Yorker other than those who directly rent out their apartments on the site.
That's the logic used to lobby for allowing cruise ships to dock in your port, but the reality is it's the high-end visitors who spend money. The kind who stay in a nice hotel.
Reduced rental stock + disruptive transient population introduced in residential areas. No-one wants to live next to a AirBnB. End of discussion. We've been over this a million times here, you're not opening up the discussion.
> No-one wants to live next to a AirBnB. End of discussion.
Exactly.
AirBnB shows total disrespect.
I am sympathetic to those who want clean, low-cost places to stay when visiting NYC. According to Priceline there are $60 hotels/motels in Union City, NJ 15 mins away by transit from Times Square.
The idea that you should have a right to dictate what your neighbors can and cannot not do in their own homes is not uncontroversial, and a slippery slope.
The idea that the city doesn't have a right to dictate exactly that is nonsensical. Pretending that we have suddenly jumped from an anarchist free-for-all city environment with no such concept as zoning to this brand new day of regulations on what a building can be used for is really making it harder to have a sensible conversation about the topic.
These are not self-standing houses. They are apartments that are part of an apartment building which has a doorman or a locked door to keep transients out.
Incidentally, some buildings don't permit pets, for example.
Why is it so hard to understand that we don't want transients in our buildings?
I do not know where you got the 15 min idea from, but this is just not correct. It's about 35 on a weekday and closer to 1 hour during weekends when public transit is slow.
There are no deals in NYC. You always get what you pay for.
Apple maps using bus 159 from Union City NJ to the Port Authority Bus Terminal which is at 8th Avenue and 42nd St. Times Square is At 7th Avenue and 42nd St. is 16 minutes. I don't know where you get 35 minutes.
Apple Maps states the driving distance is 4 miles.
I don't understand why business 159 would take longer on weekends to travel 4 miles.
A monthly subway and bus pass is about $4 per day. I'd consider that a great deal. Getting around as quickly in other cities would cost far more than $4 per day.
Also there are fruit and vegetable stands all over the city with very good deals such as $1 fir 4 bananas.
In Chinatown there are great deals on fish as well as fruits and vegetables.
B&H Photo is a huge electronics, computer and photo store with great deals.
Also there are many museums people can go to for free on certain days.
Price is as combination of supply and demand. In NYC, the demand is high. If something is cheap, then there is something wrong with it. People often think they are smart buying something cheap here, but the price is alwats fair (be careful with that Chinatown fish).
There are no hotels in Union C ity from where you ambiguously picked your travel route. Where is your 60 dollar motel located?
> if there is demand for this kind of short rentals, why wouldn't they be allowed?
There is demand for a lot of things in a lot of areas, but it isn't allowed because it would be for the benefit of a select few at the cost of the many. Casinos, bars, hotels -- any kind of business, really, aren't allowed everywhere even though there may be demand for those services from people who don't actually have to live in that area.
Just because "think of the children" is an overused argument, doesn't mean we should stop caring about children entirely to avoid that phrasing. Same goes for the "not in my backyard" complaints.
No, the response is that we don't want transients in our apartment buildings. NYC is a very large, dangerous city. Many, many buildings have doormen who keep transients out and help to protect the safety of children, the elderly, and women.
As for that market niche, I assume you mean affordable hotels. A Priceline search yields $60 per night hotels/motels in Union City, NJ. Union City is about 15 mins by transit from Times Square.
NYC is very large, and on the whole very very safe. It is in fact the safest city in America. The real problem with permanent whole apartment rentals is that is puts a strain on the limited housing supply. Its easier to regulate against non-conventional use than to rewrite zoning to allow more affordable housing to be built. So, that's the regulation we get.
NYC has a homicide rate 3 times per-capita of that of London. There is a lot of violent crime and there is also property crime.
I live in NYC and nobody I know of wants transients in the buildings. One of the functions of doormen is to keep strangers out. AirBnB is like a "back door" to allow these people into the building.
People should instead use affordable hotels $60 per night according to Priceline in Union City, NJ 15 mins by transit from Times Square.
I assume people intent on murder are happy enough to take out someone blocking their path. I've never lived in a doorman building, but I'm pretty sure they don't wear bullet proof vests and carry guns.
The reason most people aren't murdered is because nobody wants to murder them.
In NYC buildings without a doorman have locked outer doors were people are buzzed in once they have spoken to the person they want to visit over the intercom.
People hang out in front of the door, usually with some sort of sob story about how all their keys melted or something. Then you have to decide between "do I want to be a dick to someone who is probably my neighbor" or "do I want to let in the murderer". Fortunately I've invented the third option, "looks like it's time to go get some coffee".
Yeah, because NYC has a rate of just over 3 per 100,000 and London's is just over 1.1. Both are insanely low. A rate of 1.1 is pretty typical across Western Europe, but the rate in L.A. is 6.3, 5.3 in SF so its kind of relative. For the US, New York is very safe. If you're really worried about safety, lobby for an end to the drug war, improved mental health services, and policies that decrease income inequality.
8.5 million/100K * 3 is > 250 homicides in NYC every year.
For every death there are many cases of violent crime including rape, property crime. It is a big city.
> If you're really worried about safety, lobby for an end to the drug war, improved mental health services, and policies that decrease income inequality.
Banks should not use vaults to protect their money. Instead they should lobby....
Just as banks want to protect money in their care, we value our lives. In an idea world, banks wouldn't need vaults and we need not lock our front doors. But this is not an ideal world.
Yeah. It's like the argument "because it's against the law, it's fundamentally bad."
Just take a look at dealership laws. Do you really think those laws are there to protect consumers? Or do they merely protect the incumbents which helped push for the laws?
And now we're forced to buy used cars from sleazy middlemen because they have a legislated monopoly. Good thing those laws are there to protect us!
Thank you for sharing. I viewed this as "How did the hotel lobby beat the AirBnB lobby given that AirBnB hosts have so many more voters?" I still view it as a shame, but it's a little more complicated.
Are the renters locals or out of towners? My (uninformed) impression was that AirBnB is more out of towners than long term locals. (I know a lot of folks who used it for business trips)
The intent of my comment (which wasn't worded well) is that non-AirBnBing long-term residents or would-be residents (whether renting or owning) outnumber the hosters.
I can't speak for NYC, but Vancouver is looking to ban AirBnB due in part to the displacing effect it has on long term locals. In an ultra-low vacancy rental market, every AirBnB unit takes a badly-needed apartment out of the rental pool.
>The spirit of AirBnB and the "sharing" economy is to share under utilized housing.
In Croatia, almost all and every airbnb listing is from/for a professional apartment which is renting 100% of the time. I used it like that and have been satisfied. I just presumed it's like that all over the world. It started out as a living space surplus 'sharing', but it grew into pro apartment renting.
All of the AirBnBs I've stayed in were like this (New York(upstate-ish), and Colorado (Denver & Boulder)).
The place in Boulder was a rental property before AirBnB existed, and actually had a license, the place in Denver appeared to be built specifically for renting on AirBnB (as were both of its immediate neighbors).
Ditto from the ground. Airbnb's political acumen, especially in comparison with Uber's, is abysmal. They clam up when authorities ask questions, piss off powerful constituents (e.g. prosecutors by launching ad campaigns against them and investors and early employees by blocking share transfers), and then routinely overplay their "popular support" card. If this is their ground game elsewhere, expect more backlash to follow.
I showed up in SF last year to find airbnb had ads criticizing local tax laws all around town. Disgusting. They are the heart and soul of why SF sucks to live in.
Not terribly smart use of money, either, compared to growing markets where the brand is actually viewed favorably.
At least in NYC AirBnB is indeed why it is much, much harder to rent an apartment at the low/middle end of the market. Couples who move in together don't free up an apt - they rent it on AirBnB. To say nothing of landlords who don't replace tenants in order to do the same.
This means their rent is too low, right? If they can make money by being a middleman, it means people are willing to pay more than what the landlord priced the apartment at. (I bet in NYC the brokers are to blame for this; they make the cost of moving very high.)
No - it means you can charge more to rent by the week than by the year, because tourists are willing to part with more money as part of the experience of visiting a place. It makes little sense to peg residential rent to what the tourist market will bear.
This sort of comparison isn't apt. The benefit to the city for improved tourism is more than outweighed by the jobs unfulfilled by workers who couldn't find a place to move into the city.
But they can only do that because there is an existing housing shortage. You can say that AirBnB exacerbates and existing housing shortage, but it doesn't create one in the first place since the financial incentives aren't there to get creative in the ways you're describing. And reactions to crowded housing markets don't help either. For example, rent control can become such a nightmare for a landlord that making an equivalent amount of rent through AirBnB can be very attractive despite how much more work it is to rent out that way.
FWIW, my parents rent out an extra building on their property using AirBnB. They're retired and they view it as their job now, but I see it more like a hobby. The amount of work they have to put in to make around $30k/yr is substantial and they'd almost certainly do better renting to a full-time tenant and getting part-time jobs. But they're in a location that doesn't have a housing shortage. It's only because people can make a lot more money that they rent on AirBnB.
I disagree. Pre-AirBnB there was an affordable hotel shortage in NYC. Now there is something like an affordable housing shortage. The root cause is a tool - AirBnB - that has enabled (triggered?) a massive increase in tourism by making it financially advantageous to take housing stock off the market.
This is an expected headline/occurrence, but it shouldn't be what happens to sway one's opinion about the legislation. A hotel exec saying anything about business is news. What is the potential for a news org to write about the person who had a slightly easier time finding an affordable rent, which is the ostensible purpose of this bill?
It's not much different than when an executive politician stonewalls on prison reform. Willie Horton happened 30 years ago and he still hangs like a specter over the justice system. What about the thousands of released prisoners we never hear about because, if we haven't heard about them, they probably went on to live normal, non-imprisoned lives, as criminal justice reform intended.
It is one CEO with one 800 bed hotel and 3 < 200 bed hotels speaking this way.
As a NYC resident, we don't want transients living in our buildings. There are safety issues for children, the elderly, an women, as well as potential theft. Many buildings are doormen to keep transients out.
There are $60 hotel rooms in Union City, NJ (according to Priceline) which is about 15 minutes by transit away from Times Square, the center of tourism in NYC. These Union City hotel rooms are closer to Times Square than a number of NYC hotels.
I guess I'm just cynical of this since it's usually baseless fearmongering. Has there been evidence of serious problems with this? I haven't seen any but I also haven't gone looking either.
And yet we need consumer protection, which means governments need to regulate markets; of course finding the highest utility is not as simple as not at all or everything.
Echoing Spooky23's comment: "Really?" Did you really bring in Nazi Germany into a discussion on Airbnb and its practices and now illegality for short term rentals?
It was a perfectly valid analogy for the point (s)he was making (that laws aren't always just), and I see no reason to object just because the analogous subject was Nazi Germany. Making an analogy between two things is not the same as saying those two things are equivalent.
Sure, it's a valid analogy, but there are better ones that could be made instead of going directly for that that don't force readers to compare the two.
The whole point of an analogy is to ease thinking by using something the reader is already familiar with. When your analogy brings along so much baggage, it completely fails in its task and just serves to disrupt the conversation. It may be technically valid, but it's a terrible analogy to use.
Au contraire, Hitler and the Nazis are great analogy material for exactly the reason you stated: Everyone is familiar with them, so they are the perfect stand-in for <bad people> in any analogy. I'm not sure what you mean about the baggage, but an analogy always compares specific similarities between two otherwise different things, and therefore there will always be irrelevant differences, aka "baggage". If the listener insists on highlighting these irrelevant differences, what can the speaker do? Example:
Person A: John wouldn't do anything evil like that. He has a family and kids!
Person B: Well, let's not forget that Hitler also had a family and kids.
Person A: John is not Hitler!
Person B's analogy is perfectly rational and effective. He's making the point that simply having a family and kids will not stop people from committing even the greatest evils (and therefore probably not lesser evils, either). However, Person A ignores this obvious line of reasoning, and instead focuses on a total strawman: assuming that Person B said that John === Hitler. But what could Person B have done to prevent this? Simply not using Hitler wouldn't work:
Person A: John wouldn't do anything evil like that. He has a family and kids!
Person B: Well, let's not forget that <some other bad person besides Hitler> also had a family and kids.
Person A: John is not <some other bad person besides Hitler>!
Person A is still factually correct in his final statement, yet it's still a total strawman. If he insists on employing this reasoning, then it's impossible for Person B to ever use an analogy, because an analogy always uses as its subject two different things, which are by definition not the same as each other in every single way.
It's an analogy designed for an inappropriate level of emotional impact, rather than to clarify a relationship between two things. It's a valid analogy, but a misbalanced one.
It's illegal to run entire buildings as hotels 100% of the time on AirBnB for well argued local concerns.
This has nothing to do with a fascist deciding to ethnically cleanse an entire continent.
Me thinks Reddit is leaking.
Anyway, when it comes to government, I adopt a stance I think is in-line with what Sam Altman was saying about defeating Trump: the easiest solution is to support Hilary.
The government exists and isn't going anywhere any time soon. It's easier to accept that and find ways to make it work better. Rather than sit here and think private industry should be allowed to tear it asunder and make it a clusterfuck of an organization.
Look what happened when we did the former. Went to the Moon, invented the Internet.
Look what's happened in the 30+ years since we started tearing it apart.
> It was once illegal to be a Jew and own a business in Germany.
What does this have to do with protecting apartment dwellers in NYC from transients? I don't follow. We have doormen for a reason. NYC is a dangerous, large city and children, the elderly, and women should feel safe and be safe in their own apartment buildings.
The majority of AirBnB hosts are individuals just trying to make some extra money. The lobbyies are claiming these units prevent the homeless from finding homes. How about the people that avoid becoming homeless by AirBnB'ing one of their rooms?
The hypocrisy in this situation is mind blowing. Thanks to Citizen's United, corporates are protected and allowed unlimited money for lobbying as “Freedom of Speech”. But when the individual wants to advertise a room in their private home, the government censors that speech?
This is just another example of how our Democracy has been hijacked by lobbyists. Neither Clinton, nor Trump, not even Bernie Sanders could cleanse this rot from our democracy. The only way I see for us to take it back is with a Constitutional Amendment ending this legalized bribery. The group that's making the most progress towards this goal is Wolf-PAC. You can read more about it and help with the cause here:
> The majority of AirBnB hosts are individuals just trying to make some extra money.
Perhaps that's true, but AirBnB made a point to not share the data so people could figure that out.
In addition, while the number of rental properties is probably dominated by individuals, the number of days rented is probably dominated by the professional AirBnB hosts.
Of course a hotel CEO will celebrate an anti-AirBnb law, and of course the Airbnb CEO will celebrate an anti-hotel law. That doesn't make either one a bad law. The law is supposed to serve the best interest of the public, and yes, someone will benefit and be happy about that.
I really don't like the image of AirBnb. They seem to think they can do whatever they like and get away with, like they should get special treatment because they are billionaires. I'm honestly happy to see them get crushed by the US government. It's good to see them put in their place. Just like how the US government did with MSFT back in the late 90s
This is one of those comments where I'm really not sure if you're being sarcastic, or you actually believe this (because I've exchanged messages with people on boards like this one who honestly believed the US government "put MSFT in their place" with the 90s trial).
It is pretty circular that NYC has started putting up homeless people in hotels. Without ABnB maybe tourists can start staying back in the hotels and the homeless people can rent the apartments.
I guess Airbnb did not do what most industrials do - bribe the politicians. In societies where large parts of the economy are either owned by the government or directed through regulations the only way to advance is to corrupt public officials.
But when arguing from a principled position that views freedom as the highest value one can possess it is very hard to come up with a consistent and valid argument why private persons should not be allowed to rent out their property in the same way that "legal" hotels do.
Safety regulations are often cited but why shouldn't a place be good enough for a guest while it is good enough for local people living there? And why should a guest not be able to decide for him or herself if it's acceptable to stay there? (with Airbnb you'll actually get a much nicer place for the same money, especially in NY "legal" hotel owners got away with charging $250 for flea infested 2 star s* holes due to low competition)
Then there's the argument that properties rented out at Airbnb are generally advertised as great for parties. This is not true, anyone who has used this platform will know that these people offering their place go to great lengths to ensure that their guests wont do that. And even if they did, there are ways for neighbours to get reparations for damages, both from the guests (the law of the land applies to them too!) and the person renting out the place.
To me all of this sounds like politicians who are in the pocket of a certain industry ruling in favour of the same industry. This is similar to what is happening to Uber.
One thing is for sure: By suppressing competition in this way the government effectively creates an Aristocracy where everything is rigged against the average person.
Another angle to look at this issue: If you can't use your property in a way that doesn't harm anyone, like renting it to someone, is it then still _your_ property?
This seems desirable from the perspective of NYC renters. Supply will shift from the hotel market to the long term rental market which should lower rent prices.
Wow, the Washington Post is now ignoring Google's cloaking rules and putting up their paywall even when clicking from Google if you've gone over their "free article limit" for the month. I've reported them to Google, here's hoping they get deindexed.
That happens if you visit the article first from your browser and then use the google-hack to try to get around it. If you really visit the site fresh from Google, you get the article.
I just tested. I know I'm over my WaPo limit, but I could pull up the article from Google, since I hadn't gone to it before.
That's more targeted cloaking, but cloaking nonetheless. I mean of course I can get around it by clearing WaPo cookies but that isn't the point. I just hate that these large sites think they can do whatever they want - and for the most part they get away with it.
They're flagrantly violating Google's rules. That's their choice, but the penalty is deindexing. Additionally, HN has a rule against posting links to sites that use paywalls without workarounds.
Do Google's rules really say that you must be able to read an article you've already found by clicking an index result? Or only that if you first find an article via Google you must be able to read it?
The rules say that they can't show Google one thing and users something else. If the content they showed to Google for this page was "subscribe today!" that would be fine, but that of course isn't what they showed to Google because a search result for this headline comes back with a link to the fully described article. That's the very definition of cloaking.
Technically, users are seeing the same thing if they actually come from Google. Paying for things that have value is a good thing, because otherwise those companies creating that content wouldn't exist. Plenty of other companies too if you'd rather get free content.
Reading these comments reminds me of the AirBnB ad I saw on twitter. Clicked through and sure enough, every single response was railing against AirBnB. Had a good chuckle at how AirBnB paid for an ad-hoc localized forum for people to complain about them.
238 comments
[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadWhat am I missing here?
I had an Airbnb spawn across the mews behind my building they have a pretty large open balcony and there were parties literally every night during the summer here in London, they stopped only fairly recently when the season changed and I'm expecting the hell to resume when we get closer to the holiday season.
Across the street on the front of my building there is a pretty nice hotel (actually there are a few of them on the street and around it) and they are quiet because the hotel staff keeps the guests behaved. After 10 PM you'll see the porter or the front desk telling guests to be quiet even if they are talking on their phone a tad too loud while having a smoke.
And as far as calling the cops goes, this doesn't work, noise complaints especially on the weekend are pretty low priority I'm hardly the only one bothered by it and it's pretty futile.
Before that there were about 3-4 weeks of an Airbnb in my actual building, it's a small mid 19th century building with only 6 flats and there were tons of complaints including loss of mail and packages so the trust that owns the building had a vote and banned short term rental.
Hotel room prices are related but aren't a strict function of the niceness/care of a hotel room. I've paid hundreds for a crap hole in a great touristy location (and with no crowd control as you describe it).
Since AirBNB so many times matches prices of hotels in busy spots, people rent on Air because it has less rules and regulations. - hey let's throw an all booze/drugs loud music party.. where? at Cesars'. Are you insane you want to get us arrested and banned for life?? Versus: hey let's rent on AirBNB and have a reckless party, I mean what bad can happen to us?
Too bad AirBNB was busy writing complaints to Cuomo and basically threaten him with lawsuits based it baselessly on 2nd Amendment violations, instead of re-working their "behavior guidelines" for rentees.
None of the other owners/residents were consulted or told about the Airbnb, so the first thing I knew was a group of Germans at my door asking me questions about their stay, and whether I could give them a bottle of olive oil. Fortunately for them I was bemused enough to help them out rather than to think "well no, I've been at work all day, and nobody's paying me to be your concierge".
Then there was a family who stood in the communal, enclosed hallway and smoked every night. And the group who partied until 3am all week; and people who slammed the main door rather than closing it gently (it's old and a bit fragile).
I can't blame the visitors, because they were here for a cheap holiday and knew no better. And the people who rented out their flat are really nice (I'm otherwise on good terms with them). So it's hard to blame anyone but Airbnb and their business model.
This isn't what I signed up for when I bought my home; I want to live among a community of neighbours, not in a cheap hotel run for the benefit of others.
You can have an otherwise good relationship with someone while still holding them responsible for something they did.
It's fair to blame them, though. We all know Airbnbs are rented out by real people in residential buildings, with real neighbors. It's basic etiquette to treat the apartment as if it were your own and respect the people around you, no matter how much you're paying for it (and Airbnbs aren't always that much cheaper than hotels). I've stayed at a few Airbnbs and that has always been my #1 concern.
Guests being assholes is an issue that's certainly hard to deal with, but it doesn't sound impossibly hard. Maybe if Airbnb had a program to approach the representatives for each building an Airbnb is rented out at, giving them a way to be informed about guests and leave feedback for them... perhaps include some form of shared compensation with the host, at a smaller %. I can see buildings being pro-Airbnb if there's a fair system behind it.
That would take effort, most hosts won't do it and Airbnb won't do it because they would be told to go and lick a power socket by most buildings.
Having a revolving door in a small building without a porter isn't nice, noise, loss of security and theft can be a real problem.
The building getting 1% (per falt) out of the stay is really honestly nothing say you have some really nice flat to rent and you rent it for 600 a week, do you think anyone would accept this nonsense for the price of a coffee and a muffin at Starbucks?
Even if they manage to have 100% tenancy it will mean that each flat will see about 300GBP, sure no one will throw away 300GBP but this is likely less than 1 week of rent for most decent locations in London this isn't what is going to make the difference.
Zoning laws and regulations exist for a reason, sure you can have a building with a bad tenant but this is a single point issue which can be resolved through the police, council or the building trust.
And while not to sound too obnoxious when you are paying a premium for the location and accommodation you expect a certain demographic whether it's young professionals or more established families it doesn't matter, you don't expect 7 drunk dutch girls partying all day and all night that is for sure.
Sure 10 or even 5 years ago I might have liked it, but not now, I don't think it's unreasonable to not want to live in what effectively can become a hostel come summer just because people can now pay for the upgrade to first class with Airbnb.
I also don't think it's unreasonable to think that people should not be allowed to effectively build purposely built party flats with a huge bar in the living room and a balcony which was turned from a picnic table and a few benches into a dance floor just so they can ask for double the price while advertising it on ABNB or w/e.
If you document it and complain to the council you can get them shut down.
e.g. http://www.homesandproperty.co.uk/property-news/kensington-a...
You can find out who to contact here:
https://www.gov.uk/report-noise-pollution-to-council
Also, if you got organised with a few other residents you would have a lot more sway and probably be able to get councillors involved. It depends on how much effort you're willing to put in.
In Los Angeles (and most other U.S. cities) you can find a place that is pretty nice around $120 a night. In NYC you are talking about at least twice that.
That's a big reason why whole industries have left the city over the last 30 years. It's an awesome place for sure, but has a high cost and hassle factor.
Just an observation, I don't really have much of an opinion either way. I currently live next to a couple resory rentals and depending on the people it can be between "not noticeable" and "Holy crap, I wish those drunk idiots would shut up and go to bed". Since there are multiple issues on all sides, they might need some zoning for "short-stay resort" dwellings, so people can choose to live in a possible party place or not. Might also give renters some piece of mind, ala the A ratings restaurants have to post.
Anyway, constructive criticism, how to prevent such self-destruction? Boarding schools for ghetto children, to avoid prolonged contact with negative examples and behavior?
I don't know how you reach people like that. It isn't the majority of them also. Is it mental illness? Addiction? I don't know. Often they come from a long line of people who behave the exact same way. Cops around here jokingly profile on last name, "Oh, your Franks son? We'll be keeping an eye on you" and to be honest I can't really blame them.
The best solution I have is simply provide a better ladder of opportunity for everyone. If people feel that they can advance in the world, they might actually attempt to do so.
Obviously, these solutions are not very palatable to most people. If you want solutions which aren't severe human-rights violations, there really aren't any, except subtle, long-term things such as maybe taking control of popular media and using it to slowly indoctrinate the population into "desirable" behaviors and values.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolen_Generations
Boarding schools would have to be voluntarily.
Sure, a worst case long term neighbor can be worse, but the average case long term renter is more desirable to most people.
I am willingly living next to resort rentals, I knew it when I moved in. Having it foisted on mw would not be the same. And yes, people can generally do what they want within the confines of their property, it's the shared space or spilling in to neighbor's space that is an issue.
Airbnb is no longer a thing where you rent your house during your yearly family vacation; people invest in properties specifically for short term rents.
This increases the revenue from the property considerably driving up the prices further and in many places you see them buying up properties that no one would be willing to live there for more than a few days.
At least in London it's not uncommon to see 1 bed/studios that don't meet regulations e.g. no white appliances, no kitchen, smaller than the minium size being pretty much dedicated to Airbnbesque type renting. These flats are often purposely developed from larger properties to be split up as much as possible while still technically being classified as an apartment.
This puts even more stress on both the rent and buy prices in a city which is already driven beyond any reason this isn't a bubble anymore this is some goddamn superdimensional membrane manifold.
Why rent a flat to some one for 300GPB a week when you can get 600+ from Airbnbers that won't complain that there isn't a dryer and a washing machine, a dishwasher that the heating isn't good and the shower is moldy.
And they can be held accountable for the behavior of their guests and their effect on their neighbors. That is a big deal.
White goods don't have to be white, but it is still the most common colour.
White Goods are called that because they tended to have a white finish usually white formica, small appliances are sometimes still called "brown goods" because early electronics like radio's TV's etc either used wood or bakelite and had commonly a brown(ish) finish.
The outcome is to further sclerotize and limit the rental market. Now students cannot effectively sublet their apartments on Craigslist while out on summer break or study abroad, for a summer intern working at a company in the city. Now a couple can't rent out their apartment for the week while they go to Disneyworld.
To some degree I have fallen for the populist message in this article; the hoteliers are clearly reaping the most benefits from this legislation. However, in the long term, everyone in the city is harmed by unnecessarily restrictive laws.
The outcome is going to be a drive of this activity underground, as we have seen in alcohol prohibition and the formerly wild west of off-meter (or "gypsy") cabs in NYC. At least with Airbnb, there was a rating system and an escalation/authentication path.
Airbnb's failure was twofold: that of not spending as much capital and time as Uber/Lyft in changing the minds of lawmakers; and failing to address the targets of the legislation: serial short-term landlords. If Airbnb had addressed this issue, the hoteliers would not have had an argument for the public benefit.
A system like this would vastly limit Airbnb's market: it would make it so landlords could easily tell when people were Airbnbing their apartments out, and thus would vastly shrink Airbnb's market.
I like Airbnb a lot. I use it when I travel, my friends use it when they visit me in NYC. But I am happy about this law because Airbnb chose short term profit over long term sustainability. The zoning laws that support hotels are there for a reason. And there was room for innovation there, but Airbnb has not been successful in traversing the space between the economic inefficiency and the zoning issues.
None of this even touches on the macro issue that Airbnb demonstrably increases rent prices.
Lol okay.
Those two things are very much related. It's all well and good to propose an exquisitely tailored law that only forbids exactly what is socially negative and nothing else, but if it is totally unenforceable as a practical matter then what good is it?
"At least with Airbnb, there was a rating system and an escalation/authentication path."
That's great for AirBnB's customers -- both guests and owners (or leasors), but did nothing at all for the rest of us living in NYC.
All other things being equal, I'd be happy with lower hotel prices in NYC. That's good for tourism, which is good for NYC. But I sure as heck don't want to trade off not being able to rent an apartment and be assured that the apartment next door isn't an unregistered hotel room used by a rotating cast of drunk tourists every weekend. If those are my choices, I'm voting for higher hotel prices every time.
Incorrect. Sublets of 30 days or more are still legal, as they have been forever, and in fact are highly protected under NYC rent law, which requires landlords to allow sublets.
So your narrative is fiction. The law, which existed before the founding of Airbnb, and subsequent flaunting thereof, prohibits short term transient rentals. The only recent change is the prohibition on actively soliciting this illegal activity, not the already-illegal activity itself, thus making enforcement easier.
We can have a healthy debate about the short term sublet laws. Many NYC residents, myself included, will support the ban on transient rentals and improvised hotel arrangements, because it has severe negative externalities to other residents of the buildings in question, negatively affects the rental market, and violates community principles of land use and zoning.
Others, perhaps including yourself, will take the opposite view. And via democracy, following that debate, the law against short term subletting can be amended or retained. Needless to say if you're promulgating these views from San Francisco your preferences on the matter will be disregarded.
The only thing that's happened here is that the other strategy, the Silicon Valley end-around of just breaking the law and seeing what happened, has proven to be an ineffective means of changing policy. Good.
> The only thing that's happened here is that the other strategy, the Silicon Valley end-around of just breaking the law and seeing what happened, has proven to be an ineffective means of changing policy. Good.
I think the outcome is a bit more nuanced than that. The lesson to be learned in this situation is that Airbnb provided terrible curation of its service while being instrumental in renters breaking the law. I don't think it's universally a bad idea to break laws one doesn't agree with, especially if they carried no significant consequences for all stakeholders involved.
Because Airbnb failed at its curation, the state of New York added teeth to the existing law. I still maintain that the primary use case for Airbnb, the sporadic rental, is a useful one for both guests and owners. The Airbnb rentals I've used in the past were mutually beneficial. Maybe I'm an outlier because I used the rental for non-malicious purposes.
Indeed. But it's not nearly as good for Airbnb's business model.
> the state of New York added teeth to the existing law
> It basically invalidates Airbnb's business model
The rentals that AirBnB was listing that are illegal now were illegal before. The business model was predicated on that the fines were less than the cost of doing business illegally that AirBnB facilitated.
As I understand it, it shifted the scales to making fines more expensive, but that AirBnB in NYC was not necessarily a valid business model before the adding of teeth.
Am I missing something here?
The risk / reward of fines isn't AirBnB's model, but rather the calculation of the people and landlords offering rentals and their business model.
Maybe they compete with franchises that solely license a brand?
The market is short term rental property, not property management services. Supply chain is how one obtains inventory of product to sell into a market, it does not define what the market is. Owning and managing real estate that can be resold as a short term rental is just one supply chain solution to sell into the market. AirBnB uses a different one.
- The ability to rent out their home when they go away for a long weekend or take a couple weeks of vacation somewhere, most likely financing a good portion of their rent or vacation.
- Affordable ways for family to visit, especially nearby to where they live (e.g. When my family comes into town to see their grandchildren, there aren't even really any hotels nearby, let alone affordable ones. AirBnB was a good, affordable way for them to be nearby when they visit, since like most people in NYC, we don't have a guest bedroom).
What many renters would really celebrate, would be an end to many of the restrictions on building that are enriching the owners of the properties at the expense of renters. Much of NYC suffers from height restrictions, historical building laws, and an expensive process to build anything new (and neighbors who will do anything to make sure their properties don't have new competition that might lower prices).
They never had it. Rentals under 30 days have always been illegal in NYC.
> Affordable ways for family to visit, especially nearby to where they live...
Out of town friends and family aren't renters. I'd love it if my neighbours would subsidize my out-of-country family's travel, too, but for some reason, this doesn't seem to be their top priority.
> What many renters would really celebrate...
Yes, they would celebrate that very much. In the meantime, every little bit helps.
* I didn't lose the ability to rent my apartment out - that was always against the rules/law. My LL just put in new electronic locks in on my building to make sure it was significantly harder to lend apartments in the building out on Airbnb.
* As far as affordable places for family, I've always dissuaded them from renting from a largely unregulated market where quality can be difficult to determine in advance and the pitfalls of renting something unsavory could be bedbugs or worse. I live in a neighborhood well served by fairly affordable hotels nearby (in Manhattan!) which can be price competitive with Airbnb, and significantly more regulated.
I view this as a positive - this law did not change anyone's ability to rent out a bedroom in an apartment or house that they are also staying in, and stays over 30 days are still legal. It feels like a win/win to me.
Can you explain this part? What do the electronic locks do to discourage lending?
See this news story for an example of this type of lock in action: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/airbnb-guest-...
This makes it fairly trivial to lock a single fob out, and there are timestamps that can be corroborated with the camera in the building lobby, to see who was using the fob to get into the building.
Of course, cursory Googling when they were handed out shows that it's not that difficult to clone the model of key they handed out, but it's still a big 'win' over everyone having the same key.
They knew landlords were running whole buildings in nyc as pseudo hotels, and they did little until now. [1]
They knew individuals were renting whole apartments 100% of the time, and did nothing.[2]
They refused to give data to the attorney general, and instead, mounted an AD campaign.[3]
Only after they were harshly penalized, did they promise to clamp down on the actual abuses.[4]
So they willingly let their customers break the law, because nyc is their biggest market, and well, now want to play the victim.
The spirit of AirBnB and the "sharing" economy is to share under utilized housing. Not to create illegal hotels.
[1] http://gothamist.com/2014/10/16/airbnb_illegal_rapacious.php
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-07/wooing-go...
[3] http://www.businessinsider.com/airbnb-refuses-to-give-user-d... [4]http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/20/technology/airbnb-proposes...
Companies that take their customer's privacy seriously should be lauded, not condemned.
We're not talking about protecting a political activist. We're talking about illegal rentals.
Whatever negligible externalities are introduced by Airbnb, they are vastly outweighed by positive effects like making travel more affordable and busting up the hotel oligopoly.
I felt compelled to point how ridiculous this is. There are tons of lodging options. You can see for yourself with a casual search on any price comparison site.
I travel quite a bit for work, and I've stayed at 30+ hotels over the last 2 years. All of them, with the exception of a couple independents in NYC, were owned by Marriott or IHG.
NYC is a dangerous city. Many buildings have doormen to keep transients out. AirBnB introduces transients to our buildings. Please value the safety of children, the elderly, and women.
A Priceline search of Union City, NJ shows hotels for $60 per night. Union City, NJ is 15 minutes from Times Square by transit.
Have you ever been to NYC? In 2016 it's far from dangerous. It's probably one of the safer cities in the US.
Additionally, AirBnB guests aren't typically dangerous (otherwise AirBnB would be out of business).
I've lived in NYC for most of my adult life. Do you live in NYC?
The homicide rate has declined, but it is still 3 times that of London, per-capita. Moreover, there are other threats besides homicide.
People who want affordable hotels can go to Union City, NJ for $60 a night (Priceline) 15 minutes by transit from Times Square.
The city is less safe for them than a non-elderly adult male. The homicide rate in NYC is 3 times per-capita than London. There are also other forms of violent crime and property crime. Since you've been in NYC for years then you know that many residential buildings that keep people other than residents and their guests out. We value our safety and that of our children, elderly and women who are at higher risk of crime than men.
Women are also harassed.
Why don't you ask some of your female friends whether they would want the security when in their apartment buildings?
[1] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/feb/...
And even that includes some murkiness over things like "too drunk to consent".
If you want real rape statistics then look at sexual assault charges, not surveys.
• "Attempted forced penetration," 6.4 percent.
• "Completed alcohol- or drug-facilitated penetration" without the ability to consent, 9.3 percent.
Source CDC referenced in link provided.
1 in 9 completed forced penetration. Another 1 in 15 attempted forced penetration. Almost 1 on 5 for either.
In that study 1 in 21 men reported being forced to penetrate someone, 4.8%. A further 1.4% of men reported being raped which is defined only as being penetrated, not being forced to penetrate. That's a stupid definition of rape. So it's really more like 6% of men have been raped, which puts the stats at women being about 2x more likely to be raped than men (only 11.5% of women experienced a completed penetration attempt).
Fear is an important thing and we do need to address it, but public policy should be based on factual risks, not irrational fear. Only 7% of rapists are strangers. That means those transients at the AirBnB are the less likely to rape a woman than basically anyone else they know.
Only 31% of rapes and sexual assaults against women are committed by strangers. [0] An estimated 10% of female murder victims were killed by a stranger. 29% of male murder victims were killed by strangers. [0]
But sure, move the goalposts again. I'm confident you can find a good factoid to support keeping the "wrong sorts of people" (if you know what I mean!) out.
[0] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fvv.pdf
Why only them?
I wonder why they keep disregarding the safety of NYC residents when they can go to Union City, NJ?
"For clean, affordable, convenient, hotels when visiting NYC, don't use AirBnB, use the hotels of Union City, NJ"
But regardless, if an attorney general asked The Pirate Bay or Mega for all personally identifying user data, I imagine people would be singing a different tune. Or, similarly, if an attorney general asked Google for everyone who had searched for "piratebay" or "mega".
> The legal strike comes just days after AirBnB CEO Brian Chesky tried to appease state lawmakers by agreeing that its users should collect the normal hotel occupancy tax and promising to work with pols to root out bad hosts.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/state-airbnb-articl...
The appropriate summary is: AG specifically wants information about people who actually owe hotel occupancy taxes. They aren't trolling for every AirBnB user.
The difference compared to your hypothetical examples is that merely visiting the sites doesn't necessarily constitute illegal behavior. Searching for "mega" in and of itself is not an illegal activity, just like how searching for "marijuana" is not illegal (especially now that certain states have legalized recreational use). The true analogy is asking the torrent trackers to release IP information for connections pertaining to a specific torrent.
You can claim "users rights" all you want, but knowing people are using your service to break laws, and just refusing compliance, well gets you to exactly the position they are in.
[1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023034803045795759...
That wouldn't convince me that Google should turn over thousands of user records without a fight.
It's important that prosecutors have some sort of burden or proof before obtaining personal information, not after. I hope all companies push back on such requests, even when it's not in their financial interest to do so.
Google is an index of the web, and allows folks to search that index.
Google has a process to remove search results that would links to sites that host copyright material.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/2/25/11116426/airbnb-report-dat...
Depends on whether the activity they're engaging is legal or not.
AirBnB didn't want to solve this problem, so NY solved it without AirBnB's help. It's a predictable outcome, and one that AirBnB was hurtling towards once they stood in the path of any other solution.
But eBay profits from people selling stolen goods.
A telco profits when people conspire to commit crimes via email or phone.
A pharmaceutical company profits when an addict buys drugs under a fake prescription.
But the companies aren't specifically commit a crime just because those things happened and the company received income from it.
Companies are expected to do take reasonable steps to limit those sorts of activities, and to appropriately assist law enforcement when they seek to investigate or curb such occurrences.
Surely if there were landlords renting out entire apartment buildings then the sequential addresses would show up in AirBnB's data as mystreet 1a, mystreet 1b, mystreet 1c and so on? It must have been pretty obvious to the point that a routine check against illegal activity should have carried out.
While this certainly goes against the spirit of Airbnb and probably against their terms and conditions, if there is demand for this kind of short rentals, why wouldn't they be allowed?
(Not directly replying to your comment, just opening up a related discussion)
EDIT: linkregister's comment addresses the issue https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12800412
People are free to take Uber and it does not threaten the safety of New Yorkers. In fact, it has been helpful to help reduce taxi-like vehicle fares in NYC for New Yorkers. AirBnB does not benefit New Yorkers except those who rent out their apartments.
Most New Yorkers could care less that people are using AirBnB to save money. We do care about transients being in our apartment buildings.
People who are visitors to any city or country should show respect to those who live there.
It's obvious you don't like AirBnB's prior operations in NYC; I can respect that. I started out commenting how AirBnB can in fact benefit a New Yorker other than those who directly rent out their apartments on the site.
Some of those people will buy more expensive food and drink if their lodging is cheaper, but almost everyone buys something locally.
Exactly.
AirBnB shows total disrespect.
I am sympathetic to those who want clean, low-cost places to stay when visiting NYC. According to Priceline there are $60 hotels/motels in Union City, NJ 15 mins away by transit from Times Square.
Incidentally, some buildings don't permit pets, for example.
Why is it so hard to understand that we don't want transients in our buildings?
If you want to get rid of zoning, you can mount a political campaign to do so. Or you can move to Houston.
However, until that happens, you don't get to opt out.
There're externalities with Airbnb that neighbors end up paying for.
There are no deals in NYC. You always get what you pay for.
Apple Maps states the driving distance is 4 miles.
I don't understand why business 159 would take longer on weekends to travel 4 miles.
A monthly subway and bus pass is about $4 per day. I'd consider that a great deal. Getting around as quickly in other cities would cost far more than $4 per day.
Also there are fruit and vegetable stands all over the city with very good deals such as $1 fir 4 bananas.
In Chinatown there are great deals on fish as well as fruits and vegetables.
B&H Photo is a huge electronics, computer and photo store with great deals.
Also there are many museums people can go to for free on certain days.
Truthfully there are many deals in NYC.
There are no hotels in Union C ity from where you ambiguously picked your travel route. Where is your 60 dollar motel located?
There is demand for a lot of things in a lot of areas, but it isn't allowed because it would be for the benefit of a select few at the cost of the many. Casinos, bars, hotels -- any kind of business, really, aren't allowed everywhere even though there may be demand for those services from people who don't actually have to live in that area.
As for that market niche, I assume you mean affordable hotels. A Priceline search yields $60 per night hotels/motels in Union City, NJ. Union City is about 15 mins by transit from Times Square.
I live in NYC and nobody I know of wants transients in the buildings. One of the functions of doormen is to keep strangers out. AirBnB is like a "back door" to allow these people into the building.
People should instead use affordable hotels $60 per night according to Priceline in Union City, NJ 15 mins by transit from Times Square.
The reason most people aren't murdered is because nobody wants to murder them.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/feb/...
Violent crime happens to random victims.
For every death there are many cases of violent crime including rape, property crime. It is a big city.
> If you're really worried about safety, lobby for an end to the drug war, improved mental health services, and policies that decrease income inequality.
Banks should not use vaults to protect their money. Instead they should lobby....
Just as banks want to protect money in their care, we value our lives. In an idea world, banks wouldn't need vaults and we need not lock our front doors. But this is not an ideal world.
- Makes visiting the city cheaper
- Increases tourism
- Enriches land-owners
Bad things:
- Skirts consumer protection laws
- Makes it harder for law-abiding hotels to survive in that situation
- Reduces inventory of rental units on the market, driving up local prices in an already expensive place
- People in a "hotel room" are more likely to misbehave than someone that actually intends to live somewhere
It's not wrong just because it's illegal, it's wrong because it causes various problems in the city and for the people that live there.
Just take a look at dealership laws. Do you really think those laws are there to protect consumers? Or do they merely protect the incumbents which helped push for the laws?
And now we're forced to buy used cars from sleazy middlemen because they have a legislated monopoly. Good thing those laws are there to protect us!
One friend in Italy negotiated to have the owner eventually just lease their unit for which they had a long-term AirBnB thing going.
Interesting to see where this all goes in time.
In Croatia, almost all and every airbnb listing is from/for a professional apartment which is renting 100% of the time. I used it like that and have been satisfied. I just presumed it's like that all over the world. It started out as a living space surplus 'sharing', but it grew into pro apartment renting.
The place in Boulder was a rental property before AirBnB existed, and actually had a license, the place in Denver appeared to be built specifically for renting on AirBnB (as were both of its immediate neighbors).
You're asking the wrong question. You should ask why AirBnB posed such an existential risk to hotels in the first place.
Not terribly smart use of money, either, compared to growing markets where the brand is actually viewed favorably.
FWIW, my parents rent out an extra building on their property using AirBnB. They're retired and they view it as their job now, but I see it more like a hobby. The amount of work they have to put in to make around $30k/yr is substantial and they'd almost certainly do better renting to a full-time tenant and getting part-time jobs. But they're in a location that doesn't have a housing shortage. It's only because people can make a lot more money that they rent on AirBnB.
It's not much different than when an executive politician stonewalls on prison reform. Willie Horton happened 30 years ago and he still hangs like a specter over the justice system. What about the thousands of released prisoners we never hear about because, if we haven't heard about them, they probably went on to live normal, non-imprisoned lives, as criminal justice reform intended.
As a NYC resident, we don't want transients living in our buildings. There are safety issues for children, the elderly, an women, as well as potential theft. Many buildings are doormen to keep transients out.
There are $60 hotel rooms in Union City, NJ (according to Priceline) which is about 15 minutes by transit away from Times Square, the center of tourism in NYC. These Union City hotel rooms are closer to Times Square than a number of NYC hotels.
"I want my kids to be safe" isn't automatically a bad argument.
Private companies holding out against government oversight is not only often a good thing but should be a human right.
Last thing we want is to give any government full insight into everything.
R.I.P. Lavabits.
Person A: John wouldn't do anything evil like that. He has a family and kids!
Person B: Well, let's not forget that Hitler also had a family and kids.
Person A: John is not Hitler!
Person B's analogy is perfectly rational and effective. He's making the point that simply having a family and kids will not stop people from committing even the greatest evils (and therefore probably not lesser evils, either). However, Person A ignores this obvious line of reasoning, and instead focuses on a total strawman: assuming that Person B said that John === Hitler. But what could Person B have done to prevent this? Simply not using Hitler wouldn't work:
Person A: John wouldn't do anything evil like that. He has a family and kids!
Person B: Well, let's not forget that <some other bad person besides Hitler> also had a family and kids.
Person A: John is not <some other bad person besides Hitler>!
Person A is still factually correct in his final statement, yet it's still a total strawman. If he insists on employing this reasoning, then it's impossible for Person B to ever use an analogy, because an analogy always uses as its subject two different things, which are by definition not the same as each other in every single way.
It's illegal to run entire buildings as hotels 100% of the time on AirBnB for well argued local concerns.
This has nothing to do with a fascist deciding to ethnically cleanse an entire continent.
Me thinks Reddit is leaking.
Anyway, when it comes to government, I adopt a stance I think is in-line with what Sam Altman was saying about defeating Trump: the easiest solution is to support Hilary.
The government exists and isn't going anywhere any time soon. It's easier to accept that and find ways to make it work better. Rather than sit here and think private industry should be allowed to tear it asunder and make it a clusterfuck of an organization.
Look what happened when we did the former. Went to the Moon, invented the Internet.
Look what's happened in the 30+ years since we started tearing it apart.
What does this have to do with protecting apartment dwellers in NYC from transients? I don't follow. We have doormen for a reason. NYC is a dangerous, large city and children, the elderly, and women should feel safe and be safe in their own apartment buildings.
... I'd get down voted further if I gave my honest opinion.
Doesn't that mean the Hotel CEO should've been able to raise prices anyway, regardless of AirBnB?
The hypocrisy in this situation is mind blowing. Thanks to Citizen's United, corporates are protected and allowed unlimited money for lobbying as “Freedom of Speech”. But when the individual wants to advertise a room in their private home, the government censors that speech?
This is just another example of how our Democracy has been hijacked by lobbyists. Neither Clinton, nor Trump, not even Bernie Sanders could cleanse this rot from our democracy. The only way I see for us to take it back is with a Constitutional Amendment ending this legalized bribery. The group that's making the most progress towards this goal is Wolf-PAC. You can read more about it and help with the cause here:
http://www.wolf-pac.com/the_plan
Actual home sharing, that is, renting an extra room in your residence, is still allowed. This legislation doesn't touch that.
The target of this legislation is people who were creating businesses by buying condos purely to permanently rent on Airbnb.
Perhaps that's true, but AirBnB made a point to not share the data so people could figure that out.
In addition, while the number of rental properties is probably dominated by individuals, the number of days rented is probably dominated by the professional AirBnB hosts.
But when arguing from a principled position that views freedom as the highest value one can possess it is very hard to come up with a consistent and valid argument why private persons should not be allowed to rent out their property in the same way that "legal" hotels do.
Safety regulations are often cited but why shouldn't a place be good enough for a guest while it is good enough for local people living there? And why should a guest not be able to decide for him or herself if it's acceptable to stay there? (with Airbnb you'll actually get a much nicer place for the same money, especially in NY "legal" hotel owners got away with charging $250 for flea infested 2 star s* holes due to low competition)
Then there's the argument that properties rented out at Airbnb are generally advertised as great for parties. This is not true, anyone who has used this platform will know that these people offering their place go to great lengths to ensure that their guests wont do that. And even if they did, there are ways for neighbours to get reparations for damages, both from the guests (the law of the land applies to them too!) and the person renting out the place.
To me all of this sounds like politicians who are in the pocket of a certain industry ruling in favour of the same industry. This is similar to what is happening to Uber.
One thing is for sure: By suppressing competition in this way the government effectively creates an Aristocracy where everything is rigged against the average person.
Another angle to look at this issue: If you can't use your property in a way that doesn't harm anyone, like renting it to someone, is it then still _your_ property?
I just tested. I know I'm over my WaPo limit, but I could pull up the article from Google, since I hadn't gone to it before.