Or less interestingly, Airbnb host who made £100K letting council flat fined £100K for letting council flat, an amount determined by how much profit the host made.
> "Anti-fraud software had found Harman's first name in reviews and connected the listing to him."
Pretty interesting to me...
> "It's illegal for council tenants to sublet their homes and we carry out tenancy checks, as well as monitoring short-term letting websites for any potential illegal sublets."
Also pretty interesting to me... it's nice to see that the councils in London are using their own technological advances to fight illegal activity like this!
I'm very much agreed generally, but in the case of somebody hustling by renting out their council flat, I'm not sure that the worst punishment is useful. This is probably not a wealthy person, and the damage done is theoretical and marginal. Making them pay it back entirely actually might be an onerous burden, it's probably mostly spent. I might reduce the amount by some token per night rented representing having to find somewhere else to sleep or having to share your space with a stranger.
Punishing financial crimes to a degree that could have a deterrent effect should start at the top, not at the bottom. Also, IMO, if the UK actually started doing this, its economy might collapse.
It could be worse as well because either they haven't declared this income and now HMRC will be after them or they have and they might not be able to get a refund from HMRC. I assume this would be considered a business loss and I'm not sure if you can refund past taxes against a present loss.
need this in my city, there are whole neighborhoods being built that are hotels in everything but name driving rent and flat prices sky high and making the whole local housing market inaffordable for normal people.
Council flats are like "government subsidized living". Letting it out (aka renting it out), is taking money from the government, intended to help you shelter your family, and using it to turn a profit.
A "council flat" would be an apartment which is owned by the local government. The person who the council thought was living there was essentially sub-leasing it to people through Airbnb which is against the lease rules.
A council flat is an apartment rented as part of a socialized housing scheme to low-income households. Usually the rent is much much much lower than renting on the free housing market.
Sub-letting is usually explicitly forbidden when you are part of one of these schemes.
People have mentioned public housing, but it's probably more like renting out an apartment that has rent control (where there's a limit on how much the rent is allowed to increase each year). "Public housing" in the US has a connotation of being blocks of apartments/flats that are all managed by a government entity, where rent controlled units may be almost anywhere.
Could also be like Section 8 housing where I believe the landlord gets part of the rent from the government and part from the tenant (disclaimer: never lived in any of these, I could be wrong on details)
I live in a building in Central London (Soho) that has 12 flats. We pay market rate for ours, that is supposed to help the housing association offset the cost of some of the other flats that are designated as social housing.
Most of these flats are just constantly churning Airbnb guests in and out, some of the others have lodgers (also illegal, friend of mine lived in one of them, hence why I know).
I don't know what to do with this information, but its such a shame that people are so comfortably scamming the government, when it's literally funded by all of us.
EDIT: per the responses, I have called the council and they were very keen/interested. Thanks for your input.
(It's not specific to council housing; if it's specifically council housing as opposed to the developer just agreeing to let it at a reduced rate, then they'll take an even dimmer view on it; if it's the developer or some management company then it's worth contacting them as well as it may impact their insurance etc.)
If it's just the occasional thing, I personally wouldn't get involved, but if it's going on enough for you to notice regularly it doesn't sound like that's the case.
Pick up the phone and ring your local council right now - they all seem to have a different approach to this, but the person on the other end of the phone will have the answer for you. They will be very interested in the outcome of this.
Isn't it a good thing if there are lodgers in social housing? It means more people being housed, without the council having to do anything to make it happen.
I’ve never quite understood why subletting is illigal in places like this.
Person A needs money because rent is high, person B needs housing because housing is scarce, A rents B their couch and everyone is happy.
Obviously that’s a little different than just sticking the whole thing on Airbnb, but it looks to me like it’s legally considered the same when it really shouldn’t be.
If A is getting subsidized housing they’re earning taking others’ taxes and profiting from it. I’d say they’re not entitled to the subsidy in that case.
I get what you’re saying but I’m still not convinced it totally makes sense.
The goal of subsidized housing is to make housing more affordable for some group of people, subletting likely has the same effect so the money subsidizing the building is still going to the same thing.
I think the argument would be something like this:
Renting on Airbnb has the effect of subsidizing this one person's housing, not of subsidizing the community's housing.
If the goal is to use Airbnb to increase social housing opportunities, the council should do it directly, so any excess profit can be reinvested in new housing for more than just one person.
You're running a business with somebodies charity - that's a no go. If I give you $50 to buy food and you run a lemonade stand with $25 of it, then you've abused my charity.
Now, it might be that I shouldn't have given you the $50, or that we should have discussed giving you a business loan instead - those things are fine. There's nothing fundamentally bad about running a lemonade stand. You simply can't run a lemonade stand with charity earmarked for not-lemonade-stands.
It's because the housing is highly subsidised by the government, in an attempt to prevent gentrification pushing low income people out of the area, breaking up their communities, changing the ethic makeup of the community and other such social issues.
The government does not want the limited number of subsidised spaces to go to people who are happy to move away from the area and receive the market value of renting the place. This effectively results in the government granting them an income, and the social problems continuing, where a space would otherwise have been available for somebody else.
I think the issue here is scarcity. There's waiting lists for most council housing.
The whole idea of council housing is that the state provides you housing because you can't provide your own. If they're renting out theirs, where are they living? They apparently don't actually have a need, else they'd be living in it. So they're profiteering off housing that someone in need is still on the waiting list for.
(I'd be tempted to agree with you if they were renting out their couch; the screenshot shows "Entire home/flat; 3 guests")
It is illegal and immoral. You have requested a government subsidised flat because you need it and would not be able to afford one otherwise. The government has determined, after some research, yes you do need one of their flats. If you’re subletting it then it’s obvious you don’t need it. You’re staying elsewhere, someone is paying you to stay in your place, and the long list of people who really need it remains full.
In this case the issue was outright fraud: They got a council flat that is meant to provide subsidized housing for people who generally can not afford private housing, and profited from it against the terms of his rental agreement.
But in the general case, I keep arguing the same. In the UK there's a very strong trend to focus on landlords and foreign buyers leaving housing empty, or cases like in this article, but when you dig into it, it makes up a tiny proportion of properties.
The government has contributed to pushing the focus to these types of things, even though e.g. all empty properties in the UK being filled would maybe cover ~6 months of demand (and you can't fill all of them - most are empty for things like refurbishments or during a sale; very few are left intentionally empty for long periods of time). I doubt AirBnB demand would add up to more than a rounding error either. But it's a convenient excuse, and much cheaper than to drive higher growth in construction.
The UK definitely needs more overall housing capacity, and there is plenty of land which is not built on. Although I don't think this is the issue here, where the area is already full of dense residential and commercial buildings.
Subsidised housing in such areas is an effort to resist displacement and social change caused by gentrification. Permitting subletting of such housing turns the subsidy into no more than a monetary benefit, which fails to stop the unwanted demographic changes the government is aiming to prevent.
> Build more housing capacity. An increased supply of housing could support both long term housing and legal Airbnb rentals.
I keep hearing "build more housing", but I'm having a hard time seeing how it can help on its own, if housing is primarily bought up by people playing investment schemes, and people who want to rent it out. It wouldn't have to just outpace population growth, it would have to outpace the ability to rent flats at a profit, in order to dry out the pool of investors and let regular people have a chance at buying a place to live.
I think there is a strong temptation for this when there is a large gap between the value of the social housing to the occupant and the value of the social housing on the market.
This flat is in Victoria which is quite central in London. I would expect you could provide more social housing at the same cost in some of the outer zones. There is obviously a trade off where the increased amount of housing from going further out is not worth the inconvenience to the occupants. However, I would expect this trade off kicks in well outside of zone 1.
For the sake of argument let's assume you could double the zone 1 social housing by moving it to zone 2/3. That seems like a pretty big failure in policy.
Zone 1 - zone 2/3 is not bad, but what actually happens is people are moved from zone 1 to some random town 40 miles away (because it's WAY cheaper to do that).
These people don't have cars, they are the least well off people in our society, often physically, mentally and materially. Their entire support system, friends, family etc. are ripped up from beneath them. They end up never rejoining the economy and the cycle continues.
These are people so we can't just shift them where we want to.
These people OWNED their flats, they were compulsory purchased from them at ridiculously low rates, demolished and replaced with luxury flats. The only option for these people was to move from their 2 bed flat to a new studio or leave London.
Some of the most expensive places in London are outside Zone 1 (Hampstead, Richmond, Kensington, West Brompton, Wimbledon, etc.). Also creating a high density of social housing aka ghettos is not desirable for any city in the world and those who have it have big problems because of it. London has huge inequality problems, but the fact that you can have a millionaires road only 5 minutes away from a council estate has the advantage that social issues are not just being ignored and brushed under the carpet by forcing people as far away as possible, it creates more diverse and accepting communities, it ensures that people from all different fortunes have access to nice parks, good transport links (which are even more important for people who are on low income), etc.
I don't think it is very nice to make the assumption that a high density of social housing will result in a ghetto. Do you have sources that people in social housing are more prone to violence and crime?
Ghetto doesn't imply violence or crime to me. Per Wikipedia:
"A ghetto is a part of a city in which members of a minority group live, typically as a result of social, legal, or economic pressure."
It's neither an assumption nor about being nice. As mentioned isolated dense social housing has been observed to create conditions that alternate plans can counter. It also doesn't have to be about violence or crime--mere the neglect of neighbourhoods that are not 'in mind' of decision makers for simple things like maintenance of roads, lights, etc all contribute to this.
The large council estates in the UK often were an attempt at pushing poor people out to cheaper areas in many cases. Even in zone 1 most of the council estates that still exists are there because those areas were cheap, deprived, often bombed out hellholes in the post war years, and so were a convenient place to build cheap council housing.
It's just that they've now become desirable locations.
Continuing to move people out whenever an area becomes desirable is a deeply anti-social and very much temporary solution, and creates the new issue of dealing with the fact that a lot of the jobs are in the centre and a lot of the people who need this housing can't afford to get to them if they need anything more expensive than a bus pass.
For those who aren't from the UK, a council flat is an apartment owned by the local government, with subsidized or free rent for people who can't afford to rent in the area. Residents are means tested (i.e. availability is based on income / special situations). People at considerable risk on the streets tend to be prioritised in the waiting list (families, single women).
This man was eligible, lived in the apartment at some point, but took £110 a night from airbnb guests and lived elsewhere when guests stayed.
Sub-letting council flats is illegal, but pretty common as it's basically impossible to stop on a cash in hand basis. However, a platform like AirBnB could easily block this activity from happening on their platform, if they wanted to.
I love AirBnB on paper, but in practice, its just too ripe with issues. So many similarities to Uber too. Socialize the costs, privatize the revenue. Use litigation to fight to keep the loopholes open. At least Uber isn't screwing with the housing market, that I know of.
I think we all had high hopes for the "Sharing Economy". But instead we ended up with a "Sharing But Not Caring Economy". Giant corporations trying to create a monopoly with any means possible.
I think ultimately it is up to regulators to determine how to deal with these companies / platforms. They are legal entities and can be targeted, unlike open source software projects and protocols.
I can add a lot of opinions as to if these companies are a net positive or negative, but overall the regulators have a disproportionate amount of firepower compared to these companies. Airbnb first time offense for Miami Beach is $20,000 and doubles after that. All of these companies know that, and it is why they so aggressively fight the regulatory side.
Uber certainly got a lot of tailwinds due to regulatory capture backlash from local cab companies. Airbnb, to some extent because of dislike or outright unavailability of hotels. Some markets were much healthier and well regulated than others pre-Uber/ Airbnb. Some hotel/transport markets were a disaster.
In summary, if the regulatory frameworks are crafted in the right way, for whatever the given market is, everyone is better off save for previously well entrenched business. I’m not sure there is actually enough talent, globally, to accomplish that on a individual local market level.
> "We regularly remind hosts to check and follow local rules - including on subsidised housing - and we take action on issues brought to our attention," said a spokeswoman.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadPretty interesting to me...
> "It's illegal for council tenants to sublet their homes and we carry out tenancy checks, as well as monitoring short-term letting websites for any potential illegal sublets."
Also pretty interesting to me... it's nice to see that the councils in London are using their own technological advances to fight illegal activity like this!
others can do the same, at worst, you lose your profits.
Punishing financial crimes to a degree that could have a deterrent effect should start at the top, not at the bottom. Also, IMO, if the UK actually started doing this, its economy might collapse.
then it will never start.
Could also be like Section 8 housing where I believe the landlord gets part of the rent from the government and part from the tenant (disclaimer: never lived in any of these, I could be wrong on details)
Most of these flats are just constantly churning Airbnb guests in and out, some of the others have lodgers (also illegal, friend of mine lived in one of them, hence why I know).
I don't know what to do with this information, but its such a shame that people are so comfortably scamming the government, when it's literally funded by all of us.
EDIT: per the responses, I have called the council and they were very keen/interested. Thanks for your input.
https://www.westminster.gov.uk/nightly-letting-complaints-fo...
(It's not specific to council housing; if it's specifically council housing as opposed to the developer just agreeing to let it at a reduced rate, then they'll take an even dimmer view on it; if it's the developer or some management company then it's worth contacting them as well as it may impact their insurance etc.)
Otherwise you are just subsidizing / helping law breakers, is it not?
(I say that as a frequent AirBnB guest and overall supporter of the AirBnB/Uber/Lyft/VRBO/Homeaway/etc segment of the economy.)
Person A needs money because rent is high, person B needs housing because housing is scarce, A rents B their couch and everyone is happy.
Obviously that’s a little different than just sticking the whole thing on Airbnb, but it looks to me like it’s legally considered the same when it really shouldn’t be.
The goal of subsidized housing is to make housing more affordable for some group of people, subletting likely has the same effect so the money subsidizing the building is still going to the same thing.
Renting on Airbnb has the effect of subsidizing this one person's housing, not of subsidizing the community's housing.
If the goal is to use Airbnb to increase social housing opportunities, the council should do it directly, so any excess profit can be reinvested in new housing for more than just one person.
Now, it might be that I shouldn't have given you the $50, or that we should have discussed giving you a business loan instead - those things are fine. There's nothing fundamentally bad about running a lemonade stand. You simply can't run a lemonade stand with charity earmarked for not-lemonade-stands.
The government does not want the limited number of subsidised spaces to go to people who are happy to move away from the area and receive the market value of renting the place. This effectively results in the government granting them an income, and the social problems continuing, where a space would otherwise have been available for somebody else.
The whole idea of council housing is that the state provides you housing because you can't provide your own. If they're renting out theirs, where are they living? They apparently don't actually have a need, else they'd be living in it. So they're profiteering off housing that someone in need is still on the waiting list for.
(I'd be tempted to agree with you if they were renting out their couch; the screenshot shows "Entire home/flat; 3 guests")
Because of static supply, the two use cases are competing in a zero sum way, but that needn’t be the case.
But in the general case, I keep arguing the same. In the UK there's a very strong trend to focus on landlords and foreign buyers leaving housing empty, or cases like in this article, but when you dig into it, it makes up a tiny proportion of properties.
The government has contributed to pushing the focus to these types of things, even though e.g. all empty properties in the UK being filled would maybe cover ~6 months of demand (and you can't fill all of them - most are empty for things like refurbishments or during a sale; very few are left intentionally empty for long periods of time). I doubt AirBnB demand would add up to more than a rounding error either. But it's a convenient excuse, and much cheaper than to drive higher growth in construction.
Subsidised housing in such areas is an effort to resist displacement and social change caused by gentrification. Permitting subletting of such housing turns the subsidy into no more than a monetary benefit, which fails to stop the unwanted demographic changes the government is aiming to prevent.
I keep hearing "build more housing", but I'm having a hard time seeing how it can help on its own, if housing is primarily bought up by people playing investment schemes, and people who want to rent it out. It wouldn't have to just outpace population growth, it would have to outpace the ability to rent flats at a profit, in order to dry out the pool of investors and let regular people have a chance at buying a place to live.
This flat is in Victoria which is quite central in London. I would expect you could provide more social housing at the same cost in some of the outer zones. There is obviously a trade off where the increased amount of housing from going further out is not worth the inconvenience to the occupants. However, I would expect this trade off kicks in well outside of zone 1.
For the sake of argument let's assume you could double the zone 1 social housing by moving it to zone 2/3. That seems like a pretty big failure in policy.
These people don't have cars, they are the least well off people in our society, often physically, mentally and materially. Their entire support system, friends, family etc. are ripped up from beneath them. They end up never rejoining the economy and the cycle continues.
These are people so we can't just shift them where we want to.
Here's an example from Zone 1:
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/residents-of-the-heyg...
These people OWNED their flats, they were compulsory purchased from them at ridiculously low rates, demolished and replaced with luxury flats. The only option for these people was to move from their 2 bed flat to a new studio or leave London.
It's just that they've now become desirable locations.
Continuing to move people out whenever an area becomes desirable is a deeply anti-social and very much temporary solution, and creates the new issue of dealing with the fact that a lot of the jobs are in the centre and a lot of the people who need this housing can't afford to get to them if they need anything more expensive than a bus pass.
This man was eligible, lived in the apartment at some point, but took £110 a night from airbnb guests and lived elsewhere when guests stayed.
Sub-letting council flats is illegal, but pretty common as it's basically impossible to stop on a cash in hand basis. However, a platform like AirBnB could easily block this activity from happening on their platform, if they wanted to.
I can add a lot of opinions as to if these companies are a net positive or negative, but overall the regulators have a disproportionate amount of firepower compared to these companies. Airbnb first time offense for Miami Beach is $20,000 and doubles after that. All of these companies know that, and it is why they so aggressively fight the regulatory side.
Uber certainly got a lot of tailwinds due to regulatory capture backlash from local cab companies. Airbnb, to some extent because of dislike or outright unavailability of hotels. Some markets were much healthier and well regulated than others pre-Uber/ Airbnb. Some hotel/transport markets were a disaster.
In summary, if the regulatory frameworks are crafted in the right way, for whatever the given market is, everyone is better off save for previously well entrenched business. I’m not sure there is actually enough talent, globally, to accomplish that on a individual local market level.
Sounds like most industries actually, where externalities are passed on to society. E.g. resource extraction.
Bull fucking shit.