The city should seize the property if it’s in flagrant contempt of the law. That’s the only action that will send a message to these illegal hotel operators.
At least here (non us) most if not all rental contracts forbid renting your place out as well as most mortgages. Some even have special Airbnb clauses with penalties attached. I know you can get mortgages which specifically allow it but in general they are more expensive, my guess is because there is a risk element involved for the lender.
Note: you can let people stay for free as house guardians, as this is not commercial activity.
Here in Germany, subletting can’t be forbidden without cause. You have to let the landlord know, but they can’t forbid it without giving specific reasons.
The law stipulates that you must obtain permission from the landlord prior to subletting (§ 540 Abs. 1 S. 2 BGB, § 553 BGB) which must be granted if the renter has legitimate interest to sublet. The burden of proof is on the renter.
Subletting individual rooms or the entire apartment to tourists (AirBnB) in the interest of earning money is usually not considered a sufficiently good reason and as such the the decision is at the landlords discretion.
You’ll have better chances if you sublet parts of your parts of your primary residence and can show that you’re long-term traveling for work or that the income is required to make the rent payment or similar interest.
The landlord can increase the rent if they grant permission to sublet.
There are exceptions auch as having your parents or kids move in, but they are very narrow.
Even if you obtain the landlords permit, subletting to tourists may run afoul of legal restrictions.
You are still wrong. The renter must obtain permission from the landlord prior to subletting and must substantiate legitimate interest. Not doing so is a breach of contract and can ultimately lead to termination of your rental contract. If the landlord does not grant permission your only option is to sue.
While legitimate interest is interpreted broadly, it doesn‘t mean „anything goes“. „I want to earn money on a cheap rental contract that I can sublet for more money“ is not legitimate interest. The legitimate interest must also be rooted in something that occurred after you signed the rental contract. „I can‘t afford this flat, so I‘ll still sign the rental contract and then sublet“ will not create a legitimate interest that requires your landlord to grant the permission. „My income situation has deteriorated after signing the contract“ has better chances of passing the test. Some examples of what does and doesn‘t constitute legitimate interest here https://www.mietrecht.org/untervermietung/berechtigtes-inter...
The landlord can also deny the request if they have an overriding interest, for example if they expect that the sublet would disturb the community in the building.
Contrast that with where permission is not required, for example having a second job. The only requirement is that you must notify your employer. You don‘t need to substantiate anything. The only option for your employer is to deny this on very narrow grounds. If they don‘t respond to your notification within reasonable time, you‘re in the clear. This is fundamentally different from the required legal procedure when subletting.
Those are not the ones that are causing the most problems. Anyone who uses Airbnb seriously knows how rare it is for these places to be in anyone's primary homes (a lot of partial rentals or renting out of vacation homes when not there, of course)
And then the operator continues to list the city-owned property on AirBnB and collect the revenue from it until it accumulates enough 1-star reviews (from fights between the guests and the city) that AirBnB boots it off the platform.
They could, but realistically, it's not worth it for them. Worst case they're out a couple million, and that's only if the guests complain and request refunds. Litigation would cost more than that. AirBnB's legal department has their hands full just getting sued by local municipalities that want to outlaw it entirely; they don't have time to go after small-time fraudulent landlords who can just be booted off the platform.
There’s a more obvious reason why AirBnb won’t sue a listing.
It has a decent chance of sending a terrible message to other listings worldwide and misinformation and fear could easily trigger an exit from providers.
The NYC government, like most city governments, exists primarily two serve two constituents:
1. Property developers; and
2. Police unions.
Eric Adams embodies both special-interest groups in spades.
We have the infrastructure to deal with this. You encumber the property with a lien. You treat it like unpaid property tax. That means it accrues interest and penalties and at some point the state can seize it if it's sufficiently in arrears and sell it to recover those fines.
Stamping out AirBnBs is incredibly easy if the will exists. It does not. It should AirBnB is cancer.
Well-connected property developers is probably the right term. Random out of town or new to the game property developers looking to start building are effectively priced out, while those with political connections learn about public property sales, are able to get special one-off rezonings, can grease the wheels to get their permits unstuck, etc.
There’s not enough development, which keeps the gap high between what it costs a well-connected developer to build vs what a finished building is worth.
Developers make money from developing, which they can't do in the majority of major cities due to regulations outright banning development and cost burdens that make most development unprofitable.
Last time I checked, plenty of properties are developed in NYC and Los Angeles.
Also, although my day job is in tech I play a lobbyist on the side in my small Los Angeles county town. Development happens despite onerous and burdensome municipal code.
Exactly. Development absolutely happens in these places, but big capital is only interested in fat margins, thus virtually all of that development has been luxury condos (and in LA suburbs, McMansions).
Luxury condo development occurs because LA, and California as a whole, have onerous costs that make any other type of housing not pencil. The fixed costs for development are so enormous that it's often impossible to make any profit while building affordable housing.
Really? LA voters have passed literally billions of dollars in funding for affordable housing. California has passed bill after bill to overcome regulatory hurdles for approval of housing that includes even a tiny amount of affordable housing. Private developers simply aren't interested.
I think that's a common misconception. If you dig into those numbers you'll probably find a regulatory burden that is not actually gone, massive local pushback on development, or a cost structure that still doesn't work.
California refuses to learn the lesson that throwing money at a problem doesn't just mean it's fixed (see: the high speed rail).
Obviously money alone won't solve the problem. But when 95%+ of the proposals are NOT affordable housing, and those developers are actively bribing city officials, it's no surprise that most of what gets built are luxury condos, mostly downtown, the vast majority of which are uninhabited, serving as bank accounts for foreign "investors."
Yeah, try taking a drive downtown after dark in any major city. See how many of the new units have lights on. Do that night after night, random times. Most are dark. Local/state governments don't actually collect data on this because they're in the pockets of real estate. Vancouver BC had the exact same problem, so they passed a massive vacancy tax, something California needs to implement ASAP.
By definition, there is not "plenty" of development in LA, because there is far, far, far too little of it occurring. This is evidenced by the increase in rental rates and the meteoric increase in homelessness, all while developers are trying and failing to build housing due to local regulations.
I would hazard an educated guess that you live in a luxury apartment building. Is your building the best use for the land it’s on with regards to affordable housing? If not, why do you financially support the developers/owners? How do you deal with the cognitive dissonance?
But if I did, that would be fine. The reason there aren't affordable apartments in LA is because of the regulatory/cost burden. When neighbors can easily require a CEQA analysis that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, the only buildings that pencil are expensive ones. This is a well documented phenomena.
If people want to be in the hotel business buy a freaking hotel, there are plenty for sale. If you want to be in the rental business buy and apartment building, there are lots of apartment buildings available too. All these people doing Air BnB and Renting out their old house is what is skewing the market and fucking things up for everyone -the city, home owners, neighbors, hotel operators, renters and vacationers. I'm glad NYC has rental laws like they do I really wish more cities had them and actually enforced them, a lot of this bullshit would end quickly. Until them people will have to live next to unlicensed hotels, subsidize their neighbors business and generally get screwed over so Air BnB can take their 30%.
Anyone that bitches that the rent is too high, here's your starting point, all those Air BnB rentals are driving the long term rental market up significantly. Adding 20% more units to the market would save you a ton of money.
The split would be zoning and operating a business in a residence. Hotels usually have fire escapes, inspections, etc. Also parking, expected noise, any number of things my house doesn't conform to, and doubtful most of the Airbnb's do either.
I've lived across from nightly rentals at a resort, I expected it, so no complaints to the late night partying etc. But my current neighborhood I have no expectation the house next door is going to suddenly start hosting huge
gatherings every weekend, and I expect it to stay that way.
Anecdotally I see the opposite. My long-standing neighbors that own houses throw insane, loud, all the way until 5am parties and since they've lived there forever they know the police, code enforcement etc and can get away with anything. They magically have everything trimmed, cars moved etc exactly 1 day before inspectors come so that nothing bad ever happens to them. Short term renters in the neighborhood don't have such connections and can't get away with such things, someone calls for a noise complaint and they're fucked.
This sounds similar to what I hear when people oppose building housing in general: people expect their neighborhood to stay exactly the same as when they bought it. That's not how the real world works, though.
If you live in a city, you have to deal with noise, full stop. That's one of the trade offs of dense, urban living. Certainly there are limits to what you should have to put up with, and that's what noise complaints to the police are for. Police aren't doing their job? Well, maybe you should find a way to force them to, instead of trying to restrict what other people want to do with their property. Or move to a building or area or whatever with a neighborhood association that disallows short-term rentals.
Why should a business property with a bed be any more or less safe for human life than a residential property with a bed?
If fire escapes are necessary, they should be required in both cases. If they are not, they shouldn't be. Are hotel guest lives (or resident lives) worth more or less than the other?
Generally, commercial code is stricter than residential code, in everything from plumbing to electrical. I think the idea is that heavier use and providing service to others make the tougher scrutiny worthwhile.
Apartments are generally bigger than hotel rooms -> there's more people in an equivalent size building that is a hotel -> need better fire exits.
The problem with ignoring hotel regulations and renting out residential units is the existing tax, zoning, and building codes don't account for AirBnB. It should be ruinously expensive in tax terms to rent out a residential unit full time. Those units should be used to house people, not to literally extract rent. Residents should have a choice to say what they want to be surrounded by.
Are you saying that the tenants in an Airbnb doesn’t constitute “housing people”? Where do you draw the line then?
Airbnb has many problems and is a disgraceful company especially nowadays, but one thing they did well is to add significant flexibility to a legacy industry full of gatekeepers.
Except that Airbnb hosts are indeed required to pay hotel taxes (or taxes enacted specifically for short-term rentals) in some jurisdictions, and yet... it's still worth it, financially. And, what do you know, prices are often still better than staying at a hotel.
AirBnB got me an apartment for awhile in a top-3 US city because I had horrible credit and bad rental history. I don't have such issues in the cities with pretty weak tenant protections, but in places like NYC strong tenant protections make landlords nervous to rent to anyone who may take awhile to get rid of, so people end up relying on AirBnB etc.
It's not purely a bunch of tourists or whatever taking up this housing and driving out the locals.
That's great, I also had good experiences with AirBnB early on.
This seems to have become a standard practice in VC-backed firms, a process clearly documented here [0] by Cory Doctorow (article covers much more than just the title-mentioned Tiktok).
To be clear, I doubt any existing operator is selling. Without the possibility of any new competition, they will be able to start jacking rates up as demand grows (see demand growth forecasts in the articles).
Many friends and families enjoy staying under one roof. Hotels and apartments rarely offer that to even 2 families of 4. Add in Grandparents and you’re looking at 10-12 capacity. That’s 5-6 hotel rooms and typically nowhere to cook or sit at a table together to eat or play a game.
Many houses sit empty when their owners are away. Why not use that space to house travelers without having to build more hotels?
I think most cities have it backwards trying to regulate the hosts. Hosts aren’t at the property and aren’t usually awake at 1am when issues might occur.
The renters cause the issues, so regulate the renters. Cities could mandate a 25-50% deposit that’s refunded if no noise/parking issues occur. Whoever put the deposit down will likely be at the house and self-policing their group that they invited.
Makes more sense than blaming hosts when most bookings are “instant book”, or even if they do vet, it’s likely just a quick text chat or going off of previous AirBnB ratings (which many hosts rate 5/5 so the guest will return).
This is true. But there are also people who buy up properties for AirBnB aren't trying to resource-allocate their own homes like Cloud/IAAS-style and try to use it for purely 100% hotel-like purposes. In doing so they're raising up the home prices, cheating out businesses that pay taxes for being legally allow to hotel, and cause problems for other homes that don't want a hotel in their backyard.
Sedona does it well. Every HOA gets to decide if they are a tourist neighborhood or not. Short term rentals are either allowed or banned and you know that going in.
There are many homes in tourist towns that are designed to be vacation homes. Sometimes they are 5+ bedrooms, or are located inside a resort area. Families don’t want to live in those homes and they’re not conducive to long term rentals either.
Tourism zoning allows those homes to not sit empty and be taxed appropriately, while keeping short term rentals away from residential zoning areas likes parks, schools, etc.
Instead you have cities passing dozens or hundreds of pages of regulations that makes no one happy. It’s led to lots of lawsuits, complicated enforcement and more bureaucracy.
Simple is better. Another option is to allow anyone to rent, but cap it at 30-60 nights per year, or only during peak tourism months. It‘s enough income to supplement a homeowner’s mortgage, but not enough to make it a profitable investment opportunity.
I don't know enough about zoning laws to have a strong stance on this matter.
It seems like to me that the people who purchase homes specifically to run an AirBnB business seems to espouse "f@#! you, I got mine" attitude which is super contagious and toxic.
> cheating out businesses that pay taxes for being legally allow to hotel
I have zero sympathy for this part of your argument: hotel zoning is just a legally-allowed monopoly, with all the bad things that usually comes with.
And do note that, in some jurisdictions, there are now taxes specifically covering short-term rental activities. No "cheating" going on there. And any municipality that hasn't enacted such a tax... well, that's their oversight, then.
You can have zero empathy for my arguments... but one still should be following the law. I dislike how zoning happens in the US (NIMBYism, et al.) but I still follow them to the best of my ability. These AirBnB folks are outright disregarding them.
We can disagree about laws but not following/enforcing laws because you disagree with them (for most part) is a recipe for disaster.
There is a home on my block that has a permanent vacation rental sign in the front yard. I talked to the owner the other day and she literally said "this is our vacation rental". They literally only own it to rent it out. This is in a residential neighborhood in Seattle, a city with unreasonably expensive housing. I frequently use AirBnB when traveling. Only once in my life have I stayed at an AirBnB that is actually a primary residence. All the others are full time short-term rentals. AKA Hotels.
The solution to unaffordable housing is to build more housing. I think you'll find if short-term rentals were banned tomorrow, rents and home prices would not drop much, if at all. Sure, maybe there'd be a short-term drop in home prices while full-time Airbnb hosts offload their properties, but it won't last.
Building more housing in places where there is demand is the only way to reduce housing prices. We don't see that happening because homeowners like the high cost of housing, and vote down new development. Homeowners tend to have more political power since they're a bit more fervent about this sort of thing than renters, many of whom won't be living in the area long enough to care. Unfortunately, those renters who do want to stay, and perhaps even want to own their own home, just don't have the political clout to change things.
I agree we need to build more housing and in places like Seattle that means denser housing as well. A single family home in the city is a fantasy. But there’s really no reason to ever sell a house here when you can just rent it out. Just building more is only part if the solution.
I’m not saying we should just ban short term rentals. I’m saying we should make all rentals ruinously expensive unless they actually provide some economic benefit. If you aren’t providing housing to low income renters that truly can’t afford a home then you don’t get to buy more houses. Just destroy the incentives to hold real estate through taxes.
AirBnb is really great for families, in theory. I’ve had many great experiences with it.
The problem is it is now polluted with grifters, and you don’t want to take a 15% chance that your place will have cockroaches, require digging through 8’ of snow to get to the front door, or have frozen pipes (all these have happened to me with Airbnb).
Even worse, I feel that it went from a 5% bad rate to more like 35%.
> fucking things up for everyone - [...] vacationers.
Huh? As a frequent vacationer and user of Airbnb (I'm staying in one right now, as it turns out), Airbnb has made vacationing so much better.
I get to stay in a larger variety of neighborhoods and locations. Kitchens are usually standard (good luck finding one in most hotels). There's more space if I want to stay with family or friends. Prices -- even in places where Airbnb hosts are required to pay local hotel taxes -- are much more varied and, in general, better (and when I do decide to choose a hotel for whatever reason prices are often lower due to competition from Airbnb). I could go on...
> Anyone that bitches that the rent is too high, here's your starting point, all those Air BnB rentals are driving the long term rental market up significantly.
I hear this a lot, but fail to see any hard evidence that killing short-term rentals would fix this problem. I don't doubt that short-term rentals are contributing to housing unaffordability, but there are much better solutions than banning them. Which brings me to:
> Adding 20% more units to the market would save you a ton of money.
Agreed! I've been saying that for years. Please, build 20% more units, and I think prices will indeed go down. Hell, don't stop at 20%, even. If there's demand, build!
> I hear this a lot, but fail to see any hard evidence that killing short-term rentals would fix this problem. I don't doubt that short-term rentals are contributing to housing unaffordability, but there are much better solutions than banning them. Which brings me to:
The market for long term rentals doubled in Dublin during the pandemic due to lack of tourism. If you can't see how bringing all that supply (over 1000 units) back to the market won't help long-term rentals, that's on you.
AirBnB is a cancer to cities and locals, and needs to be banned for good. Tourists aren't locals, they're not entitled to live like them, especially at the locals' expense.
> hear this a lot, but fail to see any hard evidence that killing short-term rentals would fix this problem.
Well the city of Halifax just banned airbnb in some areas and there was a flood of houses both on the market to sell and for long term renting. Clearly AirBnb is taking some long term rental stock away from the market, that can't be up for debate.
if your point is that banning airbnb won't fully fix housing and therfor we shouldn't ban it, well that's an awfully high bar. What is clear is that banning airbnb will help improve the long term rental market.
I call bullshit to your bullshit. You don't know that AirBnB is skewing the market. You just see the market sucking, AirBnB existing, and went with a Post Hoc Ergo Proctor Hoc. There are so many things skewing the housing market. The rules on commercial mortgages, large corporate landlords engaging in cartel pricing, perverse incentives, wealthy people foreign and domestic buying space to park assets but not doing anything useful like renting it out or living in it, the list goes on and AirBnB is at the bottom. AirBnB provides an invaluable service, filling the niche of flexibly scaling housing for when its too long term for a hotel and too short term for a lease. Its the go to option for when you need to patch over a living situation issue just long enough to find a real place. AirBnB doesn't remove housing from the rental market because AirBnB is a rental market.
AirBnB absolutely removes housing from the one rental market that matters - long term rentals. This is quite easy to see, as well as its influence on supply and thus pricing. In 2020 the number of long term let's available in Dublin doubled thanks to tourism shutting down and landlord switching. Sadly that's likely all been lost now.
Short term lets are nowhere near as important as long term ones, especially vacation rentals. They're actively harmful often, especially with the way AirBnB takes supply from the long-term lets.
Wait a second. You're using the 2020 pandemic and the massive system shock it caused on (among other industries) tourism as a proxy for the impact of tourism in particular on rental availability and then extrapolating it further to the effects of AirBnB in particular? As opposed to the gigantic obvious other system shocks that happened in 2020 which also had a massive impact on housing and commuting patterns vis a vis work from home and mass exodus from urban areas in general. Pray tell have you ever tried to reject the hypothesis AirBnB is the cause of housing problems? Have you looked and failed to find data in that direction at all?
> Hosts will have to submit several documents to the city, including a diagram with exit routes, proof the host is a resident of the building, and the number of non-host residents in the building.
This is such a wonderful development. It should never have taken this long to have such a basic safety issue addressed.
From my perspective, as a proponent of the moral right to private property and free association, the great thing about Airbnb/Uber/etc is that they offer a non-political means of opposing and circumventing politically instituted restrictions on market exchange.
I believe public opinion will always be an insufficient guarantor of these rights, due to inherent cognitive biases and over-simplifications (in effect, ideological narratives), in addition to susceptibility to special interest public relations campaigns (e.g. right now, the Hotel Lobby has effectively manufactured the entire mainstream narrative around Airbnb: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/technology/inside-the-hot...) so we need means of fortifying rights in the face of a hostile political climate.
I hardly qualify as a libertarian, but I have had many good vacations that I could not have afforded without Airbnb.
I understand that some guests are not as courteous as I am, and that I have been reasonably lucky in not having a bad rental experience, but the same holds true for any other hotel stay as well.
It seems to me that a better course of action than outlawing property owners from using it as they please is to provide the essential enforcement to ensure that the property owners do not impinge on their neighbors' enjoyment of their property, not outlawing specific uses all together.
Airbnb opens up tourism to the middle class. The problem, IMHO, is that society views travel as a non-essential luxury, when in reality, it will evolve to become an essential mode of life in an increasingly globalized world.
You affording vacations is less important to cities and to society at large than locals bring able to afford properties without bidding against parasitic landlords.
> locals bring able to afford properties without bidding against parasitic landlords.
The problem here is the landlords, not airbnb. Even if that didn't exist, you'd still have parasitic landlords and they'd still try to take renters for everything they're worth.
Landlords maximizing what they can charge is normal behavior in an economy, and when concurrent with a free market, leads to a maximum amount of housing supply being created due to people chasing profits by building homes.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, the markets where normal profit-seeking behavior in the landlord business is prohibited, via rent control, see housing become comparatively extremely unaffordable and/or hard-to-acquire. See San Francisco:
The problem is AirBnB. Landlords are regulated with zoning and other practices; people buying up individual apartments and turning areas intended for long term rentals into hotels are the problem, and this is entirely the result of AirBnB et. al.
If there's enough demand that all of this is causing housing affordability issues, then the right answer is always to build more housing.
I am certain that banning short-term rentals will not solve housing affordability. And no, "but it will help a little" is not a valid counter-argument.
Travel gives people crucial exposure to other parts of the country and world.
Moreover, getting a job in a city often requires being able to get temporary lodging in that city due to the discrimination non-locals face when applying for jobs.
With tenant protection laws and rent control, the available stock of rentals can be extremely small, making it harder for people with poorer references to find shorter-term leases. Short-term rentals provide a means for these individuals to acquire the temporary housing they need to pursue job opportunities in other cities.
Given most of the productivity growth is, due agglomeration effects, accruing to just a couple megapolises: New York and the San Francisco Bay Area[1], short term rental stock can be a means of expanding opportunities for people not privileged enough to not already live in these cities.
If your comment made any sense you would also want to be outlawing hotels. The room sizes are equivalent - - in fact, several of the airbnbs I have stayed in are in hotels.
Is the probably really parasitic landlords or parasitic governance?
It’s not even that AirBNB is often cheaper, but personally it’s more enjoyable to experience a place like a local and not through yet another cookie-cutter hotel in a downtown business district. Staying in a hotel is like traveling to a different country and then eating at McDonalds.
Some people love that kind of thing. They want predictable, pre-arranged experiences. Personally I hate it with every fiber of my being.
I hate it, but I love having a place to live more, and giving other locals that chance. AirBnB directly ruins this for many locals trying to live in an area, since landlords can easily make more via AirBnB, removing a lot of supply from the market. It's just plain entitlement "I should give to live like a local, who cares if they can't afford housing? I'm gone in a week anyway!"
I also see a bunch of fabricated stories about how Airbnb is the reason why housing is unaffordable, with the implication that if short-term rentals were banned, housing would somehow magically become affordable overnight.
I got news for y'all, though: the only thing that solves housing unaffordability in places with demand is... building more homes.
Don't get me wrong, Airbnb as a company has and causes a ton of problems, but they are not the cause of housing unaffordability.
I dunno, considering that Dublin has more AirBnBs for let in a five km radius of city centre than, at one point, there were houses to let in the entire country. That's a problem, especially during a housing crisis. AirBnB is a cancer, as are the entitled tourists who feel they should live like locals at the locals' expense.
1. AirBnB couldn’t have more available properties simply because it is a subset of all available properties.
2. Not sure what calculus you used to determine that they live at the locals’ expense. Surely people paid for their properties and local products including paying VAT.
1. That's a poor argument and completely irrelevant. There's a massive difference between short term and long term lets. AirBnB has more short term rentals available than long term ones in the entire country. That's a problem even if it's a 'subet' of all available properties.
2. Oh they pay a little in tax. Not the same as depriving locals of places to live near where they work affordably, and pricing all but the highest earners out of a home in general. Not to mention it pushes locals further and further out of the areas near jobs, and even then it's more and more expensive. Longer commutes, higher rates, it's all a net negative on the actual residents of a city. Nobody benefits but the entitled tourists and the rich landlords, who are insulated enough by their money to not see or care about the societal harm they cause.
1. I think it is a good argument because it exposes the incoherence and false dichotomy of the statement in question. It isn’t even clear to me what rate of short term listings to long term listings would be indicative of healthy economy. Is it a problem? How big of a problem it is? What are its real causes? I think that would require a real econometric study instead of data “quote”-mining.
2. Oh, so there are also “the rich landlords”, who stand in opposition to “locals”. Who else do we have? Politicians and construction companies. All of them seem to partake in that grand conspiracy of lack of xenophobia to serve entitled foreigners through legal means. If only they could learn about Blut und Boden calculus of not harming locals…
> In 2021 alone, the homeowner racked up $984,000 in defaulted penalties, none of which have been paid, a Bloomberg calculation based on city records shows.
This is just dumb, and has nothing to do with short-term rentals. If you've fined a property owner, you should have legal means to collect those fines. If you don't, then you are a bad city and you should be ashamed at your poor governance. If you do have those means, but have still failed to collect, then you have only yourself to blame. Bad city!
> New York has tussled with Airbnb Inc. for years over the proliferation of illegal listings and has spent significant resources chasing down violators.
How is this a thing? Issue a court order to Airbnb to take down a listing and ban the address from the platform. Airbnb fails to do so? Fine them. And actually collect!
> New rules taking effect in May [...] Hosts who want to list on Airbnb or other platforms will be required to register with the city and receive an operating license.
What? How incompetent is NYC's government? This has been standard practice in many other locales for years!
I really have little sympathy for NYC here. They seem to have been badly mismanaging the situation for many years now. My sympathy goes out to NYC's residents, who seem to have a terrible local government. And I say this as someone who lives in SF, another city with a terrible local government.
Whenever I read these things, I feel the same way. I'd even go further: NYC has decided to allowed Airbnb's, it just can't quite admit that. So it pretends to fine them. But enforces nothing. Because that is politically expedient.
I honestly don't care if they all Airbnb or not. I just find it distastful when governments insist on lying about their actual policy...
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 195 ms ] threadBut at least in bankruptcy I think primary homes are hard to claim by other parties. Not sure about the government though.
Note: you can let people stay for free as house guardians, as this is not commercial activity.
The law stipulates that you must obtain permission from the landlord prior to subletting (§ 540 Abs. 1 S. 2 BGB, § 553 BGB) which must be granted if the renter has legitimate interest to sublet. The burden of proof is on the renter.
Subletting individual rooms or the entire apartment to tourists (AirBnB) in the interest of earning money is usually not considered a sufficiently good reason and as such the the decision is at the landlords discretion.
You’ll have better chances if you sublet parts of your parts of your primary residence and can show that you’re long-term traveling for work or that the income is required to make the rent payment or similar interest.
The landlord can increase the rent if they grant permission to sublet.
There are exceptions auch as having your parents or kids move in, but they are very narrow.
Even if you obtain the landlords permit, subletting to tourists may run afoul of legal restrictions.
https://www.mieterbund.de/index.php?id=540
https://www.mietrecht.de/airbnb-untervermietung-was-sie-bei-...
edit: Ah, yeah, I confused who’s the one with the burden of proof, that part was indeed wrong
While legitimate interest is interpreted broadly, it doesn‘t mean „anything goes“. „I want to earn money on a cheap rental contract that I can sublet for more money“ is not legitimate interest. The legitimate interest must also be rooted in something that occurred after you signed the rental contract. „I can‘t afford this flat, so I‘ll still sign the rental contract and then sublet“ will not create a legitimate interest that requires your landlord to grant the permission. „My income situation has deteriorated after signing the contract“ has better chances of passing the test. Some examples of what does and doesn‘t constitute legitimate interest here https://www.mietrecht.org/untervermietung/berechtigtes-inter...
The landlord can also deny the request if they have an overriding interest, for example if they expect that the sublet would disturb the community in the building.
Contrast that with where permission is not required, for example having a second job. The only requirement is that you must notify your employer. You don‘t need to substantiate anything. The only option for your employer is to deny this on very narrow grounds. If they don‘t respond to your notification within reasonable time, you‘re in the clear. This is fundamentally different from the required legal procedure when subletting.
It has a decent chance of sending a terrible message to other listings worldwide and misinformation and fear could easily trigger an exit from providers.
1. Property developers; and
2. Police unions.
Eric Adams embodies both special-interest groups in spades.
We have the infrastructure to deal with this. You encumber the property with a lien. You treat it like unpaid property tax. That means it accrues interest and penalties and at some point the state can seize it if it's sufficiently in arrears and sell it to recover those fines.
Stamping out AirBnBs is incredibly easy if the will exists. It does not. It should AirBnB is cancer.
If developers are so well represented, why is it so difficult for them to build in most American cities?
There’s not enough development, which keeps the gap high between what it costs a well-connected developer to build vs what a finished building is worth.
Developers make money from developing, which they can't do in the majority of major cities due to regulations outright banning development and cost burdens that make most development unprofitable.
Also, although my day job is in tech I play a lobbyist on the side in my small Los Angeles county town. Development happens despite onerous and burdensome municipal code.
California refuses to learn the lesson that throwing money at a problem doesn't just mean it's fixed (see: the high speed rail).
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-01-19/jose-hui...
You are wrong.
But if I did, that would be fine. The reason there aren't affordable apartments in LA is because of the regulatory/cost burden. When neighbors can easily require a CEQA analysis that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, the only buildings that pencil are expensive ones. This is a well documented phenomena.
Is there no copyediting done at publications at all any more?
When the second word is misspelt, I really wonder how much effort has gone into verifying any information contained within.
Anyone that bitches that the rent is too high, here's your starting point, all those Air BnB rentals are driving the long term rental market up significantly. Adding 20% more units to the market would save you a ton of money.
This is the same nonsense as NYC's yellow cab vs black car licensing and regulations.
Let people make businesses how they choose.
I've lived across from nightly rentals at a resort, I expected it, so no complaints to the late night partying etc. But my current neighborhood I have no expectation the house next door is going to suddenly start hosting huge gatherings every weekend, and I expect it to stay that way.
If you live in a city, you have to deal with noise, full stop. That's one of the trade offs of dense, urban living. Certainly there are limits to what you should have to put up with, and that's what noise complaints to the police are for. Police aren't doing their job? Well, maybe you should find a way to force them to, instead of trying to restrict what other people want to do with their property. Or move to a building or area or whatever with a neighborhood association that disallows short-term rentals.
If fire escapes are necessary, they should be required in both cases. If they are not, they shouldn't be. Are hotel guest lives (or resident lives) worth more or less than the other?
Apartments are generally bigger than hotel rooms -> there's more people in an equivalent size building that is a hotel -> need better fire exits.
Condo buildings aren't that much different than hotels in terms of density and usage.
> The average size of a newly built apartment in the United States, as of 2018, is 882 square feet. https://getflex.com/blog/average-apartment-size/
> The average hotel room size in the US is 300 square feet (around 28 square metres). https://www.siteminder.com/r/hotel-room-sizes/
Airbnb has many problems and is a disgraceful company especially nowadays, but one thing they did well is to add significant flexibility to a legacy industry full of gatekeepers.
A vacation rental is not housing people.
AirBnB adds flexibility for new rent-seekers. It doesn’t address housing affordability and in some cases actually makes it worse.
It's not purely a bunch of tourists or whatever taking up this housing and driving out the locals.
This seems to have become a standard practice in VC-backed firms, a process clearly documented here [0] by Cory Doctorow (article covers much more than just the title-mentioned Tiktok).
[0] https://doctorow.medium.com/tiktoks-enshittification-bb3f5df...
NYC is somewhat notorious for recently disallowing all new hotels. You could not enter the hotel business in NYC if you wanted to.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/nyregion/hotels-tourism-n...
https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2022/12/09/how-special-are-...
Many houses sit empty when their owners are away. Why not use that space to house travelers without having to build more hotels?
I think most cities have it backwards trying to regulate the hosts. Hosts aren’t at the property and aren’t usually awake at 1am when issues might occur.
The renters cause the issues, so regulate the renters. Cities could mandate a 25-50% deposit that’s refunded if no noise/parking issues occur. Whoever put the deposit down will likely be at the house and self-policing their group that they invited.
Makes more sense than blaming hosts when most bookings are “instant book”, or even if they do vet, it’s likely just a quick text chat or going off of previous AirBnB ratings (which many hosts rate 5/5 so the guest will return).
Sedona does it well. Every HOA gets to decide if they are a tourist neighborhood or not. Short term rentals are either allowed or banned and you know that going in.
There are many homes in tourist towns that are designed to be vacation homes. Sometimes they are 5+ bedrooms, or are located inside a resort area. Families don’t want to live in those homes and they’re not conducive to long term rentals either.
Tourism zoning allows those homes to not sit empty and be taxed appropriately, while keeping short term rentals away from residential zoning areas likes parks, schools, etc.
Instead you have cities passing dozens or hundreds of pages of regulations that makes no one happy. It’s led to lots of lawsuits, complicated enforcement and more bureaucracy.
Simple is better. Another option is to allow anyone to rent, but cap it at 30-60 nights per year, or only during peak tourism months. It‘s enough income to supplement a homeowner’s mortgage, but not enough to make it a profitable investment opportunity.
It seems like to me that the people who purchase homes specifically to run an AirBnB business seems to espouse "f@#! you, I got mine" attitude which is super contagious and toxic.
I have zero sympathy for this part of your argument: hotel zoning is just a legally-allowed monopoly, with all the bad things that usually comes with.
And do note that, in some jurisdictions, there are now taxes specifically covering short-term rental activities. No "cheating" going on there. And any municipality that hasn't enacted such a tax... well, that's their oversight, then.
We can disagree about laws but not following/enforcing laws because you disagree with them (for most part) is a recipe for disaster.
Building more housing in places where there is demand is the only way to reduce housing prices. We don't see that happening because homeowners like the high cost of housing, and vote down new development. Homeowners tend to have more political power since they're a bit more fervent about this sort of thing than renters, many of whom won't be living in the area long enough to care. Unfortunately, those renters who do want to stay, and perhaps even want to own their own home, just don't have the political clout to change things.
I’m not saying we should just ban short term rentals. I’m saying we should make all rentals ruinously expensive unless they actually provide some economic benefit. If you aren’t providing housing to low income renters that truly can’t afford a home then you don’t get to buy more houses. Just destroy the incentives to hold real estate through taxes.
Here are some examples: https://www.visitberlin.de/en/hotelthema/apartment-hotel
The problem is it is now polluted with grifters, and you don’t want to take a 15% chance that your place will have cockroaches, require digging through 8’ of snow to get to the front door, or have frozen pipes (all these have happened to me with Airbnb).
Even worse, I feel that it went from a 5% bad rate to more like 35%.
Huh? As a frequent vacationer and user of Airbnb (I'm staying in one right now, as it turns out), Airbnb has made vacationing so much better.
I get to stay in a larger variety of neighborhoods and locations. Kitchens are usually standard (good luck finding one in most hotels). There's more space if I want to stay with family or friends. Prices -- even in places where Airbnb hosts are required to pay local hotel taxes -- are much more varied and, in general, better (and when I do decide to choose a hotel for whatever reason prices are often lower due to competition from Airbnb). I could go on...
> Anyone that bitches that the rent is too high, here's your starting point, all those Air BnB rentals are driving the long term rental market up significantly.
I hear this a lot, but fail to see any hard evidence that killing short-term rentals would fix this problem. I don't doubt that short-term rentals are contributing to housing unaffordability, but there are much better solutions than banning them. Which brings me to:
> Adding 20% more units to the market would save you a ton of money.
Agreed! I've been saying that for years. Please, build 20% more units, and I think prices will indeed go down. Hell, don't stop at 20%, even. If there's demand, build!
The market for long term rentals doubled in Dublin during the pandemic due to lack of tourism. If you can't see how bringing all that supply (over 1000 units) back to the market won't help long-term rentals, that's on you.
AirBnB is a cancer to cities and locals, and needs to be banned for good. Tourists aren't locals, they're not entitled to live like them, especially at the locals' expense.
Well the city of Halifax just banned airbnb in some areas and there was a flood of houses both on the market to sell and for long term renting. Clearly AirBnb is taking some long term rental stock away from the market, that can't be up for debate.
if your point is that banning airbnb won't fully fix housing and therfor we shouldn't ban it, well that's an awfully high bar. What is clear is that banning airbnb will help improve the long term rental market.
Short term lets are nowhere near as important as long term ones, especially vacation rentals. They're actively harmful often, especially with the way AirBnB takes supply from the long-term lets.
This is such a wonderful development. It should never have taken this long to have such a basic safety issue addressed.
When it gets really bad the person listing it will just flee the country, for sure. Assuming its not already straw man'd out.
I believe public opinion will always be an insufficient guarantor of these rights, due to inherent cognitive biases and over-simplifications (in effect, ideological narratives), in addition to susceptibility to special interest public relations campaigns (e.g. right now, the Hotel Lobby has effectively manufactured the entire mainstream narrative around Airbnb: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/technology/inside-the-hot...) so we need means of fortifying rights in the face of a hostile political climate.
I understand that some guests are not as courteous as I am, and that I have been reasonably lucky in not having a bad rental experience, but the same holds true for any other hotel stay as well.
It seems to me that a better course of action than outlawing property owners from using it as they please is to provide the essential enforcement to ensure that the property owners do not impinge on their neighbors' enjoyment of their property, not outlawing specific uses all together.
The problem here is the landlords, not airbnb. Even if that didn't exist, you'd still have parasitic landlords and they'd still try to take renters for everything they're worth.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, the markets where normal profit-seeking behavior in the landlord business is prohibited, via rent control, see housing become comparatively extremely unaffordable and/or hard-to-acquire. See San Francisco:
https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html
I am certain that banning short-term rentals will not solve housing affordability. And no, "but it will help a little" is not a valid counter-argument.
Travel gives people crucial exposure to other parts of the country and world.
Moreover, getting a job in a city often requires being able to get temporary lodging in that city due to the discrimination non-locals face when applying for jobs.
With tenant protection laws and rent control, the available stock of rentals can be extremely small, making it harder for people with poorer references to find shorter-term leases. Short-term rentals provide a means for these individuals to acquire the temporary housing they need to pursue job opportunities in other cities.
Given most of the productivity growth is, due agglomeration effects, accruing to just a couple megapolises: New York and the San Francisco Bay Area[1], short term rental stock can be a means of expanding opportunities for people not privileged enough to not already live in these cities.
[1] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388
Is the probably really parasitic landlords or parasitic governance?
Some people love that kind of thing. They want predictable, pre-arranged experiences. Personally I hate it with every fiber of my being.
I got news for y'all, though: the only thing that solves housing unaffordability in places with demand is... building more homes.
Don't get me wrong, Airbnb as a company has and causes a ton of problems, but they are not the cause of housing unaffordability.
2. Not sure what calculus you used to determine that they live at the locals’ expense. Surely people paid for their properties and local products including paying VAT.
2. Oh they pay a little in tax. Not the same as depriving locals of places to live near where they work affordably, and pricing all but the highest earners out of a home in general. Not to mention it pushes locals further and further out of the areas near jobs, and even then it's more and more expensive. Longer commutes, higher rates, it's all a net negative on the actual residents of a city. Nobody benefits but the entitled tourists and the rich landlords, who are insulated enough by their money to not see or care about the societal harm they cause.
2. Oh, so there are also “the rich landlords”, who stand in opposition to “locals”. Who else do we have? Politicians and construction companies. All of them seem to partake in that grand conspiracy of lack of xenophobia to serve entitled foreigners through legal means. If only they could learn about Blut und Boden calculus of not harming locals…
This is just dumb, and has nothing to do with short-term rentals. If you've fined a property owner, you should have legal means to collect those fines. If you don't, then you are a bad city and you should be ashamed at your poor governance. If you do have those means, but have still failed to collect, then you have only yourself to blame. Bad city!
> New York has tussled with Airbnb Inc. for years over the proliferation of illegal listings and has spent significant resources chasing down violators.
How is this a thing? Issue a court order to Airbnb to take down a listing and ban the address from the platform. Airbnb fails to do so? Fine them. And actually collect!
> New rules taking effect in May [...] Hosts who want to list on Airbnb or other platforms will be required to register with the city and receive an operating license.
What? How incompetent is NYC's government? This has been standard practice in many other locales for years!
I really have little sympathy for NYC here. They seem to have been badly mismanaging the situation for many years now. My sympathy goes out to NYC's residents, who seem to have a terrible local government. And I say this as someone who lives in SF, another city with a terrible local government.
I honestly don't care if they all Airbnb or not. I just find it distastful when governments insist on lying about their actual policy...
I actually agree with this though, they do create deadly machines.
Airbnb only let people rent out rooms.