10 ms·

Airbnb and San Francisco

102 points by betadreamer 11y ago

applecore 11y ago
> Airbnb has recently been attacked by San Francisco politicians for driving up the price of housing in the city. The high price of housing in San Francisco is caused by one (and only one) thing: NIMBYism. If supply is constrained and new high-rise developments are held back, there will always be higher prices and a distorted market. In reality, Airbnb doesn't have any measurable effect on the price of housing. (Still, it may help alleviate the situation slightly for some people living in the city.)
- jacobolus 11y ago
  There’s no strict need for high rises to satisfy Bay Area housing requirements. A modest proportion of 4–6 story low-rise apartments throughout the region would be entirely adequate. The problem is that the whole region is almost entirely zoned for single-family houses, and designed on the premise that everyone will commute by car.
- stellar678 11y ago
  If people take residences that would otherwise be available to long-term tenants and make them only available as short-term rentals, how is that not further constraining the supply of housing? I completely agree that the lack of new housing is a huge component of the high prices, but it is reductive to pretend that a particular pet issue is the only thing causing SF's housing shortage. It's a huge problem with myriad causes.
  - bduerst 11y ago
    They address this in the article - less than 1 in 1000 residences are renting enough nights to break even on rent, implying that it's not a supply problem. Residents in SF and the peninsula are pretty quick to try to put the housing-problem blame [1] on anything tech related, but traditionally haven't wanted to increase the supply (high density housing). [1] http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2013/12/20/sf-and-oakland-activists-block-tech-buses-protest-displacement http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2013/12/20/sf-and-oakland-activ...
- pbreit 11y ago
  Except that lack of high density is one of the City's more appealing attributes. I don't like the simple call for more housing without any acknowledgement of the consequences.
  - harryh 11y ago
    A CAP theorem for bay area housing policy: Charming, Affordable, Popular. Pick two. And, like Partition Tolerance, you can't drop Popular.
    - Futurebot 11y ago
      That's a great way to think about it. You can drop popular (eventually it gets to expensive that you reach a new equilibrium and people stop coming!), but it's hard to say at what point in the future that actually happens.
      - harryh 11y ago
        Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.
  - cgy1 11y ago
    I wouldn't exactly say San Francisco lacks high density. It is true that it is not nearly as dense as New York, but it is pretty densely populated compared to other U.S. cities. I think it is right though when people say that San Francisco can still increase its density via 4-6 story housing ala Paris without destroying its charm, and without becoming Vancouver or NYC.
    - pbreit 11y ago
      SOMA could probably go that route but I'm not sure it'd work elsewhere in the City.
webmasterraj 11y ago
This atrocious bill is yet another example of how the biggest unicorns are facing a kind of challenge they aren't built to solve: the political one. Until now, the rise and of tech companies has been determined by the double-edged blad of innovation. Someone makes something new that works better, gets big, and then someone else makes something newer and displaces them. Repeat cycle over and over. It's why in tech, we specialize in the art and business of innovation. What we don't know how to do is navigate murky political waters. We're really, really bad at it. Can you imagine another $10BN company even letting this kind of bill happen, that would kill their largest market if it passed? Airbnb isn't alone. Uber hired Obama's campaign manager because they realized they're biggest existential threat is a political one too. But see their ongoing lawsuits and outright bans in other countries – they haven't figured how to solve the political question either. Meanwhile, car companies with a lower market cap, like GM, could figure out how to get a bailout from the government – right after it bailed out another huge industry, banks. Those guys are just better at it. They have been for a long time. They get things like "don't optimize to something that solves problems. Optimize optics." Or that real deals get done behind closed doors, because you can control what happens there. That by the time it becomes a public debate, you've already lost the game. We in tech have a disgust for politics. Rightfully so. It's useless at best and harmful more often. It doesn't follow the clear, hard and fast rules that the rest of tech does. But if we don't hold our nose and figure out how to play the game, or better yet, reinvent it, we'll get outplayed on the biggest board of them all.
- pbreit 11y ago
  The main reason they aren't built to solve it is because they generally just believe that politicians are idiots.
- JonFish85 11y ago
  "a kind of challenge they aren't built to solve: the political one." And yet these are the battles that "technology" companies like Uber and Airbnb had to know were coming. At best, they live in a legal gray area. You can't start a company skirting existing laws and expect politicians to look the other way. And it's not just politicians that are responsible for this. As a condo owner, I specifically don't want Airbnb to be available in my association. There are reasons that there are laws against leasing and subleasing apartments, and it's not just to screw over startups. Uber and Airbnb grew to huge valuations on the back of pushing externalities onto others. Airbnb is taking their cut and looking the other way on things like taxes, zoning regulations and such until they are forced to deal with it. Uber pushes similar things off onto their "contractors". Now the political environment is catching up to them, and it's time to deal with the same legal environment that every other company has to deal with.
pbreit 11y ago
I have trouble feeling sorry for AirBnB with this. It has had numerous opportunities to put forth a reasonable view on how this should all work and AFAICT, has not. First, most (all?) HOAs and landlords forbid short term rentals, and for good reason (short term renting is generally disliked by neighbors). Second, city zoning policies are implemented for a reason, again, a good one. Residential neighborhoods generally prefer little or no commercial activity as well as inhabitants who care about the neighborhood. I have not seen AirBnB weigh in reasonably on these important issues. For that, it's possible it deserves Prop F.
- JamisonM 11y ago
  The thing that troubles me the most about AirBNB is the general feeling I get from them that they feel concerns about their social impact are simply not worth addressing. Not just disagreeing about the degree to which the things you cited might be problems but being dismissive about the whole idea that there may be any problems at all.
  - seiji 11y ago
    feel concerns about their social impact are simply not worth addressing. Welcome to VC land. The game is: collect everybody else's money and resources for yourself at any cost. It's even easier when laws and regulations are either toothless or only get applied across 8 to 16 year time periods, so you can flaunt them with no repercussions.
  - Kalium 11y ago
    After spending some time dealing with social impact concern activists, I've personally found that it's something of a bottomless pit. No concern is too small, every concern is hugely important, no concern is irrelevant, everything needs immediate addressing with all the money, every concern is your immediate direct personal problem, etc. So it's easier to not bother at all and catch flak than it is to do an "insufficient" amount of addressing concerns and get the same amount of flak from the same people.
- seiji 11y ago
  Yeah, saying airbnb is good for housing prices is like the people who think a universal income will help people live easier. hint: if you give everyone an extra $20k/year, housing will magically go up by $20k/year to match. with airbnb, if you can't afford your $3,000/month rent so you take in a share tenant, maybe now you can afford $5,000 month in rent. now housing prices know everybody can make $5k/month appear through tenant-izing, so all prices go up. now nobody can afford a place unless they take in co-habitating renters or are DINKs.
caminante 11y ago
Wow! ~2/3 of housing units in SF are rentals... "In 2014 (the most recent year with available data) there were about 387,000 housing units in SF. About 38% were owner-occupied, and the remaining 62% or 240,000 were rental units."
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- cheepin 11y ago
  I wonder why this is... My first guess is that hardly anyone that works in SF can afford to own housing, my second is that real estate speculators are buying up and renting a lot of San Francisco property.
  - mrkurt 11y ago
    Prop 13. Very low property taxes create tremendous incentives to hold on to real estate you own. People paying 2000 level property taxes on real estate with 2015 level values are making a killing on rent.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > Prop 13. Very low property taxes create tremendous incentives to hold on to real estate you own. Very low property taxes should be relatively neutral between holding and trading compared to higher property taxes. Prop. 13 encourages holding over trading because, while it does control property tax rate, it also constrains tax basis value increases to small annual increases while you hold property, but reassesses at full market value when you buy a new property. Which means, it increases the incentives to hold on to property once you've purchased it and decreases the incentives to purchase property, because the property is (net) higher value to the current owner than a new purchaser with otherwise similar profile, since the new purchaser would have to pay higher annual property taxes.
- lisa_henderson 11y ago
  That would be normal in any big city. For over a century the general rule was "Move to the suburbs if you want to buy a house. If you stay in a city then you rent." Things have only changed slowly, since the 60s, with the rise of condos, that has made ownership slightly more common in the cities.
Mz 11y ago
The data cited here makes the bill sound ridiculous, though it also leaves me wondering how many more units are being rented out on AirBnB with less frequency than these 340 units. Still, SF was pricey before AirBnB. It is ridiculous to try to blame local housing prices on this one company. It looks like AirBnB meeds to do some serious PR work. I think thier rapid rise is helping create the illusion that they impact the local housing market more than they actually do.
- mildbow 11y ago
  They are on it: Sam's post is part of the PR work. Why else would he say the fix to the housing problem is to put more housing on airbnb? A huge part of the problem is that people are renting places just to sub-lease them. Guess what that does? Yup. It increases pricing where you are paying the zero value-add middleman more. But hey, that can't possibly be part of the problem. /s I'll leave you with this: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair iirc
  - Mz 11y ago
    A) I did say up front that I wondered what the other numbers are that Sam is not putting in the article -- the other half of the picture. I have, in fact, read "How to lie with statistics" and I am well aware we are being intentionally given a certain framing from a party with a vested interest. B) However, I also lived in the bay area at one time, in Solano County, and was pursuing education with an eye towards going into some kind of urban planning related career. In fact, I founded and moderated a subforum for a time on the most successful urban planning forum around at that time. So I have some familiarity with how crazy prices were back then, before AirBnB was a gleam in anyone's eye. And also I have some familiarity with the various factors that go into forcing housing prices up. Saying AirBnB contributes to the problem is not crazy talk. But acting like they are the single most important factor meriting the passage of a bill intended to kill them off -- I want a tad more data than "But look at the crazy high local housing prices, man!" Because that falls far short of proving they are having that big of an effect. C) Yeah, I am very familiar with the saying. I am well aware of how hard it is to be both profitable and ethical. So far, I have managed to be pretty ethical. I am also dirt poor. So I am a little tired of hearing that anyone making money is clearly The Devil. The fact that this is part of a pro AirBnB PR campaign does not ipso facto make it inherently evil. The other side is also engaging in a PR campaign, and they also have vested interest that you can put a dollar amount on. Sometimes, people are actually doing work they actually fucking believe in. Those people still need to EAT and put a roof over their head. I am so goddamn sick of the idea that all the good people are dead martyrs and, if you still draw breathe, you need to feel guilty about every single fucking thing you do to try to keep body and soul together.
rubicon33 11y ago
Am I the only one who is furious about the cost of housing in SF, and the apparent lack of action by city government? It was my dream to live in SF since I was a young kid. Unfortunately, the average working professional cannot possibly afford to buy a home. Finding affordable rentals, is not an option either. How much longer will the professional, middle class populous, put up with their savings being drained by over inflated housing costs? Sadly, it seems far too many people see SF as a professional vacation place, and not a home. When I moved there for work, I also moved there to live. I wanted to do so in a sustainable way, which means saving money every month for retirement, and possibly buying a home. That's a pipe dream in SF, even with a nationally competitive salary. I cannot figure out whether there is blatant city corruption, or a complete lack-of-caring about the middle class. Or is it that there aren't enough developers trying to develop?
- mrkurt 11y ago
  No, you're not the only one. The policies that keep housing unaffordable are infuriating. Everything from prop 13 to local ordinances needs to change. It's worse than a lack of action ... it's really silly policies preventing any actual progress. Prop F is another silly policy.
- coldcode 11y ago
  The issue of housing in SF and its surrounding areas is the #1 reason I would never move back. Too much money chasing too few decent places to live == cost++++. How people who work at Starbucks survive is beyond me.
- deleted 11y ago
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- MBlume 11y ago
  Two organizations working to solve the problem: San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation (yes, the acronym is unfortunate): http://www.sfbarf.org/ http://www.sfbarf.org/ San Francisco Housing Action Coalition: http://www.sfhac.org/ http://www.sfhac.org/ Both will notify you when there are city meetings coming up where you could show up and inject some sanity into the proceedings.
geebee 11y ago
Unfortunately, some of the problem may be the language we use to advance our points. Here's a phrase that I think really does illustrate this: "Making it harder to share your home in San Francisco may make it impossible for some of these hosts to afford to stay in their homes and in this city." I really do want to discuss this reasonably, but to me, this is clearly a misuse of the word "share". There is a powerful emotion around "sharing", and to say that San Francisco is making it harder to "share" your home does have a different ring than saying it is making it harder to "rent out your home short term". I will certainly agree that there can be some ambiguity around the word "share". For instance, if two people both pay equally for a large sandwich, they might say they "shared" it rather than "split it". But when you list your room on a website for a certain price, and someone pays you for it, I don't think we're anywhere close to that ambiguous grey area. This is clearly a quid-pro-quo commercial transaction. They can be friendly transactions, people can get to know each other through these transactions. I'm not even saying it's an undesirable transaction (more or less everyone I know things that airbnb has its place, though there is great disagreement over how these rentals should be regulated). But I really don't think it's "sharing" by any reasonable definition of the term.
- seiji 11y ago
  clearly a misuse of the word "share" Yes, it's not "sharing" when a middleman takes a fixed percentage of all transactions and works for maximizing their revenue. The way you get your astrotuf terms to be less astro-turfy is to use them as often and in as many non-hostile situations as possible while still engendering them with a sense of "this is all for the best." http://mondato.com/blog/apptivism/ http://mondato.com/blog/apptivism/ and http://www.fastcompany.com/3022974/tech-forecast/is-peers-the-sharing-economys-future-or-just-a-great-silicon-valley-pr-stunt http://www.fastcompany.com/3022974/tech-forecast/is-peers-th... and http://www.wired.com/2014/12/sharing-economy-pr-stunt-turned-real-business/ http://www.wired.com/2014/12/sharing-economy-pr-stunt-turned... and google is your friend.
- alexqgb 11y ago
  This is putting it politely. Using the word "sharing" in this context is more than a misuse, it is a deliberate misrepresentation. As such, it represents an clear ethical failure. The fact that it's so public signals that you are dealing with a company that, on a very fundamental level, lacks an essential measure of courage, foresight, and integrity. It is—in simple terms—total bullshit. I say all this having just returned from a wonderful weekend that was made much better by Airbnb. It was a great service, I enjoyed it immensely, and it's sad to see that something so good could be ruined by leadership that threatens their brand by describing what they do with such overt dishonesty. The sharing economy is real, it is also cash free. That's by definition. If you were making money you are not "sharing" anything. You are conducting short term rentals, and that's a very different beast. If you insist on using language like "sharing" anyway, don't be surprised when people respond with a few choice words of their own. If those words sting, consider that proof that your own use—or misuse—of words really does matter. Related: when facing a political backlash, don't make your own position worse by giving your enemies even more ammunition.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
smacktoward 11y ago
> I recently reached out to Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, to learn more about this. I didn't reach out to any of the sponsors or advocates for Prop F, such as the political figures and organizations listed at http://www.sharebettersf.com/endorsements-propf-prop-f-airbnb-sf/ http://www.sharebettersf.com/endorsements-propf-prop-f-airbn..., of course. And while this post is full of stats that sound a lot like the kind of thing you'd get from Airbnb PR, nowhere in it am I going to inquire further and link to an opposing view, or really engage with opposing views in any material way. I'll just dismiss them by saying that the solution is for SF to allow more building, as if making that happen hasn't been the most contentious and complicated issue in the city literally for generations. One could also argue that I myself have helped drive up the high cost of housing in SF, both by running a program that requires the people it admits to move to SF in order to participate, and more generally by being part of a hype ecosystem that aims to convince impressionable young people that the only way to be successful in tech is to somehow jam yourself into this already bursting-at-the-seams city. I'm not really going to engage with that line of thought either, though.
hiou 11y ago
> The mean revenue per host was about $13,000 per year Otherwise known as the income that one would have previously obtained by renting a room to a permanent resident. The big difference with Airbnb is that the service is removing potential rooms and roommate situations from the market. I'm not going to say whether Airbnb is a good thing as honestly I'm leaning toward it being a net benefit. But to say it has not made finding a place to live permanently in places like SF and NYC more difficult for 1st time and early in life renters is difficult for me to agree with. All progress has a price. And often that price is worth the benefit. But let's not pretend there are not people out there that will be worse off in the short term.
- kelnos 11y ago
  Otherwise known as the income that one would have previously obtained by renting a room to a permanent resident. Not true. If I want to rent my place out for a week while I'm out of town, that would be income that could never be provided by a permanent resident. If I rent out a spare room to someone in town for the weekend, that's not a permanent resident. Maybe I don't want a permanent roommate, but just want some supplementary income here and there. You're certainly welcome to argue that I shouldn't be allowed to do that, but I'd disagree with that point of view, and that has nothing to do with whether or not a permanent resident could be served by the space.
flyinglizard 11y ago
> Unfortunately, a lot of other people have problems paying their rent or mortgage. 75% of Airbnb hosts in San Francisco say that their income from Airbnb helps them stay in their homes, and 60% of the Airbnb income goes to rent/mortgage and other housing expenses. Making it harder to share your home in San Francisco may make it impossible for some of these hosts to afford to stay in their homes and in this city. This is why Airbnb helps maintain untenable pricing levels. There's more money to go around and rates can keep going up with no bearing on vacancies. A rental management company with 20% vacancies wouldn't be so quick to raise prices; but, as long as the tenants magically come up with ways of catching up with increased prices, the prices will continue going up.
- sama 11y ago
  Do you have evidence of Airbnb driving up pricing levels? I'd honestly love to see it if so.
  - flyinglizard 11y ago
    Both of us look at the same evidence, just interpreted differently. If the stats you brought are correct, that means that there exist a considerable amount of tenants which couldn't afford their apartments if not for Airbnb. Ultimately, as rental markets balance their price against vacancies, market rates will go up.
  - ChicagoBoy11 11y ago
    Is it necessary? Isn't it impossible for AirBnB not to either drive up price levels or drive down availability? If you have a property, AirBnB immediately makes it more valuable, as it is now possible to generate a (reasonably) passive income from it - you can use it more efficiently than before. If you own a home or rent. What economics are you using in which it doesn't immediately follow that this would eventually reflect in the rental/purchase price of housing units? Ahh "rent control and regs" you say! Ok fine, then the market tries to reach its equilibrium on quantity and fewer units are available. AirBnB makes housing more valuable, and if there is any vestige of market forces in SF housing, its effect on price/supply is unambiguous. This DOES NOT, however, mean that AirBnB is a bad thing. I firmly believe it is an incredibly beneficial thing for everyone and it boggles my mind how people can be so against a service whose only function is to allow us to use our resources more efficiently. If this energy were instead spent on analyzing all the distortions that our wonderful political system has introduced in the system, we'd be much better off.
adrianmacneil 11y ago
> About 33,000 of these were vacant, generally as a side effect of rent control laws. (I don’t honestly know if rent control is a net good or bad thing—I assume more good than bad—but it certainly keeps units off the market.) I will never understand why most Americans generally favor a tough-luck, fire-at-will attitude for employment, but are in favor of rent control and making eviction extremely difficult. Coming from New Zealand, it's the other way around (it's extremely difficult to fire people, but there is no rent control and you can evict anyone with 90 days notice). Not saying one or the other is necessarily better (I personally think somewhere in the middle for both approaches would be best), but strict eviction laws and rent control always seemed very un-American to me.
- gohrt 11y ago
  Americans don't favor a tough-luck, fire-at-will attitude. Employers do (obviously) and employees don't. Same as with rentals.
  - kelnos 11y ago
    Eh, I wouldn't say that's universally true. As an employee, I've appreciated it when it's been (fairly) easy for the company to e.g. get rid of a peer that was dragging the team down. Several of the (smaller) companies I've worked for would not have survived if not for at-will employment. That's certainly helped me as an employee. Fortunately I haven't yet fallen on the "wrong" side of that equation; I imagine I might feel differently if I had... but then that's kinda irrelevant.
MaysonL 11y ago
The price of housing in SF has about doubled in the past 5 years, according to the post. What has happened to the price of hotel accommodations over the same period?
seiji 11y ago
Sam means well, but he does live 200% inside the internet hype machine bubble vortex: The whole magic of the sharing economy is better asset utilization and thus lower prices for everyone. Home sharing makes better utilization out of a fixed asset, and by more optimally filling space it means the same number of people can use less supply. "better utilization out of a fixed asset" is how we talk about factory machinery, not so much living space. Housing has physical implications and psychological cost. If we wanted optimal space filling, we'd put 10,000 bunk beds in a warehouse and tell people to deal with it. The proles can have their bunk bed warehouse while the billionaires can have estates in San Francisco. et voilà, optimal filling of space allocated by level of monetary expenduture.
- megaman22 11y ago
  > Housing has physical implications and psychological cost. If we wanted optimal space filling, we'd put 10,000 bunk beds in a warehouse and tell people to deal with it. The proles can have their bunk bed warehouse while the billionaires can have estates in San Francisco. et voilà, optimal filling of space allocated by level of monetary expenduture. You know, if there were such arrangements, I'm sure that there would be people who would jump on them. I'm a little surprised Google hasn't built company dormitories, since they've got people living in vans in the parking lot rather than paying $3000 a month for a studio apartment.
  - gohrt 11y ago
    Mountain View Citcy Council has consistently blocked Google's attempts to expand housing.
7Figures2Commas 11y ago
> In fact, Airbnb worked with economist Tom Davidoff of the University of British Columbia and found that Airbnb has affected the price of housing in SF by less than 1% either up or down. Airbnb commissioned this economist[1]. That doesn't necessarily mean his conclusions aren't credible, but commissioned research that supports the agenda of the company that commissioned it should be subject to a higher level of scrutiny. Is there any independent research Altman can cite? > Unfortunately, a lot of other people have problems paying their rent or mortgage. 75% of Airbnb hosts in San Francisco say that their income from Airbnb helps them stay in their homes, and 60% of the Airbnb income goes to rent/mortgage and other housing expenses. Making it harder to share your home in San Francisco may make it impossible for some of these hosts to afford to stay in their homes and in this city. What about their neighbors? If I'm paying good money to rent an apartment or I shell out big bucks for a new condo, why should I be forced to live in a hotel-like environment because a neighbor decides to violate the lease or association CC&Rs/bylaws? It doesn't matter how well-intentioned a host is. It's callous to have sympathy for hosts who are violating leases and condo association association CC&Rs/bylaws and no sympathy for the neighbors their selfish behavior negatively affects. [1] http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2015/03/30/airbnb-pushes-up-apartment-rents-slightly-study-says/?mod=WSJBlog http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2015/03/30/airbnb-pushes-u...
chermanowicz 11y ago
Your (and many) arguments about AirBnB revolve around housing, economics, etc. There are other arguments to be made about the quality of service & safety. Read some of the comments from another recent HN story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10291070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10291070 My own individual and anecdotal story: as an individual whose neighbor was AirBnB-ing his apt next door to mine, seeing dozens of unfamiliar faces (and, without going into detail, the behavior and antics of some of these occupants) did not make me feel safe. If anything, they should severely restricted under this guise, not "affordable housing". (Though I do agree that more housing would generally improve the situation for all).
callmeed 11y ago
"Unfortunately, a lot of other people have problems paying their rent or mortgage. 75% of Airbnb hosts in San Francisco say that their income from Airbnb helps them stay in their homes, and 60% of the Airbnb income goes to rent/mortgage and other housing expenses." C'mon Sam, you can do better than this. Just about everyone's income helps them pay their rent or mortgage regardless of where it comes from. And let's not pretend (a) parkinson's law doesn't exist or (b) people allocate specific income sources to specific expenses. If you make more, you spend more. If you have to pay your rent on the 1st, you write a check from your bank account–you don't pull cash out of your "AirBnB income" envelope. And, BTW, I've never rented an AirBnB in SF who wasn't (a) a young professional that could afford to live there or (b) someone 40+ who clearly had lived in SF a long time and bought prior to the spike in prices. These statistics and stance just don't compute for me. Look, I love AirBnB and I think it's a great service. But it's just that–the best short-term/vacation rental service. Nothing more. I'm a little tired of them (and their apologists) acting like they're some kind of cultural juggernaut. I always knew they'd have huge political forces to answer to (my friends and I would often wager who was more likely to succumb to governments: Uber or AirBnB). They're going to have enforce bed taxes. They're going to have to police municipal laws, HOA regulations, and more. And after it all shakes out, maybe this isn't as profitable of a business as people thought (for both AirBnB and hosts). Of course, like Uber, they'll likely take the lobbyist route to fight this (maybe they already have). But this is a case where a little humility would go a long way IMO. Would it be so hard for AirBnB or Sam to say "yeah, there's a housing issue and we might even be part of the cause. so let's work together to find a solution or compromise."?
- sama 11y ago
  I'm not arguing that people allocate specific income to specific expenses, just that people need and deserve more income. I think Airbnb is well aware of the housing issue and more than willing to work together on solutions.
  - kelnos 11y ago
    Careful... "deserve" is a bit of a loaded term there. I don't think I'd say that people "deserve more income". Having said that, I think Airbnb is a fine way for people to earn some money making use of their existing spare housing. I may dislike the PR/marketing bullshit that is the term "sharing economy", but I'm pretty disappointed that this thread seems to be full of Airbnb bashing. While they may not be the ideal solution to SF's housing woes, it's pretty clear that they're not part of the problem... or if they are, it seems they're at least doing more good than bad.
1024core 11y ago
The problem with Prop F is that it has some very dangerous side effects. Read this detailed analysis if you want to know more: https://medium.com/@emeyerson/prop-f-is-worse-than-you-think-17e395ca8761 https://medium.com/@emeyerson/prop-f-is-worse-than-you-think...
rootedbox 11y ago
A guy with a bias; is trying to tell me that lessoning supply in a super high demand region is only nominally effecting prices. my head is spinning..
- sama 11y ago
  Actually what I'm saying is that much more supply is the thing that will drive prices down. (And also that the number of units that are effectively full-time rented on Airbnb is just about 1% of the entire off-rental-market supply--let's get that 99% back!)
  - rootedbox 11y ago
    It's just your argument requires me to believe... "In the past year, only about 340 units in SF were rented on Airbnb more than 211 nights, which is what Airbnb has calculated as the break-even point compared to long-term rental." This just didn't sound right; and doing the quick math with the average one bedroom going for 3500.. To reach that 211 day number would mean that rentals on air bnb are going for about 200. But doing a search in SF for air bnb the average rental is 422.. Now some of these are multi room, and some are just a couch.. but I can't seem to find a single 1 bedroom non-share for under 260. This makes that 211 figure feel like its off. Which makes me feel that the 340 units is off. Can we see the calculations used? Also is there a big jump in those units at 210 days.. 200 or 182.. I mean as a land lord if you only have to work half the year and make only a little less revenue; plus the positive of less liabilities I could see my self wanting to air bnb over rent out my unit.
    - rootedbox 11y ago
      Also when you throw rent control into the math.. the calculation used is non-linear and way below 211; very very quickly; because of flat monthly revenue of rent control vs. monthly increase in revenue from an upward market. I would suggest you revisit the math.. or ask to see the data of who did the math for you.
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beatpanda 11y ago
Sam, your post doesnt at all address the problem policymakers are trying to solve, which is landlords evicting tenants and then converting those units to short term rentals. I agree that Prop F is a bad way to fix that bad behavior, but its also disingenuous to not talk about the problem. I don't think anybody can make a coherent argument that renting out a spare room is driving up prices. What does do that is landlords deciding they would rather be in the hotel business.
- geebee 11y ago
  Airbnb could very well drive up "spare room" prices. For instance, think about a room in a house, or may be a small in-law, that used to be rented out to a student or other longer term tenant. With airbnb, it may be possible to make up that income on fewer days, or to greatly exceed it as a full time rental. That would result in a unit being taken off the market as a permanent rental, which could certainly reduce supply and drive up prices.
jdp23 11y ago
> In the past year, only about 340 units in SF were rented on Airbnb more than 211 nights ... For the purposes of Prop F, statistics that seem more relevant are - how many units are rented more than 90 nights (the current law) [1] - how many units are rented more than 75 nights (as proposed by Prop F) When I see AirBnB supporters focusing on a number that doesn't seems as relevant, it feels like spin to me. > The median number of trips per unit was 5, and mean was 13.3. Interesting shift here to talking about trips per unit, rather than nights per unit. Back in 2012, the average stay was 5.5 days [2]. So does that mean that the average number of days per unit is 71.5 (5.5 * 13)? Also, according to the Chronicle [3], out of the 5,459 listings in 2015, "205 hosts have three or more listings. These super hosts account for 4.8 percent of all hosts, but control 993 properties — 18.2 percent of Airbnb’s local listings." I didn't see anything in Sam's post or the other anti-Prop F posts that discusses this. [1] http://www.cnet.com/news/san-francisco-board-of-supervisors-vote-on-airbnb/ http://www.cnet.com/news/san-francisco-board-of-supervisors-... [2] http://blog.airbnb.com/economic-impact-airbnb/ http://blog.airbnb.com/economic-impact-airbnb/ [3] http://www.sfchronicle.com/airbnb-impact-san-francisco-2015/#1 http://www.sfchronicle.com/airbnb-impact-san-francisco-2015/...
- chralieboy 11y ago
  The 211 number was given as what Airbnb has found to be what it takes to break even on the cost of a unit. Prop F, and others like it, are not trying to destroy Airbnb but stop people from purchasing housing and using it exclusively for short term rentals. That statistic is meant to say that only 340 units were rented out enough to match what could have been made via a lease. So if people are snatching up property to use just for Airbnb, they either aren't doing it a lot or aren't actually making a sound economic decision in all but 340 cases.
  - jdp23 11y ago
    I understand what the statistic is meant to say and it does that well. However, the city's already limited units to 90 days, so the 211ers are already handled -- if the city (with AirBnB's cooperation) enforces the law, that is. So I don't this point isn't particularly relevant to Prop F. Your mileage may vary, of course!
billiam 11y ago
My friend Matt just summed up your cynical formulation: "let's let Airbnb capture tax revenue so that people now in their homes can stay there a little longer" as a hand sandwich: I will sell you two pieces of bread and convince you it will taste good if you shove your hand and start eating.
jsprogrammer 11y ago
>In the past year, only about 340 units in SF were rented on Airbnb more than 211 nights, which is what Airbnb has calculated as the break-even point compared to long-term rental. Ok, there are a small number of units that are let or sub-let for 2/3 of the nights per year. That doesn't tell us much. I'd guess it would be near a full time job to keep your house let out 66% of the time. You wouldn't even be living there most of the time...how can you even really claim it to be yours? Any observation would show that the primary use is for AirBnB and their customers.
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physcab 11y ago
SF absolutely needs to build more housing. SF also needs to build taller (more skyscrapers). I have trouble believing AirBnB helps SF. Anecdotally, I know a few people who rent their places on AirBnB. All live in rent controlled units and effectively re-rent at market rates. One actually reduced hours at his job because income from AirBnB was so lucrative.
ilaksh 11y ago
http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage/ http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage/
hoprocker 11y ago
> About 33,000 of these were vacant, generally as a side effect of rent control laws. (I don’t honestly know if rent control is a net good or bad thing—I assume more good than bad—but it certainly keeps units off the market.) If I understand it correctly, one of the most common ways of evicting rent-controlled tenants is through owner move in. A side effect of this is that the owner has to "live there" for 3 years[0]. Given this, it seems like this statistic -- which, taken out of context, could be used to demonize rent-controlled units as wasting valuable housing stock -- is actually forced on the short-term rental market by profit-seeking landlords. [0] http://www.sfrb.org/index.aspx?page=965 http://www.sfrb.org/index.aspx?page=965
pcmaffey 11y ago
We have the same affordable housing problem here in Boulder, but on a much smaller scale than SF. It's been this way for over a decade... Unfortunately, fixing this housing dynamic is not so simple as increasing supply. Incremental increases in supply can never keep up with exponential demand. IMO the highest impact solution is to focus on transportation. But that's a topic for another discussion.
- shostack 11y ago
  How has it impacted Denver and the housing market there? Also, are there still "affordable" and safe parts of Boulder? My understanding is there is plenty of land that can be developed there. Would love to understand more about the housing market over there since you don't see it in the press nearly as much as the Bay Area.
  - pcmaffey 11y ago
    The greater effect has been on the suburban sprawl towns in between Boulder and Denver. Places like Louisville, Lafeyette, and Longmont have seen dramatic increases in both prices and quality of living, just in the past 5 years. These towns don't have the restrictions on development that Boulder does. So that's where the growth is going. Boulder continues to develop, but its pace can't keep up with demand at all (which is a good thing). It's a university town, so there's lots of rentals. But as for purchasing homes, there's really nothing "affordable" in Boulder proper (except perhaps compared to SF). Nor are there any "unsafe" parts of Boulder...
    - shostack 11y ago
      Interesting, thanks for the insight. Would you consider any of these sprawl areas as desirable at all? I'm trying to form a comparison to the Peninsula here in the Bay Area. How is safety in those other areas or Denver proper?
      - pcmaffey 11y ago
        Yeah, certainly, each has its own vibe. Sort of depends on what you're looking for. Colorado in general IMO is the coolest state in the nation (and I've lived in a few). The different areas represent magnitudes of that. They are all relatively safe, compared to East coast (where I'm from). Though I can't speak much for Denver as I don't need to go there much... Compared to the bay area, I used to live in the mountains of Santa Cruz, and now live in the mountains outside Boulder. Other than that, I don't have much experience with the differing areas of the SF peninsula. I'd recommend maybe starting your research with Louisville. It's blown up quite a bit recently, but is not quite at Boulder prices. If you have some specific questions about places from there, I'm happy to help. :)
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balls187 11y ago
> Unfortunately, a lot of other people have problems paying their rent or mortgage. 75% of Airbnb hosts in San Francisco say that their income from Airbnb helps them stay in their homes, and 60% of the Airbnb income goes to rent/mortgage and other housing expenses. Sources of this data? How many Airbnb people are putting out property they own vs those who are renting? It sounds like people are abusing it to stay in homes they could otherwise not afford, which is in itself adding to the housing problems in San Fran. Facilitating someone easily renting out their home, great. Allowing renters (and to a lesser extent home owners) subsidize their over extended living, bad.
dynofuz 11y ago
The real solution here is to change the laws protecting gigantic swaths of ugly "historic" districts like the mission. Unfortunately no politician or home owner wants to vote for this because it would dramatically devalue their homes if SF is finally allowed to build vertically. Then the tiny increase in housing costs due to Airbnb is no big deal.
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pyrophane 11y ago
New Yorker here. Short-term rentals and Airbnb in particular have had a noticeable negative impact on my downtown Manhattan neighborhood, although I'm not talking about rent. Everyone I know now has stories about "guests" who let anyone and everyone into the building, damage common areas, and make noise all night long, because really, what do they care? They are on vacation. They are here to party, and then they are gone forever. Apartments are designed for long-term residents. Why should we even consider allowing them to become budget hotels?
- Futurebot 11y ago
  Same here. Life-long native New Yorker, and I've never seen anything like it. My building has many AirBnB guests (my floor alone has 2 apartments that have different guests all the time.) Overall it doesn't impact my personal experience, since the neighborhood I live in is fairly noisy already (LES) and I don't really care unless they blast music. That all said, I think there are things that AirBnB can do to mitigate all this: standards enforcement division. A 24-hour service where you call them up, make your complaint, and they send over some big scary people to knock on the offender's door and ask them to "turn it down" or "pick up their garbage." Local government offices and the landlords themselves can't respond quickly enough (the former can't/won't send someone there at 2AM and it'd be pretty tough to get the latter to run over to your apartment for this sort of thing.) Basically AirBnB police. There are steps that can be taken that don't involve the local government or housing authority; I think AirBnB would be wise to take them.
ksherlock 11y ago
What some people call "the sharing economy" is not new. After all, what is the world's oldest profession if not "sharing" genitals. Sometimes with a middleman (or "pimp") taking his cut.
samstave 11y ago
>His flat is still on Airbnb and guess what, you can still "Instant Book" it! And I'd lay odds if you do, you'll be met at the door with some shabby excuse about why it isn't ready, but don't worry, he has another place for you not far away... WHY doesn't AirBnB have a fraud checking department where apartments like this are booked by agents of AirBnB to check in on just such things. If ALL AirBnB hosts KNEW that their next tenant COULD be an actual AirBnB rep -- then they wouldn't pull shit like this as often. And they should be able to get a "Verified good by AirBnB stays"
swagv 11y ago
Looking forward to the day where nobody can afford to live in SF unless they are also running a private hotel. That will be the new standard.
Xyik 11y ago
Why doesn't AirB&B work to reduce prices? Once it becomes less profitable for people to sublet their places for the sake of making it money, maybe people will see it as less of an evil. There are far too many hacker hotels in SF on AirB&B charging ridiculous rates, jamming up to 20 people into a single condo stacked with bunk beds.
abalone 11y ago
"only about 340 units in SF were rented on Airbnb more than 211 nights, which is what Airbnb has calculated as the break-even point compared to long-term rental" This is a crazy figure. That's saying hosts only charge 1.7X more per night than they would get from a roommate or tenant. That's ridiculous. A quick search on AirBnB shows rooms in my neighborhood going for $130-230. That's $4k-7K/month for a room fully booked. A quick search on Craigslist shows roommates wanted for $1200-2200. That's about a 3X markup, nearly double what Airbnb claims. That matches anecdotally what I hear a lot. People are increasingly preferring to AirBnB rooms instead of seeking roommates. They get more money and/or have more control over their space. No getting stuck with a crazy roommate, no overnight guests, you can have the place to yourself when you want, etc. This takes housing stock off the residential market and moves it to the more attractive tourist market. It's similar when you look at entire apartments too and the incentives to hold onto them and Airbnb them after you've really moved out, instead of letting new residents move in. So the 75 day limit that Prop F proposes is much better targeted at changing those economics than the current 120 day limit (which is not very enforceable anyway). That means you'd have to charge 5X to break even vs. a long term rental, which is too much. So it only makes sense to AirBnB rooms/units that really would never go onto the long term market anyway.

102 points by betadreamer 11y ago

> Airbnb has recently been attacked by San Francisco politicians for driving up the price of housing in the city. The high price of housing in San Francisco is caused by one (and only one) thing: NIMBYism. If supply is constrained and new high-rise developments are held back, there will always be higher prices and a distorted market. In reality, Airbnb doesn't have any measurable effect on the price of housing. (Still, it may help alleviate the situation slightly for some people living in the city.)

jacobolus 11y ago
There’s no strict need for high rises to satisfy Bay Area housing requirements. A modest proportion of 4–6 story low-rise apartments throughout the region would be entirely adequate. The problem is that the whole region is almost entirely zoned for single-family houses, and designed on the premise that everyone will commute by car.
stellar678 11y ago
If people take residences that would otherwise be available to long-term tenants and make them only available as short-term rentals, how is that not further constraining the supply of housing? I completely agree that the lack of new housing is a huge component of the high prices, but it is reductive to pretend that a particular pet issue is the only thing causing SF's housing shortage. It's a huge problem with myriad causes.
- bduerst 11y ago
  They address this in the article - less than 1 in 1000 residences are renting enough nights to break even on rent, implying that it's not a supply problem. Residents in SF and the peninsula are pretty quick to try to put the housing-problem blame [1] on anything tech related, but traditionally haven't wanted to increase the supply (high density housing). [1] http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2013/12/20/sf-and-oakland-activists-block-tech-buses-protest-displacement http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2013/12/20/sf-and-oakland-activ...
pbreit 11y ago
Except that lack of high density is one of the City's more appealing attributes. I don't like the simple call for more housing without any acknowledgement of the consequences.
- harryh 11y ago
  A CAP theorem for bay area housing policy: Charming, Affordable, Popular. Pick two. And, like Partition Tolerance, you can't drop Popular.
  - Futurebot 11y ago
    That's a great way to think about it. You can drop popular (eventually it gets to expensive that you reach a new equilibrium and people stop coming!), but it's hard to say at what point in the future that actually happens.
    - harryh 11y ago
      Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded.
- cgy1 11y ago
  I wouldn't exactly say San Francisco lacks high density. It is true that it is not nearly as dense as New York, but it is pretty densely populated compared to other U.S. cities. I think it is right though when people say that San Francisco can still increase its density via 4-6 story housing ala Paris without destroying its charm, and without becoming Vancouver or NYC.
  - pbreit 11y ago
    SOMA could probably go that route but I'm not sure it'd work elsewhere in the City.

webmasterraj 11y ago

This atrocious bill is yet another example of how the biggest unicorns are facing a kind of challenge they aren't built to solve: the political one. Until now, the rise and of tech companies has been determined by the double-edged blad of innovation. Someone makes something new that works better, gets big, and then someone else makes something newer and displaces them. Repeat cycle over and over. It's why in tech, we specialize in the art and business of innovation. What we don't know how to do is navigate murky political waters. We're really, really bad at it. Can you imagine another $10BN company even letting this kind of bill happen, that would kill their largest market if it passed? Airbnb isn't alone. Uber hired Obama's campaign manager because they realized they're biggest existential threat is a political one too. But see their ongoing lawsuits and outright bans in other countries – they haven't figured how to solve the political question either. Meanwhile, car companies with a lower market cap, like GM, could figure out how to get a bailout from the government – right after it bailed out another huge industry, banks. Those guys are just better at it. They have been for a long time. They get things like "don't optimize to something that solves problems. Optimize optics." Or that real deals get done behind closed doors, because you can control what happens there. That by the time it becomes a public debate, you've already lost the game. We in tech have a disgust for politics. Rightfully so. It's useless at best and harmful more often. It doesn't follow the clear, hard and fast rules that the rest of tech does. But if we don't hold our nose and figure out how to play the game, or better yet, reinvent it, we'll get outplayed on the biggest board of them all.

pbreit 11y ago
The main reason they aren't built to solve it is because they generally just believe that politicians are idiots.
JonFish85 11y ago
"a kind of challenge they aren't built to solve: the political one." And yet these are the battles that "technology" companies like Uber and Airbnb had to know were coming. At best, they live in a legal gray area. You can't start a company skirting existing laws and expect politicians to look the other way. And it's not just politicians that are responsible for this. As a condo owner, I specifically don't want Airbnb to be available in my association. There are reasons that there are laws against leasing and subleasing apartments, and it's not just to screw over startups. Uber and Airbnb grew to huge valuations on the back of pushing externalities onto others. Airbnb is taking their cut and looking the other way on things like taxes, zoning regulations and such until they are forced to deal with it. Uber pushes similar things off onto their "contractors". Now the political environment is catching up to them, and it's time to deal with the same legal environment that every other company has to deal with.

pbreit 11y ago

I have trouble feeling sorry for AirBnB with this. It has had numerous opportunities to put forth a reasonable view on how this should all work and AFAICT, has not. First, most (all?) HOAs and landlords forbid short term rentals, and for good reason (short term renting is generally disliked by neighbors). Second, city zoning policies are implemented for a reason, again, a good one. Residential neighborhoods generally prefer little or no commercial activity as well as inhabitants who care about the neighborhood. I have not seen AirBnB weigh in reasonably on these important issues. For that, it's possible it deserves Prop F.

JamisonM 11y ago
The thing that troubles me the most about AirBNB is the general feeling I get from them that they feel concerns about their social impact are simply not worth addressing. Not just disagreeing about the degree to which the things you cited might be problems but being dismissive about the whole idea that there may be any problems at all.
- seiji 11y ago
  feel concerns about their social impact are simply not worth addressing. Welcome to VC land. The game is: collect everybody else's money and resources for yourself at any cost. It's even easier when laws and regulations are either toothless or only get applied across 8 to 16 year time periods, so you can flaunt them with no repercussions.
- Kalium 11y ago
  After spending some time dealing with social impact concern activists, I've personally found that it's something of a bottomless pit. No concern is too small, every concern is hugely important, no concern is irrelevant, everything needs immediate addressing with all the money, every concern is your immediate direct personal problem, etc. So it's easier to not bother at all and catch flak than it is to do an "insufficient" amount of addressing concerns and get the same amount of flak from the same people.
seiji 11y ago
Yeah, saying airbnb is good for housing prices is like the people who think a universal income will help people live easier. hint: if you give everyone an extra $20k/year, housing will magically go up by $20k/year to match. with airbnb, if you can't afford your $3,000/month rent so you take in a share tenant, maybe now you can afford $5,000 month in rent. now housing prices know everybody can make $5k/month appear through tenant-izing, so all prices go up. now nobody can afford a place unless they take in co-habitating renters or are DINKs.

caminante 11y ago

Wow! ~2/3 of housing units in SF are rentals... "In 2014 (the most recent year with available data) there were about 387,000 housing units in SF. About 38% were owner-occupied, and the remaining 62% or 240,000 were rental units."

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cheepin 11y ago
I wonder why this is... My first guess is that hardly anyone that works in SF can afford to own housing, my second is that real estate speculators are buying up and renting a lot of San Francisco property.
- mrkurt 11y ago
  Prop 13. Very low property taxes create tremendous incentives to hold on to real estate you own. People paying 2000 level property taxes on real estate with 2015 level values are making a killing on rent.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > Prop 13. Very low property taxes create tremendous incentives to hold on to real estate you own. Very low property taxes should be relatively neutral between holding and trading compared to higher property taxes. Prop. 13 encourages holding over trading because, while it does control property tax rate, it also constrains tax basis value increases to small annual increases while you hold property, but reassesses at full market value when you buy a new property. Which means, it increases the incentives to hold on to property once you've purchased it and decreases the incentives to purchase property, because the property is (net) higher value to the current owner than a new purchaser with otherwise similar profile, since the new purchaser would have to pay higher annual property taxes.
lisa_henderson 11y ago
That would be normal in any big city. For over a century the general rule was "Move to the suburbs if you want to buy a house. If you stay in a city then you rent." Things have only changed slowly, since the 60s, with the rise of condos, that has made ownership slightly more common in the cities.

Mz 11y ago

The data cited here makes the bill sound ridiculous, though it also leaves me wondering how many more units are being rented out on AirBnB with less frequency than these 340 units. Still, SF was pricey before AirBnB. It is ridiculous to try to blame local housing prices on this one company. It looks like AirBnB meeds to do some serious PR work. I think thier rapid rise is helping create the illusion that they impact the local housing market more than they actually do.

mildbow 11y ago
They are on it: Sam's post is part of the PR work. Why else would he say the fix to the housing problem is to put more housing on airbnb? A huge part of the problem is that people are renting places just to sub-lease them. Guess what that does? Yup. It increases pricing where you are paying the zero value-add middleman more. But hey, that can't possibly be part of the problem. /s I'll leave you with this: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair iirc
- Mz 11y ago
  A) I did say up front that I wondered what the other numbers are that Sam is not putting in the article -- the other half of the picture. I have, in fact, read "How to lie with statistics" and I am well aware we are being intentionally given a certain framing from a party with a vested interest. B) However, I also lived in the bay area at one time, in Solano County, and was pursuing education with an eye towards going into some kind of urban planning related career. In fact, I founded and moderated a subforum for a time on the most successful urban planning forum around at that time. So I have some familiarity with how crazy prices were back then, before AirBnB was a gleam in anyone's eye. And also I have some familiarity with the various factors that go into forcing housing prices up. Saying AirBnB contributes to the problem is not crazy talk. But acting like they are the single most important factor meriting the passage of a bill intended to kill them off -- I want a tad more data than "But look at the crazy high local housing prices, man!" Because that falls far short of proving they are having that big of an effect. C) Yeah, I am very familiar with the saying. I am well aware of how hard it is to be both profitable and ethical. So far, I have managed to be pretty ethical. I am also dirt poor. So I am a little tired of hearing that anyone making money is clearly The Devil. The fact that this is part of a pro AirBnB PR campaign does not ipso facto make it inherently evil. The other side is also engaging in a PR campaign, and they also have vested interest that you can put a dollar amount on. Sometimes, people are actually doing work they actually fucking believe in. Those people still need to EAT and put a roof over their head. I am so goddamn sick of the idea that all the good people are dead martyrs and, if you still draw breathe, you need to feel guilty about every single fucking thing you do to try to keep body and soul together.

rubicon33 11y ago

Am I the only one who is furious about the cost of housing in SF, and the apparent lack of action by city government? It was my dream to live in SF since I was a young kid. Unfortunately, the average working professional cannot possibly afford to buy a home. Finding affordable rentals, is not an option either. How much longer will the professional, middle class populous, put up with their savings being drained by over inflated housing costs? Sadly, it seems far too many people see SF as a professional vacation place, and not a home. When I moved there for work, I also moved there to live. I wanted to do so in a sustainable way, which means saving money every month for retirement, and possibly buying a home. That's a pipe dream in SF, even with a nationally competitive salary. I cannot figure out whether there is blatant city corruption, or a complete lack-of-caring about the middle class. Or is it that there aren't enough developers trying to develop?

mrkurt 11y ago
No, you're not the only one. The policies that keep housing unaffordable are infuriating. Everything from prop 13 to local ordinances needs to change. It's worse than a lack of action ... it's really silly policies preventing any actual progress. Prop F is another silly policy.
coldcode 11y ago
The issue of housing in SF and its surrounding areas is the #1 reason I would never move back. Too much money chasing too few decent places to live == cost++++. How people who work at Starbucks survive is beyond me.
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MBlume 11y ago
Two organizations working to solve the problem: San Francisco Bay Area Renters Federation (yes, the acronym is unfortunate): http://www.sfbarf.org/ http://www.sfbarf.org/ San Francisco Housing Action Coalition: http://www.sfhac.org/ http://www.sfhac.org/ Both will notify you when there are city meetings coming up where you could show up and inject some sanity into the proceedings.

geebee 11y ago

Unfortunately, some of the problem may be the language we use to advance our points. Here's a phrase that I think really does illustrate this: "Making it harder to share your home in San Francisco may make it impossible for some of these hosts to afford to stay in their homes and in this city." I really do want to discuss this reasonably, but to me, this is clearly a misuse of the word "share". There is a powerful emotion around "sharing", and to say that San Francisco is making it harder to "share" your home does have a different ring than saying it is making it harder to "rent out your home short term". I will certainly agree that there can be some ambiguity around the word "share". For instance, if two people both pay equally for a large sandwich, they might say they "shared" it rather than "split it". But when you list your room on a website for a certain price, and someone pays you for it, I don't think we're anywhere close to that ambiguous grey area. This is clearly a quid-pro-quo commercial transaction. They can be friendly transactions, people can get to know each other through these transactions. I'm not even saying it's an undesirable transaction (more or less everyone I know things that airbnb has its place, though there is great disagreement over how these rentals should be regulated). But I really don't think it's "sharing" by any reasonable definition of the term.

seiji 11y ago
clearly a misuse of the word "share" Yes, it's not "sharing" when a middleman takes a fixed percentage of all transactions and works for maximizing their revenue. The way you get your astrotuf terms to be less astro-turfy is to use them as often and in as many non-hostile situations as possible while still engendering them with a sense of "this is all for the best." http://mondato.com/blog/apptivism/ http://mondato.com/blog/apptivism/ and http://www.fastcompany.com/3022974/tech-forecast/is-peers-the-sharing-economys-future-or-just-a-great-silicon-valley-pr-stunt http://www.fastcompany.com/3022974/tech-forecast/is-peers-th... and http://www.wired.com/2014/12/sharing-economy-pr-stunt-turned-real-business/ http://www.wired.com/2014/12/sharing-economy-pr-stunt-turned... and google is your friend.
alexqgb 11y ago
This is putting it politely. Using the word "sharing" in this context is more than a misuse, it is a deliberate misrepresentation. As such, it represents an clear ethical failure. The fact that it's so public signals that you are dealing with a company that, on a very fundamental level, lacks an essential measure of courage, foresight, and integrity. It is—in simple terms—total bullshit. I say all this having just returned from a wonderful weekend that was made much better by Airbnb. It was a great service, I enjoyed it immensely, and it's sad to see that something so good could be ruined by leadership that threatens their brand by describing what they do with such overt dishonesty. The sharing economy is real, it is also cash free. That's by definition. If you were making money you are not "sharing" anything. You are conducting short term rentals, and that's a very different beast. If you insist on using language like "sharing" anyway, don't be surprised when people respond with a few choice words of their own. If those words sting, consider that proof that your own use—or misuse—of words really does matter. Related: when facing a political backlash, don't make your own position worse by giving your enemies even more ammunition.

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smacktoward 11y ago

> I recently reached out to Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, to learn more about this. I didn't reach out to any of the sponsors or advocates for Prop F, such as the political figures and organizations listed at http://www.sharebettersf.com/endorsements-propf-prop-f-airbnb-sf/ http://www.sharebettersf.com/endorsements-propf-prop-f-airbn..., of course. And while this post is full of stats that sound a lot like the kind of thing you'd get from Airbnb PR, nowhere in it am I going to inquire further and link to an opposing view, or really engage with opposing views in any material way. I'll just dismiss them by saying that the solution is for SF to allow more building, as if making that happen hasn't been the most contentious and complicated issue in the city literally for generations. One could also argue that I myself have helped drive up the high cost of housing in SF, both by running a program that requires the people it admits to move to SF in order to participate, and more generally by being part of a hype ecosystem that aims to convince impressionable young people that the only way to be successful in tech is to somehow jam yourself into this already bursting-at-the-seams city. I'm not really going to engage with that line of thought either, though.

hiou 11y ago

> The mean revenue per host was about $13,000 per year Otherwise known as the income that one would have previously obtained by renting a room to a permanent resident. The big difference with Airbnb is that the service is removing potential rooms and roommate situations from the market. I'm not going to say whether Airbnb is a good thing as honestly I'm leaning toward it being a net benefit. But to say it has not made finding a place to live permanently in places like SF and NYC more difficult for 1st time and early in life renters is difficult for me to agree with. All progress has a price. And often that price is worth the benefit. But let's not pretend there are not people out there that will be worse off in the short term.

kelnos 11y ago
Otherwise known as the income that one would have previously obtained by renting a room to a permanent resident. Not true. If I want to rent my place out for a week while I'm out of town, that would be income that could never be provided by a permanent resident. If I rent out a spare room to someone in town for the weekend, that's not a permanent resident. Maybe I don't want a permanent roommate, but just want some supplementary income here and there. You're certainly welcome to argue that I shouldn't be allowed to do that, but I'd disagree with that point of view, and that has nothing to do with whether or not a permanent resident could be served by the space.

flyinglizard 11y ago

> Unfortunately, a lot of other people have problems paying their rent or mortgage. 75% of Airbnb hosts in San Francisco say that their income from Airbnb helps them stay in their homes, and 60% of the Airbnb income goes to rent/mortgage and other housing expenses. Making it harder to share your home in San Francisco may make it impossible for some of these hosts to afford to stay in their homes and in this city. This is why Airbnb helps maintain untenable pricing levels. There's more money to go around and rates can keep going up with no bearing on vacancies. A rental management company with 20% vacancies wouldn't be so quick to raise prices; but, as long as the tenants magically come up with ways of catching up with increased prices, the prices will continue going up.

sama 11y ago
Do you have evidence of Airbnb driving up pricing levels? I'd honestly love to see it if so.
- flyinglizard 11y ago
  Both of us look at the same evidence, just interpreted differently. If the stats you brought are correct, that means that there exist a considerable amount of tenants which couldn't afford their apartments if not for Airbnb. Ultimately, as rental markets balance their price against vacancies, market rates will go up.
- ChicagoBoy11 11y ago
  Is it necessary? Isn't it impossible for AirBnB not to either drive up price levels or drive down availability? If you have a property, AirBnB immediately makes it more valuable, as it is now possible to generate a (reasonably) passive income from it - you can use it more efficiently than before. If you own a home or rent. What economics are you using in which it doesn't immediately follow that this would eventually reflect in the rental/purchase price of housing units? Ahh "rent control and regs" you say! Ok fine, then the market tries to reach its equilibrium on quantity and fewer units are available. AirBnB makes housing more valuable, and if there is any vestige of market forces in SF housing, its effect on price/supply is unambiguous. This DOES NOT, however, mean that AirBnB is a bad thing. I firmly believe it is an incredibly beneficial thing for everyone and it boggles my mind how people can be so against a service whose only function is to allow us to use our resources more efficiently. If this energy were instead spent on analyzing all the distortions that our wonderful political system has introduced in the system, we'd be much better off.

adrianmacneil 11y ago

> About 33,000 of these were vacant, generally as a side effect of rent control laws. (I don’t honestly know if rent control is a net good or bad thing—I assume more good than bad—but it certainly keeps units off the market.) I will never understand why most Americans generally favor a tough-luck, fire-at-will attitude for employment, but are in favor of rent control and making eviction extremely difficult. Coming from New Zealand, it's the other way around (it's extremely difficult to fire people, but there is no rent control and you can evict anyone with 90 days notice). Not saying one or the other is necessarily better (I personally think somewhere in the middle for both approaches would be best), but strict eviction laws and rent control always seemed very un-American to me.

gohrt 11y ago
Americans don't favor a tough-luck, fire-at-will attitude. Employers do (obviously) and employees don't. Same as with rentals.
- kelnos 11y ago
  Eh, I wouldn't say that's universally true. As an employee, I've appreciated it when it's been (fairly) easy for the company to e.g. get rid of a peer that was dragging the team down. Several of the (smaller) companies I've worked for would not have survived if not for at-will employment. That's certainly helped me as an employee. Fortunately I haven't yet fallen on the "wrong" side of that equation; I imagine I might feel differently if I had... but then that's kinda irrelevant.

MaysonL 11y ago

The price of housing in SF has about doubled in the past 5 years, according to the post. What has happened to the price of hotel accommodations over the same period?

seiji 11y ago

Sam means well, but he does live 200% inside the internet hype machine bubble vortex: The whole magic of the sharing economy is better asset utilization and thus lower prices for everyone. Home sharing makes better utilization out of a fixed asset, and by more optimally filling space it means the same number of people can use less supply. "better utilization out of a fixed asset" is how we talk about factory machinery, not so much living space. Housing has physical implications and psychological cost. If we wanted optimal space filling, we'd put 10,000 bunk beds in a warehouse and tell people to deal with it. The proles can have their bunk bed warehouse while the billionaires can have estates in San Francisco. et voilà, optimal filling of space allocated by level of monetary expenduture.

megaman22 11y ago
> Housing has physical implications and psychological cost. If we wanted optimal space filling, we'd put 10,000 bunk beds in a warehouse and tell people to deal with it. The proles can have their bunk bed warehouse while the billionaires can have estates in San Francisco. et voilà, optimal filling of space allocated by level of monetary expenduture. You know, if there were such arrangements, I'm sure that there would be people who would jump on them. I'm a little surprised Google hasn't built company dormitories, since they've got people living in vans in the parking lot rather than paying $3000 a month for a studio apartment.
- gohrt 11y ago
  Mountain View Citcy Council has consistently blocked Google's attempts to expand housing.

7Figures2Commas 11y ago

> In fact, Airbnb worked with economist Tom Davidoff of the University of British Columbia and found that Airbnb has affected the price of housing in SF by less than 1% either up or down. Airbnb commissioned this economist[1]. That doesn't necessarily mean his conclusions aren't credible, but commissioned research that supports the agenda of the company that commissioned it should be subject to a higher level of scrutiny. Is there any independent research Altman can cite? > Unfortunately, a lot of other people have problems paying their rent or mortgage. 75% of Airbnb hosts in San Francisco say that their income from Airbnb helps them stay in their homes, and 60% of the Airbnb income goes to rent/mortgage and other housing expenses. Making it harder to share your home in San Francisco may make it impossible for some of these hosts to afford to stay in their homes and in this city. What about their neighbors? If I'm paying good money to rent an apartment or I shell out big bucks for a new condo, why should I be forced to live in a hotel-like environment because a neighbor decides to violate the lease or association CC&Rs/bylaws? It doesn't matter how well-intentioned a host is. It's callous to have sympathy for hosts who are violating leases and condo association association CC&Rs/bylaws and no sympathy for the neighbors their selfish behavior negatively affects. [1] http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2015/03/30/airbnb-pushes-up-apartment-rents-slightly-study-says/?mod=WSJBlog http://blogs.wsj.com/developments/2015/03/30/airbnb-pushes-u...

chermanowicz 11y ago

Your (and many) arguments about AirBnB revolve around housing, economics, etc. There are other arguments to be made about the quality of service & safety. Read some of the comments from another recent HN story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10291070 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10291070 My own individual and anecdotal story: as an individual whose neighbor was AirBnB-ing his apt next door to mine, seeing dozens of unfamiliar faces (and, without going into detail, the behavior and antics of some of these occupants) did not make me feel safe. If anything, they should severely restricted under this guise, not "affordable housing". (Though I do agree that more housing would generally improve the situation for all).

callmeed 11y ago

"Unfortunately, a lot of other people have problems paying their rent or mortgage. 75% of Airbnb hosts in San Francisco say that their income from Airbnb helps them stay in their homes, and 60% of the Airbnb income goes to rent/mortgage and other housing expenses." C'mon Sam, you can do better than this. Just about everyone's income helps them pay their rent or mortgage regardless of where it comes from. And let's not pretend (a) parkinson's law doesn't exist or (b) people allocate specific income sources to specific expenses. If you make more, you spend more. If you have to pay your rent on the 1st, you write a check from your bank account–you don't pull cash out of your "AirBnB income" envelope. And, BTW, I've never rented an AirBnB in SF who wasn't (a) a young professional that could afford to live there or (b) someone 40+ who clearly had lived in SF a long time and bought prior to the spike in prices. These statistics and stance just don't compute for me. Look, I love AirBnB and I think it's a great service. But it's just that–the best short-term/vacation rental service. Nothing more. I'm a little tired of them (and their apologists) acting like they're some kind of cultural juggernaut. I always knew they'd have huge political forces to answer to (my friends and I would often wager who was more likely to succumb to governments: Uber or AirBnB). They're going to have enforce bed taxes. They're going to have to police municipal laws, HOA regulations, and more. And after it all shakes out, maybe this isn't as profitable of a business as people thought (for both AirBnB and hosts). Of course, like Uber, they'll likely take the lobbyist route to fight this (maybe they already have). But this is a case where a little humility would go a long way IMO. Would it be so hard for AirBnB or Sam to say "yeah, there's a housing issue and we might even be part of the cause. so let's work together to find a solution or compromise."?

sama 11y ago
I'm not arguing that people allocate specific income to specific expenses, just that people need and deserve more income. I think Airbnb is well aware of the housing issue and more than willing to work together on solutions.
- kelnos 11y ago
  Careful... "deserve" is a bit of a loaded term there. I don't think I'd say that people "deserve more income". Having said that, I think Airbnb is a fine way for people to earn some money making use of their existing spare housing. I may dislike the PR/marketing bullshit that is the term "sharing economy", but I'm pretty disappointed that this thread seems to be full of Airbnb bashing. While they may not be the ideal solution to SF's housing woes, it's pretty clear that they're not part of the problem... or if they are, it seems they're at least doing more good than bad.

1024core 11y ago

The problem with Prop F is that it has some very dangerous side effects. Read this detailed analysis if you want to know more: https://medium.com/@emeyerson/prop-f-is-worse-than-you-think-17e395ca8761 https://medium.com/@emeyerson/prop-f-is-worse-than-you-think...

rootedbox 11y ago

A guy with a bias; is trying to tell me that lessoning supply in a super high demand region is only nominally effecting prices. my head is spinning..

sama 11y ago
Actually what I'm saying is that much more supply is the thing that will drive prices down. (And also that the number of units that are effectively full-time rented on Airbnb is just about 1% of the entire off-rental-market supply--let's get that 99% back!)
- rootedbox 11y ago
  It's just your argument requires me to believe... "In the past year, only about 340 units in SF were rented on Airbnb more than 211 nights, which is what Airbnb has calculated as the break-even point compared to long-term rental." This just didn't sound right; and doing the quick math with the average one bedroom going for 3500.. To reach that 211 day number would mean that rentals on air bnb are going for about 200. But doing a search in SF for air bnb the average rental is 422.. Now some of these are multi room, and some are just a couch.. but I can't seem to find a single 1 bedroom non-share for under 260. This makes that 211 figure feel like its off. Which makes me feel that the 340 units is off. Can we see the calculations used? Also is there a big jump in those units at 210 days.. 200 or 182.. I mean as a land lord if you only have to work half the year and make only a little less revenue; plus the positive of less liabilities I could see my self wanting to air bnb over rent out my unit.
  - rootedbox 11y ago
    Also when you throw rent control into the math.. the calculation used is non-linear and way below 211; very very quickly; because of flat monthly revenue of rent control vs. monthly increase in revenue from an upward market. I would suggest you revisit the math.. or ask to see the data of who did the math for you.
- deleted 11y ago
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beatpanda 11y ago

Sam, your post doesnt at all address the problem policymakers are trying to solve, which is landlords evicting tenants and then converting those units to short term rentals. I agree that Prop F is a bad way to fix that bad behavior, but its also disingenuous to not talk about the problem. I don't think anybody can make a coherent argument that renting out a spare room is driving up prices. What does do that is landlords deciding they would rather be in the hotel business.

geebee 11y ago
Airbnb could very well drive up "spare room" prices. For instance, think about a room in a house, or may be a small in-law, that used to be rented out to a student or other longer term tenant. With airbnb, it may be possible to make up that income on fewer days, or to greatly exceed it as a full time rental. That would result in a unit being taken off the market as a permanent rental, which could certainly reduce supply and drive up prices.

jdp23 11y ago

> In the past year, only about 340 units in SF were rented on Airbnb more than 211 nights ... For the purposes of Prop F, statistics that seem more relevant are - how many units are rented more than 90 nights (the current law) [1] - how many units are rented more than 75 nights (as proposed by Prop F) When I see AirBnB supporters focusing on a number that doesn't seems as relevant, it feels like spin to me. > The median number of trips per unit was 5, and mean was 13.3. Interesting shift here to talking about trips per unit, rather than nights per unit. Back in 2012, the average stay was 5.5 days [2]. So does that mean that the average number of days per unit is 71.5 (5.5 * 13)? Also, according to the Chronicle [3], out of the 5,459 listings in 2015, "205 hosts have three or more listings. These super hosts account for 4.8 percent of all hosts, but control 993 properties — 18.2 percent of Airbnb’s local listings." I didn't see anything in Sam's post or the other anti-Prop F posts that discusses this. [1] http://www.cnet.com/news/san-francisco-board-of-supervisors-vote-on-airbnb/ http://www.cnet.com/news/san-francisco-board-of-supervisors-... [2] http://blog.airbnb.com/economic-impact-airbnb/ http://blog.airbnb.com/economic-impact-airbnb/ [3] http://www.sfchronicle.com/airbnb-impact-san-francisco-2015/#1 http://www.sfchronicle.com/airbnb-impact-san-francisco-2015/...

chralieboy 11y ago
The 211 number was given as what Airbnb has found to be what it takes to break even on the cost of a unit. Prop F, and others like it, are not trying to destroy Airbnb but stop people from purchasing housing and using it exclusively for short term rentals. That statistic is meant to say that only 340 units were rented out enough to match what could have been made via a lease. So if people are snatching up property to use just for Airbnb, they either aren't doing it a lot or aren't actually making a sound economic decision in all but 340 cases.
- jdp23 11y ago
  I understand what the statistic is meant to say and it does that well. However, the city's already limited units to 90 days, so the 211ers are already handled -- if the city (with AirBnB's cooperation) enforces the law, that is. So I don't this point isn't particularly relevant to Prop F. Your mileage may vary, of course!

billiam 11y ago

My friend Matt just summed up your cynical formulation: "let's let Airbnb capture tax revenue so that people now in their homes can stay there a little longer" as a hand sandwich: I will sell you two pieces of bread and convince you it will taste good if you shove your hand and start eating.

jsprogrammer 11y ago

>In the past year, only about 340 units in SF were rented on Airbnb more than 211 nights, which is what Airbnb has calculated as the break-even point compared to long-term rental. Ok, there are a small number of units that are let or sub-let for 2/3 of the nights per year. That doesn't tell us much. I'd guess it would be near a full time job to keep your house let out 66% of the time. You wouldn't even be living there most of the time...how can you even really claim it to be yours? Any observation would show that the primary use is for AirBnB and their customers.

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physcab 11y ago

SF absolutely needs to build more housing. SF also needs to build taller (more skyscrapers). I have trouble believing AirBnB helps SF. Anecdotally, I know a few people who rent their places on AirBnB. All live in rent controlled units and effectively re-rent at market rates. One actually reduced hours at his job because income from AirBnB was so lucrative.

ilaksh 11y ago

http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage/ http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage/

hoprocker 11y ago

> About 33,000 of these were vacant, generally as a side effect of rent control laws. (I don’t honestly know if rent control is a net good or bad thing—I assume more good than bad—but it certainly keeps units off the market.) If I understand it correctly, one of the most common ways of evicting rent-controlled tenants is through owner move in. A side effect of this is that the owner has to "live there" for 3 years[0]. Given this, it seems like this statistic -- which, taken out of context, could be used to demonize rent-controlled units as wasting valuable housing stock -- is actually forced on the short-term rental market by profit-seeking landlords. [0] http://www.sfrb.org/index.aspx?page=965 http://www.sfrb.org/index.aspx?page=965

pcmaffey 11y ago

We have the same affordable housing problem here in Boulder, but on a much smaller scale than SF. It's been this way for over a decade... Unfortunately, fixing this housing dynamic is not so simple as increasing supply. Incremental increases in supply can never keep up with exponential demand. IMO the highest impact solution is to focus on transportation. But that's a topic for another discussion.

shostack 11y ago
How has it impacted Denver and the housing market there? Also, are there still "affordable" and safe parts of Boulder? My understanding is there is plenty of land that can be developed there. Would love to understand more about the housing market over there since you don't see it in the press nearly as much as the Bay Area.
- pcmaffey 11y ago
  The greater effect has been on the suburban sprawl towns in between Boulder and Denver. Places like Louisville, Lafeyette, and Longmont have seen dramatic increases in both prices and quality of living, just in the past 5 years. These towns don't have the restrictions on development that Boulder does. So that's where the growth is going. Boulder continues to develop, but its pace can't keep up with demand at all (which is a good thing). It's a university town, so there's lots of rentals. But as for purchasing homes, there's really nothing "affordable" in Boulder proper (except perhaps compared to SF). Nor are there any "unsafe" parts of Boulder...
  - shostack 11y ago
    Interesting, thanks for the insight. Would you consider any of these sprawl areas as desirable at all? I'm trying to form a comparison to the Peninsula here in the Bay Area. How is safety in those other areas or Denver proper?
    - pcmaffey 11y ago
      Yeah, certainly, each has its own vibe. Sort of depends on what you're looking for. Colorado in general IMO is the coolest state in the nation (and I've lived in a few). The different areas represent magnitudes of that. They are all relatively safe, compared to East coast (where I'm from). Though I can't speak much for Denver as I don't need to go there much... Compared to the bay area, I used to live in the mountains of Santa Cruz, and now live in the mountains outside Boulder. Other than that, I don't have much experience with the differing areas of the SF peninsula. I'd recommend maybe starting your research with Louisville. It's blown up quite a bit recently, but is not quite at Boulder prices. If you have some specific questions about places from there, I'm happy to help. :)

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balls187 11y ago

> Unfortunately, a lot of other people have problems paying their rent or mortgage. 75% of Airbnb hosts in San Francisco say that their income from Airbnb helps them stay in their homes, and 60% of the Airbnb income goes to rent/mortgage and other housing expenses. Sources of this data? How many Airbnb people are putting out property they own vs those who are renting? It sounds like people are abusing it to stay in homes they could otherwise not afford, which is in itself adding to the housing problems in San Fran. Facilitating someone easily renting out their home, great. Allowing renters (and to a lesser extent home owners) subsidize their over extended living, bad.

dynofuz 11y ago

The real solution here is to change the laws protecting gigantic swaths of ugly "historic" districts like the mission. Unfortunately no politician or home owner wants to vote for this because it would dramatically devalue their homes if SF is finally allowed to build vertically. Then the tiny increase in housing costs due to Airbnb is no big deal.

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pyrophane 11y ago

New Yorker here. Short-term rentals and Airbnb in particular have had a noticeable negative impact on my downtown Manhattan neighborhood, although I'm not talking about rent. Everyone I know now has stories about "guests" who let anyone and everyone into the building, damage common areas, and make noise all night long, because really, what do they care? They are on vacation. They are here to party, and then they are gone forever. Apartments are designed for long-term residents. Why should we even consider allowing them to become budget hotels?

Futurebot 11y ago
Same here. Life-long native New Yorker, and I've never seen anything like it. My building has many AirBnB guests (my floor alone has 2 apartments that have different guests all the time.) Overall it doesn't impact my personal experience, since the neighborhood I live in is fairly noisy already (LES) and I don't really care unless they blast music. That all said, I think there are things that AirBnB can do to mitigate all this: standards enforcement division. A 24-hour service where you call them up, make your complaint, and they send over some big scary people to knock on the offender's door and ask them to "turn it down" or "pick up their garbage." Local government offices and the landlords themselves can't respond quickly enough (the former can't/won't send someone there at 2AM and it'd be pretty tough to get the latter to run over to your apartment for this sort of thing.) Basically AirBnB police. There are steps that can be taken that don't involve the local government or housing authority; I think AirBnB would be wise to take them.

ksherlock 11y ago

What some people call "the sharing economy" is not new. After all, what is the world's oldest profession if not "sharing" genitals. Sometimes with a middleman (or "pimp") taking his cut.

samstave 11y ago

>His flat is still on Airbnb and guess what, you can still "Instant Book" it! And I'd lay odds if you do, you'll be met at the door with some shabby excuse about why it isn't ready, but don't worry, he has another place for you not far away... WHY doesn't AirBnB have a fraud checking department where apartments like this are booked by agents of AirBnB to check in on just such things. If ALL AirBnB hosts KNEW that their next tenant COULD be an actual AirBnB rep -- then they wouldn't pull shit like this as often. And they should be able to get a "Verified good by AirBnB stays"

swagv 11y ago

Looking forward to the day where nobody can afford to live in SF unless they are also running a private hotel. That will be the new standard.

Xyik 11y ago

Why doesn't AirB&B work to reduce prices? Once it becomes less profitable for people to sublet their places for the sake of making it money, maybe people will see it as less of an evil. There are far too many hacker hotels in SF on AirB&B charging ridiculous rates, jamming up to 20 people into a single condo stacked with bunk beds.

abalone 11y ago

"only about 340 units in SF were rented on Airbnb more than 211 nights, which is what Airbnb has calculated as the break-even point compared to long-term rental" This is a crazy figure. That's saying hosts only charge 1.7X more per night than they would get from a roommate or tenant. That's ridiculous. A quick search on AirBnB shows rooms in my neighborhood going for $130-230. That's $4k-7K/month for a room fully booked. A quick search on Craigslist shows roommates wanted for $1200-2200. That's about a 3X markup, nearly double what Airbnb claims. That matches anecdotally what I hear a lot. People are increasingly preferring to AirBnB rooms instead of seeking roommates. They get more money and/or have more control over their space. No getting stuck with a crazy roommate, no overnight guests, you can have the place to yourself when you want, etc. This takes housing stock off the residential market and moves it to the more attractive tourist market. It's similar when you look at entire apartments too and the incentives to hold onto them and Airbnb them after you've really moved out, instead of letting new residents move in. So the 75 day limit that Prop F proposes is much better targeted at changing those economics than the current 120 day limit (which is not very enforceable anyway). That means you'd have to charge 5X to break even vs. a long term rental, which is too much. So it only makes sense to AirBnB rooms/units that really would never go onto the long term market anyway.