Not sure how your fifth paragraph follows. First, it is at least somewhat avoidable. Banning management companies would be one solution. Only allowing users to

Not sure how your fifth paragraph follows. First, it is at least somewhat avoidable. Banning management companies would be one solution. Only allowing users to post their homes for a fraction of a rolling 12 month period would be another. Only allowing users to have 1 or 2 simultaneous postings with different street addresses would be another. These are the things Airbnb should do and doing so honestly probably would have prevented them from getting totally screwed by NYS/NYC legislatures, which leads to my second point. Of course it harms the normal rental market. What else could it possibly do besides that? Not only that, but the backlash against the system harms those of us who do wish to actually legitimately rent out our homes while we're not in them. Airbnb should've been more proactive about this from the get go, but I don't think it's necessarily too late. With this news, though, it seems they don't even think this is a problem despite getting them outlawed in the largest city in the US. It's really a bummer, but it's not unavoidable and not unfixable.