9 ms·

The legislation allows you to rent a spare room in your house. What it disallows is having an apartment you rent out in full on AirBnB, either doing that exclus

• Spooky23 10y ago
  The tone of Airbnb's response to this law really reveal their true colors.
  • kafkaesq 10y ago
    Yep. As if we were dumb enough to believe any of the following: “In typical fashion, Albany back-room dealing rewarded a special interest — the price-gouging hotel industry — and ignored the voices of tens of thousands of New Yorkers,” Airbnb spokesman Peter Schottenfels said in a statement. “A majority of New Yorkers have embraced home sharing, and we will continue to fight for a smart policy solution that works for the the people, not the powerful."
  • tragic 10y ago
    What, that their true colors are bog standard corporate PR suggesting without actually stating that their own interests are coterminous with all ordinary persons, but none of the ill defined elite? Just fancy that.
• hueving 10y ago
  >Put in that context, the legislation seems pretty well-aimed at its goal of creating more affordable housing in the city. At the cost of higher temporary housing costs for people that want to visit. Addressing supply by ripping supply from a different market is a bandaid. This benefits hotels much more than low income people.
  • jacalata 10y ago
    This supply was explicitly built for longterm residents - it's written into the zoning laws. If you want to remove the concept of residential zoning, then start building that political platform. Will be interesting to see whether you choose to make residential housing conform to hotel firecodes, etc, in that platform!
    • mjevans 10y ago
      I believe the parent poster was expressing a desire to fix the problem by enforcing //more supply// rather than by artificially limiting how existing supply can service different types of demand.
      • untog 10y ago
        But supply is not unlimited. If you are adding more supply of short term visitor rentals, you are taking from long term resident rentals.
        • mjevans 10y ago
          You are viewing this as a zero-sum game. I am viewing it as the city not encouraging economic development and designing a sustainable balance of work, living, and entertainment areas.
          • untog 10y ago
            > You are viewing this as a zero-sum game Because it is. There is precious little new space for residential buildings in New York. How does people renting out apartments on AirBnB create a "sustainable balance of work, living, and entertainment areas"?
            • bjterry 10y ago
              The airspace above New York which you could encapsulate with more walls is worth quite literally hundreds of billions of dollars.
• marcoperaza 10y ago
  >The legislation allows you to rent a spare room in your house. What it disallows is having an apartment you rent out in full on AirBnB, either doing that exclusively as an income source or yourself staying elsewhere whenever you are renting it out. [...] If you are renting an entire apartment out on AirBnB full time, you are deciding to run an unregulated hotel rather than rent a traditional long-term lease. As you acknowledge, there are things in between renting out an apartment full-time, and renting out a spare bedroom. E.g. renting your apartment for a weekend when you travel. This makes it possible for many people to afford to live in NYC.
  • jacalata 10y ago
    That's covered by their comment: >either doing that exclusively as an income source or yourself staying elsewhere whenever you are renting it out.
    • marcoperaza 10y ago
      I've clarified my comment.
  • mamurphy 10y ago
    >As you acknowledge, there are things in between renting out an apartment full-time, and renting out a spare bedroom. E.g. renting your apartment for a weekend when you travel. Sure, but how does a lawmaker regulate and enforce "it's OK to rent out a spare room, or rent out an apartment while you travel, but it's not okay to only use the apartment as a hotel?" What if someone travels 90% of the time - that's darn close to just running it as a hotel. Should there be some numerical limit? 50% of nights? How does the city check and enforce that? What if someone has a significant other or family member they can always stay with and are always willing to rent their apartment if someone is willing to rent it from them? Is that OK? A strict "you must be present in the abode and renting a spare room" rule is over-broad, but trying to make and enforce a more narrowly tailored rule seems very difficult in implementation. With this rule, you can just check each ad - an ad will be allowed or disallowed on its face. If you allow for occasional renting-while-traveling, you need rules for how much "traveling" is OK and you need a more complex system to monitor whether an ad is legal. Is it a legal occasionally-rented-whiled-"traveling" space or illegal because it is a too-often-occasionally-rented space?
• JDiculous 10y ago
  The clickbait here is absurd.
• SilasX 10y ago
  So then what's the problem? It just limits AirBnB to their ostensible use case, right?
  • brianwawok 10y ago
    It raises rent price.
    • jacalata 10y ago
      How?
      • brianwawok 10y ago
        Supply and demand http://www.investopedia.com/university/economics/economics3.asp http://www.investopedia.com/university/economics/economics3.... Say there would normally be 1 million apartments for rent. Now AirBNB comes. Some get used as hotels. Now you have 900k apartments for rent, and 100k hotels. The price of the apartments go up. In fact a very small change in supply could lead to a fairly massive price hike.
        • jacalata 10y ago
          I thought you were saying that this bill would raise rents, but it sounds like you actually meant that Airbnb-ing an apartment raises rents, is that right?
          • brianwawok 10y ago
            Airbnb raises rents, hence why many people do not want it around their backyard.
        • arebop 10y ago
          Isn't it more like 995k apartments for rent, and 5k hotels? The difference between 10% and 0.5% matters when you're arguing that AirBnB significantly reduces the supply of housing in NYC.
• dopamean 10y ago
  I'm renting an apartment in Brooklyn next week from someone who is going to be out of town for a while. Basically our trips overlap and so I get the whole apartment. It would seem that since the host wont be present my arrangement is technically against the law. It seems to me that it shouldn't be.
  • fennecfoxen 10y ago
    When I first moved to New York, I spent weeks living in an AirBnB place before finding a real apartment. Same thing when I moved to London. I could have found a place via other means (Craigslist, or pay tons of money to some real estate agent) but this was much better. This will inhibit mobility and hurt newcomers to the city, especially in the young technology/creative classes. But what sort of politician would actually care, as long as they're not politically active in our jurisdiction yet, am I right?
    • folksinger 10y ago
      As someone who happened to be a young adult before the advent of iPhones and AirBnB I can promise you that it was indeed possible for people to do things without technologies available since 2010. I successfully moved to a number of different cities with neither money nor job prospects. It involved using the ancient human rituals of "using a telephone", "riding the bus", "speaking with other persons" and "walking around". In the process I had to deal with some minor inconveniences and sometimes things didn't go exactly the way I wanted. The horror!
      • aseipp 10y ago
        Yes, but these days, that kind of stuff is only something old or even the poor people might do. You're clearly old, QED! I, however, am a liberty loving rugged individual, so treating me that way is unacceptable. Can't you just understand: what you're advocating is pretty much legal torture of high-income Americans on a site about Web 2.0 startups?!?!? /s
    • matthewmacleod 10y ago
• deleted 10y ago
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• totalZero 10y ago
  It's typical for a young person in Manhattan to pay 3k/mo for a one-bedroom apartment. If a renter takes a four-day weekend to go on vacation, that's: 1) $400 down the drain for the resident 2) allocative inefficiency of an empty apartment that could otherwise satisfy demand for short-term housing Hotels are the winners in this situation.
  • ahoy 10y ago
    That's not how a lot of AirBnB operations work though. Many of them are effectively hotels.
    • ethanbond 10y ago
      I don't think anyone is disagreeing with that. The question is, as it often is, about the collateral damage.
  • JimboOmega 10y ago
    I don't know about NYC, but in SF, collection of any sort of hotel tax (or any attempt at following regulation) on these units is a joke. If having hotel taxes and regulations are otherwise a good thing, why should hotel bookings be exempt if they are made through AirBnB? If, instead of building a hotel, somebody rents several units in a building and turns them into perpetual AirBnBs, is that fair? What if they are also rent controlled units that the person is turning an additional profit on? And of course, there are legitimate reasons why you might not want the unit next to yours to be a de-facto hotel. (Having lived next to one, it can be a little frustrating, since every night is party night if you're on vacation!)
    • DINKDINK 10y ago
      >in SF, collection of any sort of hotel tax (or any attempt at following regulation) on these units is a joke. This is incorrect. If a user on Airbnb requests a stay that qualifies for a Transient Occupancy Tax, Airbnb collects the tax on the transaction and remits it to the City of San Francisco.
  • 10y ago
• ethanbond 10y ago
  Ah, because there are just oh so many "spare bedrooms" lying around NYC.
• quicknir 10y ago
  The legislation does not allow me to rent out my apartment for a week when I go on vacation, a few times a year. This is by far the primary usage of Airbnb, for people who live in NYC. Put in that context, the legislation seems pretty well-aimed at its goal of keeping up demand for hotels at the expense of average people getting to recoup a bit of their enormous rent expenditure.
  • falcolas 10y ago
    > This is by far the primary usage of Airbnb, for people who live in NYC. Any sources to research this claim? I'm of the impression the majority of available properties are people who make a living of renting out properties like a hotel.
    • quicknir 10y ago
      You are measuring by the number of properties, I'm measuring by fraction of people. I'm pretty sure that my statement is self-evident. Laws can always be introduced, for instance limiting the number of days on Airbnb a particular unit can be placed. It's the people who want to pass sweeping laws that penalize everyone, instead of something more targeted, who are obligated to provide sources and research.
  • hiou 10y ago
    As someone who uses Airbnb regularly I can assure you the majority are either people who use one empty room as a hotel or the whole place. I see very very few "I'm going away for the weekend / week / month" listings. The whole rating system rewards people who have consistent and frequent lodging available.
• grecy 10y ago
  In the Tesla and iPhone discussions people are furious that you don't "own" these things any more - Apple and Tesla put limits on what you can and can't do. Here we are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of property, and you can't rent it out if you choose? So do you own it, or not? If I own it, I want to do what I want with it.
• morgante 10y ago
  > What it disallows is having an apartment you rent out in full on AirBnB, either doing that exclusively as an income source or yourself staying elsewhere whenever you are renting it out. How is that well-targeted? What compelling public purpose is served by preventing people from renting out their apartment while they're on vacation? > Put in that context, the legislation seems pretty well-aimed at its goal of creating more affordable housing in the city. I really disagree. You can't just ignore supply and demand—the affordability crisis in most popular cities is a testament to how terrible of a policy doing so is. There are tourists who want to visit NYC and people who want to have short-term sublets. They're not just going to disappear—they're going to drive up the market price for hotels, which will induce the construction of more hotels (and thereby removing "affordable" housing from the market). The worst part is that hotels are vastly less efficient per-foot than AirBNB at fulfilling the needs of many short-term renters. So hotels will end up removing more capacity from the affordable housing market than AirBnB ever did.