Thank you! Seriously, if AirBNB were a free market (and it is), what these listings are doing is allowing more people to come into the city and spend their own

Thank you! Seriously, if AirBNB were a free market (and it is), what these listings are doing is allowing more people to come into the city and spend their own money on services throughout the city. This is a boon for all businesses in the city. It increases the availability of units and lowers the cost of other hotels throughout the city. What people are afraid of is that they see all these units available on AirBNB and assume they are empty? They are not, they are being rented out pretty regularly. Which means they are being used and filled, with real live human beings. If people didn't like empty units in the city, they should be complaining about the high-end units like One57 and 436park that are removing available units for the city and creating high-rise ghost towns. I don't believe for one second this increases the cost of rental and/or condo units in the city. Since what is really happening is that the units are still full. AirBNB allowed us to see that there was a very real apartment shortage in the city. I lived in NYC, and even I had to move out because of high rents. But those high rents weren't because of AirBNB. It was due to a lack of smaller units being put on the market. As the units consolidated from 1bd to 3 or 4bd apartments, the sizes of the apartments grew, and all new buildings were for multi-million dollar residences. The middle class got squeezed. Now we are blaming AirBNB for the problems. And that is simply not the case.