9 ms·

Although (in typical San Francisco fashion) this implementation seems likely to be expensive and only moderately successful in the long run, is anyone else caut

by brandur 10y ago

Although (in typical San Francisco fashion) this implementation seems likely to be expensive and only moderately successful in the long run, is anyone else cautiously optimistic in the direction that many large cities are heading with respect to AirBnB use? I for one have always enjoyed using the service, but am thoroughly convinced that allowing the rental of entire suites is having a considerable impact on local housing availability. This is going on in San Francisco, but I don't think to quite the same extent as what was happening in Berlin. I made a trip there a year and a half back where I stayed at about five different AirBnB units over a three week period. It was quite obvious that every one of them without exception was "professional" in that they were reserved for use by AirBnB 100% percent of the year and oftentimes had paid clean up crews who were _not_ the owner. I did speak to one owner about it, and he said that he was now running this unit along with four others full time on AirBnB. In a world without this option, it's hard to believe that these wouldn't have been normal rental stock. Recently the city passed Zweckentfremdungsverbot [1] to help counteract the effect. Nowadays AirBnB is still allowed, but only for single rooms in shared units. This strikes me as exactly the right balance. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/01/berlin-authorities-taking-stand-against-airbnb-rental-boom https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/01/berlin-au...

Outpox 10y ago
I went to Bruxelles earlier this year with 5 other friends and I'm glad we were able to rent a whole flat for 3 days, we wouldn't have been able to do so by renting from professional. Altough we noticed that the place we were staying in was dedicated to being rented all the time.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  Have you tried hostels? With a group of 5 you could probably get a dorm room to yourselves. I've stayed in over 30 hostels on various trips. Some are shit, but the majority of them were really nice and a lot of fun. You meet a lot of cool people and you don't overpay for a room you're just going to sleep in anyway.
  - briandear 10y ago
    Why not suggest a tent? A hostel isn't the same as renting an apartment. I for example have little kids so renting a hostel isn't as efficient as an option.
    - civilian 10y ago
      When I was a kid my family stayed in a hostel in Billund (where Legoland, Denmark is). We got a 4-bunk room to ourselves.
      - wavefunction 10y ago
        It's also a good chance to introduce your kids to the concept of a hostel and what's involved, so when they're older they will already be comfortable with heading out into the world.
  - greenhatman 10y ago
    I've done that. It's not that great...
- vertex-four 10y ago
  In the UK, there's plenty of short-term lease companies and "aparthotels" which rent out entire flats, but have actually gained the necessary permission from local Government to do so. I assume there's similar companies elsewhere.
  - briandear 10y ago
    You're assuming Airbnb owners are all not 'legal.' I have a place in Provence that has three apartments we list in AirBnB and booking.com, etc. We pay tourist taxes and taxes on the business income. It's not fair or even accurate to assume that AirBnB listings are less legitimate than "Lease companies." AirBnB is a distribution channel, not a business model.
    - vertex-four 10y ago
      > It's not fair or even accurate to assume that AirBnB listings are less legitimate than "Lease companies." No, but unfortunately the majority are (at least where I am), and AirBnB has a vested interest in ensuring that they don't have to make sure their listings are legal, and their customers don't care.
    - mikeryan 10y ago
      The whole article this is based on is the city of SF forcing Airbnb hosts to register with the city and for Airbnb to validate registered hosts. It appears that Airbnb is explicitly attempting to aid illegitimate (ie. non-registered) listings.
- jacalata 10y ago
  So you were renting from a professional.
djsumdog 10y ago
In Seattle there are problems with building managers not renewing leases because, even with high/low seasons, they can make more money renting the same rooms as AirBNBs. AirBNB is a great idea if you're renting out your space (and I've stayed at several like that; either where they're in the house with you or one guy in The Netherlands who just stayed with his girlfriend on the weekends he rented his place out). But of course, just like eBay, you'll get a mix of people just selling their stuff and people who make a business out of it; writing their own fulfilment and drop shipping software against the eBay APIs. I really like this post referring to Uber/AirBNB/et. al. as the "bullshit sharing economy": http://grist.org/politics/the-sharing-economy-is-bullsht-heres-how-we-can-take-it-back/ http://grist.org/politics/the-sharing-economy-is-bullsht-her...
- briandear 10y ago
  So what if a lease isn't renewed. The tenant doesn't have a 'right' to a lease. If property managers don't want to renew leases because of AirBnB fine -- soon there'll be an oversupply of AirBnB and the market will reach equilibrium. However since places like San Fran put artificial constraints on supply through tight regulation, then the market can't reach equilibrium because of a government-created market distortion. As a thought experiment, pretend that every home in San Fran was an AirBnB. What would happen? The demand would drop and landlords would then begin leasing their places out to where the AirBnB demand and the leasing demand was at equilibrium -- assuming San Fran allows new housing supplies to enter the market. Why doesn't San Fran allow massive high rise apartments like in China or Korea? Because the NIMBYs want to protect their own property values. All of these regulations are anti-market and thus promote inefficiencies. If we accept that there is a housing problem in San Fran, the solution isn't to tightly restrict the existing supply but to increase the supply. As it is now it's like two junkies negotiating over a plastic spoon.
  - rspeer 10y ago
    Look, I'm a YIMBY but I think that cities need to keep AirBNB under control. Competition won't solve all housing problems, particularly if you throw residential housing and hotels into the same market, as AirBNB does. Cities have every reason to incentivize people to actually live there -- and yes, most successful cities need a lot more space for people to actually live in. Any gains you could accomplish here are defeated when the new living space is set aside for visitors instead of residents.
dcosson 10y ago
I agree that AirBnB removing housing stock can be a problem, but I don't think only shared units is the one right answer. For one thing, this seems hard to enforce. Instead of renting out a one-bedroom unit on AirBnB, you could instead get a 4-bedroom and rent the bedrooms individually (or to be fully above board get a full-time tenant for one room and rent out the other 3 on AirBnB). And I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that this would kind of limit use to young, single, healthy people. People with disabilities or medical issues, families trips with kids plus grandparents, or even just older or more introverted people that don't want the hostel vibe may want or need more privacy than a shared unit. The other thing that gets overlooked is the flexibility AirBnB provides in the gray area between living somewhere and visiting - one can book an airbnb for a few weeks, pick up and move to a new city with no belongings, and look for a job while deciding whether to move there for longer. Or find a place to live for a short internship. People are doing this anyway via sketchy craigslist sublets, but it's a lot safer (I'm just assuming in terms of physical safety, but certainly in terms of avoiding scams) on a platform like AirBnB. Overall, I'm disappointed that cities are not at least looking at the popularity of AirBnB and, say, creating a new kind of zoning/licensing to officially allow some small percentage of AirBnB units, or allowing some hotel zoning & construction to be added to the fun residential neighborhoods where people want to live & stay. Or encouraging more subletting type rentals (every lease I've ever been on forbids it). If they were doing anything at all to acknowledge that AirBnB is providing something that a lot of people really want and allowing some aspects of that to flourish, I could get more behind these regulations to limit unlicensed rentals.
- gehmbo 10y ago
  I agree with you. I feel that Airbnb is unfairly becoming a scapegoat in the larger issue of housing supply in SF. I would rather see a new approach to taxing activities such as short-term rentals to increase funding for modernization efforts in SF such as high-density housing and rapid public transit.
- Sanddancer 10y ago
  Extended stay hotels for the kind of purposes you described already exist. They're essentially a small studio, with a kitchenette, are rented by the week, are larger than a normal hotel room, and have the personnel to ensure safety. The problem with zoning and having hotels in fun residential neighborhoods is that there often isn't the kind of civic infrastructure needed to support such things. Ability to ensure people adhere to noise ordinances, police officers, etc, are all issues that hotels have and need to be planned for.
driverdan 10y ago
How is adding more restrictions to using what you own a positive? The problem isn't that units are being dedicated to AirBnB, it's that existing, everyday laws like sound restrictions aren't being enforced properly.
- ThrustVectoring 10y ago
  I'm not claiming an opinion one way or the other about whether this is the case in this situation, but it can be in your best interest to be prevented from doing something. It's easier to win a game of chicken if you remove your steering wheel. You don't get intimidated as often into voting a particular way if there's no way to prove how you voted. If you can effectively work for thirty hours straight, employers will want to demand that from you. And generally speaking, not being able to do something means that other agents won't try to pressure you into doing it. In this case, it's something like "if you can have more money by AirBnBing out your place on weekends, then landlords can raise your rent by approximately that amount and since people now afford it, you've got no option other than accepting the rent increase and paying for it through AirBnB".
arebop 10y ago
When I try to take a really broad view of it, I reason that people demand a place to sleep every night and so there's really no reason to think that airbnb and long-term housing are natural enemies. There's a limit to demand for bedrooms. Apparently, there are shortages of both long-term housing and temporary places to stay. Partitioning the physical buildings into one or the other class does not help match supply to demand. Of course it can help move the shortage's effect between the two kinds of use, but that's only an issue to the extent that there are shortages for both kinds of use. Really we should fix the shortages, not just try to change the identity of the people who lose out. When we look at AirBnB specifically, there are anecdotes about its negative effect on housing supply. I have also seen some quantitative/statistical evidence about it, and that shows that it has negligible effect on housing availability. AirBnB is just far too small to have a noticeable impact on housing supply in San Francisco (and the same goes for the handful of other cities whose stats I've seen). So even if you don't buy the theoretical argument about the effect of fragmenting resources on efficient allocation, from a practical point of view it quickly becomes obvious that AirBnB bans are not worthy of serious consideration as a solution to housing shortages. So the most persuasive motivation for AirBnB bans are the arguments about noise, building security, and so forth. I don't personally find these arguments persuasive either but at least they are debatable.
- Elgrad 10y ago
  Do you have a source for those figures? I ask because most of the, admittedly incredibly brief, research that I've done indicates that it does have a significant effect on housing. [1] http://harvardlpr.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/10.1_10_Lee.pdf http://harvardlpr.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/10.1_10_Lee... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/27/airbnb-new-york-city-housing-stock-reduction-study https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/27/airbnb-new-y...
  - arebop 10y ago
    I don't have a citation ready for SF; my recollection from the last anti-airbnb ballot campaign that a leading opponent of airbnb (Campos) claimed a figure between 1999 and 3000 units listed on airbnb. http://www.sfchronicle.com/airbnb-impact-san-francisco-2015/#1 http://www.sfchronicle.com/airbnb-impact-san-francisco-2015/... claims the true figure is closer to 350 units. The higher estimate constitutes less than 0.8% of the 390000 unit supply, comparable to approving just one or two development projects [http://sf.curbed.com/building/1201/trinity-place http://sf.curbed.com/building/1201/trinity-place]. The Chief Economist in SF estimated that a supply increase of 100000 units (at least 33 airbnbs) would be needed to have a significant impact on prices [http://archives.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/leveling-sf-housing-field-could-take-100000-new-units/Content?oid=2703869 http://archives.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/leveling-sf-hous...]. Your [2] claims that 8000 units = 10% of the housing supply in NYC. I find this claim incredible. Your [1] claims that more than 12% of housing units in the LA neighborhood of Venice Beach are airbnbs. Given that the average American gets 16 days of vacation per year [http://theweek.com/articles/463897/americas-war-vacation-by-numbers http://theweek.com/articles/463897/americas-war-vacation-by-...] I suppose we should expect about 5% of bedrooms to be allocated to short-term use. AirBnB's market share is less than 100% of those 5%. On the other hand, LA is relatively popular as a tourist destination so we should expect more airbnbs than Topeka KS. So that claim seems plausible to me. This report goes on to project from a model that these Venice Beach airbnbs, if returned to the long-term rental market, would lower prices by $67/month from $2680, a reduction of 2.5%. The same author notes that in recent years, prices rental prices have increased by 7.3% per year. It appears that the "solution" of banning AirBnB amounts to turning back the clock on the problem by just a few months.
latj 10y ago
I've often wondered what would happen if AirBnb only allowed hosts to rent out their own primary residence. Or, perhaps primary residence plus one other unit. This would alleviate the problem of hotels claiming hosts are a hotel. And it would make AirBnb better as the worst hosts are the ones that are managing multiple units. Having large multi-unit hosts expands the inventory. But the whole point of using AirBnb is that you dont want to stay at a hotel. There is a critical point where, if AirBnb allows total number of multi-unit hosts to pass, I suspect the whole thing will crumble. No one wants to wade through that mess to find the thing that AirBnb became so popular for-- normal individuals connecting to strike a deal.
- joshfraser 10y ago
  This is already the case in several cities like NYC and SF: https://www.airbnbaction.com/one-host-one-home-san-francisco/ https://www.airbnbaction.com/one-host-one-home-san-francisco... https://www.airbnbaction.com/one-host-one-home-new-york-city/ https://www.airbnbaction.com/one-host-one-home-new-york-city...
- odbol_ 10y ago
  Even better, only let people own one residence to begin with. If they're not living in it, it's not theirs. That might solve the problem that there are more empty homes in the U.S. than actual homeless people...
aminok 10y ago
>I for one have always enjoyed using the service, but am thoroughly convinced that allowing the rental of entire suites is having a considerable impact on local housing availability. I believe short term accommodations affordability is just as important as long-term accommodations affordability. Valuing one over the other is the common fallacy of assuming our own subjective valuation is more accurate than the market's. Regulatory prohibitions are harmful in two additional ways: * they fundemantally violate our human rights. Any voluntary interaction between consenting adults should be legal, particularly on their own private property. One can have their friend stay over, every day of the year, but as soon money (God forbid!) changes hands, it becomes illegal and punishable with income expropriation (fines)? The absurdity of the law is an indication of its injustice. * they have collateral damage. For example an Airbnb licensing scheme will often make the difference between a person renting out their unit while they go on vacation for three weeks, and a person not bothering, even if the licensing scheme does not prohibit this. Complying with regulations is an extra cost, and it's a fixed cost that disproportionately affects the long tail of the most casual/occasional users. Regulatory prohibitions like this are one of the biggest drivers of the professionalization of the economy, which disempowers people in lower income groups.
rorykoehler 10y ago
If there is demand why not cater to it rather than legislate against it. I'm not a hardcore free-market ideologist but in this case we should let the market decide and adjust our zoning/development policies accordingly so no-one has to bear the full brunt of compromise. Airbnb is a vast improvement over hotels and opened up a new travel market. I have literally decided not to go on holiday rather than stay in a hotel that offers half the convenience, functionality and location at triple the price. This is something that is completely missing from the narrative.

by brandur 10y ago

Outpox 10y ago

I went to Bruxelles earlier this year with 5 other friends and I'm glad we were able to rent a whole flat for 3 days, we wouldn't have been able to do so by renting from professional. Altough we noticed that the place we were staying in was dedicated to being rented all the time.

djsumdog 10y ago
Have you tried hostels? With a group of 5 you could probably get a dorm room to yourselves. I've stayed in over 30 hostels on various trips. Some are shit, but the majority of them were really nice and a lot of fun. You meet a lot of cool people and you don't overpay for a room you're just going to sleep in anyway.
- briandear 10y ago
  Why not suggest a tent? A hostel isn't the same as renting an apartment. I for example have little kids so renting a hostel isn't as efficient as an option.
  - civilian 10y ago
    When I was a kid my family stayed in a hostel in Billund (where Legoland, Denmark is). We got a 4-bunk room to ourselves.
    - wavefunction 10y ago
      It's also a good chance to introduce your kids to the concept of a hostel and what's involved, so when they're older they will already be comfortable with heading out into the world.
- greenhatman 10y ago
  I've done that. It's not that great...
vertex-four 10y ago
In the UK, there's plenty of short-term lease companies and "aparthotels" which rent out entire flats, but have actually gained the necessary permission from local Government to do so. I assume there's similar companies elsewhere.
- briandear 10y ago
  You're assuming Airbnb owners are all not 'legal.' I have a place in Provence that has three apartments we list in AirBnB and booking.com, etc. We pay tourist taxes and taxes on the business income. It's not fair or even accurate to assume that AirBnB listings are less legitimate than "Lease companies." AirBnB is a distribution channel, not a business model.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    > It's not fair or even accurate to assume that AirBnB listings are less legitimate than "Lease companies." No, but unfortunately the majority are (at least where I am), and AirBnB has a vested interest in ensuring that they don't have to make sure their listings are legal, and their customers don't care.
  - mikeryan 10y ago
    The whole article this is based on is the city of SF forcing Airbnb hosts to register with the city and for Airbnb to validate registered hosts. It appears that Airbnb is explicitly attempting to aid illegitimate (ie. non-registered) listings.
jacalata 10y ago
So you were renting from a professional.

djsumdog 10y ago

In Seattle there are problems with building managers not renewing leases because, even with high/low seasons, they can make more money renting the same rooms as AirBNBs. AirBNB is a great idea if you're renting out your space (and I've stayed at several like that; either where they're in the house with you or one guy in The Netherlands who just stayed with his girlfriend on the weekends he rented his place out). But of course, just like eBay, you'll get a mix of people just selling their stuff and people who make a business out of it; writing their own fulfilment and drop shipping software against the eBay APIs. I really like this post referring to Uber/AirBNB/et. al. as the "bullshit sharing economy": http://grist.org/politics/the-sharing-economy-is-bullsht-heres-how-we-can-take-it-back/ http://grist.org/politics/the-sharing-economy-is-bullsht-her...

briandear 10y ago
So what if a lease isn't renewed. The tenant doesn't have a 'right' to a lease. If property managers don't want to renew leases because of AirBnB fine -- soon there'll be an oversupply of AirBnB and the market will reach equilibrium. However since places like San Fran put artificial constraints on supply through tight regulation, then the market can't reach equilibrium because of a government-created market distortion. As a thought experiment, pretend that every home in San Fran was an AirBnB. What would happen? The demand would drop and landlords would then begin leasing their places out to where the AirBnB demand and the leasing demand was at equilibrium -- assuming San Fran allows new housing supplies to enter the market. Why doesn't San Fran allow massive high rise apartments like in China or Korea? Because the NIMBYs want to protect their own property values. All of these regulations are anti-market and thus promote inefficiencies. If we accept that there is a housing problem in San Fran, the solution isn't to tightly restrict the existing supply but to increase the supply. As it is now it's like two junkies negotiating over a plastic spoon.
- rspeer 10y ago
  Look, I'm a YIMBY but I think that cities need to keep AirBNB under control. Competition won't solve all housing problems, particularly if you throw residential housing and hotels into the same market, as AirBNB does. Cities have every reason to incentivize people to actually live there -- and yes, most successful cities need a lot more space for people to actually live in. Any gains you could accomplish here are defeated when the new living space is set aside for visitors instead of residents.

dcosson 10y ago

I agree that AirBnB removing housing stock can be a problem, but I don't think only shared units is the one right answer. For one thing, this seems hard to enforce. Instead of renting out a one-bedroom unit on AirBnB, you could instead get a 4-bedroom and rent the bedrooms individually (or to be fully above board get a full-time tenant for one room and rent out the other 3 on AirBnB). And I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that this would kind of limit use to young, single, healthy people. People with disabilities or medical issues, families trips with kids plus grandparents, or even just older or more introverted people that don't want the hostel vibe may want or need more privacy than a shared unit. The other thing that gets overlooked is the flexibility AirBnB provides in the gray area between living somewhere and visiting - one can book an airbnb for a few weeks, pick up and move to a new city with no belongings, and look for a job while deciding whether to move there for longer. Or find a place to live for a short internship. People are doing this anyway via sketchy craigslist sublets, but it's a lot safer (I'm just assuming in terms of physical safety, but certainly in terms of avoiding scams) on a platform like AirBnB. Overall, I'm disappointed that cities are not at least looking at the popularity of AirBnB and, say, creating a new kind of zoning/licensing to officially allow some small percentage of AirBnB units, or allowing some hotel zoning & construction to be added to the fun residential neighborhoods where people want to live & stay. Or encouraging more subletting type rentals (every lease I've ever been on forbids it). If they were doing anything at all to acknowledge that AirBnB is providing something that a lot of people really want and allowing some aspects of that to flourish, I could get more behind these regulations to limit unlicensed rentals.

gehmbo 10y ago
I agree with you. I feel that Airbnb is unfairly becoming a scapegoat in the larger issue of housing supply in SF. I would rather see a new approach to taxing activities such as short-term rentals to increase funding for modernization efforts in SF such as high-density housing and rapid public transit.
Sanddancer 10y ago
Extended stay hotels for the kind of purposes you described already exist. They're essentially a small studio, with a kitchenette, are rented by the week, are larger than a normal hotel room, and have the personnel to ensure safety. The problem with zoning and having hotels in fun residential neighborhoods is that there often isn't the kind of civic infrastructure needed to support such things. Ability to ensure people adhere to noise ordinances, police officers, etc, are all issues that hotels have and need to be planned for.

driverdan 10y ago

How is adding more restrictions to using what you own a positive? The problem isn't that units are being dedicated to AirBnB, it's that existing, everyday laws like sound restrictions aren't being enforced properly.

ThrustVectoring 10y ago
I'm not claiming an opinion one way or the other about whether this is the case in this situation, but it can be in your best interest to be prevented from doing something. It's easier to win a game of chicken if you remove your steering wheel. You don't get intimidated as often into voting a particular way if there's no way to prove how you voted. If you can effectively work for thirty hours straight, employers will want to demand that from you. And generally speaking, not being able to do something means that other agents won't try to pressure you into doing it. In this case, it's something like "if you can have more money by AirBnBing out your place on weekends, then landlords can raise your rent by approximately that amount and since people now afford it, you've got no option other than accepting the rent increase and paying for it through AirBnB".

arebop 10y ago

When I try to take a really broad view of it, I reason that people demand a place to sleep every night and so there's really no reason to think that airbnb and long-term housing are natural enemies. There's a limit to demand for bedrooms. Apparently, there are shortages of both long-term housing and temporary places to stay. Partitioning the physical buildings into one or the other class does not help match supply to demand. Of course it can help move the shortage's effect between the two kinds of use, but that's only an issue to the extent that there are shortages for both kinds of use. Really we should fix the shortages, not just try to change the identity of the people who lose out. When we look at AirBnB specifically, there are anecdotes about its negative effect on housing supply. I have also seen some quantitative/statistical evidence about it, and that shows that it has negligible effect on housing availability. AirBnB is just far too small to have a noticeable impact on housing supply in San Francisco (and the same goes for the handful of other cities whose stats I've seen). So even if you don't buy the theoretical argument about the effect of fragmenting resources on efficient allocation, from a practical point of view it quickly becomes obvious that AirBnB bans are not worthy of serious consideration as a solution to housing shortages. So the most persuasive motivation for AirBnB bans are the arguments about noise, building security, and so forth. I don't personally find these arguments persuasive either but at least they are debatable.

Elgrad 10y ago
Do you have a source for those figures? I ask because most of the, admittedly incredibly brief, research that I've done indicates that it does have a significant effect on housing. [1] http://harvardlpr.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/10.1_10_Lee.pdf http://harvardlpr.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/10.1_10_Lee... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/27/airbnb-new-york-city-housing-stock-reduction-study https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jun/27/airbnb-new-y...
- arebop 10y ago
  I don't have a citation ready for SF; my recollection from the last anti-airbnb ballot campaign that a leading opponent of airbnb (Campos) claimed a figure between 1999 and 3000 units listed on airbnb. http://www.sfchronicle.com/airbnb-impact-san-francisco-2015/#1 http://www.sfchronicle.com/airbnb-impact-san-francisco-2015/... claims the true figure is closer to 350 units. The higher estimate constitutes less than 0.8% of the 390000 unit supply, comparable to approving just one or two development projects [http://sf.curbed.com/building/1201/trinity-place http://sf.curbed.com/building/1201/trinity-place]. The Chief Economist in SF estimated that a supply increase of 100000 units (at least 33 airbnbs) would be needed to have a significant impact on prices [http://archives.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/leveling-sf-housing-field-could-take-100000-new-units/Content?oid=2703869 http://archives.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/leveling-sf-hous...]. Your [2] claims that 8000 units = 10% of the housing supply in NYC. I find this claim incredible. Your [1] claims that more than 12% of housing units in the LA neighborhood of Venice Beach are airbnbs. Given that the average American gets 16 days of vacation per year [http://theweek.com/articles/463897/americas-war-vacation-by-numbers http://theweek.com/articles/463897/americas-war-vacation-by-...] I suppose we should expect about 5% of bedrooms to be allocated to short-term use. AirBnB's market share is less than 100% of those 5%. On the other hand, LA is relatively popular as a tourist destination so we should expect more airbnbs than Topeka KS. So that claim seems plausible to me. This report goes on to project from a model that these Venice Beach airbnbs, if returned to the long-term rental market, would lower prices by $67/month from $2680, a reduction of 2.5%. The same author notes that in recent years, prices rental prices have increased by 7.3% per year. It appears that the "solution" of banning AirBnB amounts to turning back the clock on the problem by just a few months.

latj 10y ago

I've often wondered what would happen if AirBnb only allowed hosts to rent out their own primary residence. Or, perhaps primary residence plus one other unit. This would alleviate the problem of hotels claiming hosts are a hotel. And it would make AirBnb better as the worst hosts are the ones that are managing multiple units. Having large multi-unit hosts expands the inventory. But the whole point of using AirBnb is that you dont want to stay at a hotel. There is a critical point where, if AirBnb allows total number of multi-unit hosts to pass, I suspect the whole thing will crumble. No one wants to wade through that mess to find the thing that AirBnb became so popular for-- normal individuals connecting to strike a deal.

joshfraser 10y ago
This is already the case in several cities like NYC and SF: https://www.airbnbaction.com/one-host-one-home-san-francisco/ https://www.airbnbaction.com/one-host-one-home-san-francisco... https://www.airbnbaction.com/one-host-one-home-new-york-city/ https://www.airbnbaction.com/one-host-one-home-new-york-city...
odbol_ 10y ago
Even better, only let people own one residence to begin with. If they're not living in it, it's not theirs. That might solve the problem that there are more empty homes in the U.S. than actual homeless people...

aminok 10y ago

>I for one have always enjoyed using the service, but am thoroughly convinced that allowing the rental of entire suites is having a considerable impact on local housing availability. I believe short term accommodations affordability is just as important as long-term accommodations affordability. Valuing one over the other is the common fallacy of assuming our own subjective valuation is more accurate than the market's. Regulatory prohibitions are harmful in two additional ways: * they fundemantally violate our human rights. Any voluntary interaction between consenting adults should be legal, particularly on their own private property. One can have their friend stay over, every day of the year, but as soon money (God forbid!) changes hands, it becomes illegal and punishable with income expropriation (fines)? The absurdity of the law is an indication of its injustice. * they have collateral damage. For example an Airbnb licensing scheme will often make the difference between a person renting out their unit while they go on vacation for three weeks, and a person not bothering, even if the licensing scheme does not prohibit this. Complying with regulations is an extra cost, and it's a fixed cost that disproportionately affects the long tail of the most casual/occasional users. Regulatory prohibitions like this are one of the biggest drivers of the professionalization of the economy, which disempowers people in lower income groups.

rorykoehler 10y ago

If there is demand why not cater to it rather than legislate against it. I'm not a hardcore free-market ideologist but in this case we should let the market decide and adjust our zoning/development policies accordingly so no-one has to bear the full brunt of compromise. Airbnb is a vast improvement over hotels and opened up a new travel market. I have literally decided not to go on holiday rather than stay in a hotel that offers half the convenience, functionality and location at triple the price. This is something that is completely missing from the narrative.