14 ms·

The “Inside Airbnb” project has earned the home-sharing company bad press

131 points by thewhitetulip 10y ago

xkrackerx 10y ago
Sifting through data looking for the unseen is one thing but this has got to be the biggest waste of time ever. AirBnB giving people a place to sleep. Yes, strangers in your apartment building..like you know your neighbors anyway.
- Neliquat 10y ago
  I lived next to a popular airbnb rental. The lack of neighborly respect, trash, and noise are not imagined problems. At this point cops now cruise my rural dirt road once a day just because of it. Commercial activity in a residential area is a serious problem.
  - random_rr 10y ago
    I just purchased a home next to an AirBnB house - it's a mixed bag - well, it's pretty much all downsides. More Uber/Lyft/taxi traffic at random hours of night - check Strange people coming and going, pickups at all hours - check Trash cans are never brought back from the street - check Yard care - non existent Socialization - zero There's 0 contribution to the neighborhood from an AirBnB house - I say this as a person who has no problem having a roommate in my own home. There's pretty much zero incentive for an AirBnB'er to give a shit about the neighborhood (I don't blame them). This isn't an outlier. A lot of my friends live in houses that are pretty much crash pads (Arlington/DC area), and there's the same problem - when people only live somewhere for a month or two, they don't participate in the community.
    - accountface 10y ago
      I have all the same problems but my neighbors are college students. Gentrification is a bitch. I'd say even 1-year residents are a detriment to the community.
    - ci5er 10y ago
      > when people only live somewhere for a month or two, they don't participate in the community. I bought a house and lived in it with my wife at the same address for 15-or-so years, and wouldn't have recognized my next-door neighbor if I were to run into him at the mall. Why do accidents related to zip-code have anything to do with "community"? EDIT. My other neighbor turned out to be a co-worker, in a distant group, and somehow was transferred into mine. He was a sucky engineer who spent all of his time politicking. I had little interest in spending time commiserating with him about office politics. Nice enough neighborhood. Good schools. Not a lot of through traffic. People kept their houses and lawns up. But I don't know that I've ever felt any inclination to spend any time with anyone because of the accident of a street address numbering scheme. Am I alone in this?
      - coredog64 10y ago
        Not really. I only know one neighbor, and only that because he is such an asshole. A large chunk of homes on my block are rentals, with a constant flow of new tenants.
  - ArtDev 10y ago
    Permanent crappy neighbors (like a frat house) would probably be worse. It sounds like the owner/host is doing a poor job of selecting their guests. Have you talked with them first?
- troisx 10y ago
  I've noticed that on a lot of Airbnb articles on here there are green accounts that are pro-Airbnb. With their huge funding I wonder how much is going to astroturfing. I doubt they're above paying people to comment online.
  - praneshp 10y ago
    I (as a non-green account but not a very old one) sometimes feel it's difficult to express my opinion on this website about Facebook, Uber, Amazon and AirBnB. My comments typically go negative for a bit without comments, then maybe there is a bit of conversation.
  - ArtDev 10y ago
    I imagine there are a lot of remote IT industry people who rent their houses out when they go on frequent trips. Just like me. I defend Airbnb because I have skin in the game. Also, I have to deal with the anti-Airbnb regulations in my city that were very poorly written.
- weeksie 10y ago
  It's not about people being uncomfortable with others in the building (a valid complaint, however). It's about cities like NYC that have less than one percent vacancy rates, where a couple of AirBNB related effects put upward pressure on rents: 1) A person can stay in an apartment they wouldn't otherwise be able to afford, pushing rents up (I personally know several people who maintain apartments like this, either by leaving for a couple days per month or maintaining an apartment after moving out of town.) 2) A full apartment stays off the market because it is being used as a dedicated hotel Both of these make a difference in rent prices, though it's hard to say how much. I'd be happy to see a ban on AirBNB while residential vacancy rates are lower than 3%. I love the service but not what it does to my already pretty unaffordable city.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    Yes, it's true that in a city with an artificial housing scarcity like NYC, AirBnB alters the distribution of who gets to consume housing. It opens the market to people who wouldn't otherwise be able to purchase. Similarly, if we allow illegal immigrants to rent flats then that will also push rents higher. Should we attempt to prevent this as well? If not, why not?
    - kareemm 10y ago
      > Similarly, if we allow illegal immigrants to rent flats then that will also push rents higher. Should we attempt to prevent this as well? If not, why not? There are lots of factors that impact housing supply and demand. Whether they should be regulated / stopped generally becomes a question once the public actively engages in discussing it (see foreign investment in the Pacific Northwest for an example). Basically, if the public doesn't care, the politicians don't care. Since a pol's main incentive is to get re-elected, the issue has to become important to their constituents, otherwise it effectively doesn't matter.
      - jstanley 10y ago
        Are you arguing that your analysis of what's right and wrong should rightly play second fiddle to a politician's chances of getting re-elected? GP wasn't asking whether it would be prevented, merely whether it should.
- megablast 10y ago
  I guess we can bury our heads into the sands with the problems that Airbnb or Uber creates because we enjoy the services.
  - ArtDev 10y ago
    Probably because they solve more problems then they cause.
jstanley 10y ago
I find the anti-AirBnB comments on this site quite confusing, because in most other cases HN seems to be pro-free markets. If a landlord wants to rent their place out to short-term tenants, and tenants want to rent it, and AirBnB want to act as a marketplace, I can't see what the harm is. You don't have any right to say who comes and goes to your neighbours' properties, any more than they have any right to say who comes and goes to your property. If you want to decide who gets to stay in a given house, you should buy that house. Otherwise it's none of your business.
- amelius 10y ago
  There are rules for renting out appartments for good reasons. For example, it influences the worth of appartments around it, and it messes up housing costs in a broader area. Another example of the free market not working outside a very simplistic view.
  - ryanlol 10y ago
    Can you make a good argument for why free market doesn't work here? I don't feel that ... >There are rules for renting out appartments for good reasons. For example, it influences the worth of appartments around it, and it messes up housing costs in a broader area. ... is really an useful argument against free market as it fails to explain why either of those are inherently bad things.
    - mehwoot 10y ago
      Because there are negative externalities to someone constantly renting out their unit for short term stay. In a completely free market, there are no rules to protect the neighbours from these negative externalities.
      - ryanlol 10y ago
        This seems to be a solved problem, housing co-operatives exist and enable the shareholders to regulate these things themselves.
mydpy 10y ago
He's not alone. The article talks about the importance of his collaborator Slee. Weird, click-baitey article title.
- dang 10y ago
  Ok, we replaced the title with the subtitle (shortened to fit).
  - mydpy 10y ago
    Sorry, I was criticizing the referenced article not your title on HN.
    - dang 10y ago
      Oh no problem—the HN guidelines call for changing titles in that case (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), so the observation was relevant here too.
debt 10y ago
"data activist" beginning of a new type of activism right here. corporations manipulate the data. data activist or journalists are tasked with teasing out the bullshit in the data itself.
Overtonwindow 10y ago
Inaccurate title.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
CodeWriter23 10y ago
There's no excuse for AirBNB permitting listings of multiple dwellings in the localities that prohibit it. In order to produce the Federally-mandated 1099K, they have to take the host's SSN and keep it on file. Even if someone uses multiple accounts, they can simple compare the SSN of an account adding a listing and reject the listing is the SSN already has a different listing on file for the locality in question.
- x0x0 10y ago
  The excuse is that's obviously where the majority of their revenue comes from. Why else would they fight so hard and risk being banned entirely?
  - jgalt212 10y ago
    agree. 80/20 rule in effect here. no different than the power sellers on Ebay who drive the lion's share of transactions.
  - CodeWriter23 10y ago
    So it's ok to break the law if your primary source of income is derived from illegal activity?
    - x0x0 10y ago
      I'm speculating about why they did it. I think that AirBNB is horrific for housing constrained cities.
      - nojvek 10y ago
        I used to be a big fan of airbnb when it got started in the spirit to support YC companies. Over the last couple of years all my experiences have been crap. I've lost about $1000 in non refundable fees because I've tried to cancel hosts who had almost unlivable places. The review system is gamed and the whole things feels like a giant scam now. I never use it anymore and back to reliable hotel chains that guarantee some sort of quality.
chx 10y ago
Here's a single data point: https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/8618464?checkin=24-03-2017&checkout=25-03-2017&guests=1&adults=1&children=0&infants=0&s=j4d9g87T https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/8618464?checkin=24-03-2017&check... I reported this listing to Airbnb more than a year ago and it's still up. As the review says, it's a shitty motel and if you look at the map https://goo.gl/maps/agvWpTr7pEN2 https://goo.gl/maps/agvWpTr7pEN2 or go there personally (which I did) you will immediately see it can not be anything else but a motel because there are no private dwellings at the junction at all! (There's another room https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/9093980?checkin=22-02-2017&checkout=23-02-2017&adults=1&children=0&infants=0&s=wDMxzxQG https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/9093980?checkin=22-02-2017&check... listed, same thing) I did a crazy one week trip last January, every day sleeping somewhere else: Tel Hazor, Tel Megiddo, Beer-Sheva, Avdat - Mitzpe Ramon, Eilat, Petra, Amman, fly home. I do not drive. I do not read or speak any Semitic language. It was quite a trip.
- kobayashi 10y ago
  Yikes. Airbnb really needs to deal with abuses such as those. That's just not fair for customers. I'm interested about why you mention not speaking any Semitic languages. English is pretty-well universally understood there - did you have any problems with language barriers?
  - chx 10y ago
    The inability to read is a major hurdle when trying to mass transit. Having a data connection and bus.co.il helps. Not speaking the language only caused problems in Jordan and even there not much.
  - c06n 10y ago
    > English is pretty-well universally understood there No, this is absolutely not the case. I was there just over Christmas, and we did have problems to communicate with locals. Sure, the college educated all speak English. They don't work as bus drivers or at the gas station though. But these are the people I interact with the most as a tourist. That is not to say that people aren't multilingual there. I'm sure they all speak two or three languages. Such as Hebrew, Arabic or Russian. Israel isn't just Tel Aviv.
cletus 10y ago
Wow. As for the legality of all this, it's really beyond my ken. Firstly, there's the question of jurisdiction. If a resident of the stste of New York uses a server outside of NY belonging to a company outside of NY to rent out an apartment in NYC, does the state of NY have jurisdiction? What about NYC? Years ago Amazon took the stance that sales were interstate commerce and they shouldn't be forced to collect sales tax on interstate transactions. They ended up caving to New York's so-called "Amazon tax" [1]. Airbnb seems to be taking the view that it's not their problem if individuals violate NY/NYC law. Personally I think that's purely a self-serving stance a bit like how Craigslist turned a blind eye to prostitution. I believe that illegal hotels in a few cities are Airbnb's core business and the efforts of cities to enforce laws prohibiting such are an existential threat. I believe Airbnb knows this. I also believe that Airbnb will ultimately lose this one. What this PDF represents is at best misleading and data manipulation and at worse misrepresentation. If at some point Airbnb has or will respond under oath or to a subpoena with this information well that could be a crime. Whatever the case I think this is going to take years to play out. [1] http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/new-york-internet-sales-tax.html http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/new-york-internet-sal...
willholloway 10y ago
My town had a recent dustup over prohibiting AirBnB, some people claimed that it was against zoning regulations, the town attorney and planning and zoning looked into it and decided it was beyond their power to regulate tenure, or the length of a lease. Short term rentals are considered residential use in my town, and they make up the backbone of the local economy. A public forum was called and almost two hundred locals, many of whom have lived here for decades, spoke in favor. Only two cranks got up and spoke against. There reasons were all about hypothetical harms and imagined worst case scenarios. My town is a popular vacation destination for families and weddings. There are about 200 short term rentals and the two opponents were unable to come up with any actual examples of misbehavior, there was not one noise complaint, prostitution, drug use or any other worst case scenarios trotted out against AirBnB. There was a recent prostitution arrest at a local hotel though. The difference between AirBnB and hotels, is that AirBnB runs an extensive criminal and sex offender background check on hosts and guests. They even check the terrorist watch list! One opponent at first tried to say that an AirBnB house was hosting loud parties on weekends, and people were drunkenly sleeping in their cars and knocking on their windows. The newspaper ran this story prominently. It turned out it was the owner's young adult children that were throwing the parties when it wasn't rented to families on AirBnB. My state has struck a deal with AirBnB to collect occupancy tax directly and we are contributing a lot in taxes in a state with a budget crisis. Homes and rentals are still abundant and affordable, and our town gets all kinds of cool visitors that enrich our town. I love AirBnB, my town has been doing vacation rentals for a hundred years but it has made it more popular and better. The new visitors are supporting a bunch of nice new and more upscale restaurants and bars. It's really revitalized this town and made it a much for fun place for young professionals to live. Short term rentals started the revitalization, then new eateries opened, and next I hope we can attract a few tech companies now that we are a more desirable place to live.
- dexwiz 10y ago
  Is it a desirable place to live? Or a desirable place to vacation? It sounds like your town was already a destination if it supports 200 short term rentals.
  - 10y ago
stuaxo 10y ago
Sounds like the earned their own bad press.

131 points by thewhitetulip 10y ago

Sifting through data looking for the unseen is one thing but this has got to be the biggest waste of time ever. AirBnB giving people a place to sleep. Yes, strangers in your apartment building..like you know your neighbors anyway.

Neliquat 10y ago
I lived next to a popular airbnb rental. The lack of neighborly respect, trash, and noise are not imagined problems. At this point cops now cruise my rural dirt road once a day just because of it. Commercial activity in a residential area is a serious problem.
- random_rr 10y ago
  I just purchased a home next to an AirBnB house - it's a mixed bag - well, it's pretty much all downsides. More Uber/Lyft/taxi traffic at random hours of night - check Strange people coming and going, pickups at all hours - check Trash cans are never brought back from the street - check Yard care - non existent Socialization - zero There's 0 contribution to the neighborhood from an AirBnB house - I say this as a person who has no problem having a roommate in my own home. There's pretty much zero incentive for an AirBnB'er to give a shit about the neighborhood (I don't blame them). This isn't an outlier. A lot of my friends live in houses that are pretty much crash pads (Arlington/DC area), and there's the same problem - when people only live somewhere for a month or two, they don't participate in the community.
  - accountface 10y ago
    I have all the same problems but my neighbors are college students. Gentrification is a bitch. I'd say even 1-year residents are a detriment to the community.
  - ci5er 10y ago
    > when people only live somewhere for a month or two, they don't participate in the community. I bought a house and lived in it with my wife at the same address for 15-or-so years, and wouldn't have recognized my next-door neighbor if I were to run into him at the mall. Why do accidents related to zip-code have anything to do with "community"? EDIT. My other neighbor turned out to be a co-worker, in a distant group, and somehow was transferred into mine. He was a sucky engineer who spent all of his time politicking. I had little interest in spending time commiserating with him about office politics. Nice enough neighborhood. Good schools. Not a lot of through traffic. People kept their houses and lawns up. But I don't know that I've ever felt any inclination to spend any time with anyone because of the accident of a street address numbering scheme. Am I alone in this?
    - coredog64 10y ago
      Not really. I only know one neighbor, and only that because he is such an asshole. A large chunk of homes on my block are rentals, with a constant flow of new tenants.
- ArtDev 10y ago
  Permanent crappy neighbors (like a frat house) would probably be worse. It sounds like the owner/host is doing a poor job of selecting their guests. Have you talked with them first?
troisx 10y ago
I've noticed that on a lot of Airbnb articles on here there are green accounts that are pro-Airbnb. With their huge funding I wonder how much is going to astroturfing. I doubt they're above paying people to comment online.
- praneshp 10y ago
  I (as a non-green account but not a very old one) sometimes feel it's difficult to express my opinion on this website about Facebook, Uber, Amazon and AirBnB. My comments typically go negative for a bit without comments, then maybe there is a bit of conversation.
- ArtDev 10y ago
  I imagine there are a lot of remote IT industry people who rent their houses out when they go on frequent trips. Just like me. I defend Airbnb because I have skin in the game. Also, I have to deal with the anti-Airbnb regulations in my city that were very poorly written.
weeksie 10y ago
It's not about people being uncomfortable with others in the building (a valid complaint, however). It's about cities like NYC that have less than one percent vacancy rates, where a couple of AirBNB related effects put upward pressure on rents: 1) A person can stay in an apartment they wouldn't otherwise be able to afford, pushing rents up (I personally know several people who maintain apartments like this, either by leaving for a couple days per month or maintaining an apartment after moving out of town.) 2) A full apartment stays off the market because it is being used as a dedicated hotel Both of these make a difference in rent prices, though it's hard to say how much. I'd be happy to see a ban on AirBNB while residential vacancy rates are lower than 3%. I love the service but not what it does to my already pretty unaffordable city.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Yes, it's true that in a city with an artificial housing scarcity like NYC, AirBnB alters the distribution of who gets to consume housing. It opens the market to people who wouldn't otherwise be able to purchase. Similarly, if we allow illegal immigrants to rent flats then that will also push rents higher. Should we attempt to prevent this as well? If not, why not?
  - kareemm 10y ago
    > Similarly, if we allow illegal immigrants to rent flats then that will also push rents higher. Should we attempt to prevent this as well? If not, why not? There are lots of factors that impact housing supply and demand. Whether they should be regulated / stopped generally becomes a question once the public actively engages in discussing it (see foreign investment in the Pacific Northwest for an example). Basically, if the public doesn't care, the politicians don't care. Since a pol's main incentive is to get re-elected, the issue has to become important to their constituents, otherwise it effectively doesn't matter.
    - jstanley 10y ago
      Are you arguing that your analysis of what's right and wrong should rightly play second fiddle to a politician's chances of getting re-elected? GP wasn't asking whether it would be prevented, merely whether it should.
megablast 10y ago
I guess we can bury our heads into the sands with the problems that Airbnb or Uber creates because we enjoy the services.
- ArtDev 10y ago
  Probably because they solve more problems then they cause.

jstanley 10y ago

I find the anti-AirBnB comments on this site quite confusing, because in most other cases HN seems to be pro-free markets. If a landlord wants to rent their place out to short-term tenants, and tenants want to rent it, and AirBnB want to act as a marketplace, I can't see what the harm is. You don't have any right to say who comes and goes to your neighbours' properties, any more than they have any right to say who comes and goes to your property. If you want to decide who gets to stay in a given house, you should buy that house. Otherwise it's none of your business.

amelius 10y ago
There are rules for renting out appartments for good reasons. For example, it influences the worth of appartments around it, and it messes up housing costs in a broader area. Another example of the free market not working outside a very simplistic view.
- ryanlol 10y ago
  Can you make a good argument for why free market doesn't work here? I don't feel that ... >There are rules for renting out appartments for good reasons. For example, it influences the worth of appartments around it, and it messes up housing costs in a broader area. ... is really an useful argument against free market as it fails to explain why either of those are inherently bad things.
  - mehwoot 10y ago
    Because there are negative externalities to someone constantly renting out their unit for short term stay. In a completely free market, there are no rules to protect the neighbours from these negative externalities.
    - ryanlol 10y ago
      This seems to be a solved problem, housing co-operatives exist and enable the shareholders to regulate these things themselves.

mydpy 10y ago

He's not alone. The article talks about the importance of his collaborator Slee. Weird, click-baitey article title.

dang 10y ago
Ok, we replaced the title with the subtitle (shortened to fit).
- mydpy 10y ago
  Sorry, I was criticizing the referenced article not your title on HN.
  - dang 10y ago
    Oh no problem—the HN guidelines call for changing titles in that case (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), so the observation was relevant here too.

debt 10y ago

"data activist" beginning of a new type of activism right here. corporations manipulate the data. data activist or journalists are tasked with teasing out the bullshit in the data itself.

Overtonwindow 10y ago

Inaccurate title.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

CodeWriter23 10y ago

There's no excuse for AirBNB permitting listings of multiple dwellings in the localities that prohibit it. In order to produce the Federally-mandated 1099K, they have to take the host's SSN and keep it on file. Even if someone uses multiple accounts, they can simple compare the SSN of an account adding a listing and reject the listing is the SSN already has a different listing on file for the locality in question.

x0x0 10y ago
The excuse is that's obviously where the majority of their revenue comes from. Why else would they fight so hard and risk being banned entirely?
- jgalt212 10y ago
  agree. 80/20 rule in effect here. no different than the power sellers on Ebay who drive the lion's share of transactions.
- CodeWriter23 10y ago
  So it's ok to break the law if your primary source of income is derived from illegal activity?
  - x0x0 10y ago
    I'm speculating about why they did it. I think that AirBNB is horrific for housing constrained cities.
    - nojvek 10y ago
      I used to be a big fan of airbnb when it got started in the spirit to support YC companies. Over the last couple of years all my experiences have been crap. I've lost about $1000 in non refundable fees because I've tried to cancel hosts who had almost unlivable places. The review system is gamed and the whole things feels like a giant scam now. I never use it anymore and back to reliable hotel chains that guarantee some sort of quality.

chx 10y ago

Here's a single data point: https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/8618464?checkin=24-03-2017&checkout=25-03-2017&guests=1&adults=1&children=0&infants=0&s=j4d9g87T https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/8618464?checkin=24-03-2017&check... I reported this listing to Airbnb more than a year ago and it's still up. As the review says, it's a shitty motel and if you look at the map https://goo.gl/maps/agvWpTr7pEN2 https://goo.gl/maps/agvWpTr7pEN2 or go there personally (which I did) you will immediately see it can not be anything else but a motel because there are no private dwellings at the junction at all! (There's another room https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/9093980?checkin=22-02-2017&checkout=23-02-2017&adults=1&children=0&infants=0&s=wDMxzxQG https://www.airbnb.ca/rooms/9093980?checkin=22-02-2017&check... listed, same thing) I did a crazy one week trip last January, every day sleeping somewhere else: Tel Hazor, Tel Megiddo, Beer-Sheva, Avdat - Mitzpe Ramon, Eilat, Petra, Amman, fly home. I do not drive. I do not read or speak any Semitic language. It was quite a trip.

kobayashi 10y ago
Yikes. Airbnb really needs to deal with abuses such as those. That's just not fair for customers. I'm interested about why you mention not speaking any Semitic languages. English is pretty-well universally understood there - did you have any problems with language barriers?
- chx 10y ago
  The inability to read is a major hurdle when trying to mass transit. Having a data connection and bus.co.il helps. Not speaking the language only caused problems in Jordan and even there not much.
- c06n 10y ago
  > English is pretty-well universally understood there No, this is absolutely not the case. I was there just over Christmas, and we did have problems to communicate with locals. Sure, the college educated all speak English. They don't work as bus drivers or at the gas station though. But these are the people I interact with the most as a tourist. That is not to say that people aren't multilingual there. I'm sure they all speak two or three languages. Such as Hebrew, Arabic or Russian. Israel isn't just Tel Aviv.

cletus 10y ago

Wow. As for the legality of all this, it's really beyond my ken. Firstly, there's the question of jurisdiction. If a resident of the stste of New York uses a server outside of NY belonging to a company outside of NY to rent out an apartment in NYC, does the state of NY have jurisdiction? What about NYC? Years ago Amazon took the stance that sales were interstate commerce and they shouldn't be forced to collect sales tax on interstate transactions. They ended up caving to New York's so-called "Amazon tax" [1]. Airbnb seems to be taking the view that it's not their problem if individuals violate NY/NYC law. Personally I think that's purely a self-serving stance a bit like how Craigslist turned a blind eye to prostitution. I believe that illegal hotels in a few cities are Airbnb's core business and the efforts of cities to enforce laws prohibiting such are an existential threat. I believe Airbnb knows this. I also believe that Airbnb will ultimately lose this one. What this PDF represents is at best misleading and data manipulation and at worse misrepresentation. If at some point Airbnb has or will respond under oath or to a subpoena with this information well that could be a crime. Whatever the case I think this is going to take years to play out. [1] http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/new-york-internet-sales-tax.html http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/new-york-internet-sal...

willholloway 10y ago

My town had a recent dustup over prohibiting AirBnB, some people claimed that it was against zoning regulations, the town attorney and planning and zoning looked into it and decided it was beyond their power to regulate tenure, or the length of a lease. Short term rentals are considered residential use in my town, and they make up the backbone of the local economy. A public forum was called and almost two hundred locals, many of whom have lived here for decades, spoke in favor. Only two cranks got up and spoke against. There reasons were all about hypothetical harms and imagined worst case scenarios. My town is a popular vacation destination for families and weddings. There are about 200 short term rentals and the two opponents were unable to come up with any actual examples of misbehavior, there was not one noise complaint, prostitution, drug use or any other worst case scenarios trotted out against AirBnB. There was a recent prostitution arrest at a local hotel though. The difference between AirBnB and hotels, is that AirBnB runs an extensive criminal and sex offender background check on hosts and guests. They even check the terrorist watch list! One opponent at first tried to say that an AirBnB house was hosting loud parties on weekends, and people were drunkenly sleeping in their cars and knocking on their windows. The newspaper ran this story prominently. It turned out it was the owner's young adult children that were throwing the parties when it wasn't rented to families on AirBnB. My state has struck a deal with AirBnB to collect occupancy tax directly and we are contributing a lot in taxes in a state with a budget crisis. Homes and rentals are still abundant and affordable, and our town gets all kinds of cool visitors that enrich our town. I love AirBnB, my town has been doing vacation rentals for a hundred years but it has made it more popular and better. The new visitors are supporting a bunch of nice new and more upscale restaurants and bars. It's really revitalized this town and made it a much for fun place for young professionals to live. Short term rentals started the revitalization, then new eateries opened, and next I hope we can attract a few tech companies now that we are a more desirable place to live.

dexwiz 10y ago
Is it a desirable place to live? Or a desirable place to vacation? It sounds like your town was already a destination if it supports 200 short term rentals.
- 10y ago

stuaxo 10y ago

Sounds like the earned their own bad press.