10 ms·

Did Airbnb Kill the Mountain Town?

89 points by pmcpinto 9y ago

mistermann 9y ago
So much money is floating to the top x% that even just renting to them on weekends is more lucrative than renting to locals 365 days per year. Where are people supposed to go when even the middle class is homeless? I guess we still have some buffer room as most people still have some disposable income that doesn't go to rent, but when that cap is hit, then what?
- bpodgursky 9y ago
  Er, in this case the x% is like, 30+%. Lots of people take ski weekends in the winter.
  - ChuckMcM 9y ago
    Probably true but it doesn't really take away from the point of resources being tied up by a percentage that is significantly less than 50% of the population. Rents businesses essentially "short circuit" the flow of capital through the economy. So a "one percenter"[1] buys a cabin which he rents through AirBnB to other "one percenters". Because he isn't a hospitality business he doesn't hire desk staff, a concierge, or pay taxes that are funding local government efforts. Instead the 'rents' just recirculate right back into the "one percenter" pool. The absurd extreme of this notion is something like the vision in Elysium of a rich people enclave with no need of any human "non rich" staff. I don't see that actually coming to pass but as Gates and others have noted, it is important to understand how technology can distort an economy and work on ways to repair that distortion. [1] In quotes because it is a stand end for 'top n% where n << 50'
    - wbl 9y ago
      Increased affordable housing supply in these areas would help. Unfortunately residents often don't want it.
      - blackguardx 9y ago
        They generally used to be very affordable until highly paid remote workers and vacation rentals became more popular.
      - mistermann 9y ago
        Q: What's the difference between a developer and an environmentalist? A: A developer is someone who wants to build a cabin in the woods; an environmentalist is someone who already has one.
    - Consultant32452 9y ago
      If you're talking about a true 1%er they're hiring handy-man types and maids. They're paying property tax on those homes, funding roads and schools they will never use. It's highly likely they are paying other state and local taxes too, including but not limited to income taxes. All of the other 1%ers who come into that area are spending money at local restaurants or other venues which is pulling money out of the 1% and into the hands of locals. If you're talking more like a 20%er, then they are either doing the same thing, or they live locally so even though they're not hiring a maid/handy-man, money is going from the 1%er to a person living in the local economy (themselves).
      - mistermann 9y ago
        Whew, I feel better now that it's clearly going to all work out with just a temporary minor hiccup as the economy readjusts.
        Consultant32452 9y ago
        If the citizens of these towns want more affordable housing, they are free to vote such zoning into existence. If they continue to shoot themselves in the foot, then I'm not sure how many crocodile tears I'm supposed to shed for them.
        mistermann 9y ago
        Oh right, in a democracy "the people" make the decisions, I forgot about that. /s
        Consultant32452 9y ago
        The smaller the government the easier it is for the people to have control. I mean, we're talking about towns of a few thousand people here. It has to be pretty easy to sway an election over a single issue like this if the people are in your favor.
      - ChuckMcM 9y ago
  - aphextron 9y ago
    >Er, in this case the x% is like, 30+%. Lots of people take ski weekends in the winter. But the reality is that the resorts make their profits off a tiny percentage of the clientele. The middle class family who stays in a budget hotel, buys season passes, and brings their own food, ends up being a net loss for the company. Practically all the money is made on the full price daily ticket sales, expensive marked up restaurants, and high end real estate sales/rentals. Without the rich people who blow $20k on a week of skiing once a year, the industry as we know it simply would not exist.
  - _delirium 9y ago
    You are significantly overestimating. According to the ski industry itself, which tends to use a fairly generous definition that includes things such as cross-country skiing, only around 7% of Americans ski: http://www.planetski.eu/news/4090 http://www.planetski.eu/news/4090 And many of these are people who live in day-trip distance of ski areas rather than renting or owning second homes, so the proportion in that market is even lower.
- Jabanga 9y ago
  I know it sounds like free market dogma, but I swear this is true: supply grows to meet demand. Airbnb will just encourage more housing to be built, by creating a new short term housing market that until now had not existed.
  - chongli 9y ago
    That doesn't work for mountain towns. When skyscraper condos start going up it ceases to be a mountain town.
    - Jabanga 9y ago
      The parent comment asked: "Where are people supposed to go when even the middle class is homeless?" They can go to places that aren't mountain towns. EDIT: or they can build new mountain towns. There is no shortage of mountains.
      - matheweis 9y ago
        There is a shortage of water, though, unless you solve desalination and pumping it up the several miles of elevation...
        Jabanga 9y ago
        Right but there's no shortage of mountains where new towns can be built. If people really want to live in mountain towns, the market can meet that demand for pretty much any number of people.
        ghaff 9y ago
        And, in fact, there are tons of "mountain towns" where real estate is cheap. They just aren't chi-chi mountain towns with cute coffee shops and gourmet restaurants often associated with world class ski areas.
    - klipt 9y ago
- jseliger 9y ago
  Where are people supposed to go when even the middle class is homeless? You know, there are pretty simple and century-old technologies that let us build more units of housing on a given piece of land. The problem is that we choose not to use them: https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regulation/2002/10/v25n3-7.pdf https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/r.... Or see http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/01/the_upper_middle_class_is_ruining_all_that_is_great_about_america.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201... for a broader view. Housing doesn't intrinsically need to get more expensive. But if we make it impossible or difficult to increase the supply, we're going to see prices rise. This isn't really about money "floating to the top;" it's about legal and regulatory problems.
  - threatofrain 9y ago
    Zoning can only be one side of the equation, as it only affects supply. There's no zoning or technology for too much demand, too much people. Better infrastructure is a temporary band-aid before people either do or don't come up with a consensus on what society and growth should look like.
    - erentz 9y ago
      In a free nation, demand can only be controlled through restriction on immigration and birth rates. For the USA that means demand is a national policy issue. It cannot be managed by cities or states. All cities and states can do is manage supply to meet demand. But for addressing your concern this is good news: "before people either do or don't come up with a consensus on what society and growth should look like." Unless there is a dramatic shift in policies to allow MASS immigration or everyone starts breeding like rabbits in the USA, we do not really have a problem here where our urban spaces will develop into unpleasent places. In fact it's actually the underinvestment in our urban spaces that precisely creates many of the issues people connect to cities. Cities and states need to address the supply and infrastructure problem to allow people to live affordably, with a good standard of living, in the places that they want to live.
- aphextron 9y ago
  >So much money is floating to the top x% that even just renting to them on weekends is more lucrative than renting to locals 365 days per year. Where are people supposed to go when even the middle class is homeless? This has always been the case in mountain towns. The article is more doom and gloom than anything. I spent my early teen and twenties ski bumming around the exact towns mentioned (Crested Butte, among others) years before AirBnB existed. It has always been a lifestyle of poverty couch surfing and floor camping. The dichotomy of extreme rich and poor has existed in these towns like nowhere else in the US for as long as skiing has been an upper class pursuit. Those who wish to make their lives in these towns know this and value the lifestyle above all, so they adapt. The ones who don't move to Denver.
twobyfour 9y ago
Of course, this is happening everywhere the rental market is tight and tourism high, including large coastal cities.
- _delirium 9y ago
  Large cities do have prices impacted, but because of the larger existing population it takes a lot more to completely push out residents. They still operate as cities, with people living and working there year-round, businesses that don't exclusively cater to tourists, etc. Regardless of how many New Yorkers complain about tourists, New York as a functioning city with residents is not on the verge of disappearing. Smaller tourist-heavy towns really are being almost completely replaced with seasonal rentals in some cases though, to such an extent that the town more or less ceases to exist as a functioning town, and turns more into a seasonal amusement park. In addition to mountain towns in the U.S., you see this in a lot of smaller European towns and cities, where especially in quaint historic areas nobody actually lives there anymore. Again usually below a certain size. Despite the AirBnBs, Paris is still a real city, but Venice is pretty much on life support (the old town has lost 70% of its population over the past few decades). Although AirBnB is only one factor in all of this. With Venice it started with mass conversion to regular B&Bs, and in some areas it's more just traditional purchase/rental of vacation homes (Londoners buying up 2nd homes in Cornwall is what's pushed locals out of towns like St. Ives).
  - m_mueller 9y ago
    Yes exactly. As an example in Switzerland the phenomenon predates the BnB boom by at least two decades. It has lead to a new law that tries to limit the 2nd home ratio for each town - not sure how successful this is though.
    - MrMorden 9y ago
      If the amount of second homes and STRs is causing a problem, it's perfectly reasonable for the government to tax them. As an example, UK councils are allowed to charge 50% more tax on homes that have been empty for more than two years (100% and one year in Scotland); if 19% of the town's rental stock has been converted to STR, that's a sizable revenue stream for rent subsidies and other programs. That said, the only way to guarantee affordable housing is to build more housing.
oisino 9y ago
The fact that airbnb is negative for rental rates and hurts locals is Airbnb biggest existential threat. In reality renters outnumber home owners that do Airbnb thus when it comes to regulations people will vote for more regulation long term.
nateberkopec 9y ago
I moved to Taos, New Mexico last year, a ski town with a huge Airbnb market, like Crested Butte. It has definitely increased long term rental prices around here, but, to a former NYC resident like me, they were pretty low to begin with. Taos, thankfully, has a lot of factors which prevent it from becoming the next Jackson Hole or Crested Butte. For one, unlike those towns, we have a lot of land. Taos isn't really hemmed in by National Forests and has plenty of room for new construction. Second, Taos was fairly large to begin with: 15,000 people or so in the greater area, so Airbnb has a more muted effect. It seems like a very mixed bag to me. Long term rental prices keep going way up, but many locals seem to be making a lot of money renting out (of course, only the ones who can afford to own in the first place). The city also seems to make a decent amount of money from lodgers tax as well.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Of course, ski towns have also had a short, long, and midterm rental market since long before there was an AirBnB. For a number of years after school, a group of us rented a ski condo decades ago. I'm a bit curious about this trend generally. Skiing as a sport isn't growing much and I believe it's still below pre-recession heights overall. Of course that's not the only reason to stay in a mountain town but it tends to be a big one in the winter.
pitaj 9y ago
Nope.
olivermarks 9y ago
I have a neighbor who grew up in Venice beach (a coastal town within greater Los Angeles). His parents live in the same house he grew up in. It's always been somewhat touristy, especially on the oceanfront, but since the digital STR wave he says it has rapidly destroyed the neighborhood. The challenge is lots of late night activity - people talking loudly in the streets, screaming etc, drink and drugs, and just a general itinerant population of people who come and go, adding nothing to the locality. I know this reads like a 'get off my lawn' mentality, but it is surprising how quickly a place can lose its ambiance and atmosphere - the things that made it attractive to visit - when the population becomes dominated by faceless, ever changing visitors. It seems anywhere 'interesting' is suffering from these issues...
- colordrops 9y ago
  Hmm, that sounds just like Venice Beach when I spent a lot of time there in the 90s.
- ng12 9y ago
  Wow, those are some military-grade nostalgia goggles. Venice Beach was never a sleepy beach town, it was always kind of earthy with a healthy dosing of weekend revilers. The only thing that changed was the surfer dudes now own million dollar "quaint beachfront townhouses" and care about noise levels and the wrong type of people visiting their neighborhood.
seany 9y ago
No.
lechiffre10 9y ago
Highly doubt Airbnb will be around in the next 10-15 years. If Hotels can catch up and get with the program they could easily get people to stop renting on Airbnb. Oddly enough the people who complained about rent control and increased rent prices in cities now ask for crazy prices on Airbnb when renting their room ( even if they have 3-4 roommates) It just isn't worth it anymore unless you're a group of 6-7 people. Might as well just get a hotel.
- Nicholas_C 9y ago
  What could hotels do to beat AirBnB so badly that it goes out of business?
- heylook 9y ago
  You can't actually kill the idea of a platform connecting travelers with decentralized supply. Sure, it's possible that the specific company Airbnb might not exist in the future, but there will always be people interested in exchanging spare housing capacity for money, and with the increasing ease of long-distance travel, I'd expect that population to only grow in the future. Maybe the dominant platform will be Airbnb, maybe it'll be HomeAway. Maybe it'll be Craigslist. Hotels are actually really poorly positioned to fight Airbnb et al, since they face the huge capital costs of building/owning/maintaining giant buildings. Sure, they might win fights to change regulation or enforcement in some number of markets for some amount of time, but they'll never be able to spin supply up or down as nimbly as the marketplace platforms that don't own their own inventory.
baus 9y ago
I've been renting my house out on Airbnb in Tahoe. It is a house I lived in for many years myself. I hear these concerns all the time, but Tahoe has always had vacation rentals, and in my opinion the real solution is to build more units. The backlash against building has gotten so ridiculous that we are creating our own problems. IMHO Tahoe would be better served by higher density development than the sprawl we have now
baus 9y ago
I've been renting my house out on Airbnb in Tahoe. It is a house I lived in for many years myself. I hear these concerns all the time, but Tahoe has always had vacation rentals, and in my opinion the real solution is to build more units. The backlash against building has gotten so ridiculous that we are creating our own problems. IMHO Tahoe would be better served by higher density development than the sprawl we have now
matheweis 9y ago
I recently relocated out of a small mountain town to a job in the city, so this article resonated poignantly. The bit about everyone either having a second job or a second home is so true! I owned my home and did not have this problem with housing directly, but rising costs of living (possibly a side effect of rising rents for the rest of the workers?) and a reduction in the available jobs in the area led to me being available to recruiters. In the end it was a positive thing, and I landed a position at one of the major tech companies that was very top on my list. But it was still a bit sad to go...
visarga 9y ago
Any title that ends in? -> The correct answer is No.

89 points by pmcpinto 9y ago

So much money is floating to the top x% that even just renting to them on weekends is more lucrative than renting to locals 365 days per year. Where are people supposed to go when even the middle class is homeless? I guess we still have some buffer room as most people still have some disposable income that doesn't go to rent, but when that cap is hit, then what?

bpodgursky 9y ago
Er, in this case the x% is like, 30+%. Lots of people take ski weekends in the winter.
- ChuckMcM 9y ago
  Probably true but it doesn't really take away from the point of resources being tied up by a percentage that is significantly less than 50% of the population. Rents businesses essentially "short circuit" the flow of capital through the economy. So a "one percenter"[1] buys a cabin which he rents through AirBnB to other "one percenters". Because he isn't a hospitality business he doesn't hire desk staff, a concierge, or pay taxes that are funding local government efforts. Instead the 'rents' just recirculate right back into the "one percenter" pool. The absurd extreme of this notion is something like the vision in Elysium of a rich people enclave with no need of any human "non rich" staff. I don't see that actually coming to pass but as Gates and others have noted, it is important to understand how technology can distort an economy and work on ways to repair that distortion. [1] In quotes because it is a stand end for 'top n% where n << 50'
  - wbl 9y ago
    Increased affordable housing supply in these areas would help. Unfortunately residents often don't want it.
    - blackguardx 9y ago
      They generally used to be very affordable until highly paid remote workers and vacation rentals became more popular.
    - mistermann 9y ago
      Q: What's the difference between a developer and an environmentalist? A: A developer is someone who wants to build a cabin in the woods; an environmentalist is someone who already has one.
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    If you're talking about a true 1%er they're hiring handy-man types and maids. They're paying property tax on those homes, funding roads and schools they will never use. It's highly likely they are paying other state and local taxes too, including but not limited to income taxes. All of the other 1%ers who come into that area are spending money at local restaurants or other venues which is pulling money out of the 1% and into the hands of locals. If you're talking more like a 20%er, then they are either doing the same thing, or they live locally so even though they're not hiring a maid/handy-man, money is going from the 1%er to a person living in the local economy (themselves).
    - mistermann 9y ago
      Whew, I feel better now that it's clearly going to all work out with just a temporary minor hiccup as the economy readjusts.
      - Consultant32452 9y ago
        If the citizens of these towns want more affordable housing, they are free to vote such zoning into existence. If they continue to shoot themselves in the foot, then I'm not sure how many crocodile tears I'm supposed to shed for them.
        mistermann 9y ago
        Oh right, in a democracy "the people" make the decisions, I forgot about that. /s
        Consultant32452 9y ago
        The smaller the government the easier it is for the people to have control. I mean, we're talking about towns of a few thousand people here. It has to be pretty easy to sway an election over a single issue like this if the people are in your favor.
    - ChuckMcM 9y ago
- aphextron 9y ago
  >Er, in this case the x% is like, 30+%. Lots of people take ski weekends in the winter. But the reality is that the resorts make their profits off a tiny percentage of the clientele. The middle class family who stays in a budget hotel, buys season passes, and brings their own food, ends up being a net loss for the company. Practically all the money is made on the full price daily ticket sales, expensive marked up restaurants, and high end real estate sales/rentals. Without the rich people who blow $20k on a week of skiing once a year, the industry as we know it simply would not exist.
- _delirium 9y ago
  You are significantly overestimating. According to the ski industry itself, which tends to use a fairly generous definition that includes things such as cross-country skiing, only around 7% of Americans ski: http://www.planetski.eu/news/4090 http://www.planetski.eu/news/4090 And many of these are people who live in day-trip distance of ski areas rather than renting or owning second homes, so the proportion in that market is even lower.
Jabanga 9y ago
I know it sounds like free market dogma, but I swear this is true: supply grows to meet demand. Airbnb will just encourage more housing to be built, by creating a new short term housing market that until now had not existed.
- chongli 9y ago
  That doesn't work for mountain towns. When skyscraper condos start going up it ceases to be a mountain town.
  - Jabanga 9y ago
    The parent comment asked: "Where are people supposed to go when even the middle class is homeless?" They can go to places that aren't mountain towns. EDIT: or they can build new mountain towns. There is no shortage of mountains.
    - matheweis 9y ago
      There is a shortage of water, though, unless you solve desalination and pumping it up the several miles of elevation...
      - Jabanga 9y ago
        Right but there's no shortage of mountains where new towns can be built. If people really want to live in mountain towns, the market can meet that demand for pretty much any number of people.
        ghaff 9y ago
        And, in fact, there are tons of "mountain towns" where real estate is cheap. They just aren't chi-chi mountain towns with cute coffee shops and gourmet restaurants often associated with world class ski areas.
  - klipt 9y ago
jseliger 9y ago
Where are people supposed to go when even the middle class is homeless? You know, there are pretty simple and century-old technologies that let us build more units of housing on a given piece of land. The problem is that we choose not to use them: https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/regulation/2002/10/v25n3-7.pdf https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/serials/files/r.... Or see http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/01/the_upper_middle_class_is_ruining_all_that_is_great_about_america.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201... for a broader view. Housing doesn't intrinsically need to get more expensive. But if we make it impossible or difficult to increase the supply, we're going to see prices rise. This isn't really about money "floating to the top;" it's about legal and regulatory problems.
- threatofrain 9y ago
  Zoning can only be one side of the equation, as it only affects supply. There's no zoning or technology for too much demand, too much people. Better infrastructure is a temporary band-aid before people either do or don't come up with a consensus on what society and growth should look like.
  - erentz 9y ago
    In a free nation, demand can only be controlled through restriction on immigration and birth rates. For the USA that means demand is a national policy issue. It cannot be managed by cities or states. All cities and states can do is manage supply to meet demand. But for addressing your concern this is good news: "before people either do or don't come up with a consensus on what society and growth should look like." Unless there is a dramatic shift in policies to allow MASS immigration or everyone starts breeding like rabbits in the USA, we do not really have a problem here where our urban spaces will develop into unpleasent places. In fact it's actually the underinvestment in our urban spaces that precisely creates many of the issues people connect to cities. Cities and states need to address the supply and infrastructure problem to allow people to live affordably, with a good standard of living, in the places that they want to live.
aphextron 9y ago
>So much money is floating to the top x% that even just renting to them on weekends is more lucrative than renting to locals 365 days per year. Where are people supposed to go when even the middle class is homeless? This has always been the case in mountain towns. The article is more doom and gloom than anything. I spent my early teen and twenties ski bumming around the exact towns mentioned (Crested Butte, among others) years before AirBnB existed. It has always been a lifestyle of poverty couch surfing and floor camping. The dichotomy of extreme rich and poor has existed in these towns like nowhere else in the US for as long as skiing has been an upper class pursuit. Those who wish to make their lives in these towns know this and value the lifestyle above all, so they adapt. The ones who don't move to Denver.

twobyfour 9y ago

Of course, this is happening everywhere the rental market is tight and tourism high, including large coastal cities.

_delirium 9y ago
Large cities do have prices impacted, but because of the larger existing population it takes a lot more to completely push out residents. They still operate as cities, with people living and working there year-round, businesses that don't exclusively cater to tourists, etc. Regardless of how many New Yorkers complain about tourists, New York as a functioning city with residents is not on the verge of disappearing. Smaller tourist-heavy towns really are being almost completely replaced with seasonal rentals in some cases though, to such an extent that the town more or less ceases to exist as a functioning town, and turns more into a seasonal amusement park. In addition to mountain towns in the U.S., you see this in a lot of smaller European towns and cities, where especially in quaint historic areas nobody actually lives there anymore. Again usually below a certain size. Despite the AirBnBs, Paris is still a real city, but Venice is pretty much on life support (the old town has lost 70% of its population over the past few decades). Although AirBnB is only one factor in all of this. With Venice it started with mass conversion to regular B&Bs, and in some areas it's more just traditional purchase/rental of vacation homes (Londoners buying up 2nd homes in Cornwall is what's pushed locals out of towns like St. Ives).
- m_mueller 9y ago
  Yes exactly. As an example in Switzerland the phenomenon predates the BnB boom by at least two decades. It has lead to a new law that tries to limit the 2nd home ratio for each town - not sure how successful this is though.
  - MrMorden 9y ago
    If the amount of second homes and STRs is causing a problem, it's perfectly reasonable for the government to tax them. As an example, UK councils are allowed to charge 50% more tax on homes that have been empty for more than two years (100% and one year in Scotland); if 19% of the town's rental stock has been converted to STR, that's a sizable revenue stream for rent subsidies and other programs. That said, the only way to guarantee affordable housing is to build more housing.

oisino 9y ago

The fact that airbnb is negative for rental rates and hurts locals is Airbnb biggest existential threat. In reality renters outnumber home owners that do Airbnb thus when it comes to regulations people will vote for more regulation long term.

nateberkopec 9y ago

I moved to Taos, New Mexico last year, a ski town with a huge Airbnb market, like Crested Butte. It has definitely increased long term rental prices around here, but, to a former NYC resident like me, they were pretty low to begin with. Taos, thankfully, has a lot of factors which prevent it from becoming the next Jackson Hole or Crested Butte. For one, unlike those towns, we have a lot of land. Taos isn't really hemmed in by National Forests and has plenty of room for new construction. Second, Taos was fairly large to begin with: 15,000 people or so in the greater area, so Airbnb has a more muted effect. It seems like a very mixed bag to me. Long term rental prices keep going way up, but many locals seem to be making a lot of money renting out (of course, only the ones who can afford to own in the first place). The city also seems to make a decent amount of money from lodgers tax as well.

ghaff 9y ago
Of course, ski towns have also had a short, long, and midterm rental market since long before there was an AirBnB. For a number of years after school, a group of us rented a ski condo decades ago. I'm a bit curious about this trend generally. Skiing as a sport isn't growing much and I believe it's still below pre-recession heights overall. Of course that's not the only reason to stay in a mountain town but it tends to be a big one in the winter.

pitaj 9y ago

Nope.

olivermarks 9y ago

I have a neighbor who grew up in Venice beach (a coastal town within greater Los Angeles). His parents live in the same house he grew up in. It's always been somewhat touristy, especially on the oceanfront, but since the digital STR wave he says it has rapidly destroyed the neighborhood. The challenge is lots of late night activity - people talking loudly in the streets, screaming etc, drink and drugs, and just a general itinerant population of people who come and go, adding nothing to the locality. I know this reads like a 'get off my lawn' mentality, but it is surprising how quickly a place can lose its ambiance and atmosphere - the things that made it attractive to visit - when the population becomes dominated by faceless, ever changing visitors. It seems anywhere 'interesting' is suffering from these issues...

colordrops 9y ago
Hmm, that sounds just like Venice Beach when I spent a lot of time there in the 90s.
ng12 9y ago
Wow, those are some military-grade nostalgia goggles. Venice Beach was never a sleepy beach town, it was always kind of earthy with a healthy dosing of weekend revilers. The only thing that changed was the surfer dudes now own million dollar "quaint beachfront townhouses" and care about noise levels and the wrong type of people visiting their neighborhood.

seany 9y ago

No.

lechiffre10 9y ago

Highly doubt Airbnb will be around in the next 10-15 years. If Hotels can catch up and get with the program they could easily get people to stop renting on Airbnb. Oddly enough the people who complained about rent control and increased rent prices in cities now ask for crazy prices on Airbnb when renting their room ( even if they have 3-4 roommates) It just isn't worth it anymore unless you're a group of 6-7 people. Might as well just get a hotel.

Nicholas_C 9y ago
What could hotels do to beat AirBnB so badly that it goes out of business?
heylook 9y ago
You can't actually kill the idea of a platform connecting travelers with decentralized supply. Sure, it's possible that the specific company Airbnb might not exist in the future, but there will always be people interested in exchanging spare housing capacity for money, and with the increasing ease of long-distance travel, I'd expect that population to only grow in the future. Maybe the dominant platform will be Airbnb, maybe it'll be HomeAway. Maybe it'll be Craigslist. Hotels are actually really poorly positioned to fight Airbnb et al, since they face the huge capital costs of building/owning/maintaining giant buildings. Sure, they might win fights to change regulation or enforcement in some number of markets for some amount of time, but they'll never be able to spin supply up or down as nimbly as the marketplace platforms that don't own their own inventory.

baus 9y ago

I've been renting my house out on Airbnb in Tahoe. It is a house I lived in for many years myself. I hear these concerns all the time, but Tahoe has always had vacation rentals, and in my opinion the real solution is to build more units. The backlash against building has gotten so ridiculous that we are creating our own problems. IMHO Tahoe would be better served by higher density development than the sprawl we have now

baus 9y ago

matheweis 9y ago

I recently relocated out of a small mountain town to a job in the city, so this article resonated poignantly. The bit about everyone either having a second job or a second home is so true! I owned my home and did not have this problem with housing directly, but rising costs of living (possibly a side effect of rising rents for the rest of the workers?) and a reduction in the available jobs in the area led to me being available to recruiters. In the end it was a positive thing, and I landed a position at one of the major tech companies that was very top on my list. But it was still a bit sad to go...

visarga 9y ago

Any title that ends in? -> The correct answer is No.