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Sorry AirBnB Hipsters, I’ll Take Health and Safety Over the Cult of Disruption
- jim_h 16y agoFUD. I'll summarize for you below. I call it FUD since the author never provides any sources or anything to actually back up what he writes. "don’t want to be burned alive by faulty wiring" "lack of fire exits or basic electrical safety" "hell of noise and violence and shady goings" "don’t want to be robbed, or scammed or murdered" "credit card and not have that card cloned" "drug-addled European backpackers armed with camping stoves" "used by gangsters and slum lords to drive families from their apartments" "fleece tourists into spending their vacations under unsafe roofs"
- hipsterelitist 16y agoYou're skipping the one very good and valid point he makes in the article, which is that the bill actually has an exemption which pretty much permits services like AirBnB to exist, if not thrive. Basically, short term rentals are acceptable as long as the owner is present... this means less competition for your average AirBnB user. Given this exemption, it makes me question why exactly AirBnB was so up in arms about this, especially with their rhetoric being centered on protecting the little guy. That being said, I love the service, though if I had more cash I'd take a hotel every time.
- jim_h 16y agoAlso this: "absent owners can lend their rooms, but are banned from taking money". This means people that go on vacation cannot take in renters. (Sorry, your point was a bit lost in all the FUD that was in that article.)
- bluesmoon 16y agobut apartment swaps are allowed
- jim_h 16y agoI think the chances of people doing an apartment 'swap' for their out of town/country vacation is pretty slim. 2 people going in the exact opposite direction and wanting to living in the other person's home. Seems slim chance to me unless those people knew each other in advance. add - bluesmoon, learn something everyday. Though I think not all everybody wants to open their own apt for swap and instead would rather rent someone's for a week or 2.
- bluesmoon 16y agoIt actually happens fairly often on couchsurfing. Couple A from New York wants to spend July in San Francisco and swaps with Couple B from San Francisco who wants to spend July in New York. I've seen it happen with entire families too. Less likely to work internationally, but domestically, it happens. It's the key exchange that's the hard part, but the safest is to leave the key with a neighbour and then call them from the other side to give them the okay.
- yardie 16y agoThere are companies, like homeexchange, that have been in businesses for decades doing exactly that. Swapping, vacation rental, subletting have all been around far longer than sites like airbnb. Even craigslist has had a home swapping section for as long as I can remember. Swapping homes is far more common than renting a room for a week. It's more common outside the US sites like gumtree, leboncoin, etc. have been doing this for years
- j_baker 16y agoAutomatic upvote for having come up with that username before reading this article's title.
- dman 16y agoIn one of the past AirBnB articles about NYC the author mentioned that many landlords owning multiple apartments are making money on their vacant apartments by renting them on AirBnB. Maybe a bulk of AirBnB revenue comes from these operators who are doing hotel rentals on scale?
- patio11 16y agoI don't remember any particular public comment from AirBnB. Speaking generally, I think any business would react negatively to having a powerful competitor convince the government to rule a segment of their business illegal. After all, all it takes is a quick amendment to the law later to eliminate "the loophole being abused by vagrants, drunks, and foreigners" and suddenly you're guilty of Felony Interference With Business Model. One's marketing and PR posture does not necessarily mirror the totality of one's business. If I was planting an article in the New York Times, it would focus on a poor Hispanic girl learning at a NYC school which has a number who loves school now rather than on a middle class white boy learning at a suburban Illinois school which has a name who got a candied apple at the Halloween party last year. Two true stories, but the one which pays the rent is not the one that gives NYT reporters weak knees.
- mechanical_fish 16y agoit makes me question why exactly AirBnB was so up in arms about this Well, one obvious problem is that losing a big subset of your business is always bad. But another problem, which I just found, is that these fine points of the law, if they exist, are nowhere to be seen on the web. All the immediately obvious Google hits paraphrase the law as "AirBnB and Craigslist short-term rentals now illegal in NYC". So that's a first-order marketing problem. It also adds fuel to the FUD fire, as we are seeing right here in the linked article. Suddenly every AirBnB host is being accused of running a flea-infested, credit-card-scamming, fire-hazard rat trap. That's a second-order marketing problem, but it could prove even worse than the first-order one: The law only applies in NYC, but FUD can spread everywhere. Finally, there are the legal problems. This law gives the cops, and whoever tips off the cops, a lever with which to hassle AirBnB guests and hosts alike. Just because you're ultimately going to be found innocent doesn't mean that being hassled by the cops is a barrel of fun. If it happens to any extent it's bound to hurt the reputation of services like AirBnB, especially among foreign travelers, who are probably damn scared of American police as it is. And, of course, to prevent a raft of lawsuits AirBnB must now carefully educate its NYC hosts about the law, and pay a lawyer to draft an airtight agreement for the hosts to sign to indicate that they understand the law, and defend any lawsuits that spring up when people get busted in NYC and blame AirBnB anyway despite all those precautions...
- moxiemk1 16y agoThat part had me puzzled - does 'owner' include renters? This does seem to alleviate any legitamate concerns about the bill, as long as renters count as owners (ie, if I have a free room in my apartment, I can put it on AirBnB) If its only _owners_, though, its quite draconian, as most NYC building owners don't live in their buildings.
- inboulder 16y agoNotice how this 'valid point' has nothing to do with all the other 'safety' red herring nonsense. Forcing the owner to be present cripples the opportunity to sublet, which is exactly what the hotels want.
- jbooth 16y agoOk, he's probably being hyperbolic. All the same. There's a reason that hotels have to be licensed, and it's because people occasionally die if they're not. Do you consider the board of health restaurant inspections to be a bad idea?
- jim_h 16y ago"There's a reason that hotels have to be licensed, and it's because people occasionally die if they're not." Show us something that backs up your statement. People die all the time. Even from things that are heavily regulated and licensed.
- jbooth 16y agoSo, do you think the board of health should no longer inspect restaurants?
- jim_h 16y ago(So, are you avoiding backing up your statement?) I never said that or implied that. We are talking about places to stay, not restaurants(food). Don't change the topic.
- Locke1689 16y agoThey're actually so similar that they're regulated under the same branch of law called "hospitality law."
- justin_vanw 16y agolet me paraphrase the article: "GET OFF MY LAWN YOU PUNK KIDS" full disclosure: the startup I work at uses AirBNB when we bring in potential new hires, unless they insist on a hotel. We have never had anything but the absolute best experience, and I haven't spoken to anyone who has used it that didn't become an evangelist for it. But I guess paranoia and hypothetical boogy men trumps empirical data over at tech-crunch.
- sandofsky 16y agoI wonder how you phrase the offer. If I were planning to interview with a company and they suggested I use the service, I would get the impression the company is cheap beyond practicality, and find a way to politely back out of the interview.
- smokinn 16y agoI would think the same. There's obviously a market for people who don't mind sleeping with strangers but I'm definitely not in it. I'm way too paranoid that I would get robbed. The credit card cloning example from the original article would probably be my biggest fear. I'd be checking my credit card purchases multiple times a day for weeks I'm sure. While actually there I'm sure I would put my wallet, phone and anything else that's valuable in a bag and sleep on top of it. It wouldn't be a very relaxing night's sleep just before an interview. On the other hand, hostels tend to be cheaper than AirBnB and I have no problems sleeping there.
- naz 16y agoYou're scared of getting robbed by a middle-class condo owner, but you'll happily share a hostel room with 6 traveling youths?
- smokinn 16y agoMost hostels have dorm and private room options. I just get the private room. It's more expensive than the dorm but way less expensive than a hotel. I've never slept in a hostel that only offered dorm rooms. I'm just as paranoid about the dorm option.
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- parfe 16y agoI rent an apartment on a 1 year lease. I expect my neighbors to live under the same situation as that forces a social contract. I don't fuck their lives up so they don't fuck mine up. What does a vacationing transient care about pissing in the hallway? He'll be gone in 8 hours. AirBNB ignores the reality that apartments are part of shared property. That shared property maintains its state of repair thanks to people from the building having large stakes in making sure they don't leave human feces in the stairwell.
- dman 16y agoTotally agree with you - different countries / places have different norms on what is considered socially acceptable. So visitors can often have different expectations on what is considered late hours, what is being loud and how okay it is to dispose off trash in public places. Even ruling out bad behavior on part of the guests, they could be making a scene without knowing about it.
- nostromo 16y agoAlmost all apartment leases have stipulations about excessive guests and required behavior. I don't see in your comment justification on why this required YET ANOTHER LAW and not just common sense and enforced contracts.
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- w1ntermute 16y agoDisclosure: I like hotels a lot – and I’ve spent much of my life in them. Both of my parents are career-long hoteliers, first managing large corporate chain units and now owning their own hotel in the UK. Why would you even bother taking the opinion of such a biased source seriously?
- projectileboy 16y agoDitto. I respect Techcrunch enough that I actually can't believe they published such a ridiculous article. My family (me plus wife and 3 kids) have used vrbo.com for our last two vacations (granted, not many data points). In each case, we saved money over staying in a hotel, enjoyed superior lodging over a hotel at almost any price range, and in both cases enjoyed far greater customer service over any hotel experience I've ever had. Any time someone trots out the tired old argument of "well, with big huge companies, you have recourse if something goes bad", I always want to know which big company X they're talking about. Whether it's dealing with the DMV, trying to get JDBC driver bug fixes from Oracle, trying to get billing questions answered from Comcast, or trying to get the shower in you room fixed at a <major hotel chain here>, big organizations simply aren't organized around their customers. There may be legitimate reasons to pick a major hotel chain over AirBnB or the like, but customer satisfaction hardly seems like the best avenue of attack. But of course none of this is rocket science... Whenever an industry resorts to competing through legislation, they aren't fighting the good fight to provide you with a better quality of life.
- yurisagalov 16y agoWell, for one, because it's an opinion... He's overly dramatic in his post and he doesn't present a lot of facts, but I think he's entitled to his opinion, especially as long as he's honest about his bias...
- billswift 16y ago"Opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one"; and this one really stinks. EDIT- "this one" refers to the original article, not the parent comment; sorry for any confusion.
- JulianMorrison 16y agoYou go right ahead and do that - great thing about a free market, it makes room for everyone.
- richcollins 16y agoBecause I don’t want to be burned alive by faulty wiring. Because I don’t want to be robbed, or scammed or murdered. Because I want to pay by credit card and not have that card cloned. Because I want legal recourse if something goes wrong. That government licensing will protect you from these better than the market is an untested assumption.
- Locke1689 16y agoHow would you test that? How many people would have to die in fires or slums before we consider the hypothesis "proven"?
- Empact 16y agoSo we're banning this the avoid deaths-by-fire? Can you name a single example to justify the restraint? And if you could, wouldn't it apply to residences in general, not just those let out by their owners?
- anigbrowl 16y agohttp://www.iklimnet.com/hotelfires/case.html http://www.iklimnet.com/hotelfires/case.html MGM Grand Hotel fire, 1980.
- Empact 16y agoWhat does a fire in a hotel say about short-term rentals, which have more to do with homes & apts than hotels? Do horrific club fires (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZx4i1TwZME http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZx4i1TwZME) justify a ban on house parties? To restate: one of the justifications for regulating landlords is the possibility that they may offer unsuitable, even unsafe housing, in desperate circumstances. But where's the evidence that this is happening in the short-term rental market?
- anigbrowl 16y ago
- bluesmoon 16y agoFWIW, the bill still allows couchsurfing where exchange of money is strictly prohibited by the terms of service.
- brianmckenzie 16y agoYou're just as likely to have unsafe wiring in your leased apartment as w/an AirBnB situation. Same goes for most of the stuff he said. The article doesn't make any sense to me.
- greenlblue 16y agoIs this guy for real? I understand the need for minimum safety standards but the ban against AirBnB and their ilk goes a bit far.
- jdminhbg 16y agoEven by the standards of Techcrunch, this is a particularly egregious exercise in begging the question.
- defen 16y agoWow...talk about a flamebait article. This one was so bad that I finally went ahead and actually added an entry in /etc/hosts for techcrunch.com pointing to 127.0.0.1, something I had been "threatening" to do for a while.
- makmanalp 16y agoI'm sorry, but his claims seem to apply to a lot of hostels but not to any of the airbnb homes I've been to. Public health concerns, egregious conditions, credit card fraud ... If things like this happened in an airbnb home, they'd get a bad rating and a bad comment explaining what went on, effectively ruining the rest of their business. Also, payments happen through airbnb so that also gets rid of a lot of problems and ripoff issues. There is a world of difference between the hostels / illegal hotels mentioned and airbnb.
- jerguismi 16y agoFor hostels, there are sites like hostelbookers.com and hostelworld.com, and reviews matter a lot with those sites. If you choose only top reviewed places, you will get good service for sure.
- edanm 16y agoThen again, he also says that the laws don't apply to most AirBnB homes, either.
- pg 16y agoYou know you've made it when you become material for linkbait.
- barmstrong 16y agoYep - I think Paul Carr's schtick since he started there has just been to take the most outrageous position possible to try and shock, awe, and offend his way to page views. It's probably working to some extent, but at the end of the day there isn't any substance to it - it's just a cheap trick.
- projectileboy 16y agoI think he means AirBnB...
- boredguy8 16y agoWhy is parent being downvoted? PG says "material for linkbait" not "the author of linkbait": it's a mildly obtuse compliment for AirBnB. The grandparent misreads this, and someone helps him understand better, and gets slammed for it? C'mon, people.
- drats 16y agoBarmstrong was making a legitimate comment about troll tech journalists, in a legitimate place (i.e. following its mention), which Projectileboy seems to have grossly misinterpreted. Both PG's comment and Barmstrong's make sense and flow to me; the "yep" signifying agreement with the AirBnB complement before extending commentary on the linkbait aspect: an addendum if you will. I don't see why, or how, Barmstrong's reply to PG would be read in the manner Projectileboy objects to - perhaps the dash could lead to such a reading but it's fairly difficult to arrive at.
- projectileboy 16y agoHoly cow, guys... I just thought (perhaps mistakenly) that the commenter had missed the connection to AirBnB. Not a big deal.
- shadowsun7 16y agohttp://techcrunch.com/2010/06/21/airbnb-brian-chesky/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/06/21/airbnb-brian-chesky/ Airbnb's founder is himself living on Airbnb for the next coupla months (or even indefinitely - though he doesn't say). If that isn't a plus for dependability, I don't know what is. Edit: here's the first blog post - http://blog.airbnb.com/living-on-airbnb-0 http://blog.airbnb.com/living-on-airbnb-0
- seldo 16y agoI wasn't aware that the law has an exemption for short-term lets if the owner is present -- which is almost all AirBnB lets that I've seen, isn't it?
- jonknee 16y ago> which is almost all AirBnB lets that I've seen, isn't it? That's more Couchsurfing's territory. There are plenty of shares on AirBnB, but whole apartments and even buildings are commonly listed too.
- inboulder 16y ago"Sorry AirBnB Hipsters, I’ll Take Health and Safety Over the Cult of Disruption" And you were free to do that already, why force everyone else? (what is that again hotel lobby?)
- groaner 16y agoWhat the heck is NSFW about this?
- angrycoder 16y agofirst response, why is the main character from "Up in the Air" writing blog posts. second response, Techcrunch has become the Fox News of technology blogs.
- hdctambien 16y agoI agree with the author, but he definitely could have gone about his argument a bit more civilly. As an example of the type of people that would/will abuse AirBnB and similar services I submit this article describing my last landlord: http://www.tenant.net/Other_Areas/Massachusetts/jaffe.html http://www.tenant.net/Other_Areas/Massachusetts/jaffe.html . It is dated 1994, but they are still up to the same tricks 16 years later (I lived in one of their houses for the last year). I can't imagine the field day they would have if they knew about AirBnB and the like.
- noodle 16y agoi find it hard to take this angry rant seriously. if it were much more calm, with rational arguments and justifications, i might actually agree, or at least agree to disagree.