11 ms·

What Airbnb really does to a neighbourhood

67 points by loriverkutya 8y ago

walrus01 8y ago
The apartment vacancy rate in Vancouver is presently sub 1%. People are illegally renting suites as Airbnb, taking up domestic housing stock. It's illegal to rent suites for less than 31 days and without a business licence here, but they do it anyways.
- jessaustin 8y ago
  Are any of those occupied by locals for whom it's the best housing they can find?
  - walrus01 8y ago
    There are a great many of these that are 1BD/650 sq ft size condos and apartments that would otherwise be occupied by locals, at market rental rate for standard 12-month lease terms. But the owners of the condos are renting them out on AirBNB. Or people are renting apartments for $1700/mo from absentee owners, and then illegally subletting them for less than 30-day terms on AirBNB and running the sublet as a business.
glup 8y ago
It seems like there is a perfectly reasonable middle ground here — where households have the flexibility to rent out part of their primary residence, on a limited basis (either temporal or just part of the house), subject to clear and evenly enforced regulations. This is a pre-internet idea (e.g., casas particulares in Cuba in the 1990s) that becomes way easier/safer/better with a web-based platform. Personally, I find it massively more fun to stay in a typical home in a region that I'm visiting, and I can often find these on AirBnB. Of course AirBnB is going to try to grow as much as possible to try to eat hotel revenues and develop new markets. But shouldn't communities have the right to combat the externalities that such growth entails?
- ck425 8y ago
  I suspect that partial apartment rentals are far less disruptive. It's full apartment rents that are causing issues. I think this also comes back to over tourism. Travel is the new materialism. It used to be you kept up with the Jones by buying new cars, new jewellery, new houses. Now it's by going away, frequently and to the most exotic places, to prove how open minded and wordly you are. And it's killing the planet and many local communities. There will be a backlash eventually.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    A lot of tourism is also cheaper because of cheap airfares/lowish fuel prices. Probably Airbnb can also make traveling a bit cheaper for those who use it. Economies of many of the countries in which and from which people travel a lot are fairly strong. >Travel is the new materialism. Maybe? I know there is the whole experiences over things mantra. Maybe that's in play. On the other hand, maybe there's less interest in big McMansions but the apartment/condo in a lot of major cities is--as can be seen in other comments--pretty expensive by historical patterns. If tourism were down instead, we'd be hearing arguments that young people who have fewer other obligations aren't traveling because they have no money. In any case, I have trouble seeing tourism as a particular source of the world's problems.
  - wwweston 8y ago
    "Travel is the new materialism." I wanna argue with this -- I think some portion of the population has a deep-seated psychological personal need to travel for their own internal well-being rather than to perform travel for an audience as a status symbol. But I think there's a pretty strong case that especially with the rise of social media, travel's become much more tightly linked with attention and status.
    - ck425 8y ago
      But travel is relatively new idea to much of the population. We don't realise how little folk used to travel because those who did travel are disproportionately famous.
- 8y ago
mazatta 8y ago
Airbnb is a zero sum game - what tourists win, locals lose. Two of my coworkers are currently being forced to look for a new place to live in a tight housing market because their current landlord can make more money renting on Airbnb. I've stayed in Airbnbs in the past (and appreciated the convenience), but I no longer will.
- grandmczeb 8y ago
  It's not zero sum unless the housing supply is fixed - the additional income from Airbnb can be invested in new housing.
  - ck425 8y ago
    But that additional housing can also destroy the character of existing areas. That doesn't mean we don't build, just that it has to be considered, which is harder to do when demand is increasing too quickly.
    - grandmczeb 8y ago
      Sounds like preserving character is the real zero sum problem then.
    - pc86 8y ago
      Complaining about both the rapidly increasing housing prices as well as the loss of character in developed areas doesn't have any cognitive dissonance at all, though.
      - ck425 8y ago
        It's a balance, one that AirBnB is making far more difficult to maintain.
- jseliger 8y ago
  Airbnb is a zero sum game - what tourists win, locals lose. I think you mean that "zoning is a zero-sum game." Since the 1970s, when zoning became more severe and restrictive, housing costs have increased substantially: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-the-1970s https://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-.... We know how to create a positive-sum game: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-14/california-affordable-housing-is-no-mystery-just-build-more https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-14/californi..., but we've made doing so illegal.
mc32 8y ago
Here is where the rubber of “corporate responsibility” meets the road. So far AB&B has looked askance to the issues they bring to the table and have only taken token steps to mitigate what they have wrought on communities. They talk the talk all day long about inclusivity, implicit bias and any other terms du jour to shirk from confronting the gigantic mastodon in the room —the one sided effects their services have on lower and middle income shoppers of housing. Yet, where it matters, they fail to walk the walk. Their inaction and continued ignorance of these issues does magnitudes more harm than their progressive efforts in their corp HQ which benefits very few people in comparison.
- ralusek 8y ago
  Is Facebook responsible for people using it to browse their highschool sweetheart's page, and using messenger to try to cheat on their spouse? Is Tinder responsible for an increase in STDs, infidelity, or date-rapes that occur? Is Zillow responsible for someone finding a house that was foreclosed on because somebody got sick and couldn't afford to make their mortgage payments? AirBnB lets you find available short-term housing on their platform, that's all it does. Any complexity that arises around that, as far as I'm concerned, has nothing to do with AirBnB, and everything to do with local governance (if you have a problem with it). Housing markets are based off of supply and demand, like most things. If AirBnB suddenly alters the nature of what is supplied, why does that matter? The demand in a given location is based off of so many factors to begin with, should we become upset with everything that changes the nature of the housing market? What happens if there is a neighborhood that is completely crime-ridden, and new police station is added right outside. Suddenly the crime goes down, and the housing prices in that neighborhood increase substantially as it becomes safer to live in. Whose fault is it that the people who were living there when it was highly unsafe can no longer afford to pay rent? Is it the police station's fault? Is it the new tenants'? The landlords'? I just can't understand why people are so averse to letting situations play themselves out. SV, for example, is refusing to allow new construction due to zoning laws, and all of the jobs that drew people here are no longer enough to counterbalance the monumental cost in living...so people are leaving. Natural equilibriums exist. What happens when an area becomes so oversaturated with tourists that it no longer retains what made it desirable? Japanese tourism in Paris has dropped 42% in the last few years. What happens when the lack of supply for regular housing makes it so difficult to find local housing, people working normal service jobs have to travel increasingly far to work in the area? The rates to do those jobs begin to increase, as they become less desirable, and the area becomes less desirable to visit as everything gets more expensive. Those people become more capable of moving back to the area as their rates have gone up, etc. This need for platforms to take responsibility for everything that happens as a result of the transactions they allow individuals to make with each other is so unbelievably misguided. There isn't always a boogeyman.
danharaj 8y ago
To put it bluntly, I don't like competing with the entire rest of the world for housing in my city, and I'm pretty sure most other people don't either.
- lifeisstillgood 8y ago
  This is the heart of the matter. it is also the heart of globalisation and the very heart of the internet - we should be very aware of the massive social dislocation caused by the globalisation of the food industry in 1870s following the first wave of refrigeration (ice in atlantic ships)
  - piker 8y ago
    > it is also the heart of globalisation and the very heart of the internet Except that real estate is intrinsically a geographic issue. Manufacturing and distribution aren't.
    - cwyers 8y ago
      They used to be.
      - eerwrq 8y ago
        Ok. So does that change the argument in any way? Or are you just being pedantic. [edit: yeah i'm being dumb. i felt the discussion was being derailed, but thats no reason to yell at strangers on the internet.]
        danharaj 8y ago
        Friend, why are you being so combative?
        eerwrq 8y ago
        Maybe I'm just in a bad mood. I'm sorry for being a jerk today.
mrmrcoleman 8y ago
I agree that AirBNB is enabling (and profiting from) this behaviour but what is essentially happening is people using AirBNB to turn on their own neighbours. Have there been any government initiatives to educate AirBNB hosts about the impact of their actions?
weeksie 8y ago
AirBNB restrictions should be based on housing vacancy rates. In areas where either through poor zoning or historical preservation there is a restricted supply of housing AirBNB should be strictly limited. However, if vacancy rates are high enough AirBNB acts as a nice pressure valve distributing residential and vacation occupancy without the expense of having to overbuild hotels.
- whichdan 8y ago
  What if the vacancy rates are due to untenable rent prices? I could see vacancy being artificially created this way.
  - weeksie 8y ago
    If vacancy rates are high enough they create downward pressure on rent.
    - whichdan 8y ago
      Yes, assuming AirBnb isn't more profitable than decreasing prices.
      - weeksie 8y ago
        That may happen in a vanishingly small subset of instances, perhaps in developing economies where the housing stock of a desirable destination hadn't already been augmented by dedicated hotel space—since visitors would be so profitable. My guess it that any situation like that would be relatively short term, but could be handled with special case moratoriums. Maybe I'm missing something but I have a hard time thinking of a situation where this would be anything other than a short term issue.
the_mitsuhiko 8y ago
I still use airbnb when travelling because it's convenient but when I'm not travelling I can't stand it at all. (I do realize that I'm contributing to the issue by being a customer myself.) Airbnb is probably one of the worst things that has happened to many places that were already tourism heavy. The bit of regulation that made stuff work somewhat was completely subverted by it and because of how quickly it became popular it's now almost impossible to put the genie back into the bottle as there are too many vested interests now. Overall I can't get rid of the feeling that Airbnb is here to stay and it permanently made the world a worse place.
- Rotdhizon 8y ago
  The legal side of AirBnB is bad enough, but you couple that with their shady practices and the outright illegal stuff that goes on and AirBnB as a whole is a plague. I've heard there are smaller alternatives that work fantastic, I don't know them by heart though.
burlesona 8y ago
How have we gotten this far into the comments without anyone mentioning the root cause here is a general shortage of housing in places people want to live / work / visit? It seems to me that AirBNB isn't to blame for the overall lack of housing (and temporary housing aka hostel/hotel) options, rather it's just the most visible brand name competing for the limited supply. Cities can ban it if they want, but I'd rather they focused on allowing more housing to be built.
- nerdponx 8y ago
  Unless there wasn't, and now there is because of Airbnb. Or an existing shortage was exacerbated by Airbnb.
  - burlesona 8y ago
    I understand what you're saying but that doesn't contradict my point. If the appearance of AirBNB suddenly causes a housing shortage than there was presumably a lot of pent up demand for hotel-type space in the market that was being artificially restricted by hotel regulations, and the regional housing supply was fragile in the face of increased demand. Across the world right now most major cities are struggling in the face of growth, but it doesn't really make sense that they should be. I live in San Francisco where housing supply is critically low, but our annual growth rate is only around 1%. It's deeply concerning that our institutions crumble and in the face of a 1% annual growth rate.
    - nerdponx 8y ago
      hotel-type space in the market that was being artificially restricted by hotel regulations is not the same as housing.
  - dcosson 8y ago
    For a quick order of magnitude comparison, taking SF as an example - as near I can find, there are somewhere between 5k and 10k airbnb listings in the whole bay area. But to be very conservative let's assume 10k and assume they're all in SF itself. Well between 2010 and 2015 SF added 150k more jobs than housing units. Meaning to get back to 2010 levels of affodability SF would have to add on the order of 150k more housing units (and that has probably grown even worse in the past 3 years since 2015). Airbnb is unfortunately just a drop in the bucket.
CryptoPunk 8y ago
Maybe locals would be more supportive of Airbnb if cities made deals with other cities saying 'your residents can stay in our units on a short term basis if ours can stay in yours'. People from boring/small towns and cities would be left out of this though, since their demand to visit tourist destinations would exceed the outside demand to visit their area. The result would be the residents of larger/more-attractive cities, who are free to stay in other major cities, seeing their advantage over the rest of the population grow, which in turn could lead to more people choosing to move to these cities.
mcjiggerlog 8y ago
I live next door to an AirBnB, in a building where maybe 1/5 of the flats have been converted to tourist flats. When I moved in 3 years ago there were zero. I'm woken up by screaming drunk tourists as they come home at 3am on a Tuesday night. There are constantly people clattering suitcases up the stairs at all hours. People smoke inside the common areas instead of on the street. Of course, just generally feeling like you live in an illegal hotel is horrible. We're looking to move. Then again, I have reservations for two AirBnBs next week on holiday in another part of the country. The difference is we have booked entire houses in the countryside, not city-centre flats. AirBnB is not inherently evil, but strict and enforced controls are definitely necessary in cities. I love AirBnB as a customer, but hate it as a resident.
- jonny_eh 8y ago
  Neighbours should have a hotline to Airbnb that they can call to report disruptive guests.
  - mcjiggerlog 8y ago
    I've been thinking this for ages! Makes me really angry when I think that the guests will receive great reviews from some faceless agency who never even interacted with them, whereas we as residents have to suffer for their behaviour.
  - oalessandr 8y ago
    Not sure if it's useful, but they have www.airbnb.com/neighbors
- jschwartzi 8y ago
  Yeah, I'm an AirBnB customer as well and I use it mostly for business travel because affordable hotels are usually located in the crappy parts of town, have nothing around them, and are generally not comfortable. In contrast I can book an AirBnB at 1 to 2 star rates and get a place that's within walking distance of coffee shops and running trails and stuff to do when I'm not working. I generally don't stumble home drunk at 3 AM, but I sympathize with the neighbors of people who do.
canada_dry 8y ago
> My research has found as many as 90% of Airbnb guests have said they were "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their stays. For a perspective on the other 10%... checkout: https://airbnbhell.com https://airbnbhell.com
mywittyname 8y ago
Levy taxes on the rentals.
11thEarlOfMar 8y ago
One impact of AirBnb is that it lowers the threshold for traveler affordability. Couple it with discount air carriers such as RyanAir or Southwest and the number of humans who can afford to travel increases dramatically. For example, a quick survey of Chicago shows: On TripAdvisor: 8 hotels with rooms under $100/night. Lowest room $79. On AirBnb: 100+ listings, entire place, under $100/night. Many under $50. In this way, AirBnb is an enabler for travel. Moreover, you don't even need to look at discount airlines. British Air had a round trip from San Francisco to Milan for $650. AirBnb in Milan, entire apartment, start at around $30/night. Suddenly, 10 days in Milan can be had for under $1,500. Economists might see the future for this situation: More air travel leads to cheaper fares. Cheaper fares leads to still more travelers. More travelers on cheap fares means more demand for AirBnb style housing. AirBnb prices get some upward pressure from added demand, bringing more units into the market. More landlords convert from long to short-term rental. Fewer long term rental means lower supply of long term and higher rents. Higher rents mean more people choose to buy, increasing demand for owned homes. What it all adds up to: Without increasing the number of humans on the planet, you've increased housing prices by making travel more affordable. /s Maybe we make the following rule: In order to rent an AirBnb, you have to AirBnb your home while you're gone. s/
yonran 8y ago
Rather than blaming the company Airbnb for a city’s ills, it may be more helpful to examine why it has popular support in the first place, while family-only zoning is declining in popularity. Short-term rentals in residences were already illegal in San Francisco and New York; they were legalized to allow Airbnb because short-term rentals have popular support from voters. Single-family zoning was designed 100 years ago to create neighborhoods of families who were protected from the nuisances of the lower-class apartment “parasite”s (Euclid v. Ambler) and lower-class houses that were used to raise chickens and take on boarders (https://www.citylab.com/equity/2013/07/it-time-bring-back-boarding-house/6236/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2013/07/it-time-bring-back-bo... or https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Government-Undermines-Ownership/dp/1937184889 https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Government-Undermi...). I think exclusionary zoning has been so extreme in some cities that it is beginning to lose its support among the middle class, for whom it is now more necessary to use their property as a business rather than only as consumption. Edit: Related point: In some places, it is ingrained in our culture since the 1970s that housing should be a good investment. Low property taxes (Proposition 13) and zoning restrictions are designed to increase the private gains to this investment (https://www.amazon.com/Homevoter-Hypothesis-Influence-Government-Taxation/dp/0674015959 https://www.amazon.com/Homevoter-Hypothesis-Influence-Govern...). A small change of use to short-term rentals is perhaps the next incremental step for house investors. It sucks for people who want to use housing as only a peaceful consumption good, but in my opinion that ship sailed a long time ago in Closed-Access cities.

67 points by loriverkutya 8y ago

The apartment vacancy rate in Vancouver is presently sub 1%. People are illegally renting suites as Airbnb, taking up domestic housing stock. It's illegal to rent suites for less than 31 days and without a business licence here, but they do it anyways.

jessaustin 8y ago
Are any of those occupied by locals for whom it's the best housing they can find?
- walrus01 8y ago
  There are a great many of these that are 1BD/650 sq ft size condos and apartments that would otherwise be occupied by locals, at market rental rate for standard 12-month lease terms. But the owners of the condos are renting them out on AirBNB. Or people are renting apartments for $1700/mo from absentee owners, and then illegally subletting them for less than 30-day terms on AirBNB and running the sublet as a business.

glup 8y ago

It seems like there is a perfectly reasonable middle ground here — where households have the flexibility to rent out part of their primary residence, on a limited basis (either temporal or just part of the house), subject to clear and evenly enforced regulations. This is a pre-internet idea (e.g., casas particulares in Cuba in the 1990s) that becomes way easier/safer/better with a web-based platform. Personally, I find it massively more fun to stay in a typical home in a region that I'm visiting, and I can often find these on AirBnB. Of course AirBnB is going to try to grow as much as possible to try to eat hotel revenues and develop new markets. But shouldn't communities have the right to combat the externalities that such growth entails?

ck425 8y ago
I suspect that partial apartment rentals are far less disruptive. It's full apartment rents that are causing issues. I think this also comes back to over tourism. Travel is the new materialism. It used to be you kept up with the Jones by buying new cars, new jewellery, new houses. Now it's by going away, frequently and to the most exotic places, to prove how open minded and wordly you are. And it's killing the planet and many local communities. There will be a backlash eventually.
- ghaff 8y ago
  A lot of tourism is also cheaper because of cheap airfares/lowish fuel prices. Probably Airbnb can also make traveling a bit cheaper for those who use it. Economies of many of the countries in which and from which people travel a lot are fairly strong. >Travel is the new materialism. Maybe? I know there is the whole experiences over things mantra. Maybe that's in play. On the other hand, maybe there's less interest in big McMansions but the apartment/condo in a lot of major cities is--as can be seen in other comments--pretty expensive by historical patterns. If tourism were down instead, we'd be hearing arguments that young people who have fewer other obligations aren't traveling because they have no money. In any case, I have trouble seeing tourism as a particular source of the world's problems.
- wwweston 8y ago
  "Travel is the new materialism." I wanna argue with this -- I think some portion of the population has a deep-seated psychological personal need to travel for their own internal well-being rather than to perform travel for an audience as a status symbol. But I think there's a pretty strong case that especially with the rise of social media, travel's become much more tightly linked with attention and status.
  - ck425 8y ago
    But travel is relatively new idea to much of the population. We don't realise how little folk used to travel because those who did travel are disproportionately famous.
8y ago

mazatta 8y ago

Airbnb is a zero sum game - what tourists win, locals lose. Two of my coworkers are currently being forced to look for a new place to live in a tight housing market because their current landlord can make more money renting on Airbnb. I've stayed in Airbnbs in the past (and appreciated the convenience), but I no longer will.

grandmczeb 8y ago
It's not zero sum unless the housing supply is fixed - the additional income from Airbnb can be invested in new housing.
- ck425 8y ago
  But that additional housing can also destroy the character of existing areas. That doesn't mean we don't build, just that it has to be considered, which is harder to do when demand is increasing too quickly.
  - grandmczeb 8y ago
    Sounds like preserving character is the real zero sum problem then.
  - pc86 8y ago
    Complaining about both the rapidly increasing housing prices as well as the loss of character in developed areas doesn't have any cognitive dissonance at all, though.
    - ck425 8y ago
      It's a balance, one that AirBnB is making far more difficult to maintain.
jseliger 8y ago
Airbnb is a zero sum game - what tourists win, locals lose. I think you mean that "zoning is a zero-sum game." Since the 1970s, when zoning became more severe and restrictive, housing costs have increased substantially: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-the-1970s https://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-.... We know how to create a positive-sum game: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-14/california-affordable-housing-is-no-mystery-just-build-more https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-14/californi..., but we've made doing so illegal.

mc32 8y ago

Here is where the rubber of “corporate responsibility” meets the road. So far AB&B has looked askance to the issues they bring to the table and have only taken token steps to mitigate what they have wrought on communities. They talk the talk all day long about inclusivity, implicit bias and any other terms du jour to shirk from confronting the gigantic mastodon in the room —the one sided effects their services have on lower and middle income shoppers of housing. Yet, where it matters, they fail to walk the walk. Their inaction and continued ignorance of these issues does magnitudes more harm than their progressive efforts in their corp HQ which benefits very few people in comparison.

ralusek 8y ago
Is Facebook responsible for people using it to browse their highschool sweetheart's page, and using messenger to try to cheat on their spouse? Is Tinder responsible for an increase in STDs, infidelity, or date-rapes that occur? Is Zillow responsible for someone finding a house that was foreclosed on because somebody got sick and couldn't afford to make their mortgage payments? AirBnB lets you find available short-term housing on their platform, that's all it does. Any complexity that arises around that, as far as I'm concerned, has nothing to do with AirBnB, and everything to do with local governance (if you have a problem with it). Housing markets are based off of supply and demand, like most things. If AirBnB suddenly alters the nature of what is supplied, why does that matter? The demand in a given location is based off of so many factors to begin with, should we become upset with everything that changes the nature of the housing market? What happens if there is a neighborhood that is completely crime-ridden, and new police station is added right outside. Suddenly the crime goes down, and the housing prices in that neighborhood increase substantially as it becomes safer to live in. Whose fault is it that the people who were living there when it was highly unsafe can no longer afford to pay rent? Is it the police station's fault? Is it the new tenants'? The landlords'? I just can't understand why people are so averse to letting situations play themselves out. SV, for example, is refusing to allow new construction due to zoning laws, and all of the jobs that drew people here are no longer enough to counterbalance the monumental cost in living...so people are leaving. Natural equilibriums exist. What happens when an area becomes so oversaturated with tourists that it no longer retains what made it desirable? Japanese tourism in Paris has dropped 42% in the last few years. What happens when the lack of supply for regular housing makes it so difficult to find local housing, people working normal service jobs have to travel increasingly far to work in the area? The rates to do those jobs begin to increase, as they become less desirable, and the area becomes less desirable to visit as everything gets more expensive. Those people become more capable of moving back to the area as their rates have gone up, etc. This need for platforms to take responsibility for everything that happens as a result of the transactions they allow individuals to make with each other is so unbelievably misguided. There isn't always a boogeyman.

danharaj 8y ago

To put it bluntly, I don't like competing with the entire rest of the world for housing in my city, and I'm pretty sure most other people don't either.

lifeisstillgood 8y ago
This is the heart of the matter. it is also the heart of globalisation and the very heart of the internet - we should be very aware of the massive social dislocation caused by the globalisation of the food industry in 1870s following the first wave of refrigeration (ice in atlantic ships)
- piker 8y ago
  > it is also the heart of globalisation and the very heart of the internet Except that real estate is intrinsically a geographic issue. Manufacturing and distribution aren't.
  - cwyers 8y ago
    They used to be.
    - eerwrq 8y ago
      Ok. So does that change the argument in any way? Or are you just being pedantic. [edit: yeah i'm being dumb. i felt the discussion was being derailed, but thats no reason to yell at strangers on the internet.]
      - danharaj 8y ago
        Friend, why are you being so combative?
        eerwrq 8y ago
        Maybe I'm just in a bad mood. I'm sorry for being a jerk today.

mrmrcoleman 8y ago

I agree that AirBNB is enabling (and profiting from) this behaviour but what is essentially happening is people using AirBNB to turn on their own neighbours. Have there been any government initiatives to educate AirBNB hosts about the impact of their actions?

weeksie 8y ago

AirBNB restrictions should be based on housing vacancy rates. In areas where either through poor zoning or historical preservation there is a restricted supply of housing AirBNB should be strictly limited. However, if vacancy rates are high enough AirBNB acts as a nice pressure valve distributing residential and vacation occupancy without the expense of having to overbuild hotels.

whichdan 8y ago
What if the vacancy rates are due to untenable rent prices? I could see vacancy being artificially created this way.
- weeksie 8y ago
  If vacancy rates are high enough they create downward pressure on rent.
  - whichdan 8y ago
    Yes, assuming AirBnb isn't more profitable than decreasing prices.
    - weeksie 8y ago
      That may happen in a vanishingly small subset of instances, perhaps in developing economies where the housing stock of a desirable destination hadn't already been augmented by dedicated hotel space—since visitors would be so profitable. My guess it that any situation like that would be relatively short term, but could be handled with special case moratoriums. Maybe I'm missing something but I have a hard time thinking of a situation where this would be anything other than a short term issue.

the_mitsuhiko 8y ago

I still use airbnb when travelling because it's convenient but when I'm not travelling I can't stand it at all. (I do realize that I'm contributing to the issue by being a customer myself.) Airbnb is probably one of the worst things that has happened to many places that were already tourism heavy. The bit of regulation that made stuff work somewhat was completely subverted by it and because of how quickly it became popular it's now almost impossible to put the genie back into the bottle as there are too many vested interests now. Overall I can't get rid of the feeling that Airbnb is here to stay and it permanently made the world a worse place.

Rotdhizon 8y ago
The legal side of AirBnB is bad enough, but you couple that with their shady practices and the outright illegal stuff that goes on and AirBnB as a whole is a plague. I've heard there are smaller alternatives that work fantastic, I don't know them by heart though.

burlesona 8y ago

How have we gotten this far into the comments without anyone mentioning the root cause here is a general shortage of housing in places people want to live / work / visit? It seems to me that AirBNB isn't to blame for the overall lack of housing (and temporary housing aka hostel/hotel) options, rather it's just the most visible brand name competing for the limited supply. Cities can ban it if they want, but I'd rather they focused on allowing more housing to be built.

nerdponx 8y ago
Unless there wasn't, and now there is because of Airbnb. Or an existing shortage was exacerbated by Airbnb.
- burlesona 8y ago
  I understand what you're saying but that doesn't contradict my point. If the appearance of AirBNB suddenly causes a housing shortage than there was presumably a lot of pent up demand for hotel-type space in the market that was being artificially restricted by hotel regulations, and the regional housing supply was fragile in the face of increased demand. Across the world right now most major cities are struggling in the face of growth, but it doesn't really make sense that they should be. I live in San Francisco where housing supply is critically low, but our annual growth rate is only around 1%. It's deeply concerning that our institutions crumble and in the face of a 1% annual growth rate.
  - nerdponx 8y ago
    hotel-type space in the market that was being artificially restricted by hotel regulations is not the same as housing.
- dcosson 8y ago
  For a quick order of magnitude comparison, taking SF as an example - as near I can find, there are somewhere between 5k and 10k airbnb listings in the whole bay area. But to be very conservative let's assume 10k and assume they're all in SF itself. Well between 2010 and 2015 SF added 150k more jobs than housing units. Meaning to get back to 2010 levels of affodability SF would have to add on the order of 150k more housing units (and that has probably grown even worse in the past 3 years since 2015). Airbnb is unfortunately just a drop in the bucket.

CryptoPunk 8y ago

Maybe locals would be more supportive of Airbnb if cities made deals with other cities saying 'your residents can stay in our units on a short term basis if ours can stay in yours'. People from boring/small towns and cities would be left out of this though, since their demand to visit tourist destinations would exceed the outside demand to visit their area. The result would be the residents of larger/more-attractive cities, who are free to stay in other major cities, seeing their advantage over the rest of the population grow, which in turn could lead to more people choosing to move to these cities.

mcjiggerlog 8y ago

I live next door to an AirBnB, in a building where maybe 1/5 of the flats have been converted to tourist flats. When I moved in 3 years ago there were zero. I'm woken up by screaming drunk tourists as they come home at 3am on a Tuesday night. There are constantly people clattering suitcases up the stairs at all hours. People smoke inside the common areas instead of on the street. Of course, just generally feeling like you live in an illegal hotel is horrible. We're looking to move. Then again, I have reservations for two AirBnBs next week on holiday in another part of the country. The difference is we have booked entire houses in the countryside, not city-centre flats. AirBnB is not inherently evil, but strict and enforced controls are definitely necessary in cities. I love AirBnB as a customer, but hate it as a resident.

jonny_eh 8y ago
Neighbours should have a hotline to Airbnb that they can call to report disruptive guests.
- mcjiggerlog 8y ago
  I've been thinking this for ages! Makes me really angry when I think that the guests will receive great reviews from some faceless agency who never even interacted with them, whereas we as residents have to suffer for their behaviour.
- oalessandr 8y ago
  Not sure if it's useful, but they have www.airbnb.com/neighbors
jschwartzi 8y ago
Yeah, I'm an AirBnB customer as well and I use it mostly for business travel because affordable hotels are usually located in the crappy parts of town, have nothing around them, and are generally not comfortable. In contrast I can book an AirBnB at 1 to 2 star rates and get a place that's within walking distance of coffee shops and running trails and stuff to do when I'm not working. I generally don't stumble home drunk at 3 AM, but I sympathize with the neighbors of people who do.

canada_dry 8y ago

> My research has found as many as 90% of Airbnb guests have said they were "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their stays. For a perspective on the other 10%... checkout: https://airbnbhell.com https://airbnbhell.com

mywittyname 8y ago

Levy taxes on the rentals.

11thEarlOfMar 8y ago

One impact of AirBnb is that it lowers the threshold for traveler affordability. Couple it with discount air carriers such as RyanAir or Southwest and the number of humans who can afford to travel increases dramatically. For example, a quick survey of Chicago shows: On TripAdvisor: 8 hotels with rooms under $100/night. Lowest room $79. On AirBnb: 100+ listings, entire place, under $100/night. Many under $50. In this way, AirBnb is an enabler for travel. Moreover, you don't even need to look at discount airlines. British Air had a round trip from San Francisco to Milan for $650. AirBnb in Milan, entire apartment, start at around $30/night. Suddenly, 10 days in Milan can be had for under $1,500. Economists might see the future for this situation: More air travel leads to cheaper fares. Cheaper fares leads to still more travelers. More travelers on cheap fares means more demand for AirBnb style housing. AirBnb prices get some upward pressure from added demand, bringing more units into the market. More landlords convert from long to short-term rental. Fewer long term rental means lower supply of long term and higher rents. Higher rents mean more people choose to buy, increasing demand for owned homes. What it all adds up to: Without increasing the number of humans on the planet, you've increased housing prices by making travel more affordable. /s Maybe we make the following rule: In order to rent an AirBnb, you have to AirBnb your home while you're gone. s/

yonran 8y ago

Rather than blaming the company Airbnb for a city’s ills, it may be more helpful to examine why it has popular support in the first place, while family-only zoning is declining in popularity. Short-term rentals in residences were already illegal in San Francisco and New York; they were legalized to allow Airbnb because short-term rentals have popular support from voters. Single-family zoning was designed 100 years ago to create neighborhoods of families who were protected from the nuisances of the lower-class apartment “parasite”s (Euclid v. Ambler) and lower-class houses that were used to raise chickens and take on boarders (https://www.citylab.com/equity/2013/07/it-time-bring-back-boarding-house/6236/ https://www.citylab.com/equity/2013/07/it-time-bring-back-bo... or https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Government-Undermines-Ownership/dp/1937184889 https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Government-Undermi...). I think exclusionary zoning has been so extreme in some cities that it is beginning to lose its support among the middle class, for whom it is now more necessary to use their property as a business rather than only as consumption. Edit: Related point: In some places, it is ingrained in our culture since the 1970s that housing should be a good investment. Low property taxes (Proposition 13) and zoning restrictions are designed to increase the private gains to this investment (https://www.amazon.com/Homevoter-Hypothesis-Influence-Government-Taxation/dp/0674015959 https://www.amazon.com/Homevoter-Hypothesis-Influence-Govern...). A small change of use to short-term rentals is perhaps the next incremental step for house investors. It sucks for people who want to use housing as only a peaceful consumption good, but in my opinion that ship sailed a long time ago in Closed-Access cities.