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The AirBnb "effect" has directly led to increased home prices. A home turning a profit thus becomes more important than how its guests impact a neighborhood an

The AirBnb "effect" has directly led to increased home prices. A home turning a profit thus becomes more important than how its guests impact a neighborhood and community. Ignoring or spinning the social costs is a primary goal of Airbnb's PR machine. It has made many neighborhoods more transitory (i.e. less homesteading, more short term rentals). Acknowledge the social costs to community and it's not surprising to read that violent crime rates are trending up where AirBnbs thrive.

trident5000 5y ago
We had anti-hoarding measures on masks but dont seem to have them on homes. Every additional income property you own (and used as such) should have an escalating hoarding penalty.
- tehjoker 5y ago
  These penalties are never high enough to actually discourage the behavior. It's better to just ban accumulating more than X homes, where X could be as low as 1.
  - trident5000 5y ago
    Im good with that idea on investment properties. Though I have no issue with people having vacation homes. Theres a natural limit to how many vacation homes someone can have without a revenue source on the asset.
    - vetinari 5y ago
      And that limit is enforced by upkeep costs. Owning homes isn't free, you know. It is a physically depreciating asset, that you have to take care of, whether you use it actively or not. Doing so costs money, so depth of your wallet puts a firm limit on the amount of properties you are capable to take care of.
      - trident5000 5y ago
        Yep thats what I was getting at. Taxes and insurance alone put in a nice dent every year.
        vetinari 5y ago
        > Taxes and insurance alone put in a nice dent every year. Just make sure you know what are you doing. For rental properties, these things will be paid by the tenant in the rent, and for those wanting to get their own property, it will push it even further out of reach.
      - tehjoker 5y ago
        Many landlords own tens, hundreds, or more properties. There is not a level distribution.
        vetinari 5y ago
        So what? It is business as any other. If someone owns many hundreds properties, there is probably investor money behind that. There is not a human right to get assigned a dream house. You have to purchase, build or otherwise procure it. People make different choices with their money, some people save/get mortgage and then get a house, other people will spend their money in other ways.
  - disabled 5y ago
    The penalties can be effective if you are a citizen of the country that you are purchasing the home in. Also, for American citizens, they almost always have US annual income taxes, which are taxed on worldwide income. The taxation situation becomes tremendously more complicated if you own a home (or homes) abroad. So, interestingly, Americans may hoard homes stateside but rarely so abroad.
- prawn 5y ago
  State government where I live floated a change to land taxation. Previously, any property beyond your home was subject to a tax. Developers got around this by having each development owned by a different entity. The state government intended to change this so that your ownership of a sub-entity counted - if you owned a trust that owned property, that counted against you. Developers were aggressively vocal in lobbying against this. Every excuse in the book. Not sure if it ever got through, but the developers shut up about it so maybe they won.
cracker_jacks 5y ago
No, the difficulty of increasing supply has directly led to increased home prices.
- dorchadas 5y ago
  And if it wasn't for people turning that supply into AirBnBs to satisfy their short term greed and tourists, there wouldn't be as much of an issue. AirBnB has certainly contributed a lot to the lack of supply in major tourist destinations.
  - stickfigure 5y ago
    Tourists are people too. This really seems like an extreme version of nativism.
    - eropple 5y ago
      Respectfully: if you're going to attempt to co-opt a political framing to which you are less than familiar, drawing a transparent parallel between the fundamentally consumerist nature of tourism and needing a place to live that lets you get to your job, and then attempting to tag it as nativism--let alone an "extreme version" of it!--is probably not the least disingenuous way to do so. You are describing something functionally on the same scale as to the "extreme blowback" rich people get when people make fun of them on Twitter for, say, burning untold amounts of dead dinosaur goop to make an NFT or to not quite go to space as a personal stunt. It is somehow, however, though not the "economically just circumstances" of the hand-to-mouth mom. Which is a situation to which I will confess some confusion, but whatever.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      The social consequences to a tourist going to a hotel instead of an Airbnb are nowhere even near the social consequences of an even modest increase in rents.
    - lgessler 5y ago
      Is it really right to equate a tourist's interest in accommodation with a resident's interest in a strong community?
jimbob45 5y ago
I’ve tried to tell this to people and I get blank stares every time. If you take an AirBNB house off the AirBNB market and put it up for sale, it’s like you just built a house for that community. Even better, the market for houses dips lower because of the increased supply. I really wish rental housing was banned. There is no real gain in productivity from allowing rental housing other than some scummy landlord who lives three states away getting a bit richer off of the dime of the actual residents in the city.
- TechBro8615 5y ago
  What if I can’t afford to buy a house? Do I need to get a loan from the bank? Do you also believe banks should be forced to lend money to people they don’t think will pay it back?
  - jimbob45 5y ago
    Get an apartment. Apartments are designed to best utilize space for those who need cheap and temporary housing. Houses take up far more space and unnecessarily contribute to sprawl when unchecked renting is allowed.
    - tptacek 5y ago
      Lots of people rent houses long-term. It's a norm throughout much of Europe. Eradicating short-term rentals of houses is a coherent demand. Eradicating all rental housing is deeply silly. I moved for a job to Ann Arbor from San Francisco back in 2001 with my spouse and our two kids. The idea that I should have immediately bought a house simply in order to start a job is risible. There are lots of good reasons not to own your house, even if you're going to stay in an area long-term (I ended up staying there for 4 years; we bought the house we lived in for our last year there, and took a bath on it, because buying a house you only keep for a year or two is usually a terrible idea). I live in Chicagoland now. I own my house, but several of my neighbors rent theirs. Why wouldn't they? Residential real estate exposure is not a universally appropriate investment strategy. People live for decades in houses they rent; their landlords have property managers who handle upkeep, and the renters invest their money elsewhere. Maybe at some point they have to move houses; there are plenty of other rentals nearby.
11thEarlOfMar 5y ago
I'd say AirBnb increases travel by decreasing the cost of housing. It increases supply of an otherwise dormant asset. I agree that to argue that it has no effect on privacy of neighborhoods or crime is naïve. On the other hand, lowering the cost of international travel[0] enables more people to travel and to be exposed to more of the world. This is, in my view, a positive. [0] San Francisco<->Milan Oct. 7-21: $522 on Lufthansa $22/night, 4.93/5 Rating: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/19010312 https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/19010312 : $432 14 nights in Milan + Air fare for <$1,000. Eat in the AirBnb for, what, $25/day? and you've spent under $1,500.
- dorchadas 5y ago
  > I'd say AirBnb increases travel by decreasing the cost of housing. It decreases the cost of housing for tourists by decreasing the supply of housing, and thus increasing its cost, for locals. > This is, in my view, a positive. There's many ways where increased travel can be considered a negative such the increase in greenhouse gas emissions. I'd also consider if that positive truly outweighs the negatives on the locals of an area. Hotels work just fine, and are accounted for in city planning.
- jareklupinski 5y ago
  From the AirBnB link: > Often, in the weekend, It will be available the entire apartment in exclusive mode for the guest! oh boy, a chance at "exclusive mode" is exactly what I want from my off-peak Milan vacation :^)

trident5000 5y ago

We had anti-hoarding measures on masks but dont seem to have them on homes. Every additional income property you own (and used as such) should have an escalating hoarding penalty.

tehjoker 5y ago
These penalties are never high enough to actually discourage the behavior. It's better to just ban accumulating more than X homes, where X could be as low as 1.
- trident5000 5y ago
  Im good with that idea on investment properties. Though I have no issue with people having vacation homes. Theres a natural limit to how many vacation homes someone can have without a revenue source on the asset.
  - vetinari 5y ago
    And that limit is enforced by upkeep costs. Owning homes isn't free, you know. It is a physically depreciating asset, that you have to take care of, whether you use it actively or not. Doing so costs money, so depth of your wallet puts a firm limit on the amount of properties you are capable to take care of.
    - trident5000 5y ago
      Yep thats what I was getting at. Taxes and insurance alone put in a nice dent every year.
      - vetinari 5y ago
        > Taxes and insurance alone put in a nice dent every year. Just make sure you know what are you doing. For rental properties, these things will be paid by the tenant in the rent, and for those wanting to get their own property, it will push it even further out of reach.
    - tehjoker 5y ago
      Many landlords own tens, hundreds, or more properties. There is not a level distribution.
      - vetinari 5y ago
        So what? It is business as any other. If someone owns many hundreds properties, there is probably investor money behind that. There is not a human right to get assigned a dream house. You have to purchase, build or otherwise procure it. People make different choices with their money, some people save/get mortgage and then get a house, other people will spend their money in other ways.
- disabled 5y ago
  The penalties can be effective if you are a citizen of the country that you are purchasing the home in. Also, for American citizens, they almost always have US annual income taxes, which are taxed on worldwide income. The taxation situation becomes tremendously more complicated if you own a home (or homes) abroad. So, interestingly, Americans may hoard homes stateside but rarely so abroad.
prawn 5y ago
State government where I live floated a change to land taxation. Previously, any property beyond your home was subject to a tax. Developers got around this by having each development owned by a different entity. The state government intended to change this so that your ownership of a sub-entity counted - if you owned a trust that owned property, that counted against you. Developers were aggressively vocal in lobbying against this. Every excuse in the book. Not sure if it ever got through, but the developers shut up about it so maybe they won.

cracker_jacks 5y ago

No, the difficulty of increasing supply has directly led to increased home prices.

dorchadas 5y ago
And if it wasn't for people turning that supply into AirBnBs to satisfy their short term greed and tourists, there wouldn't be as much of an issue. AirBnB has certainly contributed a lot to the lack of supply in major tourist destinations.
- stickfigure 5y ago
  Tourists are people too. This really seems like an extreme version of nativism.
  - eropple 5y ago
    Respectfully: if you're going to attempt to co-opt a political framing to which you are less than familiar, drawing a transparent parallel between the fundamentally consumerist nature of tourism and needing a place to live that lets you get to your job, and then attempting to tag it as nativism--let alone an "extreme version" of it!--is probably not the least disingenuous way to do so. You are describing something functionally on the same scale as to the "extreme blowback" rich people get when people make fun of them on Twitter for, say, burning untold amounts of dead dinosaur goop to make an NFT or to not quite go to space as a personal stunt. It is somehow, however, though not the "economically just circumstances" of the hand-to-mouth mom. Which is a situation to which I will confess some confusion, but whatever.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    The social consequences to a tourist going to a hotel instead of an Airbnb are nowhere even near the social consequences of an even modest increase in rents.
  - lgessler 5y ago
    Is it really right to equate a tourist's interest in accommodation with a resident's interest in a strong community?

jimbob45 5y ago

I’ve tried to tell this to people and I get blank stares every time. If you take an AirBNB house off the AirBNB market and put it up for sale, it’s like you just built a house for that community. Even better, the market for houses dips lower because of the increased supply. I really wish rental housing was banned. There is no real gain in productivity from allowing rental housing other than some scummy landlord who lives three states away getting a bit richer off of the dime of the actual residents in the city.

TechBro8615 5y ago
What if I can’t afford to buy a house? Do I need to get a loan from the bank? Do you also believe banks should be forced to lend money to people they don’t think will pay it back?
- jimbob45 5y ago
  Get an apartment. Apartments are designed to best utilize space for those who need cheap and temporary housing. Houses take up far more space and unnecessarily contribute to sprawl when unchecked renting is allowed.
  - tptacek 5y ago
    Lots of people rent houses long-term. It's a norm throughout much of Europe. Eradicating short-term rentals of houses is a coherent demand. Eradicating all rental housing is deeply silly. I moved for a job to Ann Arbor from San Francisco back in 2001 with my spouse and our two kids. The idea that I should have immediately bought a house simply in order to start a job is risible. There are lots of good reasons not to own your house, even if you're going to stay in an area long-term (I ended up staying there for 4 years; we bought the house we lived in for our last year there, and took a bath on it, because buying a house you only keep for a year or two is usually a terrible idea). I live in Chicagoland now. I own my house, but several of my neighbors rent theirs. Why wouldn't they? Residential real estate exposure is not a universally appropriate investment strategy. People live for decades in houses they rent; their landlords have property managers who handle upkeep, and the renters invest their money elsewhere. Maybe at some point they have to move houses; there are plenty of other rentals nearby.

11thEarlOfMar 5y ago

I'd say AirBnb increases travel by decreasing the cost of housing. It increases supply of an otherwise dormant asset. I agree that to argue that it has no effect on privacy of neighborhoods or crime is naïve. On the other hand, lowering the cost of international travel[0] enables more people to travel and to be exposed to more of the world. This is, in my view, a positive. [0] San Francisco<->Milan Oct. 7-21: $522 on Lufthansa $22/night, 4.93/5 Rating: https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/19010312 https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/19010312 : $432 14 nights in Milan + Air fare for <$1,000. Eat in the AirBnb for, what, $25/day? and you've spent under $1,500.

dorchadas 5y ago
> I'd say AirBnb increases travel by decreasing the cost of housing. It decreases the cost of housing for tourists by decreasing the supply of housing, and thus increasing its cost, for locals. > This is, in my view, a positive. There's many ways where increased travel can be considered a negative such the increase in greenhouse gas emissions. I'd also consider if that positive truly outweighs the negatives on the locals of an area. Hotels work just fine, and are accounted for in city planning.
jareklupinski 5y ago
From the AirBnB link: > Often, in the weekend, It will be available the entire apartment in exclusive mode for the guest! oh boy, a chance at "exclusive mode" is exactly what I want from my off-peak Milan vacation :^)