7 ms·

An NYC Airbnb Racked Up $1M in Fines. New Rules Would Block the Listing

91 points by toss1 4y ago

kelnos 4y ago
> In 2021 alone, the homeowner racked up $984,000 in defaulted penalties, none of which have been paid, a Bloomberg calculation based on city records shows. This is just dumb, and has nothing to do with short-term rentals. If you've fined a property owner, you should have legal means to collect those fines. If you don't, then you are a bad city and you should be ashamed at your poor governance. If you do have those means, but have still failed to collect, then you have only yourself to blame. Bad city! > New York has tussled with Airbnb Inc. for years over the proliferation of illegal listings and has spent significant resources chasing down violators. How is this a thing? Issue a court order to Airbnb to take down a listing and ban the address from the platform. Airbnb fails to do so? Fine them. And actually collect! > New rules taking effect in May [...] Hosts who want to list on Airbnb or other platforms will be required to register with the city and receive an operating license. What? How incompetent is NYC's government? This has been standard practice in many other locales for years! I really have little sympathy for NYC here. They seem to have been badly mismanaging the situation for many years now. My sympathy goes out to NYC's residents, who seem to have a terrible local government. And I say this as someone who lives in SF, another city with a terrible local government.
- LatteLazy 4y ago
  Whenever I read these things, I feel the same way. I'd even go further: NYC has decided to allowed Airbnb's, it just can't quite admit that. So it pretends to fine them. But enforces nothing. Because that is politically expedient. I honestly don't care if they all Airbnb or not. I just find it distastful when governments insist on lying about their actual policy...
lr1970 4y ago
Why not to sue AirBnB itself for aiding and abetting of renting illegal properties and benefitting from it?
- megablast 4y ago
  Why not sue car manufacturers for aiding and abetting of all crimes and death committed by car drivers? I actually agree with this though, they do create deadly machines. Airbnb only let people rent out rooms.
dublinben 4y ago
The city should seize the property if it’s in flagrant contempt of the law. That’s the only action that will send a message to these illegal hotel operators.
- awb 4y ago
  In Douglas County, which is home to Nevada’s South Lake Tahoe, fines can accrue up to the value of the property. But at least in bankruptcy I think primary homes are hard to claim by other parties. Not sure about the government though.
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    if it's being used for air bnb enough, it's not a primary home.
    - awb 4y ago
      Lots of people AirBnB their primary home when they’re traveling.
      - gnopgnip 4y ago
        Are lots of people subletting part time like that? Or are virtually all the listings from permanent hosts?
      - consp 4y ago
        At least here (non us) most if not all rental contracts forbid renting your place out as well as most mortgages. Some even have special Airbnb clauses with penalties attached. I know you can get mortgages which specifically allow it but in general they are more expensive, my guess is because there is a risk element involved for the lender. Note: you can let people stay for free as house guardians, as this is not commercial activity.
        Semaphor 4y ago
jmyeet 4y ago
The NYC government, like most city governments, exists primarily two serve two constituents: 1. Property developers; and 2. Police unions. Eric Adams embodies both special-interest groups in spades. We have the infrastructure to deal with this. You encumber the property with a lien. You treat it like unpaid property tax. That means it accrues interest and penalties and at some point the state can seize it if it's sufficiently in arrears and sell it to recover those fines. Stamping out AirBnBs is incredibly easy if the will exists. It does not. It should AirBnB is cancer.
- hahaxdxd123 4y ago
  %s/Property developers/Property owners If developers are so well represented, why is it so difficult for them to build in most American cities?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - mjmahone17 4y ago
    Well-connected property developers is probably the right term. Random out of town or new to the game property developers looking to start building are effectively priced out, while those with political connections learn about public property sales, are able to get special one-off rezonings, can grease the wheels to get their permits unstuck, etc. There’s not enough development, which keeps the gap high between what it costs a well-connected developer to build vs what a finished building is worth.
- jamestimmins 4y ago
  This is wrong. Developers make money from developing, which they can't do in the majority of major cities due to regulations outright banning development and cost burdens that make most development unprofitable.
  - dhbanes 4y ago
    Last time I checked, plenty of properties are developed in NYC and Los Angeles. Also, although my day job is in tech I play a lobbyist on the side in my small Los Angeles county town. Development happens despite onerous and burdensome municipal code.
plantain 4y ago
>An Aribnb in Queens has accumulated nearly $1M in fines, according to Bloomberg. It hasn't paid any of them. Is there no copyediting done at publications at all any more? When the second word is misspelt, I really wonder how much effort has gone into verifying any information contained within.
screwturner68 4y ago
If people want to be in the hotel business buy a freaking hotel, there are plenty for sale. If you want to be in the rental business buy and apartment building, there are lots of apartment buildings available too. All these people doing Air BnB and Renting out their old house is what is skewing the market and fucking things up for everyone -the city, home owners, neighbors, hotel operators, renters and vacationers. I'm glad NYC has rental laws like they do I really wish more cities had them and actually enforced them, a lot of this bullshit would end quickly. Until them people will have to live next to unlicensed hotels, subsidize their neighbors business and generally get screwed over so Air BnB can take their 30%. Anyone that bitches that the rent is too high, here's your starting point, all those Air BnB rentals are driving the long term rental market up significantly. Adding 20% more units to the market would save you a ton of money.
- kelnos 4y ago
  > fucking things up for everyone - [...] vacationers. Huh? As a frequent vacationer and user of Airbnb (I'm staying in one right now, as it turns out), Airbnb has made vacationing so much better. I get to stay in a larger variety of neighborhoods and locations. Kitchens are usually standard (good luck finding one in most hotels). There's more space if I want to stay with family or friends. Prices -- even in places where Airbnb hosts are required to pay local hotel taxes -- are much more varied and, in general, better (and when I do decide to choose a hotel for whatever reason prices are often lower due to competition from Airbnb). I could go on... > Anyone that bitches that the rent is too high, here's your starting point, all those Air BnB rentals are driving the long term rental market up significantly. I hear this a lot, but fail to see any hard evidence that killing short-term rentals would fix this problem. I don't doubt that short-term rentals are contributing to housing unaffordability, but there are much better solutions than banning them. Which brings me to: > Adding 20% more units to the market would save you a ton of money. Agreed! I've been saying that for years. Please, build 20% more units, and I think prices will indeed go down. Hell, don't stop at 20%, even. If there's demand, build!
  - dorchadas 4y ago
    > I hear this a lot, but fail to see any hard evidence that killing short-term rentals would fix this problem. I don't doubt that short-term rentals are contributing to housing unaffordability, but there are much better solutions than banning them. Which brings me to: The market for long term rentals doubled in Dublin during the pandemic due to lack of tourism. If you can't see how bringing all that supply (over 1000 units) back to the market won't help long-term rentals, that's on you. AirBnB is a cancer to cities and locals, and needs to be banned for good. Tourists aren't locals, they're not entitled to live like them, especially at the locals' expense.
Mistletoe 4y ago
> Hosts will have to submit several documents to the city, including a diagram with exit routes, proof the host is a resident of the building, and the number of non-host residents in the building. This is such a wonderful development. It should never have taken this long to have such a basic safety issue addressed.
VectorLock 4y ago
>Flushing When it gets really bad the person listing it will just flee the country, for sure. Assuming its not already straw man'd out.
ETH_start 4y ago
From my perspective, as a proponent of the moral right to private property and free association, the great thing about Airbnb/Uber/etc is that they offer a non-political means of opposing and circumventing politically instituted restrictions on market exchange. I believe public opinion will always be an insufficient guarantor of these rights, due to inherent cognitive biases and over-simplifications (in effect, ideological narratives), in addition to susceptibility to special interest public relations campaigns (e.g. right now, the Hotel Lobby has effectively manufactured the entire mainstream narrative around Airbnb: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/technology/inside-the-hotel-industrys-plan-to-combat-airbnb.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/technology/inside-the-hot...) so we need means of fortifying rights in the face of a hostile political climate.
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  I hardly qualify as a libertarian, but I have had many good vacations that I could not have afforded without Airbnb. I understand that some guests are not as courteous as I am, and that I have been reasonably lucky in not having a bad rental experience, but the same holds true for any other hotel stay as well. It seems to me that a better course of action than outlawing property owners from using it as they please is to provide the essential enforcement to ensure that the property owners do not impinge on their neighbors' enjoyment of their property, not outlawing specific uses all together.
  - ETH_start 4y ago
    Airbnb opens up tourism to the middle class. The problem, IMHO, is that society views travel as a non-essential luxury, when in reality, it will evolve to become an essential mode of life in an increasingly globalized world.
  - Arainach 4y ago
    You affording vacations is less important to cities and to society at large than locals bring able to afford properties without bidding against parasitic landlords.
l_theanine 4y ago
In this thread: a bunch of fabricated stories about how AirBNB is “actually a good thing”
- kelnos 4y ago
  I also see a bunch of fabricated stories about how Airbnb is the reason why housing is unaffordable, with the implication that if short-term rentals were banned, housing would somehow magically become affordable overnight. I got news for y'all, though: the only thing that solves housing unaffordability in places with demand is... building more homes. Don't get me wrong, Airbnb as a company has and causes a ton of problems, but they are not the cause of housing unaffordability.
  - dorchadas 4y ago
    I dunno, considering that Dublin has more AirBnBs for let in a five km radius of city centre than, at one point, there were houses to let in the entire country. That's a problem, especially during a housing crisis. AirBnB is a cancer, as are the entitled tourists who feel they should live like locals at the locals' expense.
    - LudwigNagasena 4y ago
      1. AirBnB couldn’t have more available properties simply because it is a subset of all available properties. 2. Not sure what calculus you used to determine that they live at the locals’ expense. Surely people paid for their properties and local products including paying VAT.
      - dorchadas 4y ago
        1. That's a poor argument and completely irrelevant. There's a massive difference between short term and long term lets. AirBnB has more short term rentals available than long term ones in the entire country. That's a problem even if it's a 'subet' of all available properties. 2. Oh they pay a little in tax. Not the same as depriving locals of places to live near where they work affordably, and pricing all but the highest earners out of a home in general. Not to mention it pushes locals further and further out of the areas near jobs, and even then it's more and more expensive. Longer commutes, higher rates, it's all a net negative on the actual residents of a city. Nobody benefits but the entitled tourists and the rich landlords, who are insulated enough by their money to not see or care about the societal harm they cause.

91 points by toss1 4y ago

> In 2021 alone, the homeowner racked up $984,000 in defaulted penalties, none of which have been paid, a Bloomberg calculation based on city records shows. This is just dumb, and has nothing to do with short-term rentals. If you've fined a property owner, you should have legal means to collect those fines. If you don't, then you are a bad city and you should be ashamed at your poor governance. If you do have those means, but have still failed to collect, then you have only yourself to blame. Bad city! > New York has tussled with Airbnb Inc. for years over the proliferation of illegal listings and has spent significant resources chasing down violators. How is this a thing? Issue a court order to Airbnb to take down a listing and ban the address from the platform. Airbnb fails to do so? Fine them. And actually collect! > New rules taking effect in May [...] Hosts who want to list on Airbnb or other platforms will be required to register with the city and receive an operating license. What? How incompetent is NYC's government? This has been standard practice in many other locales for years! I really have little sympathy for NYC here. They seem to have been badly mismanaging the situation for many years now. My sympathy goes out to NYC's residents, who seem to have a terrible local government. And I say this as someone who lives in SF, another city with a terrible local government.

LatteLazy 4y ago
Whenever I read these things, I feel the same way. I'd even go further: NYC has decided to allowed Airbnb's, it just can't quite admit that. So it pretends to fine them. But enforces nothing. Because that is politically expedient. I honestly don't care if they all Airbnb or not. I just find it distastful when governments insist on lying about their actual policy...

lr1970 4y ago

Why not to sue AirBnB itself for aiding and abetting of renting illegal properties and benefitting from it?

megablast 4y ago
Why not sue car manufacturers for aiding and abetting of all crimes and death committed by car drivers? I actually agree with this though, they do create deadly machines. Airbnb only let people rent out rooms.

dublinben 4y ago

The city should seize the property if it’s in flagrant contempt of the law. That’s the only action that will send a message to these illegal hotel operators.

awb 4y ago
In Douglas County, which is home to Nevada’s South Lake Tahoe, fines can accrue up to the value of the property. But at least in bankruptcy I think primary homes are hard to claim by other parties. Not sure about the government though.
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  if it's being used for air bnb enough, it's not a primary home.
  - awb 4y ago
    Lots of people AirBnB their primary home when they’re traveling.
    - gnopgnip 4y ago
      Are lots of people subletting part time like that? Or are virtually all the listings from permanent hosts?
    - consp 4y ago
      At least here (non us) most if not all rental contracts forbid renting your place out as well as most mortgages. Some even have special Airbnb clauses with penalties attached. I know you can get mortgages which specifically allow it but in general they are more expensive, my guess is because there is a risk element involved for the lender. Note: you can let people stay for free as house guardians, as this is not commercial activity.
      - Semaphor 4y ago

jmyeet 4y ago

The NYC government, like most city governments, exists primarily two serve two constituents: 1. Property developers; and 2. Police unions. Eric Adams embodies both special-interest groups in spades. We have the infrastructure to deal with this. You encumber the property with a lien. You treat it like unpaid property tax. That means it accrues interest and penalties and at some point the state can seize it if it's sufficiently in arrears and sell it to recover those fines. Stamping out AirBnBs is incredibly easy if the will exists. It does not. It should AirBnB is cancer.

hahaxdxd123 4y ago
%s/Property developers/Property owners If developers are so well represented, why is it so difficult for them to build in most American cities?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mjmahone17 4y ago
  Well-connected property developers is probably the right term. Random out of town or new to the game property developers looking to start building are effectively priced out, while those with political connections learn about public property sales, are able to get special one-off rezonings, can grease the wheels to get their permits unstuck, etc. There’s not enough development, which keeps the gap high between what it costs a well-connected developer to build vs what a finished building is worth.
jamestimmins 4y ago
This is wrong. Developers make money from developing, which they can't do in the majority of major cities due to regulations outright banning development and cost burdens that make most development unprofitable.
- dhbanes 4y ago
  Last time I checked, plenty of properties are developed in NYC and Los Angeles. Also, although my day job is in tech I play a lobbyist on the side in my small Los Angeles county town. Development happens despite onerous and burdensome municipal code.

plantain 4y ago

>An Aribnb in Queens has accumulated nearly $1M in fines, according to Bloomberg. It hasn't paid any of them. Is there no copyediting done at publications at all any more? When the second word is misspelt, I really wonder how much effort has gone into verifying any information contained within.

screwturner68 4y ago

If people want to be in the hotel business buy a freaking hotel, there are plenty for sale. If you want to be in the rental business buy and apartment building, there are lots of apartment buildings available too. All these people doing Air BnB and Renting out their old house is what is skewing the market and fucking things up for everyone -the city, home owners, neighbors, hotel operators, renters and vacationers. I'm glad NYC has rental laws like they do I really wish more cities had them and actually enforced them, a lot of this bullshit would end quickly. Until them people will have to live next to unlicensed hotels, subsidize their neighbors business and generally get screwed over so Air BnB can take their 30%. Anyone that bitches that the rent is too high, here's your starting point, all those Air BnB rentals are driving the long term rental market up significantly. Adding 20% more units to the market would save you a ton of money.

kelnos 4y ago
> fucking things up for everyone - [...] vacationers. Huh? As a frequent vacationer and user of Airbnb (I'm staying in one right now, as it turns out), Airbnb has made vacationing so much better. I get to stay in a larger variety of neighborhoods and locations. Kitchens are usually standard (good luck finding one in most hotels). There's more space if I want to stay with family or friends. Prices -- even in places where Airbnb hosts are required to pay local hotel taxes -- are much more varied and, in general, better (and when I do decide to choose a hotel for whatever reason prices are often lower due to competition from Airbnb). I could go on... > Anyone that bitches that the rent is too high, here's your starting point, all those Air BnB rentals are driving the long term rental market up significantly. I hear this a lot, but fail to see any hard evidence that killing short-term rentals would fix this problem. I don't doubt that short-term rentals are contributing to housing unaffordability, but there are much better solutions than banning them. Which brings me to: > Adding 20% more units to the market would save you a ton of money. Agreed! I've been saying that for years. Please, build 20% more units, and I think prices will indeed go down. Hell, don't stop at 20%, even. If there's demand, build!
- dorchadas 4y ago
  > I hear this a lot, but fail to see any hard evidence that killing short-term rentals would fix this problem. I don't doubt that short-term rentals are contributing to housing unaffordability, but there are much better solutions than banning them. Which brings me to: The market for long term rentals doubled in Dublin during the pandemic due to lack of tourism. If you can't see how bringing all that supply (over 1000 units) back to the market won't help long-term rentals, that's on you. AirBnB is a cancer to cities and locals, and needs to be banned for good. Tourists aren't locals, they're not entitled to live like them, especially at the locals' expense.

Mistletoe 4y ago

> Hosts will have to submit several documents to the city, including a diagram with exit routes, proof the host is a resident of the building, and the number of non-host residents in the building. This is such a wonderful development. It should never have taken this long to have such a basic safety issue addressed.

VectorLock 4y ago

>Flushing When it gets really bad the person listing it will just flee the country, for sure. Assuming its not already straw man'd out.

ETH_start 4y ago

From my perspective, as a proponent of the moral right to private property and free association, the great thing about Airbnb/Uber/etc is that they offer a non-political means of opposing and circumventing politically instituted restrictions on market exchange. I believe public opinion will always be an insufficient guarantor of these rights, due to inherent cognitive biases and over-simplifications (in effect, ideological narratives), in addition to susceptibility to special interest public relations campaigns (e.g. right now, the Hotel Lobby has effectively manufactured the entire mainstream narrative around Airbnb: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/technology/inside-the-hotel-industrys-plan-to-combat-airbnb.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/technology/inside-the-hot...) so we need means of fortifying rights in the face of a hostile political climate.

readthenotes1 4y ago
I hardly qualify as a libertarian, but I have had many good vacations that I could not have afforded without Airbnb. I understand that some guests are not as courteous as I am, and that I have been reasonably lucky in not having a bad rental experience, but the same holds true for any other hotel stay as well. It seems to me that a better course of action than outlawing property owners from using it as they please is to provide the essential enforcement to ensure that the property owners do not impinge on their neighbors' enjoyment of their property, not outlawing specific uses all together.
- ETH_start 4y ago
  Airbnb opens up tourism to the middle class. The problem, IMHO, is that society views travel as a non-essential luxury, when in reality, it will evolve to become an essential mode of life in an increasingly globalized world.
- Arainach 4y ago
  You affording vacations is less important to cities and to society at large than locals bring able to afford properties without bidding against parasitic landlords.

l_theanine 4y ago

In this thread: a bunch of fabricated stories about how AirBNB is “actually a good thing”

kelnos 4y ago
I also see a bunch of fabricated stories about how Airbnb is the reason why housing is unaffordable, with the implication that if short-term rentals were banned, housing would somehow magically become affordable overnight. I got news for y'all, though: the only thing that solves housing unaffordability in places with demand is... building more homes. Don't get me wrong, Airbnb as a company has and causes a ton of problems, but they are not the cause of housing unaffordability.
- dorchadas 4y ago
  I dunno, considering that Dublin has more AirBnBs for let in a five km radius of city centre than, at one point, there were houses to let in the entire country. That's a problem, especially during a housing crisis. AirBnB is a cancer, as are the entitled tourists who feel they should live like locals at the locals' expense.
  - LudwigNagasena 4y ago
    1. AirBnB couldn’t have more available properties simply because it is a subset of all available properties. 2. Not sure what calculus you used to determine that they live at the locals’ expense. Surely people paid for their properties and local products including paying VAT.
    - dorchadas 4y ago
      1. That's a poor argument and completely irrelevant. There's a massive difference between short term and long term lets. AirBnB has more short term rentals available than long term ones in the entire country. That's a problem even if it's a 'subet' of all available properties. 2. Oh they pay a little in tax. Not the same as depriving locals of places to live near where they work affordably, and pricing all but the highest earners out of a home in general. Not to mention it pushes locals further and further out of the areas near jobs, and even then it's more and more expensive. Longer commutes, higher rates, it's all a net negative on the actual residents of a city. Nobody benefits but the entitled tourists and the rich landlords, who are insulated enough by their money to not see or care about the societal harm they cause.