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Hawaii moves to ban short-term rentals to address housing crisis
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoMy Tennessee county is considering doing this (banning new Short Term Vacation Rentals), next week, unless the property is zoned commercial. I wish my entire state would also ban them all (even retroactively)! Could not be more supportive, as I moved from a previous neighborhood where all but three of the houses on my street were STVR's (e.g. AirBnB). My previous home was just recently (and illegally!) converted into yet another AirBnB!
- toomuchtodo 3y agoI would encourage you to actively engage in the political process to help achieve this outcome.
- ProllyInfamous 3y agoThanks for the encouragement; I just called my county representative to avail myself for Wednesday's Commissioners meeting.
- olliej 3y ago“Short term rentals” are just hotels, and should be taxed and regulated as such, including protection against BS charges and the like, zoning requirements, etc. Put some reasonable limit - say 10 days a year - after which you get to register as a hotel, motel, or rental property and comply with the relevant regulations and taxes.
- thechao 3y agoThe "reasonable limit" is 0 days per year.
- olliej 3y agoPersonally I would agree, but it's not uncommon for people to let friends/family stay at their house and contribute to expenses and rent etc, and I'm not sure how you could make a law that allowed that without airbnb changing all their marketing to "meet new friends" or similar BS to try and violate the law while claiming they think it's "legitimate".
- arealaccount 3y agoWhat if it's an owner occupied house. Renting out a converted garage or something. Does that pass the "not a hotel" test?
- HWR_14 3y agoOf course that doesn't pass the "not a hotel" test. If you are consistently renting out the garage as a short term rental you should be paying hotel taxes, abiding by hotel regulations, etc. Just like if you lived in the penthouse of a 500-room hotel and rented out all the other rooms.
- olliej 3y ago.. you're renting out part of your property, it is either a hotel/motel, or it is a rental arrangement. Either the occupants should be protected by tenancy laws, e.g. you don't get to evict them, you must do all the stuff that comes with being a landlord/lady and ensure the space conforms to the legal requirements for such. Or it's a hotel/motel, in which case the same applies, but for the hotel/motel regulations. You can't do what airbnb hosts do which is to pick and choose what laws apply based on convenience to them. If you have paying occupants of your property there are only two options: hotel guest (e.g. you're subject to hotel regulations) or they're a tenant, there is no such thing as a quantum occupant. Also if you are basing your rental/hotel fees on market price, you should obviously being paying taxes (property and income) based on those market values. Why would you not be?
- Chris2048 3y agoYou listening Ireland?
- jnsie 3y agoHah. Came here to say the same thing!
- betaby 3y agoRight! Because travel is for the rich who can afford expensive hotels! NYC example shows what banning AirBnB decreased the price dramatically. Add /s on your taste.
- objektif 3y agoIn my experience hotels are almost always cheaper than a similar quality Airbnb. So this is certainly a move in the right direction.
- skybrian 3y agoIf you want to stay somewhere local (without a car) there often aren't any hotels.
- objektif 3y agoWhy should there be a hotel in every town? May be we were not supposed to vacation in a remote town in the middle of nowhere. If locals love the idea of having their houses as short term rental so be it. If they dont, it is not for us to decide for them honestly.
- skybrian 3y agoBecause you are visiting someone, and they don't have room at their place for you to stay. Not all travel is business or tourism.
- foogazi 3y agoEvery town has a hotel/motel - people traveled before AirBnB
- rtkwe 3y agoI'm not entirely sure what you're trying to say in the second half but AirBnBs and other STRs are barely cheaper than hotels in most cases now after you factor in the fees most places tack on at checkout.
- epistasis 3y agoPeople will do literally anything to address the housing crisis except for the one thing that works: build housing. If you want to ban AirBNB for nuisance or other reasons, great. But don't pretend that this will create enough housing for people. It just removes one small sliver of demand, and acknowledges that the core problem is a supply/demand mismatch. If you want to deny people's needs, limit them, at least be explicit about that too. Housing is a basic necessity of life. Why limit it?
- eo3x0 3y agothis ignores the basic economics which is that it’s too expensive to build housing. Labor is expensive, materials are expensive, and permitting is expensive.
- epistasis 3y agoAre you seriously proposing that we do not have enough economic capacity to build the most basic life necessity of life, housing? As Keynes said: is we can do it, we can afford it. We can build more housing.
- eo3x0 3y agoThen you should do it. The market will clearly reward you for it right?
- epistasis 3y agoI don't know why you think the market would reward me for this. The market is the result of regulation, and the regulations right now do not permit more housing, but do allow the highest bidder clear the market. The market has been set up to only serve those with the most money, through a conscious choice of how the regulations were chosen.
- eej71 3y agoI don't think that's what's being proposed. The thesis being offered - which you will likely disagree with - can be read as - the economic capacity certainly exists, but the regulatory regime prices it out of the market.
- causal 3y agoThis seems like a step in the right direction but the real issue seems to remain that so much of the housing is owned by people who do not live in Hawaii, regardless of how it is used. At least some of these AirBNBs are just people's vacation homes that will still sit empty because the owners don't intend to give up their private getaways.
- CrimsonCape 3y agoSure that's true, but a lot of properties in tourist-heavy areas are owned by people who use income from short-term rentals to pay the mortgage. It's one thing if you can look at a property and say, "well my income is high enough that I can afford the note on this property." It's another thing if you say "well I can afford this property by using the property to pay for itself" I would argue that a lot of the properties will be sold off.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago> I would argue that a lot of the properties will be sold off. Which, if that happens, should lower the average cost of housing for long term residents, which is basically the primary goal of this bill.
- dwaite 3y agoI'm very surprised they didn't do this over a decade ago.
- skybrian 3y agoThey did on Oahu, for most places outside Waikiki.
- BurningFrog 3y agoOne thing this common idea misses is that AirBNB's are housing. Both for tourists and locals.
- exabrial 3y agoI completely disagree. They're a business. Housing would be an owner lives in it as their primary residence.
- hackeraccount 3y agoOne person's business is another's residence. The bank owns more of my home then I do. It's my residence and their business.
- spywaregorilla 3y agoGrossly underutilized housing
- fragmede 3y agoDepends on the Airbnb. Some of them are fully utilized with back to back rentals, and earn a ton of money for their hosts.
- spywaregorilla 3y agoAverage is ~50%
- srackey 3y agoAll the comments here say “build more housing”. True! But to solve Airbnb, it’s “build more hotels!” Like with Taxis and Uber, there are clearly regulatory hurdles to fulfilling hotel demand. We can tell because places like Tokyo have cheap cheap hotels, despite high density.
- kjkjadksj 3y agoNot all airbnbs equate a hotel. Usually families will try and just book an entire home for airbnb. Even suite style hotels aren’t nearly as nice as a multibedroom home with a yard and potentially a pool with zero other guests and the easiest parking situation possible for the rental car. Probably makes a big stress difference for parents with young kids I’d imagine.
- srackey 3y agoYou’re describing another consequence of hotel and land use regulations. Ease up zoning and hotels in a house form-factor will be built, as demand clearly exists!
- kjkjadksj 3y agoEven that might not pencil out like the airbnb. Its still potentially someones home so it doesn’t have to stand alone as a business that fully covers its costs and makes a profit margin. A hotel on the otherhand would have to do that. I don’t imagine youd ever be able to rent an entire home from a hotel company for just a few dozen dollars more than a basic hotel room.
- nine_zeros 3y agoThis is a good move. I myself used short-term airbnb in Big Island. Great for the tourist me but it could easily have been rented out long term to a local. So could the 40 other airbnbs I considered. These places are off the local rental market only because the landlord has the option of renting it out on airbnb - at the expense of renting it out to locals.
- exabrial 3y agoGood. I've been waiting for someone to try this experiment. My viewpoint: Tax relief for your primary residence that you actually _use_ and live in. Like nobody should pay property taxes for just living. For additional residences, you can't have to both ways: zoned residential AND be renting it out as a business full time. Absolutely property tax the shit out out of these. Require business licensure, commericial insurance, fire sprinkler, inspections, zoning, taxation, because this is literally what hotels have to do.
- Kon-Peki 3y agoHawaii has the lowest property tax rates in the US. It makes it extremely cheap for a mainlander to buy property and hold it empty except for the small amount of time they visit. Combined with the high income and business taxes, they've created a tax system that favors non-residents over residents (and retirees over the working age). Of course the system sucks. It was designed to suck.
- WarOnPrivacy 3y ago> Hawaii has the lowest property tax rates in the US. It makes it extremely cheap for a mainlander to buy property Or maybe "Residents of Hawai‘i face the highest housing costs in the nation" ref: https://uhero.hawaii.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/TheHawaiiHousingFactbook.pdf https://uhero.hawaii.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/TheHawai...
- Kon-Peki 3y agoThis stems from the intentional decision to make absentee ownership have very low carrying costs. If you build a housing unit in Hawaii, nearly anyone in the entire world is an eligible purchaser. Shift the tax distribution to favor workers/residents, and a huge percentage of eligible purchasers drop out of contention. Make it so that it is a dumb idea to buy housing in Hawaii unless you spend a really significant amount of time there.
- ktosobcy 3y agoAirbnb should be ban altogether - I haven't seen a place where it's existence didn't ef-uped local housing market just to line up pseudo "investor's" pockets... (which is another problem - housing stock becoming an investment instrument instead of being a house...
- causal 3y agoOr just be regulated the way every commercial hotel/BNB was before, and not magically excepted because the property uses an app.
- thehappypm 3y agoI think that this is something that we can do that will actually help with housing crisis in the short term. Look at your city, and then do a search on Airbnb with no filters on. Those are all units of housing that just a decade ago would’ve been full-time units.
- balderdash 3y ago"roughly three-quarters of the total amount of new housing required in coming years needs to be affordable to the lowest-income half of the population. The greatest housing needs are at the lowest levels of the income scale." That is from a dated, but very anti-vacation rental report [1], i just don't see the houses in the rental pool filling this need (yes it increases aggreagate supply/changes marginal pricing). [1] https://static1.squarespace.com/static/63a60a7b774001557452176c/t/65aada75fc4cbf794bb51e66/1705695863233/Appleseed_Vacation%2BRental%2BImpact%2BReport_3.29.18_NewCover.pdf https://static1.squarespace.com/static/63a60a7b7740015574521...