17 ms·

Scale Ruins Everything

175 points by drc500free 2y ago

endo_bunker 2y ago
Comical to suggest that AirBnB "ruined communities" or "destroyed the dream of home ownership" as if decades of federal, state, and local government policy had not already guaranteed those outcomes.
- api 2y ago
  Yeah I'm tired of this too. Real estate hyperinflation is almost entirely the fault of chronically under-building real estate due to regulatory capture by landlords, legacy homeowners, and speculators. The real estate market is more or less a cartel in quite a few places. AirBnB is a small factor. I suppose it drives up prices, but only because supply is so absurdly tight.
  - Blackthorn 2y ago
    100% of code uses 100% of resources. Let's not downplay the role of Airbnb as both a company and a phenomena for causing inflation. But more than that, remember that a lot happens at the margins in these markets: what's actually liquid or in play is a small part of the overall stock. So anything that messes with that will have an outsized effect.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    You can define it as under-building, but that's only one side of the political effect. E.g. the UK net immigration rate has been pretty enormous, and it seems lopsided to call it under-building to have not built homes for a giant number of people coming from their previous homes elsewhere in the world to the UK. Speaking as the son of an immigrant, married to an immigrant, for the people who can only think tribally, and must assume I am doing the same.
    - arccy 2y ago
      most of these are legal immigrants, so the country decided to accept them, and yet failed to build enough to keep up with demand that they allowed.
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
        I agree that both things are caused by one level or government or another. I'm just saying that under building is not the only explanation. It's probably not even the most natural one. It's maybe a second or effect once you've decided to admit multiple cities' worth of people each year.
        BlueTemplar 2y ago
        Curious, what happened to their previous homes ? Did they become Airbnb rentals on the cheap too by any chance ?
        robertlagrant 2y ago
        That would be an odd thing to assume. Net immigration has long predated AirBnB.
        BlueTemplar 2y ago
        Obviously I wonder about post-AirBnB migrants... or maybe also can we see changes in the source countries between pre- and post- ?
    - Hammershaft 2y ago
      Underutilization of land as a result on speculation on the growth of land prices is a major reason, even Manhattan has massive chunks of real estate that are vacant, a land value tax would fix this.
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
- sgdfhijfgsdfgds 2y ago
  Airbnb has in fact ruined communities and destroyed the dream of home ownership for an entire class of people: those who would already be buying at the limits of their budgets to stay where they were brought up. This happened even in areas where holiday home ownership and rental was common as a business. The failure of government to grapple with the negative effects of Airbnb is a separate thing. Airbnb are, in fact, in control of their own morality.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    You need to explain why AirBnB did this as opposed to other factors. Renting your house out predates AirBnB.
    - sgdfhijfgsdfgds 2y ago
      I need to? Thanks for the unnecessary correction, when it's pretty clear that my comment you are replying to includes the words "even in areas where holiday home ownership and rental was common as a business". I don't know why it did not happen before. All I know is that the situation in coastal resort towns in Cornwall, Devon, and elsewhere in the UK changed utterly when Airbnb became a thing. I could guess that barrier to entry was always an issue before then; the relative complexity and process involved in listing a property with e.g. Hoseasons, who were the dominant player in the 80s and 90s, and who inspected properties and had greater requirements. But either way, Airbnb did unambiguously change things. Ask people who lived in Cornish towns whether they're even able to rent a room or a flat.
      - JackYoustra 2y ago
        I mean, usually if thing popular, make more of thing until everyone can have it? I guess we could go with your solution of deliberately killing demand with bizarre mechanisms so only a few people can enjoy a holiday instead of pointing the blame where it demands: locals fighting tooth and nail to not build more. Nimbys are basically hukou advocates in disguise. After all, it's the only solution if you don't primarily place the blame on lack of construction.
- Joel_Mckay 2y ago
  Sure, but if someone started running heavy industrial concrete equipment in a residential zoned block 24/7, than the city wouldn't be blaming poor people for the issues. The fact is you can go to travel websites, and the first 70k listings in some cities are for commercial hotel/share services running out of residential zoned homes. Low-income people are easier to squeeze, and "with a computer" convenience doesn't make it an ethical securitization model. =3
- fire_lake 2y ago
  AirBnB has been shown to raise residential house prices. It’s not the only factor, or even the biggest, but still…
  - kelnos 2y ago
    > It’s not the only factor, or even the biggest, but still… But that's the key, really. In most places, banning short-term rentals will not move the needle on housing affordability. It's like trying to optimize the thing that's causing 3% of the slowdown when things that are responsible for 40%, 30%, and 25% are right there, staring you in the face.
  - Spivak 2y ago
    But getting rid of it doesn't lower them or even slow the increase. https://medium.com/chamber-of-progress/new-nyc-data-shows-that-airbnb-restrictions-arent-solving-housing-crunch-b835803d0040 https://medium.com/chamber-of-progress/new-nyc-data-shows-th...
- deleted 2y ago
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- nonameiguess 2y ago
  When I read stuff like this, I'm left wondering if I'm the only person who actually lives in a place that has been infested with Airbnb. On paper, my neighborhood is the Hacker News dreamland. Nobody has a yard. There is train service. Many people don't have cars. There is no mandatory parking allowance. There is no zoning restriction against multifamily housing. Virtually every unit is at least attached. Multi-use is fine. Plenty of buildings contain both housing and businesses. There isn't a lot of traffic. It's walkable. The only major restriction is you can't build higher than five stories. And we've been in a construction boom for nearly a decade. But much of that boom has been tearing down multifamily apartment complexes and replacing them with luxury townhouses and condos instead. Almost nobody is actually moving into those places. They're 90% being purchased by investors, mostly out of state investors, to be used as Airbnbs. There is a significant categorical difference between investment property today and investment property before Airbnb. Before Airbnb, you rented via long-term leases, or you bought hotels and apartments in really shitty neighborhoods to use as weekly or even daily rentals for homeless people with jobs. Now you can buy as little as a single unit and the infrastructure to rent it out daily as a hotel room to much wealthier travelers exists without you needing to do anything extra. With predictable results. Even in neighorhoods with little to no zoning restrictions, with virtually nonstop construction of new housing, almost nobody lives here, the neighborhood is completely hollowed out, and all of these new luxury homes are mostly party houses used by rich college students and bachelorette parties.
  - jovial_cavalier 2y ago
    That should drive your property value down, not up.
    - g-b-r 2y ago
      Not until there are so many short-term rentals that they aren't profitable anymore
    - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
      I did not hear a complaint about what it was doing to their property values. I did hear: > virtually nonstop construction of new housing, almost nobody lives here, the neighborhood is completely hollowed out, and all of these new luxury homes are mostly party houses used by rich college students and bachelorette parties.
- FooBarBizBazz 2y ago
  If anything, there is a housing cartel that we need an Uber-like blitz (times a million) to destroy. In the same way that Uber ignored local taxi regulations, you would need to ignore local zoning regulations. Just "build, baby, build", become valuable, and then, with your fait-accompli in hand, bribe the various local governments -- just like Uber. Except -- if it took the combined might of Uber's VCs, and the disposable human battering ram that was Travis Kalanick, just to disrupt the puny little taxi industry, imagine what it would take to change housing. Ain't never gonna happen.
- RiverCrochet 2y ago
  I thought the original idea of Airbnb was to open a spare room in the house you already own to guests. I've used it only in this way and it really helped with a financial crunch, and given that I lived there and was present while guests where there, there was no negative impact to the community at all. I know people have been buying houses just for Airbnb rental, but that's not everyone.
- insane_dreamer 2y ago
  > Comical to suggest that AirBnB "ruined communities" it has absolutely done so in the same way that a bunch of motels springing up in your neighborhood would completely change it and not necessarily for the better it also greatly constrained the availability of housing for locals, therefore pushing up prices, so that people not living in the city could visit for cheaper; probably ok if you're in the tourism business, otherwise not
- remyp 2y ago
  I live in Lisbon. Over 80% of housing units in the historic Alfama neighborhood are now vacation rentals. This is the most historically Portuguese neighborhood in the capital. It was the only neighborhood to survive the earthquake in 1755. Fado was born there. Yes, it's a failure of government policy, but I don't think it's hyperbole to say that AirBnB and its ilk destroyed that community. That is, assuming you define "community" as a group of people and not a group of buildings.
daxfohl 2y ago
Given that we've been throwing cash at every conceivable idea for the last ten plus years, yet when speaking of unicorns we still have to refer back to airbnb and uber, seems like we're well past "peak unicorn" and well into the "horse with a mild concussion" era.
- Terr_ 2y ago
  It's also disconcerting how much their success seems to hinge on using technology as a lever to break laws or social expectations, as opposed to technology as something that itself empowers humans to be more productive.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    Er no, they totally transformed things through technology as well. Their product was fantastic. Hail a cab in the 2000s in the UK and tell me Uber had no improvement for its customers.
    - daxfohl 2y ago
      I understand GP's point, but to yours I'll add they have also open sourced and mainstreamed some of their key technologies. So it's not all bad.
      - adamc 2y ago
        Not all bad != good.
    - CPLX 2y ago
      Right but how much of this improvement came from the invention and popularity of smartphones and how much of the innovation came from a company called Uber.
      - ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
        Struggling to see the relevance of this question. How much of Uber's "innovation" was actually Ford/GM/Toyota innovation in car manufacturing?
CM30 2y ago
To be honest, you could say this about capitalism in general. Everything has to be huge no matter what industry it's in or what the product is, just because shareholders demand that impossible infinite growth.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  It's not capitalism. It's government bonds. If you can get a guaranteed return from bonds, then any risk must beat the bond market. That increases the cost of capital for businesses, so they have to produce greater returns.
- vladms 2y ago
  Human nature in most big culture seems to be trained to demand more (even if not always money). If there was any group of people that were "content with what they had", they were outpaced in development by the ones that "want more" so there will be minor (or inexistent) now. I do wonder if there is any smart solution to this issue.
  - begueradj 2y ago
    Good observation. The answer is at the beginning of your statement: "human nature". In plain English: there's no solution to that.
    - hackable_sand 2y ago
      Bad observation. Stop projecting, you two. Just because you want to take take take from others doesn't mean everyone else is.
      - alanbernstein 2y ago
        Your comment is quite confusing. The observation is that the "take take take" behavior arises out of a sort of survival-of-the-fittest mechanism. Both preceding comments seem to lament this, rather than relate to it.
kayo_20211030 2y ago
Any advance, early industrial revolution; late nineteenth century industrialization; twentieth century vertical integration; globalization; internet disintermediation etc. will cause some dislocation. Often unintended, and rarely foreseen. Ultimately it all settles down to a new equilibrium, until the next perturbation. It's a bit disingenuous blaming VC's, or scale, or anything exogenous. The system's capacity for change will always outstrip the current institutions' abilities to fully buffer the change. If we focused on improving the institutions responsible for that function we'd be performing a more useful function than trying to limit the change.
elevatedastalt 2y ago
I misread the title as "Scala Ruins Everything" and was very confused by the comments.
- jelling 2y ago
  So did I and having chosen it once, I still thought "well, I'll hear this out..."
tantalor 2y ago
I'm halfway through reading this and still not discovered what the point is.
- rpigab 2y ago
  Startups and incubators are actually ruining everything while telling everyone they're improving everything. I think it's kinda true, but govt regulations should have prevented it, which is not happening anytime soon because politicians act like startups and lobbies act like incubators.
rKarpinski 2y ago
Odd piece. It highlights some hyper-scalers but it needs to work on justifying 'how they ruin everything'. "At scale, they would ruin communities, put restaurants out of business, destroy the dream of home ownership, and eventually undermine democracy itself." Uh what now?
- jaggederest 2y ago
  airbnb, doordash, airbnb, facebook - did those things, respectively, with plenty of hard evidence (does anyone still remember cambridge analytica)
  - Spivak 2y ago
    You have to stretch to get even one of those claims to be true. Has DoorDash put some restaurants out of business, probably. Have they put restaurants out of business, absolutely not. Has Airbnb raised home prices, yes by around ~1%. Have they destroyed the dream of home ownership, lol no. We're talking about ~$5k on the loan which isn't making or breaking anyone. And claims on destroying communities are dubious because they're just not that dense in places where people actually live. Has Facebook increased political polarization and sent people down the right-wing pipeline, yep. Would this have happened anyway with a constellation of smaller social media sites, it already has.
  - rKarpinski 2y ago
    Ok let's look at "destroying the dream of homeownership" since that the most objective. Homeownership rates are almost 66% now in 2024 [1], which is the highest it's been since 2011 [2]. [1] https://www.bankrate.com/homeownership/home-ownership-statistics/?tpt=a https://www.bankrate.com/homeownership/home-ownership-statis... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_St...
adamc 2y ago
One of the questions all this raises for me is: what fraction of successful startups actually make society better? I'm sure to get pushback here, but my suspicion is: most do not. Looking at companies like Facebook, Amazon, or Google, I'm kind of think they made it worse. Yeah, I know, some people benefited. But net-net, I preferred having more and better bookstores to Amazon. I don't like what google has become at all. And Facebook has never been good.
- tremarley 2y ago
  Google helps us lookup anything we want Amazon helps us buy anything we want Facebook helps us keep in touch with all of our friends easily Their not as good a they used to be but how are they not good?
  - coldpie 2y ago
    Google & Facebook push the advertising/attention economy business model, which rewards spreading misinformation & extreme viewpoints, leading to the rise in conspiracy theories and breakdown in discourse & trust in public institutions we see today. Amazon has killed a lot of local retail, removing OK jobs and replacing them with low-paying/low-skill warehouse labor. I think there's arguments for both sides, but personally I land on the net-evil side for all 3 of the listed companies.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    Google provided a useful lookup service at the expense of brainwashing society with consumerist propaganda and the complete destruction of personal privacy and the normalization of the surveillance state. It wasn't worth it. Amazon inspired us to think we needed more cheap crap in order to inspire us to buy cheap crap that we didn't need. We aren't any happier than we were before we had the ability to buy cheap crap on a whim, but we sure do have a lot more cheap crap than before. That wasn't worth it. Facebook is essentially as good at helping people keep in touch as any instant messenger that preceded it. But unlike those instant messengers, it's supported by invasive targeted ads, and consult the first paragraph for why this is a negative. This has all been a waste. Society isn't any better as a result of these companies existing.
dash2 2y ago
I like Airbnb, because it's made staying abroad much cheaper and nicer. I also like being able to rent a taxi on an app in a new town.
- sausagefeet 2y ago
  For awhile I'd been using AirBnb by reflex, but after a few pretty bad experiences I started indexing it against local hotels before committing, and my experience has been that if you just need a place to be (don't care about kitchen) then AirBnB is not nearly as competitive as it used to be. So yes, AirBnB has made staying places cheaper, but the industry is also catching up. Concrete example is nightly rate for a studio in Paris vs the hotel next to it were +/- euros difference when I was there last year.
  - dash2 2y ago
    I agree and have had similar experiences. But note that the fact hotels have got cheaper/better is also part of AirBnB's influence. Competition makes incumbents up their game.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  That was true like 5+ years ago. By now market prices of housing have gone up to match the tourism profit lure I guess. It seems common nowadays for the owner to own multiple apartments, like 8+, where as in the beginning it was one or two. I prefer ordinary hotels nowadays. Especially when travelling with children.
- wavemode 2y ago
  "Cheaper" is questionable. I usually find that, after fees, I'm paying the same, or more, than I'd pay at a nicer Comfort Inn. Maybe I'm just unlucky but the last several times I've traveled, staying at an AirBnB simply made no financial sense. Sometimes I feel like I'm crazy, hearing people talk about "cheaper".
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Comfort Inn is in the lower middle of hotel levels. Not roach infested, not tiny, but also not very luxury. It is about the cheapest hotel I'll let my family stay in. The rooms work, but they are tiny and everyone stays in the same room. For a similar price I find airBnB which has separate bedrooms for us and each kid, a full kitchen (this saves us a ton of money vs restaurants and is healthier), and generally some other rooms to play in. We don't (rarely) get a pool which the kids miss, but overall it is a much better value. I agree the price is similar though.
cbsmith 2y ago
Uber & Airbnb were really exploring a time-honoured model that has predictable effects. Taking underutilized resources and shifting to a "rental" model increases utilization of assets, broadening accessibility, and thereby increasing wealth... while simultaneously increasing the value of the underlying asset (making it less affordable). This isn't a new thing, or a surprising thing, nor is the scale of it the problem. Where we get into a problem is when, due to lack of competition, you start extracting almost all (or perhaps even somewhat more than all) of the value that you're adding. That leaves everyone else in the same boat they were in before the rental model showed up, except comparatively worse off because there's a ton of wealth in there that has been concentrated in the hands of a few. This is the kind of thing that having more competition would help with.
smitty1e 2y ago
> Those were the innocuous founding ideas behind DoorDash, AirBnB, Uber, and Facebook. At scale, they would ruin communities, put restaurants out of business, destroy the dream of home ownership, and eventually undermine democracy itself. Impossible to assess. These things happened, but as a chemistry experiment. You'd need to be some sort of $Diety to track the individiual atoms in the solution and judge the alternatives. Quit this fruitlessness while you're behind, say I.
joony527 2y ago
Nice Artice!
osigurdson 2y ago
I'm grateful for VCs throwing money around at various things that may or may not work. We would not be in a better world if all money went into low risk investments.
efitz 2y ago
It’s not that scale ruins everything, it’s the pursuit of scale that ruins everything. I have thought a lot about antitrust recently and realized that it’s an overlapping problem with the VC unicorn problem. People get so hung up with being bigger/biggest, faster/fastest, that they minimize or ignore pathological side effects. What if we have a progressive tax structure on business based on scale? Partly on size, partly on market power? For example, what if corporate income tax were tied to the logarithm of the number of employees+contractors? What if the corporate income tax increased with the market share in markets served? These kind of ideas have very low impact at small scales, but after a certain scale they start to have such a huge effect on bottom line that they disincentive growth for its own sake. And they’re self-regulating and largely objective, unlike our current antitrust laws in the US.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  >For example, what if corporate income tax were tied to the logarithm of the number of employees+contractors? Unemployment would increase. >What if the corporate income tax increased with the market share in markets served? More companies would register in Panama or some other tax haven. I would be wary of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
  - azemetre 2y ago
    You're making it sound as if registering in Panama is some "gotcha" that can't also be easily closed via legislation.
    - medvezhenok 2y ago
      Indeed. Change from corporate tax to VAT, and then no such trickery is possible (tax charged at point of sale)
      - robertlagrant 2y ago
        VAT is a much better tax. Tax the flow of money, not the intermediate holding of money by a company.
_1tem 2y ago
I’ve been thinking a lot about this. There seems to be an “optimal” scale for tech — Google used to be amazing and wonderful about a decade ago, until it reached a certain scale. So were Facebook, etc. And even the positive effects of darling unicorns like Uber and Airbnb are actually more in the business model they pioneered, rather than the app itself. In Eastern Europe I use Uber alternatives which are usually about as good as Uber or better. Only Airbnb is a “naturally” global company by its very nature, because it is for travel. Maybe the natural limit to scale should be state sovereignty (i.e. protectionism). I actually believe that consumers benefit if countries ban or tax the likes of Uber and promote a homegrown alternative. (Imagine if each country had its own Google customized to the local language and culture, it might actually be a better experience for everyone). I’ve heard that Baidu and Yandex are better than Google for local content. Too bad the EU didn’t catch on with this. Europe could’ve outcompeted the US by playing a different game on quality and boutique charm instead of scale. Instead of pathetically trying to become a large homogeneous market like the US (and then failing badly and then regulating “privacy” out of spite), the EU should’ve actually been protectionist in favor of its members and it would’ve been interesting to see what marvels could originate.
robertlagrant 2y ago
> The bump in interest rates has cooled things down This is the actual issue. When ZIRP was introduced (and then RE-introduced, sigh), it makes money appear to be worth almost nothing. Which means everything looks valuable.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
Actually, it's more like the pursuit of large profits (and VC exits) through scaling ruins everything.
- Night_Thastus 2y ago
  And the way publicly traded companies are so beholden to shareholders. What, have a profitable, efficient business with happy customers and workers? Well, we NEED to see growth, so better find a way to cut the operating costs - no matter how much worse it makes the product, how unhappy the workers are, etc. Better try to capture more of the market even if it makes 0 sense in context and will end up being a massive waste of resources. It may run the business into the ground, but as long as there's a quarter of growth they can't see anything else.
svilen_dobrev 2y ago
> "society-bending hyper growth" i like that phrase. Like black holes' hyper-gravity bending the fabric of space-time.. the article also reminds me of that book "The Limits to Growth" (from the 70ies?)..
dgraph_advocate 2y ago
"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." - Mark Zuckerberg (when asked about how he obtained the information for his newly launched social network.)
almararajaded 2y ago
091 2898 185
musicale 2y ago
> Mark tried to think of the most harmless thing: keeping track of your friends, and organizing group photos. With comments! Regarding "Facemash": > Zuckerberg faced expulsion and was charged with breaching security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy. Ultimately the charges were dropped. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

175 points by drc500free 2y ago

Comical to suggest that AirBnB "ruined communities" or "destroyed the dream of home ownership" as if decades of federal, state, and local government policy had not already guaranteed those outcomes.

api 2y ago
Yeah I'm tired of this too. Real estate hyperinflation is almost entirely the fault of chronically under-building real estate due to regulatory capture by landlords, legacy homeowners, and speculators. The real estate market is more or less a cartel in quite a few places. AirBnB is a small factor. I suppose it drives up prices, but only because supply is so absurdly tight.
- Blackthorn 2y ago
  100% of code uses 100% of resources. Let's not downplay the role of Airbnb as both a company and a phenomena for causing inflation. But more than that, remember that a lot happens at the margins in these markets: what's actually liquid or in play is a small part of the overall stock. So anything that messes with that will have an outsized effect.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  You can define it as under-building, but that's only one side of the political effect. E.g. the UK net immigration rate has been pretty enormous, and it seems lopsided to call it under-building to have not built homes for a giant number of people coming from their previous homes elsewhere in the world to the UK. Speaking as the son of an immigrant, married to an immigrant, for the people who can only think tribally, and must assume I am doing the same.
  - arccy 2y ago
    most of these are legal immigrants, so the country decided to accept them, and yet failed to build enough to keep up with demand that they allowed.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      I agree that both things are caused by one level or government or another. I'm just saying that under building is not the only explanation. It's probably not even the most natural one. It's maybe a second or effect once you've decided to admit multiple cities' worth of people each year.
      - BlueTemplar 2y ago
        Curious, what happened to their previous homes ? Did they become Airbnb rentals on the cheap too by any chance ?
        robertlagrant 2y ago
        That would be an odd thing to assume. Net immigration has long predated AirBnB.
        BlueTemplar 2y ago
        Obviously I wonder about post-AirBnB migrants... or maybe also can we see changes in the source countries between pre- and post- ?
  - Hammershaft 2y ago
    Underutilization of land as a result on speculation on the growth of land prices is a major reason, even Manhattan has massive chunks of real estate that are vacant, a land value tax would fix this.
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
sgdfhijfgsdfgds 2y ago
Airbnb has in fact ruined communities and destroyed the dream of home ownership for an entire class of people: those who would already be buying at the limits of their budgets to stay where they were brought up. This happened even in areas where holiday home ownership and rental was common as a business. The failure of government to grapple with the negative effects of Airbnb is a separate thing. Airbnb are, in fact, in control of their own morality.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  You need to explain why AirBnB did this as opposed to other factors. Renting your house out predates AirBnB.
  - sgdfhijfgsdfgds 2y ago
    I need to? Thanks for the unnecessary correction, when it's pretty clear that my comment you are replying to includes the words "even in areas where holiday home ownership and rental was common as a business". I don't know why it did not happen before. All I know is that the situation in coastal resort towns in Cornwall, Devon, and elsewhere in the UK changed utterly when Airbnb became a thing. I could guess that barrier to entry was always an issue before then; the relative complexity and process involved in listing a property with e.g. Hoseasons, who were the dominant player in the 80s and 90s, and who inspected properties and had greater requirements. But either way, Airbnb did unambiguously change things. Ask people who lived in Cornish towns whether they're even able to rent a room or a flat.
    - JackYoustra 2y ago
      I mean, usually if thing popular, make more of thing until everyone can have it? I guess we could go with your solution of deliberately killing demand with bizarre mechanisms so only a few people can enjoy a holiday instead of pointing the blame where it demands: locals fighting tooth and nail to not build more. Nimbys are basically hukou advocates in disguise. After all, it's the only solution if you don't primarily place the blame on lack of construction.
Joel_Mckay 2y ago
Sure, but if someone started running heavy industrial concrete equipment in a residential zoned block 24/7, than the city wouldn't be blaming poor people for the issues. The fact is you can go to travel websites, and the first 70k listings in some cities are for commercial hotel/share services running out of residential zoned homes. Low-income people are easier to squeeze, and "with a computer" convenience doesn't make it an ethical securitization model. =3
fire_lake 2y ago
AirBnB has been shown to raise residential house prices. It’s not the only factor, or even the biggest, but still…
- kelnos 2y ago
  > It’s not the only factor, or even the biggest, but still… But that's the key, really. In most places, banning short-term rentals will not move the needle on housing affordability. It's like trying to optimize the thing that's causing 3% of the slowdown when things that are responsible for 40%, 30%, and 25% are right there, staring you in the face.
- Spivak 2y ago
  But getting rid of it doesn't lower them or even slow the increase. https://medium.com/chamber-of-progress/new-nyc-data-shows-that-airbnb-restrictions-arent-solving-housing-crunch-b835803d0040 https://medium.com/chamber-of-progress/new-nyc-data-shows-th...
deleted 2y ago
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nonameiguess 2y ago
When I read stuff like this, I'm left wondering if I'm the only person who actually lives in a place that has been infested with Airbnb. On paper, my neighborhood is the Hacker News dreamland. Nobody has a yard. There is train service. Many people don't have cars. There is no mandatory parking allowance. There is no zoning restriction against multifamily housing. Virtually every unit is at least attached. Multi-use is fine. Plenty of buildings contain both housing and businesses. There isn't a lot of traffic. It's walkable. The only major restriction is you can't build higher than five stories. And we've been in a construction boom for nearly a decade. But much of that boom has been tearing down multifamily apartment complexes and replacing them with luxury townhouses and condos instead. Almost nobody is actually moving into those places. They're 90% being purchased by investors, mostly out of state investors, to be used as Airbnbs. There is a significant categorical difference between investment property today and investment property before Airbnb. Before Airbnb, you rented via long-term leases, or you bought hotels and apartments in really shitty neighborhoods to use as weekly or even daily rentals for homeless people with jobs. Now you can buy as little as a single unit and the infrastructure to rent it out daily as a hotel room to much wealthier travelers exists without you needing to do anything extra. With predictable results. Even in neighorhoods with little to no zoning restrictions, with virtually nonstop construction of new housing, almost nobody lives here, the neighborhood is completely hollowed out, and all of these new luxury homes are mostly party houses used by rich college students and bachelorette parties.
- jovial_cavalier 2y ago
  That should drive your property value down, not up.
  - g-b-r 2y ago
    Not until there are so many short-term rentals that they aren't profitable anymore
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    I did not hear a complaint about what it was doing to their property values. I did hear: > virtually nonstop construction of new housing, almost nobody lives here, the neighborhood is completely hollowed out, and all of these new luxury homes are mostly party houses used by rich college students and bachelorette parties.
FooBarBizBazz 2y ago
If anything, there is a housing cartel that we need an Uber-like blitz (times a million) to destroy. In the same way that Uber ignored local taxi regulations, you would need to ignore local zoning regulations. Just "build, baby, build", become valuable, and then, with your fait-accompli in hand, bribe the various local governments -- just like Uber. Except -- if it took the combined might of Uber's VCs, and the disposable human battering ram that was Travis Kalanick, just to disrupt the puny little taxi industry, imagine what it would take to change housing. Ain't never gonna happen.
RiverCrochet 2y ago
I thought the original idea of Airbnb was to open a spare room in the house you already own to guests. I've used it only in this way and it really helped with a financial crunch, and given that I lived there and was present while guests where there, there was no negative impact to the community at all. I know people have been buying houses just for Airbnb rental, but that's not everyone.
insane_dreamer 2y ago
> Comical to suggest that AirBnB "ruined communities" it has absolutely done so in the same way that a bunch of motels springing up in your neighborhood would completely change it and not necessarily for the better it also greatly constrained the availability of housing for locals, therefore pushing up prices, so that people not living in the city could visit for cheaper; probably ok if you're in the tourism business, otherwise not
remyp 2y ago
I live in Lisbon. Over 80% of housing units in the historic Alfama neighborhood are now vacation rentals. This is the most historically Portuguese neighborhood in the capital. It was the only neighborhood to survive the earthquake in 1755. Fado was born there. Yes, it's a failure of government policy, but I don't think it's hyperbole to say that AirBnB and its ilk destroyed that community. That is, assuming you define "community" as a group of people and not a group of buildings.

daxfohl 2y ago

Given that we've been throwing cash at every conceivable idea for the last ten plus years, yet when speaking of unicorns we still have to refer back to airbnb and uber, seems like we're well past "peak unicorn" and well into the "horse with a mild concussion" era.

Terr_ 2y ago
It's also disconcerting how much their success seems to hinge on using technology as a lever to break laws or social expectations, as opposed to technology as something that itself empowers humans to be more productive.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  Er no, they totally transformed things through technology as well. Their product was fantastic. Hail a cab in the 2000s in the UK and tell me Uber had no improvement for its customers.
  - daxfohl 2y ago
    I understand GP's point, but to yours I'll add they have also open sourced and mainstreamed some of their key technologies. So it's not all bad.
    - adamc 2y ago
      Not all bad != good.
  - CPLX 2y ago
    Right but how much of this improvement came from the invention and popularity of smartphones and how much of the innovation came from a company called Uber.
    - ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
      Struggling to see the relevance of this question. How much of Uber's "innovation" was actually Ford/GM/Toyota innovation in car manufacturing?

CM30 2y ago

To be honest, you could say this about capitalism in general. Everything has to be huge no matter what industry it's in or what the product is, just because shareholders demand that impossible infinite growth.

robertlagrant 2y ago
It's not capitalism. It's government bonds. If you can get a guaranteed return from bonds, then any risk must beat the bond market. That increases the cost of capital for businesses, so they have to produce greater returns.
vladms 2y ago
Human nature in most big culture seems to be trained to demand more (even if not always money). If there was any group of people that were "content with what they had", they were outpaced in development by the ones that "want more" so there will be minor (or inexistent) now. I do wonder if there is any smart solution to this issue.
- begueradj 2y ago
  Good observation. The answer is at the beginning of your statement: "human nature". In plain English: there's no solution to that.
  - hackable_sand 2y ago
    Bad observation. Stop projecting, you two. Just because you want to take take take from others doesn't mean everyone else is.
    - alanbernstein 2y ago
      Your comment is quite confusing. The observation is that the "take take take" behavior arises out of a sort of survival-of-the-fittest mechanism. Both preceding comments seem to lament this, rather than relate to it.

kayo_20211030 2y ago

Any advance, early industrial revolution; late nineteenth century industrialization; twentieth century vertical integration; globalization; internet disintermediation etc. will cause some dislocation. Often unintended, and rarely foreseen. Ultimately it all settles down to a new equilibrium, until the next perturbation. It's a bit disingenuous blaming VC's, or scale, or anything exogenous. The system's capacity for change will always outstrip the current institutions' abilities to fully buffer the change. If we focused on improving the institutions responsible for that function we'd be performing a more useful function than trying to limit the change.

elevatedastalt 2y ago

I misread the title as "Scala Ruins Everything" and was very confused by the comments.

jelling 2y ago
So did I and having chosen it once, I still thought "well, I'll hear this out..."

tantalor 2y ago

I'm halfway through reading this and still not discovered what the point is.

rpigab 2y ago
Startups and incubators are actually ruining everything while telling everyone they're improving everything. I think it's kinda true, but govt regulations should have prevented it, which is not happening anytime soon because politicians act like startups and lobbies act like incubators.

rKarpinski 2y ago

Odd piece. It highlights some hyper-scalers but it needs to work on justifying 'how they ruin everything'. "At scale, they would ruin communities, put restaurants out of business, destroy the dream of home ownership, and eventually undermine democracy itself." Uh what now?

jaggederest 2y ago
airbnb, doordash, airbnb, facebook - did those things, respectively, with plenty of hard evidence (does anyone still remember cambridge analytica)
- Spivak 2y ago
  You have to stretch to get even one of those claims to be true. Has DoorDash put some restaurants out of business, probably. Have they put restaurants out of business, absolutely not. Has Airbnb raised home prices, yes by around ~1%. Have they destroyed the dream of home ownership, lol no. We're talking about ~$5k on the loan which isn't making or breaking anyone. And claims on destroying communities are dubious because they're just not that dense in places where people actually live. Has Facebook increased political polarization and sent people down the right-wing pipeline, yep. Would this have happened anyway with a constellation of smaller social media sites, it already has.
- rKarpinski 2y ago
  Ok let's look at "destroying the dream of homeownership" since that the most objective. Homeownership rates are almost 66% now in 2024 [1], which is the highest it's been since 2011 [2]. [1] https://www.bankrate.com/homeownership/home-ownership-statistics/?tpt=a https://www.bankrate.com/homeownership/home-ownership-statis... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_St...

adamc 2y ago

One of the questions all this raises for me is: what fraction of successful startups actually make society better? I'm sure to get pushback here, but my suspicion is: most do not. Looking at companies like Facebook, Amazon, or Google, I'm kind of think they made it worse. Yeah, I know, some people benefited. But net-net, I preferred having more and better bookstores to Amazon. I don't like what google has become at all. And Facebook has never been good.

tremarley 2y ago
Google helps us lookup anything we want Amazon helps us buy anything we want Facebook helps us keep in touch with all of our friends easily Their not as good a they used to be but how are they not good?
- coldpie 2y ago
  Google & Facebook push the advertising/attention economy business model, which rewards spreading misinformation & extreme viewpoints, leading to the rise in conspiracy theories and breakdown in discourse & trust in public institutions we see today. Amazon has killed a lot of local retail, removing OK jobs and replacing them with low-paying/low-skill warehouse labor. I think there's arguments for both sides, but personally I land on the net-evil side for all 3 of the listed companies.
- kibwen 2y ago
  Google provided a useful lookup service at the expense of brainwashing society with consumerist propaganda and the complete destruction of personal privacy and the normalization of the surveillance state. It wasn't worth it. Amazon inspired us to think we needed more cheap crap in order to inspire us to buy cheap crap that we didn't need. We aren't any happier than we were before we had the ability to buy cheap crap on a whim, but we sure do have a lot more cheap crap than before. That wasn't worth it. Facebook is essentially as good at helping people keep in touch as any instant messenger that preceded it. But unlike those instant messengers, it's supported by invasive targeted ads, and consult the first paragraph for why this is a negative. This has all been a waste. Society isn't any better as a result of these companies existing.

dash2 2y ago

I like Airbnb, because it's made staying abroad much cheaper and nicer. I also like being able to rent a taxi on an app in a new town.

sausagefeet 2y ago
For awhile I'd been using AirBnb by reflex, but after a few pretty bad experiences I started indexing it against local hotels before committing, and my experience has been that if you just need a place to be (don't care about kitchen) then AirBnB is not nearly as competitive as it used to be. So yes, AirBnB has made staying places cheaper, but the industry is also catching up. Concrete example is nightly rate for a studio in Paris vs the hotel next to it were +/- euros difference when I was there last year.
- dash2 2y ago
  I agree and have had similar experiences. But note that the fact hotels have got cheaper/better is also part of AirBnB's influence. Competition makes incumbents up their game.
rightbyte 2y ago
That was true like 5+ years ago. By now market prices of housing have gone up to match the tourism profit lure I guess. It seems common nowadays for the owner to own multiple apartments, like 8+, where as in the beginning it was one or two. I prefer ordinary hotels nowadays. Especially when travelling with children.
wavemode 2y ago
"Cheaper" is questionable. I usually find that, after fees, I'm paying the same, or more, than I'd pay at a nicer Comfort Inn. Maybe I'm just unlucky but the last several times I've traveled, staying at an AirBnB simply made no financial sense. Sometimes I feel like I'm crazy, hearing people talk about "cheaper".
- bluGill 2y ago
  Comfort Inn is in the lower middle of hotel levels. Not roach infested, not tiny, but also not very luxury. It is about the cheapest hotel I'll let my family stay in. The rooms work, but they are tiny and everyone stays in the same room. For a similar price I find airBnB which has separate bedrooms for us and each kid, a full kitchen (this saves us a ton of money vs restaurants and is healthier), and generally some other rooms to play in. We don't (rarely) get a pool which the kids miss, but overall it is a much better value. I agree the price is similar though.

cbsmith 2y ago

Uber & Airbnb were really exploring a time-honoured model that has predictable effects. Taking underutilized resources and shifting to a "rental" model increases utilization of assets, broadening accessibility, and thereby increasing wealth... while simultaneously increasing the value of the underlying asset (making it less affordable). This isn't a new thing, or a surprising thing, nor is the scale of it the problem. Where we get into a problem is when, due to lack of competition, you start extracting almost all (or perhaps even somewhat more than all) of the value that you're adding. That leaves everyone else in the same boat they were in before the rental model showed up, except comparatively worse off because there's a ton of wealth in there that has been concentrated in the hands of a few. This is the kind of thing that having more competition would help with.

smitty1e 2y ago

> Those were the innocuous founding ideas behind DoorDash, AirBnB, Uber, and Facebook. At scale, they would ruin communities, put restaurants out of business, destroy the dream of home ownership, and eventually undermine democracy itself. Impossible to assess. These things happened, but as a chemistry experiment. You'd need to be some sort of $Diety to track the individiual atoms in the solution and judge the alternatives. Quit this fruitlessness while you're behind, say I.

joony527 2y ago

Nice Artice!

osigurdson 2y ago

I'm grateful for VCs throwing money around at various things that may or may not work. We would not be in a better world if all money went into low risk investments.

efitz 2y ago

It’s not that scale ruins everything, it’s the pursuit of scale that ruins everything. I have thought a lot about antitrust recently and realized that it’s an overlapping problem with the VC unicorn problem. People get so hung up with being bigger/biggest, faster/fastest, that they minimize or ignore pathological side effects. What if we have a progressive tax structure on business based on scale? Partly on size, partly on market power? For example, what if corporate income tax were tied to the logarithm of the number of employees+contractors? What if the corporate income tax increased with the market share in markets served? These kind of ideas have very low impact at small scales, but after a certain scale they start to have such a huge effect on bottom line that they disincentive growth for its own sake. And they’re self-regulating and largely objective, unlike our current antitrust laws in the US.

Dalewyn 2y ago
>For example, what if corporate income tax were tied to the logarithm of the number of employees+contractors? Unemployment would increase. >What if the corporate income tax increased with the market share in markets served? More companies would register in Panama or some other tax haven. I would be wary of the Law of Unintended Consequences.
- azemetre 2y ago
  You're making it sound as if registering in Panama is some "gotcha" that can't also be easily closed via legislation.
  - medvezhenok 2y ago
    Indeed. Change from corporate tax to VAT, and then no such trickery is possible (tax charged at point of sale)
    - robertlagrant 2y ago
      VAT is a much better tax. Tax the flow of money, not the intermediate holding of money by a company.

_1tem 2y ago

I’ve been thinking a lot about this. There seems to be an “optimal” scale for tech — Google used to be amazing and wonderful about a decade ago, until it reached a certain scale. So were Facebook, etc. And even the positive effects of darling unicorns like Uber and Airbnb are actually more in the business model they pioneered, rather than the app itself. In Eastern Europe I use Uber alternatives which are usually about as good as Uber or better. Only Airbnb is a “naturally” global company by its very nature, because it is for travel. Maybe the natural limit to scale should be state sovereignty (i.e. protectionism). I actually believe that consumers benefit if countries ban or tax the likes of Uber and promote a homegrown alternative. (Imagine if each country had its own Google customized to the local language and culture, it might actually be a better experience for everyone). I’ve heard that Baidu and Yandex are better than Google for local content. Too bad the EU didn’t catch on with this. Europe could’ve outcompeted the US by playing a different game on quality and boutique charm instead of scale. Instead of pathetically trying to become a large homogeneous market like the US (and then failing badly and then regulating “privacy” out of spite), the EU should’ve actually been protectionist in favor of its members and it would’ve been interesting to see what marvels could originate.

robertlagrant 2y ago

> The bump in interest rates has cooled things down This is the actual issue. When ZIRP was introduced (and then RE-introduced, sigh), it makes money appear to be worth almost nothing. Which means everything looks valuable.

insane_dreamer 2y ago

Actually, it's more like the pursuit of large profits (and VC exits) through scaling ruins everything.

Night_Thastus 2y ago
And the way publicly traded companies are so beholden to shareholders. What, have a profitable, efficient business with happy customers and workers? Well, we NEED to see growth, so better find a way to cut the operating costs - no matter how much worse it makes the product, how unhappy the workers are, etc. Better try to capture more of the market even if it makes 0 sense in context and will end up being a massive waste of resources. It may run the business into the ground, but as long as there's a quarter of growth they can't see anything else.

svilen_dobrev 2y ago

> "society-bending hyper growth" i like that phrase. Like black holes' hyper-gravity bending the fabric of space-time.. the article also reminds me of that book "The Limits to Growth" (from the 70ies?)..

dgraph_advocate 2y ago

"People just submitted it. I don't know why. They 'trust me'. Dumb fucks." - Mark Zuckerberg (when asked about how he obtained the information for his newly launched social network.)

almararajaded 2y ago

091 2898 185

musicale 2y ago

> Mark tried to think of the most harmless thing: keeping track of your friends, and organizing group photos. With comments! Regarding "Facemash": > Zuckerberg faced expulsion and was charged with breaching security, violating copyrights and violating individual privacy. Ultimately the charges were dropped. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook