6 ms·

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 o

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.
    - sgdfhijfgsdfgds 2y ago
      > make more of thing until everyone can have it? There are literal physical limits on this in many coastal villages and towns -- for example pick almost anywhere on the south west coast of the UK. Not only is the area on which houses can be built restrictive due to geography (and often geology), the transport infrastructure does not scale. New property building both has not caught up with, and probably cannot catch up with, short term demand. As it happens, a collapse seems likely, because local sentiment is turning against them so fast and because of general economic weakness; the number of "thriving holiday let" properties that are on the market now suggests that Airbnb's own accelerating rental costs problem is going to cause a bit of a bust. But that bust will not benefit most of the people in the areas affected where the price of a small house is twenty to thirty times the average salary of would-be-first-time-buyers. Those people are leaving, so there will instead be a ghost town. And the sheer number of residents who are temporary has destroyed the potential for long-term stable infrastructure businesses for residents. > Nimbys are basically hukou advocates in disguise. It's nothing to do with nimbyism, is it? Nimbys are property owners. The problem only affects people who do not have back yards. They can no longer afford the houses at the prices at which they will be built and the rates at which they can be.
      - kelnos 2y ago
        > It's nothing to do with nimbyism, is it? Nimbys are property owners. The problem only affects people who do not have back yards. NIMBYs are property owners who vote for restrictive housing development policy in order to prop up their own home values. Eliminate the NIMBYs and you end up with a lot more people who can have their own backyard.
        PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
        Don't have to be property owners. Anyone who can show up at a meeting, vote, submit comments ...
        bluGill 2y ago
etothepii 2y ago
As a home owner that was only able to afford to buy a house because we were able to rent out the spare rooms on AirBnb I find fault in your logic. I think you'll find that zoning/planning permission is the real bad guy here. That and a failure to understand Adam Smith and implement the ideas of Henry George.
- sgdfhijfgsdfgds 2y ago
  > because we were able to rent out the spare rooms on AirBnb Unless you were the very first person in the entire area to think to do so, then the existence of that very market for you to rent spare rooms on is actually driving up the prices of properties so you have to do so. It's also driving up the prices of long term rental, because landlords make more money in the short-term rental market. The prices of long-term rental also affect the floor price of permanent ownership.
  - etothepii 2y ago
    I have friends and family. From time to time I would like to host them when they visit so we can drink alcohol and stay up late. Consequently it is always likely that one might want at least one more room than is needed by the family. It additionally provides buffer overflow should the pitter-patter of tiny drains on one's resources appear. In such circumstances renting out a spare room on a longish licence should necessarily reduce rents since now there is an option which is likely to be cheaper. Renting out a spare room for other people visiting ones city should similarly have had a depressive impact on the price of hotels or an improvement in their offering. Given the inconvenience and reduced amenity one gains from living in a house under multiple occupation there is further no specific reason why it should be the case that this does not more than offset the cash remuneration meaning there is no in principle reason why the capital cost of such a property should increase.
    - insane_dreamer 2y ago
      Yours is not a common case. That was the original dream of AirBNB and the appeal of staying with a family in some far away place made it cool. The vast majority of AirBNBs are the entire house or some separate guest cottage. Many are owned and managed by larger companies. Or by people who own multiple houses. The individual home owner renting out a room so they can cover their mortgage has become more of an outlier.
Hammershaft 2y ago
AirBnB rentals are not making it criminal to build supply, local zoning regulations that benefit incumbents at the expense of everyone else are what make it criminal to build supply. It's a defect at the intersection of capitalism, property ownership, and democracy.
- g-b-r 2y ago
  What do you think would happen if you filled a cozy touristic town with skyscrapers?
  - Hammershaft 2y ago
    Who is building skyscrapers in a cozy tourist town? Do you really think zoning laws are the only thing standing between tiny towns and a bustling metropolis? If there is strong demand for housing, you might see bungalows turn into town homes or townhomes turn into mixed use 3 story flats... Which tend to be much more economically productive for the local gov anyways because the cost of infrastructure & services per person drops.
    - g-b-r 2y ago
      If there were no rules some people would build as much as they could, so long as it stayed profitable Some zoning rules are worse, some better, but without rules at all many places would get ruined quickly
    - LunaSea 2y ago
      Maybe not skyscrapers but very high tourism rental apartment buildings. You can look at the Belgian coast for an example of this enshitification of coastal real estate.
lacy_tinpot 2y ago
AirBnB destroyed home ownership? As far as I can remember AirBnB didn't cause the 2008 financial disaster that really sealed the fate of homeownership in America for the next decade for a lot of Americans. AirBnB has provided an avenue to generate income for small business owners in rural communities. Urban areas are struggling because they aren't building more. BUILD MORE. How difficult is it to understand that?
- sgdfhijfgsdfgds 2y ago
  > AirBnB destroyed home ownership? What I said was rather more specifically qualified than that.
  - lacy_tinpot 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. The thing that's "ruined communities and destroyed the dream of home ownership" is the incapacity of the community, "where they were brought up", to actually change and accommodate increasing demands. In reality these individuals from these communities are using Left rhetoric to advocate an extremely conservative position. That is for the community to remain as is, in the exact way such people were "brought up", such that no progress, no change, no additional value is added to the communities. What ends up happening because of this confused policy is that the individuals in these communities both lose out on their hometown, the community ends up changing, and it becomes impossibly expensive for everyone in the community. IE the worst of all options. Instead. Build more. Build vertically. Build better infrastructure. Provide for local residents an opportunity to "buy-in". This kind of cloaked conservatism, masquerading itself using leftist rhetoric ends up being confused from a policy POV.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
      Lots of assumptions buried in here. There are rural/tourist-dependent communities that had an adequate supply of housing when the only visitor accomodation was licensed as a hotel/motel/inn/B&B/hostel. They didn't need a lot of extra, but some slack to accomodate tourist season workers, and occasional new arrivals. Then AirBnB came along and converted not just the slack, but some residential property that would otherwise have been available for long term lease, into much more profitable short term rentals. Income at licensed residential stays sometimes drops; short term and long term housing options either vanish or are reduced; problems begin to occur that were not present before. None of this is in any way dependent on the failures caused by zoning, permitting and housing policy. This story has been repeated at tourist locations across the world. AirBnB was fundamentally a message to anyone with residential property: you can make more money with it as a short term rental than via any other use. This is why in many locations we've seen new construction of residential property intended solely for short term rentals. Nobody wanted to build that stuff when it was only going to be LTR; AirBnB changed the game.
TrainedMonkey 2y ago
> Airbnb has in fact ruined communities and destroyed the dream of home ownership for an entire class of people That is fair, but also misses the point. The issue with AirBnB is not that they are evil company and must be regulated. It's that they operate in a system where housing is an investment vehicle due to artificially constrained supply and tax system that is riddled with well intentioned and widely abused property ownership cuts. At worst they have accelerated the issue rather than caused it. > Airbnb are, in fact, in control of their own morality. Not entirely, they are a publicly listed company and will get sued if they do anything that will hurt the stock price.
kelnos 2y ago
Oh please. NIMBYs ruined home ownership. Airbnb certainly hasn't had zero contribution to higher home prices, but abolishing short-term rentals hasn't fixed affordability issues anywhere it's been done.
eddd-ddde 2y ago
Honestly I'm not convinced when an airbnb is cheaper to me than renting some other place. It even includes furniture!
- BlueTemplar 2y ago
  Speaking of, at some point even middle class families could afford to live in a hotel year long. Are these days coming back ? What happened for that to become uneconomical for a while ? (Is it a symptom of the middle class getting much smaller ?)
EasyMark 2y ago
There are many factors, and Abnb can be one of them, but it’s not the only read. Zoning laws, economic landscape of the town, etc all play into to the lack of affordable housing. I would posit NIMBYism and zoning are likely the biggest ones.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
As an aside, I own a home and now merely dream that renting should be as cheap as owning. Having equity in something that needs constant repair, loses heat on all sides, and has a bunch of fucking grass around it, is only equivalent to a certain amount of cash. I suspect the real reason owning is cheap is not that it's inherently better, but because everything is cheaper when you have lots of money.

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.
  - sgdfhijfgsdfgds 2y ago
    > make more of thing until everyone can have it? There are literal physical limits on this in many coastal villages and towns -- for example pick almost anywhere on the south west coast of the UK. Not only is the area on which houses can be built restrictive due to geography (and often geology), the transport infrastructure does not scale. New property building both has not caught up with, and probably cannot catch up with, short term demand. As it happens, a collapse seems likely, because local sentiment is turning against them so fast and because of general economic weakness; the number of "thriving holiday let" properties that are on the market now suggests that Airbnb's own accelerating rental costs problem is going to cause a bit of a bust. But that bust will not benefit most of the people in the areas affected where the price of a small house is twenty to thirty times the average salary of would-be-first-time-buyers. Those people are leaving, so there will instead be a ghost town. And the sheer number of residents who are temporary has destroyed the potential for long-term stable infrastructure businesses for residents. > Nimbys are basically hukou advocates in disguise. It's nothing to do with nimbyism, is it? Nimbys are property owners. The problem only affects people who do not have back yards. They can no longer afford the houses at the prices at which they will be built and the rates at which they can be.
    - kelnos 2y ago
      > It's nothing to do with nimbyism, is it? Nimbys are property owners. The problem only affects people who do not have back yards. NIMBYs are property owners who vote for restrictive housing development policy in order to prop up their own home values. Eliminate the NIMBYs and you end up with a lot more people who can have their own backyard.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
        Don't have to be property owners. Anyone who can show up at a meeting, vote, submit comments ...
        bluGill 2y ago

etothepii 2y ago

As a home owner that was only able to afford to buy a house because we were able to rent out the spare rooms on AirBnb I find fault in your logic. I think you'll find that zoning/planning permission is the real bad guy here. That and a failure to understand Adam Smith and implement the ideas of Henry George.

sgdfhijfgsdfgds 2y ago
> because we were able to rent out the spare rooms on AirBnb Unless you were the very first person in the entire area to think to do so, then the existence of that very market for you to rent spare rooms on is actually driving up the prices of properties so you have to do so. It's also driving up the prices of long term rental, because landlords make more money in the short-term rental market. The prices of long-term rental also affect the floor price of permanent ownership.
- etothepii 2y ago
  I have friends and family. From time to time I would like to host them when they visit so we can drink alcohol and stay up late. Consequently it is always likely that one might want at least one more room than is needed by the family. It additionally provides buffer overflow should the pitter-patter of tiny drains on one's resources appear. In such circumstances renting out a spare room on a longish licence should necessarily reduce rents since now there is an option which is likely to be cheaper. Renting out a spare room for other people visiting ones city should similarly have had a depressive impact on the price of hotels or an improvement in their offering. Given the inconvenience and reduced amenity one gains from living in a house under multiple occupation there is further no specific reason why it should be the case that this does not more than offset the cash remuneration meaning there is no in principle reason why the capital cost of such a property should increase.
  - insane_dreamer 2y ago
    Yours is not a common case. That was the original dream of AirBNB and the appeal of staying with a family in some far away place made it cool. The vast majority of AirBNBs are the entire house or some separate guest cottage. Many are owned and managed by larger companies. Or by people who own multiple houses. The individual home owner renting out a room so they can cover their mortgage has become more of an outlier.

Hammershaft 2y ago

AirBnB rentals are not making it criminal to build supply, local zoning regulations that benefit incumbents at the expense of everyone else are what make it criminal to build supply. It's a defect at the intersection of capitalism, property ownership, and democracy.

g-b-r 2y ago
What do you think would happen if you filled a cozy touristic town with skyscrapers?
- Hammershaft 2y ago
  Who is building skyscrapers in a cozy tourist town? Do you really think zoning laws are the only thing standing between tiny towns and a bustling metropolis? If there is strong demand for housing, you might see bungalows turn into town homes or townhomes turn into mixed use 3 story flats... Which tend to be much more economically productive for the local gov anyways because the cost of infrastructure & services per person drops.
  - g-b-r 2y ago
    If there were no rules some people would build as much as they could, so long as it stayed profitable Some zoning rules are worse, some better, but without rules at all many places would get ruined quickly
  - LunaSea 2y ago
    Maybe not skyscrapers but very high tourism rental apartment buildings. You can look at the Belgian coast for an example of this enshitification of coastal real estate.

lacy_tinpot 2y ago

AirBnB destroyed home ownership? As far as I can remember AirBnB didn't cause the 2008 financial disaster that really sealed the fate of homeownership in America for the next decade for a lot of Americans. AirBnB has provided an avenue to generate income for small business owners in rural communities. Urban areas are struggling because they aren't building more. BUILD MORE. How difficult is it to understand that?

sgdfhijfgsdfgds 2y ago
> AirBnB destroyed home ownership? What I said was rather more specifically qualified than that.
- lacy_tinpot 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. The thing that's "ruined communities and destroyed the dream of home ownership" is the incapacity of the community, "where they were brought up", to actually change and accommodate increasing demands. In reality these individuals from these communities are using Left rhetoric to advocate an extremely conservative position. That is for the community to remain as is, in the exact way such people were "brought up", such that no progress, no change, no additional value is added to the communities. What ends up happening because of this confused policy is that the individuals in these communities both lose out on their hometown, the community ends up changing, and it becomes impossibly expensive for everyone in the community. IE the worst of all options. Instead. Build more. Build vertically. Build better infrastructure. Provide for local residents an opportunity to "buy-in". This kind of cloaked conservatism, masquerading itself using leftist rhetoric ends up being confused from a policy POV.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    Lots of assumptions buried in here. There are rural/tourist-dependent communities that had an adequate supply of housing when the only visitor accomodation was licensed as a hotel/motel/inn/B&B/hostel. They didn't need a lot of extra, but some slack to accomodate tourist season workers, and occasional new arrivals. Then AirBnB came along and converted not just the slack, but some residential property that would otherwise have been available for long term lease, into much more profitable short term rentals. Income at licensed residential stays sometimes drops; short term and long term housing options either vanish or are reduced; problems begin to occur that were not present before. None of this is in any way dependent on the failures caused by zoning, permitting and housing policy. This story has been repeated at tourist locations across the world. AirBnB was fundamentally a message to anyone with residential property: you can make more money with it as a short term rental than via any other use. This is why in many locations we've seen new construction of residential property intended solely for short term rentals. Nobody wanted to build that stuff when it was only going to be LTR; AirBnB changed the game.

TrainedMonkey 2y ago

> Airbnb has in fact ruined communities and destroyed the dream of home ownership for an entire class of people That is fair, but also misses the point. The issue with AirBnB is not that they are evil company and must be regulated. It's that they operate in a system where housing is an investment vehicle due to artificially constrained supply and tax system that is riddled with well intentioned and widely abused property ownership cuts. At worst they have accelerated the issue rather than caused it. > Airbnb are, in fact, in control of their own morality. Not entirely, they are a publicly listed company and will get sued if they do anything that will hurt the stock price.

kelnos 2y ago

Oh please. NIMBYs ruined home ownership. Airbnb certainly hasn't had zero contribution to higher home prices, but abolishing short-term rentals hasn't fixed affordability issues anywhere it's been done.

eddd-ddde 2y ago

Honestly I'm not convinced when an airbnb is cheaper to me than renting some other place. It even includes furniture!

BlueTemplar 2y ago
Speaking of, at some point even middle class families could afford to live in a hotel year long. Are these days coming back ? What happened for that to become uneconomical for a while ? (Is it a symptom of the middle class getting much smaller ?)

EasyMark 2y ago

There are many factors, and Abnb can be one of them, but it’s not the only read. Zoning laws, economic landscape of the town, etc all play into to the lack of affordable housing. I would posit NIMBYism and zoning are likely the biggest ones.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago

As an aside, I own a home and now merely dream that renting should be as cheap as owning. Having equity in something that needs constant repair, loses heat on all sides, and has a bunch of fucking grass around it, is only equivalent to a certain amount of cash. I suspect the real reason owning is cheap is not that it's inherently better, but because everything is cheaper when you have lots of money.