6 ms·

Lodging laws aren't there just to protect hotels. They exist to protect consumers and residents as well by setting standards for safety, etc. and helping pay fo

Lodging laws aren't there just to protect hotels. They exist to protect consumers and residents as well by setting standards for safety, etc. and helping pay for the services provided to guests by the municipality. If you take AirBNB to its logical conclusion, you end up with landlords renting apartments on AirBNB instead of to actual residents, because they can make more that way -- because they're ducking the rules on offering commercial lodging, not paying for proper insurance, not paying taxes, etc. I'm sure if someone ran a hotel but didn't bother with commercial fire codes and local taxes, they could charge less too.

bilbo0s 14y ago
"...If you take AirBNB to its logical conclusion, you end up with landlords renting apartments on AirBNB instead of to actual residents, because they can make more that way..." This is exactly what happens in Paris. Housing market there is skewed due to exactly this behavior. People buy apartments and sit on them to rent them out short term. Over time it created a situation where people who I would classify as "working poor", were without housing. It struck me as strange when I was in college to see SDF who have to go to work.
- tjic 14y ago
  > This is exactly what happens in Paris. Housing market there is skewed due to exactly this behavior. Under any sane market, untapped demand creates its own supply. Big cities, though, have big governments that forbid new construction. This works very well for those who already own property (they have their rental prices driven up), and works very well for the politicians (who get donations from the existing property owners) but works poorly for everyone else.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    Not everyone who owns property is a landlord, so that alone blows a giant hole in your thesis. The older a city is, the more people want it to stay the same because they bought their property based on a certain set of assumptions, like a place being a quiet neighborhood or so. Property owners do have an interest in the use and enjoyment of their property, and it is they, rather than government itself, that tend to raise a fuss when new construction is proposed. After all, local government makes quite a lot of money from new construction - permit fees, increased spending by construction workers, increased tax revenue on the newly developed property, and so forth. Likewise, politicians get donations from developers, and often larger ones than from residents since developers have deeper pockets. On the other hand, developers only have one vote each and tend to be outnumbered by residents, whose interests often prevail for this reason. If you own your own home, you would probably not be thrilled if the lot next door was suddenly the site of a ten-story apartment building without you being consulted or compensated. If you don't like it, it's not like you can just move, and selling your property might involve a rather steep loss, depending on the quality and configuration of the new development. If you rent, it's easy to be indifferent to those considerations because you don't have any assets at risk.
    - natrius 14y ago
      People who aren't comfortable with the uncertainties of homeownership are free to rent instead. There are plenty of other investment opportunities out there. It isn't self-evident that keeping neighborhoods static creates more value than it destroys. I think there's more evidence to the contrary.
      - anigbrowl 14y ago
        It's not a binary choice between runaway Shanghai-style development and amber-like stasis. You can equally argue that if people don't have any input into the planning process then they won't invest that property market in the first place. If there aren't enough people willing to buy, then developers won't be willing to build. This is why developers create HOA corporations for apartment buildings and tract housing, and make membership a condition of sale: to assure buyers that the development will be maintained in similar style to the time the properties were offered to the market. They don't emerge naturally from some common democratic impulse of apartment-dwellers or suburbanites. Also, home ownership is not an investment opportunity for most people, who are looking for a place to live long-term rather than to flip or extract cash value from (the departure from this historical approach has a lot to do with the recent financial crisis). Rather, most homeowners want to extract use value and simply maintain the asset price.
    - sophacles 14y ago
      Quiet you. Everyone knows that people are strictly rational economic actors. Factors such as sentimentality, preference, and anything else not about screwing over the next guy as much as possible never come into play.
  - victoro 14y ago
    I'm pretty sure the construction contractors have some skin in the "donating"-to-local-politicians game as well. Its not just one side that gets to hire lobbyists.
baddox 14y ago
> Lodging laws aren't there just to protect hotels. They exist to protect consumers and residents as well by setting standards for safety, etc. and helping pay for the services provided to guests by the municipality. That sounds very naive, and is extremely difficult to believe, unless hotels played no role in advocating the regulations. Besides, if that were the purpose, then why not ask the Airbnb renter and occupants if everything was up to their standards, and if both parties were happy (which is presumably the case, since most Airbnb transactions are presumably voluntary), drop the charges?
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  He's saying regulations are there for hotels, consumers, and residents. It's not an either/or proposition.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  Exactly. Of course the regulations are worded and advertised as being about "consumer protection", what could the alternative possibly be? There is no way in hell a hotel lobby would write a law that plainly claimed to be for the protection of their interests. When laws protecting Taxi monopolies claim to be for consumer protection, nobody here buys it. Those laws are for the protection of Taxi companies and unions. These laws are more of the same.
  - CJefferson 14y ago
    Please don't make blanket claims about what everyone here believes. I believe laws protecting Taxis are for consumer protection, and so are the hotel laws. While I do not claim these laws are perfect, I believe they continue to serve an important real purpose.
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      Certainly Taxis laws can and do protect consumers, but do you really think they are for that? In the authorial intent meaning of "for"? That is a legitimate viewpoint, but I find it surprising to hear it here. It was not my intent to marginalize.
tjic 14y ago
> Lodging laws aren't there just to protect hotels. They exist to protect consumers Asserted without evidence.
- tomkarlo 14y ago
  Show me how commercial fire codes / building codes protect hotels but not consumers. (Edited from "instead of" to "but not", since the original assertion was that they only help hotel owners.)
  - nsp 14y ago
    They don't help people who want to make a new hotel, but they increase barriers to entry into the hotel marketplace, which benefits established players in the space. An analogous case is federal/iihs car safety regulations - since it costs xx million to get a car federally certified, you didn't see that many automotive startups until pretty recently, and we don't get a lot of European cars since it would cost to much to recertify them for the us market
    - anigbrowl 14y ago
      We get plenty of European cars. The only European brands that I've never seen in the US are Seat and Citroen, neither of which is especially competitive even within Europe. Car safety regulations are not there just to aid established players, as evidenced by the fact that US car companies have often strenuously opposed them. They do reduce injuries and deaths from car accidents, which otherwise impose a high cost upon society.
    - BrianEatWorld 14y ago
      This actually affected me directly. A mate and I were looking into bringing over some utes from Australia. Even though the cars are fit for the road over there, the governments here all wanted to "re-certify" the safety of the cars, which meant purchasing several for the sole purpose of having the crashed. Even then, the certifications would only apply to specific years. Now I can understand trying to protect against some crazy welding his own frames in his backyard, but these are cars built by Ford and GM and driven millions of miles on tougher roads than any over here. Completely knackered.
gcb 14y ago
Most houses and apartments adhere to fire safety just fine. Comercial ones are required based on the volume of people you are serving. If you keep the rental under the reasonable number of people that the apartment was designed for, this is nothing other than a bad excuse for a law that is using your tax money to pay for people to enforce something that adds no value to society, in fact, removes from it.
danielweber 14y ago
If the complaint is that there are taxes that AirBnB lessors are avoiding, the solution is to have them pay the taxes. (I understand there are other issues as well. I don't want my neighbor running a hotel.)

bilbo0s 14y ago

"...If you take AirBNB to its logical conclusion, you end up with landlords renting apartments on AirBNB instead of to actual residents, because they can make more that way..." This is exactly what happens in Paris. Housing market there is skewed due to exactly this behavior. People buy apartments and sit on them to rent them out short term. Over time it created a situation where people who I would classify as "working poor", were without housing. It struck me as strange when I was in college to see SDF who have to go to work.

tjic 14y ago
> This is exactly what happens in Paris. Housing market there is skewed due to exactly this behavior. Under any sane market, untapped demand creates its own supply. Big cities, though, have big governments that forbid new construction. This works very well for those who already own property (they have their rental prices driven up), and works very well for the politicians (who get donations from the existing property owners) but works poorly for everyone else.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  Not everyone who owns property is a landlord, so that alone blows a giant hole in your thesis. The older a city is, the more people want it to stay the same because they bought their property based on a certain set of assumptions, like a place being a quiet neighborhood or so. Property owners do have an interest in the use and enjoyment of their property, and it is they, rather than government itself, that tend to raise a fuss when new construction is proposed. After all, local government makes quite a lot of money from new construction - permit fees, increased spending by construction workers, increased tax revenue on the newly developed property, and so forth. Likewise, politicians get donations from developers, and often larger ones than from residents since developers have deeper pockets. On the other hand, developers only have one vote each and tend to be outnumbered by residents, whose interests often prevail for this reason. If you own your own home, you would probably not be thrilled if the lot next door was suddenly the site of a ten-story apartment building without you being consulted or compensated. If you don't like it, it's not like you can just move, and selling your property might involve a rather steep loss, depending on the quality and configuration of the new development. If you rent, it's easy to be indifferent to those considerations because you don't have any assets at risk.
  - natrius 14y ago
    People who aren't comfortable with the uncertainties of homeownership are free to rent instead. There are plenty of other investment opportunities out there. It isn't self-evident that keeping neighborhoods static creates more value than it destroys. I think there's more evidence to the contrary.
    - anigbrowl 14y ago
      It's not a binary choice between runaway Shanghai-style development and amber-like stasis. You can equally argue that if people don't have any input into the planning process then they won't invest that property market in the first place. If there aren't enough people willing to buy, then developers won't be willing to build. This is why developers create HOA corporations for apartment buildings and tract housing, and make membership a condition of sale: to assure buyers that the development will be maintained in similar style to the time the properties were offered to the market. They don't emerge naturally from some common democratic impulse of apartment-dwellers or suburbanites. Also, home ownership is not an investment opportunity for most people, who are looking for a place to live long-term rather than to flip or extract cash value from (the departure from this historical approach has a lot to do with the recent financial crisis). Rather, most homeowners want to extract use value and simply maintain the asset price.
  - sophacles 14y ago
    Quiet you. Everyone knows that people are strictly rational economic actors. Factors such as sentimentality, preference, and anything else not about screwing over the next guy as much as possible never come into play.
- victoro 14y ago
  I'm pretty sure the construction contractors have some skin in the "donating"-to-local-politicians game as well. Its not just one side that gets to hire lobbyists.

baddox 14y ago

> Lodging laws aren't there just to protect hotels. They exist to protect consumers and residents as well by setting standards for safety, etc. and helping pay for the services provided to guests by the municipality. That sounds very naive, and is extremely difficult to believe, unless hotels played no role in advocating the regulations. Besides, if that were the purpose, then why not ask the Airbnb renter and occupants if everything was up to their standards, and if both parties were happy (which is presumably the case, since most Airbnb transactions are presumably voluntary), drop the charges?

anigbrowl 14y ago
He's saying regulations are there for hotels, consumers, and residents. It's not an either/or proposition.
jlgreco 14y ago
Exactly. Of course the regulations are worded and advertised as being about "consumer protection", what could the alternative possibly be? There is no way in hell a hotel lobby would write a law that plainly claimed to be for the protection of their interests. When laws protecting Taxi monopolies claim to be for consumer protection, nobody here buys it. Those laws are for the protection of Taxi companies and unions. These laws are more of the same.
- CJefferson 14y ago
  Please don't make blanket claims about what everyone here believes. I believe laws protecting Taxis are for consumer protection, and so are the hotel laws. While I do not claim these laws are perfect, I believe they continue to serve an important real purpose.
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    Certainly Taxis laws can and do protect consumers, but do you really think they are for that? In the authorial intent meaning of "for"? That is a legitimate viewpoint, but I find it surprising to hear it here. It was not my intent to marginalize.

tjic 14y ago

> Lodging laws aren't there just to protect hotels. They exist to protect consumers Asserted without evidence.

tomkarlo 14y ago
Show me how commercial fire codes / building codes protect hotels but not consumers. (Edited from "instead of" to "but not", since the original assertion was that they only help hotel owners.)
- nsp 14y ago
  They don't help people who want to make a new hotel, but they increase barriers to entry into the hotel marketplace, which benefits established players in the space. An analogous case is federal/iihs car safety regulations - since it costs xx million to get a car federally certified, you didn't see that many automotive startups until pretty recently, and we don't get a lot of European cars since it would cost to much to recertify them for the us market
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    We get plenty of European cars. The only European brands that I've never seen in the US are Seat and Citroen, neither of which is especially competitive even within Europe. Car safety regulations are not there just to aid established players, as evidenced by the fact that US car companies have often strenuously opposed them. They do reduce injuries and deaths from car accidents, which otherwise impose a high cost upon society.
  - BrianEatWorld 14y ago
    This actually affected me directly. A mate and I were looking into bringing over some utes from Australia. Even though the cars are fit for the road over there, the governments here all wanted to "re-certify" the safety of the cars, which meant purchasing several for the sole purpose of having the crashed. Even then, the certifications would only apply to specific years. Now I can understand trying to protect against some crazy welding his own frames in his backyard, but these are cars built by Ford and GM and driven millions of miles on tougher roads than any over here. Completely knackered.

gcb 14y ago

Most houses and apartments adhere to fire safety just fine. Comercial ones are required based on the volume of people you are serving. If you keep the rental under the reasonable number of people that the apartment was designed for, this is nothing other than a bad excuse for a law that is using your tax money to pay for people to enforce something that adds no value to society, in fact, removes from it.

danielweber 14y ago

If the complaint is that there are taxes that AirBnB lessors are avoiding, the solution is to have them pay the taxes. (I understand there are other issues as well. I don't want my neighbor running a hotel.)