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> As you've pointed out, there are plenty of places where it is perfectly legal to do this. .. Why the everloving fuck would this be illegal? What sense could

> As you've pointed out, there are plenty of places where it is perfectly legal to do this. .. Why the everloving fuck would this be illegal? What sense could it possibly make? -You have some property and you're letting someone use it for a fee. I get that this actually might be illegal somewhere - I'm just trying to highlight the fact that it would be absolutely fucking insane.

hansjorg 13y ago
> What sense could it possibly make? -You have some property and you're letting someone use it for a fee This is the extraordinarily naive libertarian position. Most people would not welcome a brothel as their closest neighbor for example.
- faster 13y ago
  Funny that you should mention that. My next door neighbor put herself through nursing school on her back, and by renting her place to others in the same profession when she was at school. They were far quieter and less disruptive than the aging couple on the other side of my place. If it had been put up for a vote, I probably would have voted 'no', but the reality was not what I would have expected. This of course is not relevant to the discussion, where someone bought a condo which requires accepting the declaration, bylaws and rules and regulations of the HOA. If those rules, which the buyer accepted, forbid short-term rentals, then there's no excuse for doing it anyway.
- anoncowherd 13y ago
  >> This is the extraordinarily naive libertarian position. Most people would not welcome a brothel as their closest neighbor for example. That's different from just renting out your place to some random traveller. Besides, even if renting your place is legal, nothing prevents you from whipping up a contract that places some limits on how rowdy the occupant(s) can get. So no, there's nothing "naive" about thinking that renting out your property being illegal is fucking insane.
DanBC 13y ago
Hotels are regulated for fire safety, food hygiene, etc etc. You can see how it's useful to protect society to not allow people to run unlicensed hotels?
geebee 13y ago
A lot of people don't want to live next to a revolving door of new arrivals. They enjoy knowing their neighbors, having friends for their kids nearby, and building lasting relationships with the community. They are willing to trade their own right to rent out their house as a short term hotel in exchange for a legally enforced expectation that their neighbors won't do this either. Yes, this does amount to a limit on personal, individual freedom - you can not purchase a house and turn it into a short term rental unit (ie., a hotel) at will anywhere you please.
- lambdaphage 13y ago
  People have lots of preferences about housing, which is why people tend to make an effort to suss out their housing options. Whether your neighbors are permanent or transient is just another dimension along which your preferences can vary. I don't understand why that preference in particular should be legally codified, whereas practically every other variable gets determined by people voting with their feet and dollars. The same argument, after all, goes through for long-term renters too, whom a lot of people don't want to live next to. Should we zone all annual leases as well?
  - intopieces 13y ago
    Have you ever bought a house? It's exhausting and expensive, and it's not as easy to "vote with your feet" after the neighbor decides to make his new place into a hotel. It's not like changing pharmacists. These protections exist for a reason.
    - lambdaphage 13y ago
      Well actually, speak of the devil, I moved out of my last apartment specifically because my downstairs neighbors, who had lived there for years, were completely intolerable. If I could have waved a magic wand and replaced them with an AirBnB crash pad, I would have done so in an instant. Restrictions on short-term rentals are of little comfort when your long-term neighbors are worse. Then again, the arguments against short-term rentals go through just about as well for long-term rentals, so why not just restrict rental properties altogether? Many homeowners seek to avoid neighborhoods with high rental density, so why not make their jobs easier with a law? As I said, there are plenty of attributes that make different houses more or less desirable to different people. If the OP had converted their apartment into a sarin gas factory or a practice pad for MBV, it might be a little more understandable why regulation would be efficient. As it stands, having a short-term rental next door strikes me as an extremely vague sort of source of disutility: all you can say with certainty is that you won't have long-term neighbors. Which many people are fine with in the first place. If people have varying preferences about living next to short-term rentals (either because they view them as a source of variety in se or just don't mind that much either way, as I do) then it should be more efficient to let people figure it out for themselves. People already self-assort into spatially resolved communities according to many other attributes (e.g. school quality, proximity to nightlife, population density; all attributes which reasonable people can value differently) so it seems strange to pick 'proximity to a short-term rental' as the one intangible neighborhood-character issue to treat like 'proximity to a meth lab'. So let me just state again: I wouldn't mind living next to a short-term rental. In fact, if they're as widely despised as you suggest, I'd mind it even less because the housing market would be effectively subsidizing my tolerance.

hansjorg 13y ago

> What sense could it possibly make? -You have some property and you're letting someone use it for a fee This is the extraordinarily naive libertarian position. Most people would not welcome a brothel as their closest neighbor for example.

faster 13y ago
Funny that you should mention that. My next door neighbor put herself through nursing school on her back, and by renting her place to others in the same profession when she was at school. They were far quieter and less disruptive than the aging couple on the other side of my place. If it had been put up for a vote, I probably would have voted 'no', but the reality was not what I would have expected. This of course is not relevant to the discussion, where someone bought a condo which requires accepting the declaration, bylaws and rules and regulations of the HOA. If those rules, which the buyer accepted, forbid short-term rentals, then there's no excuse for doing it anyway.
anoncowherd 13y ago
>> This is the extraordinarily naive libertarian position. Most people would not welcome a brothel as their closest neighbor for example. That's different from just renting out your place to some random traveller. Besides, even if renting your place is legal, nothing prevents you from whipping up a contract that places some limits on how rowdy the occupant(s) can get. So no, there's nothing "naive" about thinking that renting out your property being illegal is fucking insane.

DanBC 13y ago

Hotels are regulated for fire safety, food hygiene, etc etc. You can see how it's useful to protect society to not allow people to run unlicensed hotels?

geebee 13y ago

A lot of people don't want to live next to a revolving door of new arrivals. They enjoy knowing their neighbors, having friends for their kids nearby, and building lasting relationships with the community. They are willing to trade their own right to rent out their house as a short term hotel in exchange for a legally enforced expectation that their neighbors won't do this either. Yes, this does amount to a limit on personal, individual freedom - you can not purchase a house and turn it into a short term rental unit (ie., a hotel) at will anywhere you please.

lambdaphage 13y ago
People have lots of preferences about housing, which is why people tend to make an effort to suss out their housing options. Whether your neighbors are permanent or transient is just another dimension along which your preferences can vary. I don't understand why that preference in particular should be legally codified, whereas practically every other variable gets determined by people voting with their feet and dollars. The same argument, after all, goes through for long-term renters too, whom a lot of people don't want to live next to. Should we zone all annual leases as well?
- intopieces 13y ago
  Have you ever bought a house? It's exhausting and expensive, and it's not as easy to "vote with your feet" after the neighbor decides to make his new place into a hotel. It's not like changing pharmacists. These protections exist for a reason.
  - lambdaphage 13y ago
    Well actually, speak of the devil, I moved out of my last apartment specifically because my downstairs neighbors, who had lived there for years, were completely intolerable. If I could have waved a magic wand and replaced them with an AirBnB crash pad, I would have done so in an instant. Restrictions on short-term rentals are of little comfort when your long-term neighbors are worse. Then again, the arguments against short-term rentals go through just about as well for long-term rentals, so why not just restrict rental properties altogether? Many homeowners seek to avoid neighborhoods with high rental density, so why not make their jobs easier with a law? As I said, there are plenty of attributes that make different houses more or less desirable to different people. If the OP had converted their apartment into a sarin gas factory or a practice pad for MBV, it might be a little more understandable why regulation would be efficient. As it stands, having a short-term rental next door strikes me as an extremely vague sort of source of disutility: all you can say with certainty is that you won't have long-term neighbors. Which many people are fine with in the first place. If people have varying preferences about living next to short-term rentals (either because they view them as a source of variety in se or just don't mind that much either way, as I do) then it should be more efficient to let people figure it out for themselves. People already self-assort into spatially resolved communities according to many other attributes (e.g. school quality, proximity to nightlife, population density; all attributes which reasonable people can value differently) so it seems strange to pick 'proximity to a short-term rental' as the one intangible neighborhood-character issue to treat like 'proximity to a meth lab'. So let me just state again: I wouldn't mind living next to a short-term rental. In fact, if they're as widely despised as you suggest, I'd mind it even less because the housing market would be effectively subsidizing my tolerance.