8 ms·

Krueger Statement on Use of Airbnb for Floating Brothels

89 points by parsley 12y ago

mturmon 12y ago
From the press release: "Prostitution wasn't really at the top of our minds when we passed the 2010 law helping NYC enforce against illegal short-term rentals, but in hindsight it seems kind of obvious." You have to admit, I think the enterprising minds here at HN also failed to foresee this.
- sadfaceunread 12y ago
  The retroactive obviousness of it does seem quite incredible. People get hotel rooms to do things they don't want to do at home. AirBnB is a hotel substitute. I wonder if AirBnB internally had some risk assessment of this.
  - Terr_ 12y ago
    Or to quote Terry Pratchett in Going Postal: > Everyone knew it happened. Actually, the new management probably didn't, but wouldn't have done anything about it if they'd found out, apart from carefully forgetting that they'd known.
- bri3d 12y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2801400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2801400 is a great thread in many ways considering AirBnB's recent press. I think "potential illegal uses" is a pretty common argument against short-term rentals, and prostitution isn't exactly a non-obvious one. It's just generally a bit easier on the neighbors than, for example, crazy parties or drug houses, which are both commonly-touted (and valid) arguments against short-term rentals.
- nailer 12y ago
  TBH from the moment AirBnB was announced, with it's inital focus on couch surfing from strangers (and the lack of traditional 'quiet enjoyment' as a result) I expected a serious sexual assault to occur. A prostitution ring is pretty low on the list of things that could go wrong.
- sjtgraham 12y ago
  "When have you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage?" Weeeeeell…
- fleitz 12y ago
  You mean that people would use AirBNBs for the same things they use normal apartments for?!?!?!? Most likely it's that most of HN doesn't care what consenting adults do on their own time.
rch 12y ago
> we need to protect the limited housing stock we have from being arbitraged into other uses This seems like a more compelling point than the title topic.
- fennecfoxen 12y ago
  Hmm. Why do we need that? AirBnB promotes better capital utilization. The only reason to be against that is if you're some sort of Commie at heart and think that the government should be in the job of trying to make your rental a way to transfer wealth from landlords to tenants. Which is certainly a political opinion that some people endorse, of course, but when you do that it's generally a contributing factor towards a housing shortage, like you see in places such as New York and San Francisco... go figure :b
  - fennecfoxen 12y ago
    Postscript. I see I've been downmodded for identifying Communism as such. I blame the communists. There are a lot in San Francisco. :P
- moron4hire 12y ago
  So basically, she's admitting that the property is more valuable than its current use, and the city is actively denying itself tax revenue because of it.
  - ddt 12y ago
    I think she's taking the position that there's inherent value in providing affordable residential property in New York which exceeds the value in extracting maximum tax revenue from every square inch of the city. At the very least, I find that to be a defensible position.
    - moron4hire 12y ago
      Yeah, I get that, but it seems pretty tenuous. All this talk about the "value" of the property with regards to it being used for one thing over another, when price is the way in which we quantify value. Who gets to decide what the value of a piece of property to The People should be? Should it be elected officials, who probably only represent the interests of the people on even numbered days, or should it be The People themselves, through price movement?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- greenyoda 12y ago
  This has actually happened, as reported here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/14/prostitutes-renting-airbnb-apartments_n_5147910.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/14/prostitutes-renting...
jhonovich 12y ago
Let's demand her resignation!
001sky 12y ago
This is the NY Post'a article which the kreuger text references, it's in the headline article but for those skimming the comments or who missed the hyperlink: http://nypost.com/2014/04/14/hookers-using-airbnb-to-use-apartments-for-sex-sessions/ http://nypost.com/2014/04/14/hookers-using-airbnb-to-use-apa...
- darklajid 12y ago
  That article is .. not helpful. So baby swipes and 'at least ten condoms' is a proof of prostitution? That .. doesn't quite add up. I mean, you actually buy condoms in packs of 10-12 here and the baby swipe thing is inconclusive. Maybe the claim in the headline is right, probably the story is backed by real facts. That article though? That's really useless.
  - 001sky 12y ago
    "Says a 21-year-old call girl who works for the illicit business.[...] “It’s more discreet and much cheaper than The Waldorf,” --> Apparently, this is from an interview. But, YMMV.
  - ameister14 12y ago
    Except that her guest was slashed with a knife by a client in her apartment; I think you missed that part.
aalpbalkan 12y ago
> (underlined) Today it's a prostitution ring, tomorrow it could be an illegal gambling ring, and maybe next week it could be a drug operation. This is textbook 'slippery slope' fallacy. https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/slippery-slope https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/slippery-slope You said that if we allow A to happen, then Z will eventually happen too, therefore A should not happen.
- jmathai 12y ago
  Perhaps something like "allowing same sex marriage today will lead to humans marrying animals tomorrow" is a fallacy. This seems very well reasoned. I hope you're not implying that we can't make reasoned assumptions and take actions based off them. Also there's actual law breaking going on here. I love and use AirBnb but the lady has some great points.
  - hippoman 12y ago
    That kind of progression really happened. "Perhaps allowing interracial marriage today will lead to men marrying other men tomorrow". Gay marriage was unthinkable a hundred years ago. The ideas that are acceptable to society change over time and we can't be so arrogant as to assume our current set of values is correct while all the previous ones were wrong and no future ones will make ours look wrong. You can already see attitudes towards drug use changing to the point where Krueger's "drug operations" seem harmless to many people today.
    - jmathai 12y ago
      Agreed. But the laws of today have to apply to society as we know of today. I'm all for forward progress but we can't make laws for how our evolved selves. In 10 years same opposing sex marriage might the same as opposing interracial marriage is today. But we're not there and the laws have to reflect what society as a whole is ready for. Sad but true.
- sjtgraham 12y ago
  It can't get much worse than one's apartment being used as a brothel, there's really nowhere to slide to at that point.
moron4hire 12y ago
Clutch those purse strings! Clutch them tiiiiiiiight. Lest some ne'erdowell slip something like DRUGS into your bag. And then you might accidentally take them, and LORD KNOWS one dose is enough to make you so addicted to the marijuana shots that you will be shooting cops and blowing judges for your next hit.
vijayboyapati 12y ago
It's always painful to watch luddite bureaucrats pontificate on technology and how it needs to be controlled to "protect" the population. I remember when I was at Google in 2003 there was a California politician who demanded that Google be regulated like a utility company because it was so important. That was when it was still a private company! Or when another California bureaucrat wanted to ban gmail because it violated people's privacy by showing targeted ads next to emails. Listening to people like this requires a perma-facepalm.
- md224 12y ago
  I sympathize with your position, but I want to point out that it's equally foolish to assume that technological progress poses no dangers to society and that no control is necessary. It isn't really about controlling the technology either; it's about controlling how that technology is operated by human beings, people who are fallible and who can be dangerous when given a certain level of power. There's definitely a continuum from "radical luddite" to "techno-utopian," and I think striking a balance between caution and optimism is the way to go.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  "That was when it was still a private company!" I don't see why there's any particular link between how widely distributed the ownership of a company is, and whether the infrastructure it is building holds potential for abuse and should be considered a matter of vital public interest. For the record, I think (with low confidence) that this is not true of Google and wasn't at the time, I just think this point is irrelevant.
honksillet 12y ago
> Real estate is an extremely well-developed industry here in New York City Should read over-regulated industry
maxwell2022 12y ago
Hotels have so much to lose they won't let it happen and this is an opportunity to give them a bad publicity.
pbiggar 12y ago
So is every apartment. In buildings near where I lived in Dublin there were known brothels in rented residential apartments. Long before there was Airbnb, obviously. This is a standard part of success: criminals hack the system. Much like AWS being used for bitcoin mining, and every cash-in-cash-out system being used for money laundering.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
brownbat 12y ago
We have some inconsistent intuitions about what the government should be allowed to regulate. It seems like I should be able to give a neighbor's kid a 20 to pick up some leaves without getting the government involved. It seems like I should be able to give a friend a dollar for running and grabbing me a coke without consulting minimum wage laws or local sales taxes. I should be able to lend my cousin some money without registering as a bank. A business hiring leafblowers or messengers with a "no questions asked" policy, or even an individual loan shark, seems like the law should get involved. The internet as a communication platform blurs these lines. It lowers the barriers between strangers and acquaintances and friends. It lets private individuals behave like businesses some of the time. It lets small transactions rapidly scale. I don't think one set of intuitions is necessarily right or wrong. But I think these conflicting intuitions make some people libertarians towards businesses like airbnb and uber, and other people think those businesses are just profiting off of skirting regulations.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
tpeng 12y ago
The issue is not between AirBNB and its customers; its customers can evaluate the risks of renting on AirBNB, and factor that into their rental price, as well as insure for adverse outcomes. The real issue is that AirBNB also imposes these risks on communities (i.e., AirBNB's customers' neighbors) by exposing them to, in the worst case, criminal elements, but even in a normal case, temporary renters who lack incentive to follow social norms or respect communal property. This doesn't mean that AirBNB's business can't work, but it does mean that AirBNB needs to work with regulators to find a solution acceptable to the communities in which it operates. Such a solution would most likely be a combination of technical solutions to minimize bad outcomes and perhaps a tax on AirBNB, the proceeds of which could compensate communities for the externality imposed by AirBNB.
- teacup50 12y ago
  > This doesn't mean that AirBNB's business can't work, but it does mean that AirBNB needs to work with regulators to find a solution acceptable to the communities in which it operates. I don't see there being a solution at all; hotels are zoned differently than residential for a reason. The fact that AirBNB managed to popularize "breaking zoning laws ON THE WEB" doesn't mean that the zoning laws need to change.
  - tpeng 12y ago
    I live in a downtown residential building one block away from a hotel, so that's not always the case. Of course, some communities may choose to prohibit AirBNB altogether. I think the bigger issue is if the externalities imposed by normal usage are so high that, when properly internalized, AirBNB no longer presents a compelling value proposition in the majority of cases. This is certainly possible. From AirBNB's perspective, perhaps they just fight the internalization as hard as possible. There are businesses with much costlier externalities, such as energy companies, that are actually subsidized and not taxed. In the AirBNB case, however, they may have a tougher fight as the harm, while lower in aggregate, is also less diffuse.
    - nathanvanfleet 12y ago
frandroid 12y ago
I was expecting a story about airbnb getting to the waterborne rental market.
dkarapetyan 12y ago
Wait. Isn't this a problem with motels and other temporary housing situations as well? What makes Airbnb so special?
- zymhan 12y ago
  Because Airbnb is used to rent out rooms or houses that aren't in areas zoned for hotel/motel purposes. No one can reasonably expect that living in a motel room and living in an apartment are similar. The other tenants in the building of the Airbnb user can be reasonably expected not to have to deal with tourists being discourteous or annoying in their building.
RV86 12y ago
The runaway success of AirBnB has to largely be viewed as a reaction to the alarming trend of increased % of income spent on rent. What used to be a standard of 25% has approached 45%+ in a very short amount of time in cities like NYC, San Fran, LA, and more. Wages have stagnated and tenants are doing everything they possibly can to afford to live in their city of choice. For politicians to go after AirBnB is to miss the underlying problem.
- dkuebric 12y ago
  It could even be fueling the increased rent in a small way. With residential apartments occupied as hotels, there's fewer on the market. I've hosted on airbnb to defray the cost of my apartment; viewed from another angle, that's helping keep the market's costs up through my increased willingness to pay the prices.
- jessaustin 12y ago
  This is a good point; it would be a shame (but not exactly a surprise) if society focused its regulatory policy on the symptom rather than the disease. One seems to hear a lot less about the evils of AirBnb from relatively-cheaper cities.

89 points by parsley 12y ago

From the press release: "Prostitution wasn't really at the top of our minds when we passed the 2010 law helping NYC enforce against illegal short-term rentals, but in hindsight it seems kind of obvious." You have to admit, I think the enterprising minds here at HN also failed to foresee this.

sadfaceunread 12y ago
The retroactive obviousness of it does seem quite incredible. People get hotel rooms to do things they don't want to do at home. AirBnB is a hotel substitute. I wonder if AirBnB internally had some risk assessment of this.
- Terr_ 12y ago
  Or to quote Terry Pratchett in Going Postal: > Everyone knew it happened. Actually, the new management probably didn't, but wouldn't have done anything about it if they'd found out, apart from carefully forgetting that they'd known.
bri3d 12y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2801400 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2801400 is a great thread in many ways considering AirBnB's recent press. I think "potential illegal uses" is a pretty common argument against short-term rentals, and prostitution isn't exactly a non-obvious one. It's just generally a bit easier on the neighbors than, for example, crazy parties or drug houses, which are both commonly-touted (and valid) arguments against short-term rentals.
nailer 12y ago
TBH from the moment AirBnB was announced, with it's inital focus on couch surfing from strangers (and the lack of traditional 'quiet enjoyment' as a result) I expected a serious sexual assault to occur. A prostitution ring is pretty low on the list of things that could go wrong.
sjtgraham 12y ago
"When have you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage?" Weeeeeell…
fleitz 12y ago
You mean that people would use AirBNBs for the same things they use normal apartments for?!?!?!? Most likely it's that most of HN doesn't care what consenting adults do on their own time.

rch 12y ago

> we need to protect the limited housing stock we have from being arbitraged into other uses This seems like a more compelling point than the title topic.

fennecfoxen 12y ago
Hmm. Why do we need that? AirBnB promotes better capital utilization. The only reason to be against that is if you're some sort of Commie at heart and think that the government should be in the job of trying to make your rental a way to transfer wealth from landlords to tenants. Which is certainly a political opinion that some people endorse, of course, but when you do that it's generally a contributing factor towards a housing shortage, like you see in places such as New York and San Francisco... go figure :b
- fennecfoxen 12y ago
  Postscript. I see I've been downmodded for identifying Communism as such. I blame the communists. There are a lot in San Francisco. :P
moron4hire 12y ago
So basically, she's admitting that the property is more valuable than its current use, and the city is actively denying itself tax revenue because of it.
- ddt 12y ago
  I think she's taking the position that there's inherent value in providing affordable residential property in New York which exceeds the value in extracting maximum tax revenue from every square inch of the city. At the very least, I find that to be a defensible position.
  - moron4hire 12y ago
    Yeah, I get that, but it seems pretty tenuous. All this talk about the "value" of the property with regards to it being used for one thing over another, when price is the way in which we quantify value. Who gets to decide what the value of a piece of property to The People should be? Should it be elected officials, who probably only represent the interests of the people on even numbered days, or should it be The People themselves, through price movement?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

greenyoda 12y ago
This has actually happened, as reported here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/14/prostitutes-renting-airbnb-apartments_n_5147910.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/14/prostitutes-renting...

jhonovich 12y ago

Let's demand her resignation!

001sky 12y ago

This is the NY Post'a article which the kreuger text references, it's in the headline article but for those skimming the comments or who missed the hyperlink: http://nypost.com/2014/04/14/hookers-using-airbnb-to-use-apartments-for-sex-sessions/ http://nypost.com/2014/04/14/hookers-using-airbnb-to-use-apa...

darklajid 12y ago
That article is .. not helpful. So baby swipes and 'at least ten condoms' is a proof of prostitution? That .. doesn't quite add up. I mean, you actually buy condoms in packs of 10-12 here and the baby swipe thing is inconclusive. Maybe the claim in the headline is right, probably the story is backed by real facts. That article though? That's really useless.
- 001sky 12y ago
  "Says a 21-year-old call girl who works for the illicit business.[...] “It’s more discreet and much cheaper than The Waldorf,” --> Apparently, this is from an interview. But, YMMV.
- ameister14 12y ago
  Except that her guest was slashed with a knife by a client in her apartment; I think you missed that part.

aalpbalkan 12y ago

> (underlined) Today it's a prostitution ring, tomorrow it could be an illegal gambling ring, and maybe next week it could be a drug operation. This is textbook 'slippery slope' fallacy. https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/slippery-slope https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/slippery-slope You said that if we allow A to happen, then Z will eventually happen too, therefore A should not happen.

jmathai 12y ago
Perhaps something like "allowing same sex marriage today will lead to humans marrying animals tomorrow" is a fallacy. This seems very well reasoned. I hope you're not implying that we can't make reasoned assumptions and take actions based off them. Also there's actual law breaking going on here. I love and use AirBnb but the lady has some great points.
- hippoman 12y ago
  That kind of progression really happened. "Perhaps allowing interracial marriage today will lead to men marrying other men tomorrow". Gay marriage was unthinkable a hundred years ago. The ideas that are acceptable to society change over time and we can't be so arrogant as to assume our current set of values is correct while all the previous ones were wrong and no future ones will make ours look wrong. You can already see attitudes towards drug use changing to the point where Krueger's "drug operations" seem harmless to many people today.
  - jmathai 12y ago
    Agreed. But the laws of today have to apply to society as we know of today. I'm all for forward progress but we can't make laws for how our evolved selves. In 10 years same opposing sex marriage might the same as opposing interracial marriage is today. But we're not there and the laws have to reflect what society as a whole is ready for. Sad but true.
sjtgraham 12y ago
It can't get much worse than one's apartment being used as a brothel, there's really nowhere to slide to at that point.

moron4hire 12y ago

Clutch those purse strings! Clutch them tiiiiiiiight. Lest some ne'erdowell slip something like DRUGS into your bag. And then you might accidentally take them, and LORD KNOWS one dose is enough to make you so addicted to the marijuana shots that you will be shooting cops and blowing judges for your next hit.

vijayboyapati 12y ago

It's always painful to watch luddite bureaucrats pontificate on technology and how it needs to be controlled to "protect" the population. I remember when I was at Google in 2003 there was a California politician who demanded that Google be regulated like a utility company because it was so important. That was when it was still a private company! Or when another California bureaucrat wanted to ban gmail because it violated people's privacy by showing targeted ads next to emails. Listening to people like this requires a perma-facepalm.

md224 12y ago
I sympathize with your position, but I want to point out that it's equally foolish to assume that technological progress poses no dangers to society and that no control is necessary. It isn't really about controlling the technology either; it's about controlling how that technology is operated by human beings, people who are fallible and who can be dangerous when given a certain level of power. There's definitely a continuum from "radical luddite" to "techno-utopian," and I think striking a balance between caution and optimism is the way to go.
dllthomas 12y ago
"That was when it was still a private company!" I don't see why there's any particular link between how widely distributed the ownership of a company is, and whether the infrastructure it is building holds potential for abuse and should be considered a matter of vital public interest. For the record, I think (with low confidence) that this is not true of Google and wasn't at the time, I just think this point is irrelevant.

honksillet 12y ago

> Real estate is an extremely well-developed industry here in New York City Should read over-regulated industry

maxwell2022 12y ago

Hotels have so much to lose they won't let it happen and this is an opportunity to give them a bad publicity.

pbiggar 12y ago

So is every apartment. In buildings near where I lived in Dublin there were known brothels in rented residential apartments. Long before there was Airbnb, obviously. This is a standard part of success: criminals hack the system. Much like AWS being used for bitcoin mining, and every cash-in-cash-out system being used for money laundering.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

brownbat 12y ago

We have some inconsistent intuitions about what the government should be allowed to regulate. It seems like I should be able to give a neighbor's kid a 20 to pick up some leaves without getting the government involved. It seems like I should be able to give a friend a dollar for running and grabbing me a coke without consulting minimum wage laws or local sales taxes. I should be able to lend my cousin some money without registering as a bank. A business hiring leafblowers or messengers with a "no questions asked" policy, or even an individual loan shark, seems like the law should get involved. The internet as a communication platform blurs these lines. It lowers the barriers between strangers and acquaintances and friends. It lets private individuals behave like businesses some of the time. It lets small transactions rapidly scale. I don't think one set of intuitions is necessarily right or wrong. But I think these conflicting intuitions make some people libertarians towards businesses like airbnb and uber, and other people think those businesses are just profiting off of skirting regulations.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

tpeng 12y ago

The issue is not between AirBNB and its customers; its customers can evaluate the risks of renting on AirBNB, and factor that into their rental price, as well as insure for adverse outcomes. The real issue is that AirBNB also imposes these risks on communities (i.e., AirBNB's customers' neighbors) by exposing them to, in the worst case, criminal elements, but even in a normal case, temporary renters who lack incentive to follow social norms or respect communal property. This doesn't mean that AirBNB's business can't work, but it does mean that AirBNB needs to work with regulators to find a solution acceptable to the communities in which it operates. Such a solution would most likely be a combination of technical solutions to minimize bad outcomes and perhaps a tax on AirBNB, the proceeds of which could compensate communities for the externality imposed by AirBNB.

teacup50 12y ago
> This doesn't mean that AirBNB's business can't work, but it does mean that AirBNB needs to work with regulators to find a solution acceptable to the communities in which it operates. I don't see there being a solution at all; hotels are zoned differently than residential for a reason. The fact that AirBNB managed to popularize "breaking zoning laws ON THE WEB" doesn't mean that the zoning laws need to change.
- tpeng 12y ago
  I live in a downtown residential building one block away from a hotel, so that's not always the case. Of course, some communities may choose to prohibit AirBNB altogether. I think the bigger issue is if the externalities imposed by normal usage are so high that, when properly internalized, AirBNB no longer presents a compelling value proposition in the majority of cases. This is certainly possible. From AirBNB's perspective, perhaps they just fight the internalization as hard as possible. There are businesses with much costlier externalities, such as energy companies, that are actually subsidized and not taxed. In the AirBNB case, however, they may have a tougher fight as the harm, while lower in aggregate, is also less diffuse.
  - nathanvanfleet 12y ago

frandroid 12y ago

I was expecting a story about airbnb getting to the waterborne rental market.

dkarapetyan 12y ago

Wait. Isn't this a problem with motels and other temporary housing situations as well? What makes Airbnb so special?

zymhan 12y ago
Because Airbnb is used to rent out rooms or houses that aren't in areas zoned for hotel/motel purposes. No one can reasonably expect that living in a motel room and living in an apartment are similar. The other tenants in the building of the Airbnb user can be reasonably expected not to have to deal with tourists being discourteous or annoying in their building.

RV86 12y ago

The runaway success of AirBnB has to largely be viewed as a reaction to the alarming trend of increased % of income spent on rent. What used to be a standard of 25% has approached 45%+ in a very short amount of time in cities like NYC, San Fran, LA, and more. Wages have stagnated and tenants are doing everything they possibly can to afford to live in their city of choice. For politicians to go after AirBnB is to miss the underlying problem.

dkuebric 12y ago
It could even be fueling the increased rent in a small way. With residential apartments occupied as hotels, there's fewer on the market. I've hosted on airbnb to defray the cost of my apartment; viewed from another angle, that's helping keep the market's costs up through my increased willingness to pay the prices.
jessaustin 12y ago
This is a good point; it would be a shame (but not exactly a surprise) if society focused its regulatory policy on the symptom rather than the disease. One seems to hear a lot less about the evils of AirBnb from relatively-cheaper cities.