Airbnb's response: "A majority of New Yorkers have embraced home sharing, and we will continue to fight for a smart policy solution that works for the the people, not the powerful."
I'd be more interested in knowing how New Yorkers feel about regulating short term apartment rentals than how they feel about sharing.
I don't think I'm guilty of being a broken record if airbnb keeps misusing the word "sharing." Although I understand there can be some ambiguity in the word "sharing", the arrangement "you may rent my apartment out for a week if and only if you pay me $1,000" isn't anywhere close to this zone of ambiguity.
It is commerce. It is unambiguously commerce, it is a pure quid pro quo money for services transaction.
New York has passed legislation regulating commerce - in this case, the conditions under which someone may rent out property for under 30 days. Those laws aren't obsolete just because someone wrote a rails app where you can type in an address and click a "create hotel here" button. Also, commerce doesn't become sharing just because the quid pro quo financial transactions take place over the web.
> we will continue to fight for a smart policy solution that works for the the people, not the powerful.
lol, they talk like they are a grass root movement, they fight for nothing but their own bottom line, I hate this insulting "disruptive" marketing speech. There are laws, just because you're an "app" doesn't give you the right to violate them.
The law in this case is a hammer looking for a nail. If a short term rental is violating noise ordinances, fine it or shut it down, don't shut down every short term rental just because you fear it.
The biggest thing I have learned from running a couple short term rental listings is that people are basically good.
I hosted 68 guests in the last three weeks and every last one of them was nice and respectful and quiet.
Anti short term rental sentiment is based on paranoid hysteria.
I don't live in NYC, but in a neighboring state and bought a three family house with the express intent of living in one unit and renting the others as vacation rentals.
The prospect of nosy, controlling moral scolds shutting down my American dream, is extremely maddening.
'
The only externality to my house is that there are cars in the drive way with license plates from a variety of states. Fear of new cars in the driveway should not trump my rights as owner and tax payer on this land.
Luckily in public meetings our town planners have declared their need for vacation rentals. The housing market is weak here and if the town were to shut down vacation rentals, it would put even more pressure on an already cold real estate market.
To answer your anecdotal evidence with my own: my neighbor's apartment is an AirBnb, and is often very noisy and over-capacity. I feel less safe in my building because I'm no longer on a personal basis with all my neighbors. I use AirBnb as well, but the negatives are more than "paranoid hysteria".
Folks, not all apartment units in New York City are big, crowded buildings with long hallways. You're forgetting the Multiple Dwelling Law affects multi-family houses, many of which (especially in Brooklyn and Queens) were single families build in the 1890's that were converted to 2, 3 or 4 family structures in the 1930's.
I'm not ideologically against regulation, don't get me wrong, but I DO recognize that sometimes 'big hammers' affect big and small scale landlords equally, and that's not fair. And quite frankly if you're disrupted because I'm AirBNBing one of my units, just come down the stairs and knock on my door and we can talk about it.
Joking aside - New York housing laws need to do a better job, whether it's housing code, fines, or anti AirBNB laws, of distinguishing between big and small scale operations.
Feel free to do short term rentals, but get a zoning variance and meet the same standards as hotels and real BNBs.
You can't make subjective judgements about small vs big landlords because frankly, lots of landlords, big or small are scum and can only be managed with a stick.
I don't need to knock on your door -- if you want to be a hotelier, buy a hotel.
Here is the thing, I have read the entire zoning code for my town. My town has a strict definition of what a hotel is, and what I am doing does not meet it.
A hotel has shared facilities, a check in desk and some other things.
It also does not meet the definition of a bed and breakfast, which by definition serves food.
So by the zoning of my town I am not operating a hotel or a bed and breakfast.
The problem is that you're trying to compare a vacation rentals in a small, depressed area to New York City. If you're in a situation where what your doing is legal, great, you're someone legally renting property through airbnb.
NYC has laws that may seem onerous to you, but they exist as a direct response to problems that have already happened in the past and are already manifesting themselves in the modern AirBnb era. The issues are real, and the company has taken an attitude that the law doesn't apply to them. Fuck them.
Airbnb often implies that they are like Uber/Lyft, fighting some evil hotel lobby. That's also bullshit -- Uber is fighting cartels with strong local regulation at the municipal level. Hotels aren't organized the same way and frankly don't need the regulatory protection that cabs do. To the contrary, my understanding is that Airbnb was the party doing lots of heavy lobbying in Albany.
If they were smart, instead of carrying on like children, they should come up with a co-op hotel model that is compatible with the law, less capital intensive and closer to the spirit of their platform.
> NYC has laws that may seem onerous to you, but they exist as a direct response to problems that have already happened in the past and are already manifesting themselves in the modern AirBnb.
Really? What exactly is the compelling problem solved by requiring all short term rentals to have a "check-in" desk? Why shouldn't I be able to rent out my apartment for a few weeks while I go on vacation?
This is straight up protectionism. I wonder how much it cost the hotel industry to buy this legislation.
As an AirBnB host, renter, and apartment building tenant, I do not want a "co-op hotel model." I want to be able to not spend thousands of dollars a month on a space which isn't even being used. It's ridiculous to try to spin this as some helpful regulation.
You have no obligation to spend money on a space that isn't used.
If you are truly renting your apartment home while you're away, you're actually fine with doing so with respect to this law. You're probably violating your lease or HOA contract, but that's your problem.
If you're buying or renting apartments to sublet as ersatz hotels, then you have a problem. It's not society's problem to save your from a poor investment choice.
This legislation passed in an environment where the US Attorney is likely tapping the phones of any remaining unindicted political players in Albany. Hotels aren't well organized to begin with, and I doubt they had an opportunity to make huge contributions to influence this. Real estate moguls like reduced housing supply as they get to reap higher rents, so they don't care. (Feel free to link to the board of elections filings if I'm wrong).
The public outcry against Airbnb is strong and consistent, and this law imho is unusually democratic and fair one. Everyone got what they claimed to want. True Airbnb hosts can continue to share their homes. You can continue to rent them. The only party hurt is Airbnb who has been deceptive about their true intentions from day 1 -- so fuck them.
> Really? What exactly is the compelling problem solved by requiring all short term rentals to have a "check-in" desk? Why shouldn't I be able to rent out my apartment for a few weeks while I go on vacation?
Seriously? You don't know why you should have someone available in person if the people staying at your hotel have an issue? There's a reason your homeowner's insurance is cheaper than the insurance for a hotel.
IANL but I think when people like most of us here try to interpret the law we try to think of it as software code. However the law doesn't work that way. Intent of the law can cover more than the strictly literal interpretation. That's why we have judges, to decide what the law means. A Judge could very well decide that what you are doing is close enough to a B&B as to be a distinction without a difference.
I don't know why being a small landlord would mean that you should be immune to regulation.
The idea that tenants are able to knock on your door means you shouldn't have to follow this law kind of demonstrates an attitude I've seen with a number of small but not "good" landlords I've had.
That last part's a wide logical leap from anything implied above. No one implied immunity. The suggestion is that the law should view differently those businesses which have the operational capacity and capital to handle strictly abiding by regulatory burdens firstly, and secondly whose scale is high enough that their negative social impact is truly high. In the world of property, that's the distinction between a landlord that owns hundreds of buildings and a family that owns a house that's split into three units.
In my neighborhood, for example, it's rare for houses to be renovated fully permitted because the entire permitting process is designed around large scale construction projects. There's an entire shadow economy that goes just to paying thousands to architects, expediters, inspectors, licensed pros, etc., in addition to the actual work. That's just one example. The end result is that people don't do it, because they can't afford it unless they have a lot of capital.
Now the law already does this distinction I'm mentioning: for example a three or four family home has to be registered for the rentals to be legal, a two-family doesn't. Also the code is different, and more broadly the Multiple Dwelling Law treats them differently.
Going back to AirBNB, concretely I think a good compromise would be to limit the number of units for rent to one, and take down the ones that have turned rental buildings into hotels. People who own big rental buildings do these things. What's left are co-ops and condos. Co-ops have self-regulating powers to evict people. Condos, which someone here complained upon, are a different story (even if they have house rules with fines, I don't know how that's enforced).
The 'knocking on the door' comment was an attempt to try to separate the large from the small. As for myself I'm always above board and legal, because I'm risk-averse, but my risk-averse nature also means I don't rent to anyone I don't know or trust. Partly because of comments about everyone needing sticks. Ironically I've been on that side, which is why I decided I didn't like being a tenant anymore. I haven't used AirBNB, but plan to do so -legally. I do have a right to feel wronged by the passage of the law, especially when I hear all the anti-AirBNB comments not apply to my situation (eg. 'disruption to the residents').
We should have a conversation of where short term rentals are appropriate. Maybe they are not appropriate in apartment buildings, but banning them in all of New York state is draconian.
The law only applies to Class A multiple dwellings.
A multiple dwelling "is a dwelling which is either rented, leased, let or hired out, to be occupied, or is occupied as the residence or home of three or more families independently of each other."
A Class A is a multiple dwellings "which is occupied, as a rule, for permanent residence purposes. This class shall include tenements, flat houses, maisonette apartments, apartment houses ..."
A Class B is a multiple dwelling "occupied, as a rule transiently, as the more or less temporary abode of individuals or families who are lodged with or without meals".
Who's being a moral scold or hampering "American Dream"s now?
There are reasons, good and bad, that states and municipalities have regulations about zoning for commercial, residential, mixed, and other use. There can be a discussion about how well they're applied, misapplied or whatever.
Here's my opinion: I think you, and other transient-rental aficionados, have the burden of showing sufficient reason for allowing you and AirBnB to avoid civil and possibly criminal (depending on circumstances) sanction for breaking the laws. You also have the burden of showing why the rules should be changed to permit your activities subsequently.
I disagree about the burden of proof here. Why should there be laws that prohibit Airbnb? Who is being harmed? The hotels are being harmed, no doubt. Why should they be protected.
I've never used Airbnb, but unless there are serious harms to people, where is the harm and why should the law be followed?
I bought a three family house. I live on the second floor and rent out the first and third floor units on the web.
It is sharing my house.
When I first bought the house I inherited a 12 month lease tenant from the previous owner.
When I had that tentant, I didn't feel like this was my house. I couldnt go on the first floor, I had to walk on eggshells around the tenant and her kid.
Now this is my house! My house! I own it, and I let in guests that I screen through airbnb and other sites. They come for a few days, pay 300-600, and I make the beds and greet them and its really nice and I have met some cool people.
So in my case we are talking about turning a three family house into a basically single family house with some guests. That is a use case I dont think is being represented in this conversation.
It's really hard to see a version of this story that supports your claim that these laws are "hammers in search of nails".
In one telling, you --- or, the proverbial you, the 10 less-responsible versions of you that exist for every equally-responsible you --- bringing a massive flow of short-term renters to buildings and neighborhoods zoned and coded for long-term tenants, overriding those regulations based entirely on your personal hunch that people are generally better than the democratic process of your municipality has decided they are.
In another telling, you are more or less stating outright that, because after buying a building designed for three families you discovered you don't like letting two other families have long-term leases, you've converted your three-family dwelling into a hotel. Even putting zoning aside, you're like living proof of how Airbnb impacts housing stock.
I'm not saying you're doing anything wrong. I'm saying that you're making a pretty clear case that there is a significant public policy stake in whether or not you should be able to continue doing it it.
I'm not even saying that the zoning concern or the housing stock concern should prevail or are dispositive or anything! I happen to find them compelling, but, whatever. I'm just saying, if I was trying to convince people that the state should mind its own business and let a hundred Airbnbs bloom, this is probably not the thing I would brag about in public.
This house was built around the turn of the century as a single family house. At some point someone changed it to three.
I'm changing it back. I own it. If for some reason the town tried to stop me from doing short term rentals, I would just convert the house to single family and sell it for twice what I bought it for.
Unless one is opposed to property rights and free markets, I don't see how how one has standing to complain.
> Unless one is opposed to property rights and free markets, I don't see how how one has standing to complain.
Owning property doesn't let you alone change its zoning. If I was your free market property right loving neighbor I would be upset that you're running a hotel in a residential area.
It is fine to own a place and do things that don't negatively affect other folks inside: Renting it out in any fashion affects others to a point.
The fact of the matter is that you've been living in a multiple-family dwelling with three residences, only one of which was being rented out. You didn't like the arrangement, and decided to revert it to a single family home, leaving the town with two fewer housing units.
In the process of rennovation, you have been renting it out in the manner of a hotel by layman's standards - but you aren't technically a hotel. Basically, you get to take advantage of a poorly written law.
Property rights only go so far - once you start affecting others, including renting a portion of house for any length of time - you start picking up responsibilities. Free markets? Free markets work well in some areas, some not as well: Others need regulations to various degrees.
And hotels and housing are one of those that somewhat need regulation because we know some folks do bad or stupid stuff to the detriment of others, and what you do as a landlord renting in any capacity affects others.
And you are still renting it out in some fashion. Why should the laws to either hotels/motels/b&b's or laws applying to a landlord not apply? For the most part, such laws are designed to protect a renter and keep minimum standards for cleanliness and other such things. Some rental laws are there because of shortages and prices [1]. Hotels often pay extra taxes. In some areas, a bed and breakfast has looser and different standards, partially because it isn't unheard of to take a family home and turn it into a B&B, with the owners living in a portion.
And truth is that while I'd support someone renting out their place for a week or two once or twice a year without many issues (permit or fees, mostly), once you are regularly doing such, you are either a landlord or a hotel manager and should have such laws governing you. The pushback from those doing this I see as basically folks trying to get out of complying with the law.
[1] Understandably, two units hardly affects the housing market so long as it is an isolated incident, but if or when that trends to multiple folks, it can.
Every time people say "property rights, free markets", other people keep pointing out that property rights in the US have never been absolute, and really represent a basket of different more specific rights. But people keep wielding the term "property rights" as if it alone was dispositive.
That's pretty much exactly what a lot of people don't want you to do - remove permanent housing and convert it to short term rentals for tourists. This is a big part of why NY and other municipalities are moving to regulate airbnb.
Well heres the thing, the house I am in is non-conforming multi-family.
Its only allowed to be mutli-family because its grandfathered in. Believe me, the town and neighbors would rather it be single-family, because multi-family brings in a lower class of occupant.
And heres the other thing. It was originally a single family house that was converted to multi family. So things change, markets change, demand changes.
Codifying usage in zoning laws and making it immutable might be a luxury affordable for places like NYC, but its not affordable for places with tons of sellers and little buyers, places where foreclosure rates threaten the value of homes with current mortgages.
The occupants of my house go to restaurants, rent kayaks, go to the local attractions. This is a tourist town, and vacation rentals are expanding our reach.
People will stay at a vacation rental that wouldnt stay at a hotel. Because they get a kitchen and a room for the kids. They will stay for a week in the summer. Who wants to stay for a week in a hotel room with four kids?
Vacation rentals are keeping this town alive, and I don't think this is being represented in this debate.
There is near unlimited affordable housing available in this area.
Seriously, if AirBNB were a free market (and it is), what these listings are doing is allowing more people to come into the city and spend their own money on services throughout the city. This is a boon for all businesses in the city. It increases the availability of units and lowers the cost of other hotels throughout the city.
What people are afraid of is that they see all these units available on AirBNB and assume they are empty? They are not, they are being rented out pretty regularly. Which means they are being used and filled, with real live human beings.
If people didn't like empty units in the city, they should be complaining about the high-end units like One57 and 436park that are removing available units for the city and creating high-rise ghost towns.
I don't believe for one second this increases the cost of rental and/or condo units in the city. Since what is really happening is that the units are still full. AirBNB allowed us to see that there was a very real apartment shortage in the city.
I lived in NYC, and even I had to move out because of high rents. But those high rents weren't because of AirBNB. It was due to a lack of smaller units being put on the market.
As the units consolidated from 1bd to 3 or 4bd apartments, the sizes of the apartments grew, and all new buildings were for multi-million dollar residences. The middle class got squeezed.
Now we are blaming AirBNB for the problems. And that is simply not the case.
> Seriously, if AirBNB were a free market (and it is), what these listings are doing is allowing more people to come into the city and spend their own money on services throughout the city.
thanks to airbnb i was able to visit nyc for ~10 where i spent a ton of money between restaurants, coffeeshops, random shopping and broadway shows.
the wife and i were thinking about returning next year but without airbnb (and all the freedom we have thanks to it, like cooking our own meals) i don't think we will. i'm sure i'm not the only one thinking like that.
> Vacation rentals are keeping this town alive, and I don't think this is being represented in this debate.
This debate is about a law in NYC. Not your little vacation village where things may be completely different. The Outer Banks aren't going to outlaw short term rentals.
Contrast to condo buildings, which throughout the country adopt similar rules with no pressure from the government; no leases under 6 months or 1 year are an extremely common in condo agreements.
These rules have been around for decades. My own buildings were set in 1989 in the original docs. The desire to not have short term rentals as neighbors is something extremely common. Most tenants don't have the ability to effect change the way an owner in a condo building does, so they cannot prevent the unit next door from being AirBnB'ed, so they turn to the government. Whether it should be the law as it is in NYC, probably not, but using the law is more like someone using a hammer to put in a screw, not your characterization of a "hammer looking for a nail."
You're pretending like your experience amongst suburban single family houses is at all applicable to multi-family housing in NYC when it isn't. You don't own a 10-unit building in Brooklyn Heights going all short-term rental, which is the more typical target of this law and what AirBnB is trying to defend.
So basically, you are running a small-scale hotel and you live in it. I think you are competing with other hotels and you should follow the same rules as the other hotels do. If you don't like the rules, then you should change them but it should be the same rules for everyone.
"The biggest thing I have learned from running a couple short term rental listings is that people are basically good."
I think you're in a honeymoon period where everything is working great because of thoughtful, well-intentioned early adopters on both sides (the providers and the guests).
I have done a lot of airbnb all over the world - and I love it - but I, as a user and the hosts are obviously very literate, technically adept, relatively wealthy people. It's not surprising that it all works out really nicely - and it does.
That can't last. People will find way to game both airbnb and the users of airbnb and it will be a race of con artists and malcontents all the way to whatever cesspool it is that form the back-story of every law we have on the books. Every law that governs a hotel or a taxi or a restaurant is on the books because some asshole got someone killed (or robbed them blind).
That's pretty harsh and a little bit rude, honestly. When someone buys a house or condo or whatever, they usually don't expect it to be turned in a hotel / motel. Most people don't like when their neighborhoods turn into rental units either, but at least in that case they have some time to react.
The idea that people are free to make business and do what they want with their own property is alien to the state of New York. By far, it is the most commie ridden state, even ahead of California.
The state should be fought over laws like this, not negotiated with.
Are you throwing "commie" in there as shorthand for something that you think we'll all agree is abhorrent? 'Cause I'm really totally fine with the community getting together and dictating certain things to each other. That's the level we're on here – not state control of the means of production for the benefit of the people collectively.
The state of New York has lost two Congressional representatives due to its population fleeing for more favorable areas.
New York State is not doing well, and its combination of nanny state, local government corruption and high taxes is not winning in the market place of governments.
If it wasn't for the inheritance of NYC being the capital of the world, NY state would be in seriously dire straits.
New York is kind of fucked as a state. The City has enough voters to completely nullify the rest of the state, so that what is sane to the rural, upstate New Yorkers, is droned out by the paranoia of the city people.
Yes, it's obviously BS on AirBnB's part, but this line of speech is their best chance of not being shut down in NYC.
The priority should be alleviating the burden of sclerosing bureaucratic regulations, and if AirBnB can do that with a BS narrative about "the sharing economy", more power to them. The same goes with Uber and the taxi medallion system.
This isn't a fair debate where we should weigh the merit of each's side argument. This is a battle where one side will ultimately resort to violence to enforce its decision.
> "Move fast and break things" is a saying common in science and engineering industries. In that context, it means that making mistakes is a natural consequence of innovation in a highly competitive and complex environment. In particular, it was adopted by Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook (who even went as far as to say that 'breaking things' is a necessary feature of moving 'fast enough').
Breaking the law is a mistake (and a serious one for any business caught). Move fast and break things is more about breaking your own things, not someone else's things :)
What's next ? Breaking your node shop competitors' legs :) ?
Move fast and break things != One can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.
So its okay for the established businesses to use the power of government to shut down competition and prevent people from using their property as they see fit, even when it is safe and does not endanger the well being of others?
This is one of the biggest abuses of government power there can be, using to it to snuff competition or favor one particular business. It hides behind "regulation" and if that doesn't work there is always "think of the children"
Is there a handy list of jurisdictions where they successfully got what they were doing legalized after they were already doing it. Here in DC for one.
I know, right? It's one of the reasons why the culture of the SV tech industry turns me off so much, and it's a part of why I'm glad I don't live in SV or work for an SV company.
Sort of true... I've actually seen hotels list rooms on AirBnB in San Francisco. The logic is that the type of people who are looking at AirBnB are looking at a specific price range, great location, good value, etc... . So if you're a hotel you can list a room or so on that platform that you otherwise might lose out on to an AirBnB competitor.
It's not simply NIMBYism. In NYC and other cities, there are legitimate questions about the preservation of (rapidly dwindling) affordable housing at stake.
NIMBYism (in the form of parking minimums and height/density restrictions) are one of the main causes of that housing shortage you mentioned. The fact that permanent residents feel like they are locked in a tight competition with short-term visitors is a symptom of the problem, not the cause.
So you would like to see the zoning rules changed, and that's a reasonable discussion to have. OTOH, the intent of zoning is to let people know what to expect when they move into a neighborhood. Changing that after-the-fact violates this agreement, and not surprisingly results in what you call NIMBYism.
Our system of government is specifically designed to limit the tyranny of the majority. It may not be to your liking but a lot of smart people who came before you learned that slow and steady change is what effects actual progress, and (additionally) what the majority wants right now isn't necessarily what we should be implementing wholesale.
Yes. We live in a representative democracy, not a direct democracy. I like that.
(I am a current NY resident who was formerly a California resident, and the thing that most actively annoyed me about California politics was the little bits of direct democracy that popped up on the ballot.)
This highlights a flaw in the law more than anything else. Who owns your home? If government can tell you who can stay with you, regardless of any private transactions or agreements you make with that person, then government has more authority over your living space than you do.
Who owns your home? If government can tell you who can stay with you
The government can do all manner of proscriptions for your residence. For instance, no, you cannot run a brothel from your house. You cannot turn it into a bouncy house park. And you cannot have short-term rentals in an area that the community has decided to use for permanent housing.
It's called "zoning", and collectively we've agreed to the allowed uses of our property. You live in a community of others, and your property lines do not define "The Independent Republic of JJordan", so yeah, the government does have some authority over your use of your property. You might not like it, but you'll be going against the flow. Because, personally, I'd rather not have the house next to me used for short-term rentals "shared" with those that don't give two shits about the community they'll be leaving on Sunday afternoon.
You also don't get to just decide not to follow the rules after the fact. One moved to a community, and directly or indirectly agreed to abide by the community standards. If one decides that's just not really working for them anymore, well, move to a community that has standards more to your liking. There do exist places that will have no problem with you throwing all the loud parties you like, and renting to college students on spring break. Those places are not in SV, however, so good luck in your search for remote work.
Isn't "zoning" the primary reason why NYC real estate is so expensive in the first place? Controls that restrict the supply of housing is probably not a good thing if you're looking to make NYC real estate more affordable.
Actually it's mostly because NYC is a very very popular place to live. It's also because a lot of people with too much money are buying condos in NYC as an investment. Removing zoning laws will not change these things.
> a lot of people with too much money are buying condos in NYC as an investment
That would be OK, but renting for short term should be illegal? If AirBnb residents are noisy and disrespect the laws, call the cops on them. If owners don't pay their due taxes, call IRS on them. It's no reason to make it illegal to rent for short term.
I have used AirBnb in many cities on 4 continents and was always respectful to the locals and even tried my best to follow the specific recycling rules and such.
What I enjoy the most is the organic feeling of being in a real apartment vs being in a hotel room. Hotel rooms all feel the same, wherever you go. What I want is to experience the same perspective as a local, well, at least to attempt to do that, and that is because I appreciate the different cultures.
Banning short term apartment rentals would send a bad message to people who just want to appreciate your culture.
> If AirBnb residents are noisy and disrespect the laws, call the cops on them.
And what happens when that leads to calling the cops every weekend, for a different group of people?
I'll tolerate my neighbour having a loud party on his 25th birthday, or him accidentally banging his suitcase down the stairs at 5.30 when he's catching an early flight. I'll do the same, equally infrequently.
It's simply not fair to have that behaviour every fucking weekend, which was what happened when an apartment in the building was put on AirBnB.
Fortunately, the listing was removed the day after I sent it to the landlord, and the noise has stopped. I highly doubt any tax was paid on the income, which is also wrong.
Maybe AirBnb should allow neighbors to comment on disturbing behavior by tourists. Responsibility and consequences could follow a tourist wherever s/he goes.
Calling the cops on a noisy neighbor in NYC is pointless unless that neighbor is a business. The cops may pay a visit, but it the person starts making noise again, they can, they will, and the cops will not force the issue. They'll say that's for the landlord/condo association/coop board to sort out. Dealing with those entities can sometimes be extremely difficult, and can take a long time to sort out. A landlord can't evict someone without really good cause, and even then it can take a long time, during which the tenant can keep renting out over and over.
People don't want transients living in their apartment buildings for safety and other reasons. Unlike hotels in NYC, we lack the necessary security and also lacking is stringent check-in procedures that hotels have. We have doormen but they are not security guards.
It is true that NYC is a popular place to live, but the higher apartment costs are caused by zoning density restrictions and overuse of historic landmark status. These are "economic rents" -- a market failure that creates inefficient markets through use of politics by special interests -- in this case landlords that want to extract higher rents from tenants.
In general this is true (and certainly given that many HN readers live in the Bay area, it probably falls within people's personal experience), but NYC is not a great example. Parts of NYC have some degree of density restriction, but much of it (pretty much all of Manhattan, say) is among the highest-density residential areas in the US, and still very expensive, because even given all the density, there's a finite amount of land, which still means supply is constrained as compared to demand. Even given no density restrictions at all, some places would still be very expensive. Tokyo is another good example of this.
Yeah, the buildings aren't very tall, but people are in them right now.
Before you can build a newer, bigger building, you first need to buy a large enough contiguous area from potentially several owners who don't particularly want to move. That adds friction and years of extra work to any new building, which will discourage new construction, lower supply and raise prices regardless of the zoning.
Unless you're proposing that the government begin seizing tracts of land in Manhattan on behalf of high-rise developers?
I don't think this is as much of a problem as you are making it out to be. If the east village, which is currently mostly zoned R8B[1] were tomorrow to be substantially upzoned (to say R10) you'd see lots of new construction within a year. There'd be so much money to be made that deals would happen.
That's part of it. Another major part of it is that there are major zoning restrictions. Excessive zoning laws pushes up price. This has been demonstrated time and time again.
This is a fair point. My original comment should have been more specific: cities with above average zoning restrictions consistently see higher housing costs. A corollary of which is that excessive zoning also leads to higher costs, unless your position is there is no city with excessive zoning.
Isn't "zoning" the primary reason why NYC real estate is so expensive in the first place?
More directly, it's one of the reasons NYC real estate is so valuable in the first place. The way the city has managed density (and parks, open space, and its waterfront) has in general worked out pretty well, over the years. Which has helped the city thrive in ways that its direct competitors (such as Boston and Baltimore) have not.
You are correct that zoning density restrictions and overuse of historic landmark status create political scarcity of housing that benefits landlords such as Donald Trump to the detriment of renters. The landlords and allied special interests back laws that create "economic rents" -- additional profits not through wealth creation and efficient markets but through the market failure of creating artificial scarcity.
If AirBnb wants to make housing more affordable in NYC, they should lobby to remove these zoning laws that benefit wealthy landlords such as Donald Trump.
> short-term rentals in an area that the community has decided to use for permanent housing
It shouldn't be legal to tell someone who owns a home that they cannot rent it out. We're not talking about someone running a business out of their home, where the zoning laws actually apply.
> I'd rather not have the house next to me used for short-term rentals "shared" with those that don't give two shits about the community they'll be leaving on Sunday afternoon.
How about the ones who let that druggie sister down on her luck move in, she's ok because it's for over 30 days?
This is just whiny bullcrap from someone who wants to be able to control their neighbors.
> You also don't get to just decide not to follow the rules after the fact. One moved to a community, and directly or indirectly agreed to abide by the community standards.
We're not discussing a housing authority here. If you and your neighbors get together and decide the community cannot abide someone allowing another person to use their house for less than ... what 6 months? a year ... you write that into the bylaws, set out the financial penalty, and then you enforce it.
And that's your right.
But when these kinds of things become illegal across an entire state, there's a problem. This law should have never been on the books in its current form to begin with.
> It shouldn't be legal to tell someone who owns a home that they cannot rent it out. We're not talking about someone running a business out of their home, where the zoning laws actually apply.
By that definition so are long-term rentals, or even home buying and selling. A Colorado court has ruled that there's no substantive difference between a renter who rents for one month or one week.
Subletting is not short term, and is rightly considered to be largely governed by the same laws as those that apply to rentals since the uses are so similar.
I honestly do not understand the willful ignorance in this thread. Short term rentals is commerce. Everyone knows it's commerce. When you say you think it isn't (or you don't understand how it could be) you sound like you're denying the earth goes around the sun. This isn't even a particularly nuanced area of permitted use laws (zoning) or the appropriate role of government. You are all basically advocating for elimination of all zoning and/or pretending it doesn't exist as a totally normal type of regulation in the US (and all over the world).
Of course they shut down lemonade stands. Especially if you tried to run a daily lemonade stand out of your front yard, staffed by people who don't live there.
They're legal because the government has not decided to make them illegal. If the government decides that your lemonade stand is a danger to public health, or that your stamp collection is a national patrimony and cannot leave the country, it will make new laws that enforce those decisions.
It shouldn't be legal to tell someone who owns a home that they cannot rent it out.
That's not what relevant the laws say ("You can't rent your property, period!"). Just that you can't use a residential property as a de-facto hotel.
If you and your neighbors get together and decide the community cannot abide someone allowing another person to use their house for less than ... what 6 months?
30 days. The point is that short-term rentals have a very different character (in terms of impact on neighbors, and impact on property values) than long-term rentals.
This is just whiny bullcrap from someone who wants to be able to control their neighbors.
No, it's just life the big city. Though I agree that whether these issues should be of interest of the state (as opposed to municipalities) is very much open to question. Then again, the Empire State is known to be messed up (and to have lopsided control over) a great many things, in this regard.
It shouldn't be legal to tell someone who owns a home that they cannot rent it out
Your right to do as you please with your property ends where my property, and interference with my enjoyment of it, begins.
Or do you also think that if you buy some property straddling a river, you can dump waste into it and say "my property, nobody can tell me what to do with it" while making everyone downriver pay for the cleanup of what you did? Because that's the ultimate moral grounding of laws restricting property -- you don't own an isolated island in the middle of nowhere, you own property that's adjacent to and can affect other pieces of property owned by other people who also have rights.
> Or do you also think that if you buy some property straddling a river, you can dump waste into it and say "my property, nobody can tell me what to do with it" while making everyone downriver pay for the cleanup of what you did?
You can't actually own the land around a river, but I get the point you're trying to make regardless.
The point is, if they're causing a ruckus, report them and have it shut down. If they're not, leave it alone. And having multiple different vehicles in the driveway isn't causing a ruckus.
This is basically FUD. What if they do something the neighbors don't like!?! Then deal with it at that time, stop being thought police.
> It shouldn't be legal to tell someone who owns a home that they cannot rent it out.
I mean, a majority of our forebears thought it should. The original law was passed by a representative democracy. And so was this one. You're one of the (totally guessing) 48% of people that disagree. That's democracy. You have to live with getting out-voted.
If the "fast-paced, innovative future" includes petulant children stomping around mad because the big, bad government won't let them do whatever they want no matter the consequences to those around them, I'd say governments are more relevant than ever.
We've already asked you to comment civilly and substantively, so we're banning this account. We're glad to unban accounts if you email hn@ycombinator.com and we believe that you won't do this any more.
Historically, either the government wins or the petulant children win and then become the power center that directs government that the next set of petulant children complain about.
Either way, governments are part of the future. There no real reason to expect this iteration to work any differently than all the others since humans gathered in structured societies.
Its not the government imposing these restrictions, its your neighbors. If there were no government for them to impose them through, they'd use other institutions, or else just the threat of violence. You can imagine a government-free future all you want, but you're talking about a non-collectivist future, which is absurd.
What exactly would that future look like? Where there is no government, one will appear. People seem to have this incurable efficiency whereby we create rules, regulations, and eventually bureaucracies. Rules, implicit and explicit, manifest whether you like it or not. Authority manifests.
I doubt the poster above is against rules, but like me wants to decentralize that authority and enforcement. My answer: you want to have a market for law and enforcement. Read "the machinery of freedom" by David Friedman if interested.
> Because, personally, I'd rather not have the house next to me used for short-term rentals "shared" with those that don't give two shits about the community they'll be leaving on Sunday afternoon.
Why do you believe that guests wont give "two shits" about the community. This sounds incredibly xenophobic to me.
Do you perceive that your sarcasm was effective? Did it convey your point clearly and concisely, so that you can share your perspective and point of view?
Or did it do more harm to what is otherwise a legitimate viewpoint and possibly deserving of discussion?
I'm btw sure that many Socialists would actually agree that the statement undoubtably displayed hatred and xenophobia. He did argue against allowing people from the outside to come and live in his community because he by default perceives foreigners as not giving "two shits" about the community. This is obviously not true, you can't just declare that all foreigners want to harm your community.
OK, I would encourage you to reread the conversation. The HN consensus is clearly different than how you perceive it.
You may be absolutely correct. The HN Hivemind is frequently wrong.
But please use this as an opportunity for introspection, wherein you centralize the idea that the community of peers with whom you choose to associate, think you are an ass.
This argument doesn't hold much water. There's many, many things you can't do in or with your own home due to various laws. There are externalities associated with lots of activities, and therefore these activities are regulated or outlawed. I can't use my home as a bar, or as a concert venue. I can't use it to tan leather, or operate a waste incinerator.
But you can let your druggie sibling live there for free. There's a reason why zoning laws exist, there's no good reason to disallow someone from doing what's effectively subleasing. It's been legal since forever.
If you want to have visitors over when you live in your house you're free to do so.
If you own a property and operate it as a hotel while not actually living in it you're violating the zoning laws that every business/hotel operation have to adhere to.
AirBnB's use of the word "sharing" is laughably liberal. By their standard if I'm running a convenience store I'm "sharing" my property with every customer who wanders in.
> If government can tell you who can stay with you, regardless of any private transactions or agreements you make with that person, then government has more authority over your living space than you do.
Fire marshals have limited the amount of people you can have in a particular building for more than a hundred years.
I don't know the rationale in this case, but there are very good rationales for government to have more control of your house than you do in some instances. Mandatory fire suppression systems can end up saving not just your apt unit, but your whole neighborhood.
Is it a flaw or a feature? This might be more akin to the local government saying that you can't run a business in a residential area (i.e. zoning laws) than it is to squashing "private transactions or agreements".
That's part of the deal with living in an urban area. Living in such close quarters, you can easily disrupt the lives of those around you - that's why we have noise complaints, rules around trash disposal, etc. etc.
If you don't want to live by those community rules then it would best to live outside of a community.
You own your home. Government also has a duty to the well being of the people living around you. Zone laws prevent you from using your home to manufacture chemicals. Noise law prevents you from running musical concert day and night. You would expect your neighbors to obey the same laws to enjoy your peace and quiet at home.
It's called "zoning" and it's been around for quite a while. You know, those pesky laws that says someone can't just build, say, a giant slag heap directly behind (and towering above) your house with nothing but rusty wire holding it together.
Which laws (a.k.a. zoning laws) you unequivocally agree to abide by when buying a piece of property, in just about any jurisdiction on the planet.
If you live in the US (where NYC is), you can also tell the government who can stay with you per the third amendment. Therefore, they don't have more authority than you, just different authority.
It's probably good that they do. I may not agree with this particular exercise of authority, but I'd like to be able to do something about it if my neighbor decides to build bombs in his spare room.
It's not exactly who but if, per the third amendment.
Also, I don't see how your point about neighbors is relevant to it. Is it a serious risk where you live? A common occurence, would you say? And how exactly, in constitutional sense, would you be able to do anything about it?
If implies who, as it gives negotiating leverage. But that's kind of beside the point.
Edit: I just realized I probably misunderstood you. The point about neighbors is meant to be relevant to the notion of the government having a degree of control over your property in general, not the specific question of who's allowed to stay there. Most of my response is no longer relevant with that clarification, so I've removed it.
Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man... To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law; where no law, no injustice. Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues. Justice and injustice are none of the faculties neither of the body nor mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his senses and passions. They are qualities that relate to men in society, not in solitude. It is consequent also to the same condition that there be no propriety, no dominion, no mine and thine distinct; but only that to be every man's that he can get, and for so long as he can keep it.
What is ownership without a government? Who issues and authenticates the deeds? What do private police do when someone calls them and asks them to remove you from "your" property.
The housing in NYC is mostly apartments. People don't want transients in their apartment buildings. We value our safety. It is really that simple. People absolutely do not have the right to make an unsafe environment for others in the apartment building.
That's a poor description of what is going on here. I suppose you'd argue that having to pay a property tax is the same as paying the government rent, and so that means one doesn't "own" his home at all as long as it's taxed?
Where does that argument end? At what point can we just call it what it is: advocacy for disbanding government entirely?
Great point; property taxes are remarkably similar to rent, are they not? Pay your annual dues or you're out on your ass, so to speak.
Consumption taxes are a much fairer way of funding the government, IMO. Rich people consume more and pay more in taxes. Those with less consume less and pay less.
As long as property tax exists (your county will seize your home if you don't pay it) the concept of real estate ownership is pretty tenuous. I accept taxation in general but property taxes have always rubbed me the wrong way.
There's a movement that sees things exactly the other way, based on the ideas of Henry George: maintaining that only real property taxation is legitimate (or appropriate) and that other kinds of taxes aren't!
Property tax is pretty essential. Huge weird distortions can happen in low property tax places. California with prop 13, the UK with it's non-existent property taxes, Vancouver, BC with it's very low property tax rates are all examples of RE gone wrong and are places with low property tax.
The problem in California is the grandfathering in of rates, rather than the fact that the tax exists. If property tax was completely removed and the state made up the shortfall in some other tax (hopefully progressive) then there'd be no market distortion.
Yeah it's not the rate, it's the %2 increase rate. Takes 35 years for the tax to double in cost. Seattle's King County has a lower property tax rate than a chunk of the bay area for example.
Well, do you not own your home if an association can force you not to paint an icon on your roof or put certain statues in your yard? I would say so. I have always seen homeowners associations as a grevious affront to the First Amendment. But apparently I am missing something vital or I am insane.
* I have always seen homeowners associations as a grevious affront to the First Amendment. But apparently I am missing something vital or I am insane.*
The 1st refers to the government, not to housing communities to which you willingly moved. Don't like HOAs? Don't live in an HOA community. The government has no hand in this.
> Don't like HOAs? Don't live in an HOA community.
That's becoming harder and harder. Currently 68 million Americans live in some sort of community association [1] and that's constantly rising.
These are essentially hyper-local governments. I can "willingly move" between cities and states and yet city and state governments also can not infringe upon constitutional rights (though they certainly sometimes try).
It doesn't seem like a big stretch to hold HOAs to the same standard when you're talking about putting restrictions on something as fundamental as someone's residence. That isn't to say they aren't allowed to make any rules governing the community.
Some cities/states are effectively or actually forcing all new development to include a HOA as part of the developer opening up that tract of land, under the auspices of reducing the cost of maintenance by foisting that upon the HOA/community directly.
Like the fact that the HOA can lien your house for as little as $100 in dues.
And can then sell your house out from under you.
If you're _really_ unlucky, they'll sell it to a landlord who sits on the board of the HOA, and the board of the HOA will accept the sale for less than half of the market price, with the landlord buying the house being one of the deciding votes...
You are missing something vital. The First Amendment guarantees that the government cannot restrict speech, free association, etc. Homeowners associations are not the government. They are private organizations. You generally agree to follow their rules as part of the contract you sign when purchasing the property.
But why do you have to sign that contract? Why does this private organization have the power to force you to sign a contract before purchasing property? Because the munucipal government has granted them that power.
The way the bill of rights is applied to municipal governments isn't clear, but in my opinion this is an overreach.
Homeowners associations aren't the government, you technically agree to join them when you buy the house. It's "free exchange of goods and services" - quotes to indicate that it really isn't but in the government's eyes it's fine. Social coercion is a powerful force, the same that produces many odd laws.
There are a shocking amount of units in NYC that are full-time Airbnbs. As a New Yorker, I am in favor of legislation that tries to ensure that New York's rental units are occupied by actual residents.
I read somewhere that Amsterdam has a rule that states you can only use your lodging for short-term rental for up to 60 days a year.
This seems like it maintains the sharing spirit of something like AirBnB (rent your place out occasionally when you're away) while preventing the problems that come from people essentially running unregulated hotels..
The problem is enforcement. As it is this law is all about tractability of enforcement, it doesn't change what apartments are or are not allowed to be let/sublet but rather adds a provision that makes it illegal to advertise an illegal unit. This is because the existing law is very difficult to enforce and AirBnB moguls are blatantly flaunting it. This is the same problem with those that suggest that we don't need state laws because condos and co-ops can just enforce their contractual rules. (Also, that argument neglects rental buildings.)
Relaxing the law in the manner you suggest would make it even more difficult to enforce than the law as it stood prior to this addition.
Just like governments demand companies hand over financial information they could demand that AirBnb hands over the list of users and the total stay length.
But you have to do that for every similar service and try and match up records. It would be a nightmare. Landlords would also create different companies/accounts to rent out the max nights per year. It's just not enforceable.
The tax office does this for tens of thousands of companies.
It can easily handle at most a dozen sharing sites. And it's trivial to prevent landlords from registering multiple accounts i.e. make sure no two landlords advertise the same address.
In some of these cities, you also have the issue where people are renting out their state subsidized housing as unregulated hotels. So they aren't even paying market rent for the place in the first place.
We the "people" who are not the "powerful" are getting pushed further away from the center each year chasing afforadable housing. Pretty soon we'll end up in Jersey or Long Island.
Why not just leave the rules up to the property owners? For example, residents can move to properties where landlords have banned Airbnb customers. Wouldn't this be a win/win situation for everyone?
> For example, residents can move to properties where landlords have banned Airbnb customers.
The main problem with this sort of thing is that while it is easy to say that, it isn't actually always an option for folks. This is part of the reason why folks don't always just "move to where jobs are available."
Moving costs money and takes quite an effort. Minimally, for cost you have first month's rent and a deposit, usually equal. Sometimes last month's rent. There are fees for utilities, and sometimes deposits for them if you change companies. Collect boxes: Secure moving vehicles if you don't have something to move large stuff.
Heck, you might not even be able to move for months if the landlord starting allowing it after you signed your lease. Your lease might be against it, but the neighbor's doesn't.
This is truly only a win/win if you have the finances and time to be able to move.
There are many ways! The ones used by myself, my friends, and my family when moving to The Big City and looking for a job/permanent housing included:
1. Couch surfing with friends/family.
2. Youth hostels / YMCA.
3. Renting a terrible apartment cheap, sight-unseen,
breaking the lease early when better options became
available.
4. The Daughters of Divine Charity, et al, run boarding
houses.
5. Rent a place in the outer boroughs, Jersey, Yonkers,
etc, take the train in until you find something
closer.
6. Walk around until you see "room for rent" signs.
7. Check papers, Craiglist for roommates (*actual* room
sharing -- a number of people I know started off
renting a *bed*, not even a bed*room*.)
Ok, I wasn't being entirely literal. The point is AirBnB was just about the only way to find safe, convenient, relatively affordable housing for a few weeks. And it's probably going to get worse now given that this legislation applies to services like Craigslist as well.
AirBNB units make up 1/5 of 1% of the NYC's rental units. A bottleneck? no, but sizable and impactful, especially when you consider that these tend to be clustered around where they're convenient.
Convenient is not the right description -- high demand is. Who's to say an AirBnB is a worse use of space for, say, a unit in SoHo than a year-round resident?
AirBnB has real issues -- zoning, hotel tax, safety, etc -- but politicians like to use rent cost/resident displacement because it's an easy rallying call.
Eh, I don't know that most of the people I knew who sublet half a bedroom would ask themselves that question.
Subletting half a bedroom from a total stranger can be inconvenient and occasionally weird but if you're fresh out of college it's not really that different from the dorm room experience for most people. And it usually costs less than half what an apartment does a month, and is usually month to month or so.
I could have also rented a room for a couple of months while I figured things out (which is still legal, even on Airbnb), but this was a rent stabilized apartment in a nice neighborhood. It's pretty common for deals like that to be rented sight unseen.
Either way, there are many options for moving to the city. This doesn't really make moving to the city significantly more difficult than it has always been.
> It's pretty common for deals like that to be rented sight unseen.
Given the prevalence of the broker industry I'm not sure that's the case.
Either way -- the city only cares because they're missing out on hotel taxes. I don't think the city actually cares too much about who can afford an apartment in the desirable neighborhoods that have a high volume of AirBnBs.
> Given the prevalence of the broker industry I'm not sure that's the case.
I paid a broker that I found on Craigslist. No one said renting an apartment in NYC doesn't suck.
> I don't think the city actually cares too much about who can afford an apartment in the desirable neighborhoods that have a high volume of AirBnBs.
As a resident that lives in one of those desirable Brooklyn neighborhoods that has turned into Times Square for European tourists, I actually do think the city is looking out for me.
> As a resident that lives in one of those desirable Brooklyn neighborhoods that has turned into Times Square for European tourists, I actually do think the city is looking out for me.
Now that's an honest argument: "I just don't like tourists". The whole raising-prices-displacing-real-new-yorkers thing is just disingenuous.
NYC already has a rent-stabilization policy -- so generally speaking they don't. In fact, tourism bolsters the local economy which provides jobs for local residents.
I personally disagree with time spent being a metric for who gets to live here and who doesn't but people don't take kindly to that sentiment in the US.
Rent Stabilization has been in the process of being phased out since 1970:
- Rent Control simply doesn't exist if you or a relative you co-habitated for years with under special conditions lived there before then.
- Rent Stabilization for a unit ends the moment the stabilized rent hits within striking distance of market rate or the number of stabilized units in-building drops below a threshold. More units deregulate every year than are added and this is true year over year as well (sole exceptions to the latter being in 2014 & 2015).
But it's a very slow process: a majority of NYC residents live in below-market-rate housing. And Bill de Blasio's mayor campaign was anchored on preventing "affordable housing" units from leaving the pool, so the rate of decrease may have slowed down.
The law does not prohibit short term AirBnB rentals in general. It prohibits them when the owner does not also occupy the unit. You'd still be able to use AirBnB to rent someone's spare room short term.
What are the numbers? When the numbers were released for SF, it was a number around ~6000. While SF rent laws cause over 30'000 units to stay off the market because landlords don't want to deal with the risk and hassle. And even more potential units are 'off the market' because of building restrictions.
> "smart policy solution that works for the the people, not the powerful"
This is so duplicitous. AirBnB is a for profit company. They have zero skin in the game in terms of exposure to and responsibility for lowered quality of life, apartment hoarding, rental increase, etc.
The hotel industry works within the legal framework of my city. And as far as "power" goes, I'm pretty sure the $30B company playing the role of advocate for the weak and people is pretty powerful in its own right.
[& p.s. the hotel industry, afaik, has a pretty small footprint in terms of side effects on the average resident. Further, it provides a natural cap on the tourist flux in the city, which is a certain plus in my opinion.]
The poster was arguing against something that was never said, I was clarifying. Despite what anyone may think about whether or not the hotel industry is "powerful", the article was describing the hotel industry.
That doesn't change because someone lands on a specific side of the argument and feels they have to make an argument about whether or not the hotel industry is actually powerful. None of that is required in order to understand what the article was saying. And indeed, it actively takes away from it by doing shit like spawning this particular tangent.
Is political self interest nobler somehow than economic self interest?
Even if it was, does it make Airbnb wrong? Should people not be able to freely make living arrangements with whom they choose for arbitrary amounts of time?
> I'd be more interested in knowing how New Yorkers feel about regulating short term apartment rentals than how they feel about sharing.
Around the time when AG Schneiderman first subpoenaed Airbnb's records, Airbnb had a very aggressive advertising campaign in the NYC subway stations. Certain high-traffic stations were plastered with ads proclaiming how "New Yorkers Love Airbnb" and showing "regular New Yorkers" who were using Airbnb.
On my commute each morning, it was interesting to see how those ads would get defaced with graffiti... not just once, but every single day, with new messages in different handwriting. The messages weren't saying anything you wouldn't expect - mostly they were complaints from angry neighbors of people who rented out on Airbnb full-time, or people who had to move because their landlords had decided to turn their apartments into full-time Airbnb rentals[0]. But it was quite amazing to see how persistent the rancor towards Airbnb was. I took some pictures of them, though I wish I'd gotten a true time-lapse of those over the span of the weeks (months?) that the ads were up.
For contrast, advertising campaigns in NYC subways commonly get defaced, but usually over a much longer period of time. And it's rare for it to be in retaliation towards the advertising company - usually it's people drawing beards on women or making off-brand remarks.
[0] Yes, no matter how much Airbnb tries to deny it, this does happen.
>It is commerce. It is unambiguously commerce, it is a pure quid pro quo money for services transaction.
This is the same case for companies like Uber and Lyft. You're paying someone to drive you from Point A to Point B. You aren't sharing a ride, it's just a taxi.
Indeed. Ride sharing is BlaBlaCar, and countless other services that existed locally years (even a decade) before, that facilitated carpooling for work commute. In such a service, the driver advertises that they'll be going from Point A to Point B, and is willing to take passengers (in exchange for fuel money). Any additional money that goes to the service itself is payment for matching drivers and passengers.
Uber and Lyft are not sharing economy, they're taxis. AirBnB is not sharing economy, it's Booking.com meets Craigslist.
If your personal definition of property is such that property has never existed anywhere (except maybe early medieval Iceland) than you don't have a very useful definition.
The first is that there are a ton of rules about owning property, and (for the most part) nobody thinks that any of those other rules mean that it's not really the owner's property. There are zoning laws, for instance: if I own a house, I can't run a business there. If I own an office building, I can't live there. If I own a three-story building, I probably can't knock it down and replace it with a forty-story building. There's the rule of law: if I run a suspected meth lab in my basement, or harbor a suspected criminal in a spare bedroom, the state gets to barge in. There's taxes: if I don't give the state money merely for the privilege of owning property, it gets to take the property back. There are rent control/stabilization laws: depending on what my property is, I can't charge more than a certain amount to rent it out, even if the tenant is willing to pay. There are certainly political theories under which all of those mean that I don't really own the property, but those aren't the theories we live under. Airbnb shouldn't get an excuse just because we want to start theorizing at that particular point.
The second is that, for most rental property in New York, the state is already involved. There are tax exemption programs, subsidies, city services and infrastructure, and all sorts of things without which the building would not have existed in the first place. The state is more than free to set conditions on buildings where it helped with the construction, even if that condition is "We get to set rules arbitrarily forevermore" - if an owner doesn't want to agree, they're welcome to try building without the state's help.
For others who want to be lazy, but not that lazy to forego knowing what that word means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allod (so it seems to be allodial, not alodial, though dictionaries know both)
Please elaborate. I don't follow you. Are you arguing that if I own an apartment, I should be able to rent my apartment out for any purpose? Can I rent it out as a party venue? Can I rent it to 50 people at once? Are you just saying that regulation shouldn't be at the state level?
People staying somewhere for only 10 days have less concern about the neighbours, the building and the community.
The father probably wants his children to be able to sleep without interruption at the weekend, but is more likely to clatter up the stairs drunk at 3am during his 10-day business trip.
Property rights do not exist without the enforcement of the state. Property is essentially a limited contract between the owner and the state, so of course property owners cannot go against the will of the state.
There are many different types of properties. Condominiums and co-ops work very differently. If you are a condo owner and you give someone else your keys for 2 nights, you are violating the contractual rights of everyone else that owns property in the building and putting them at financial risk. The proprietor and state are the not the only parties involved.
that is definitely true for a co-op, and whether or not it is true for a condo is more up in the air. but I suspect you meant to say "co-op" where you said "condo".
Everything I've come to understand as a condo board president is that it is not "up in the air". Court cases have established precedent and we have reasonable by-laws. If we all collectively don't want it, we don't have to have it. Our lawyers tell us what we are doing is perfectly within our rights.
No, I don't think "timeshare" is the same. In a timeshare, there's no exchange of funds between you and the people with whom you're sharing; you and your co-sharers are collectively purchasing a thing from a third party and sharing it (in this case, a rental property). It's like if I said I was "sharing a cab": you would assume I meant some other person or people and I all got in a cab and split the fare. The other passengers and I would be the ones doing the sharing, with each other. The driver is not sharing with us, and I would never use the word "share" to describe taking a cab alone.
New Yorkers don't want AirBnB. We don't want transients in our buildings. There are elderly, there are children, there are women. Vulnerable populations. We have doormen. We pay a lot for our apartments.
I think you're really downplaying the impact the Internet and the acceptance of this market in the minds of consumers has. It's a big deal, and it IS disruptive, and I doubt Cuomo is signing this because he cares about noise complaints in apartment complexes.
I think you're hung up on the kindergarden meaning of "sharing." The word doesn't mean "free" -- it only means to subdivide something amongst multiple people.
We use the word "share" in commerce all the time. Time share, shares in a company, profit sharing, etc.
People at pro-airbnb rallies have chanted "sharing is caring". The reason airbnb so assiduously works to keep the word "sharing" in there is precisely because of the kindergarten meaning.
The legislation allows you to rent a spare room in your house. What it disallows is having an apartment you rent out in full on AirBnB, either doing that exclusively as an income source or yourself staying elsewhere whenever you are renting it out.
Put in that context, the legislation seems pretty well-aimed at its goal of creating more affordable housing in the city.
If you are renting an entire apartment out on AirBnB full time, you are deciding to run an unregulated hotel rather than rent a traditional long-term lease. The city doesn't like that.
> At the cost of higher temporary housing costs for people that want to visit. Addressing supply by ripping supply from a different market is a bandaid.
That's not such a bad thing. The market has demonstrated that hotels and similar will be built until supply mostly meets the demand.
No one will build affordable housing when they can build expensive housing instead.
Affordable cars get built because the market for cars is saturated. Where the supply of some key component of cars a limiting factor on the production capability of car manufacturers, expensive cars would be the only ones produced.
> The market has demonstrated that hotels and similar will be built until supply mostly meets the demand.
Actually I think what we're seeing is precisely that this is not happening. If that were the case, hotel rooms in NYC would not cost 2-3x what they do in the suburbs. The price is high because short term rentals are scarce.
One could argue that "affordable" long-term housing is a market who's supply should take precedence on the temporary housing market. Since the two must, by nature, compete with each other for the same real estate.
This supply was explicitly built for longterm residents - it's written into the zoning laws. If you want to remove the concept of residential zoning, then start building that political platform. Will be interesting to see whether you choose to make residential housing conform to hotel firecodes, etc, in that platform!
I believe the parent poster was expressing a desire to fix the problem by enforcing //more supply// rather than by artificially limiting how existing supply can service different types of demand.
You are viewing this as a zero-sum game. I am viewing it as the city not encouraging economic development and designing a sustainable balance of work, living, and entertainment areas.
Because it is. There is precious little new space for residential buildings in New York. How does people renting out apartments on AirBnB create a "sustainable balance of work, living, and entertainment areas"?
The only solution that's not a band-aid is to kick out multiple property owners, retirees, and generally all non-productive people out of metropolitan areas to drive prices down, while at the same time removing rent controls. Oh and also to remove most of the bullshit NIMBY zoning laws.
But that's obviously not politically feasible now, is it?
> At the cost of higher temporary housing costs for people that want to visit.
You're implying this is a bad thing. A city's first responsibility is towards its residents, everyone else comes after their needs and wants are catered to.
1 minute (though in practical terms that may take a few days), from the moment you registered your address and are able to vote. Everyone else is an outsider.
What new thing could you not argue for by comparing it to higher crime rate? Why stop with crime? Your argument might be even more compelling if you used cholera as your baseline.
Agreed--government playing whack-a-mole again with regulation. Instead, perhaps the regulations governing construction of buildings, zoning, etc are a problem because they inhibit construction that could meet market demand.
A possible metric is limiting competition by keeping existing (likely paid for by hotels and others interested in high lodging/housing costs) barriers to competition in place.
Another possible metric is comparing the benefit to some versus the benefits to others.
The need for rent control at all, as well as the surely depressingly long lines for any waiting list / lottery for rent controlled units, points to a market that has already failed to serve the needs of the community.
Compounding that, the fact that AirBnB or any similar offering is able to so successfully compete with hotels in the area signals that one or more aspects of the hotels is dramatically out of alignment with what the competition that is being eliminated can offer. It /may/ be price, but factored in to that should be the security and piece of mind that a more established name brand and reputation has; possibly the hotels (like Taxis) are doing a poor job upholding a quality brand name, or those that do charge far more than they should if competition were actually a factor for them.
Still, it'd be nice of one of the many people who downvoted my comment in the past few minutes can explain why I wasn't "allowed" to ask that question.
Most Manhattan buildings are large and have many units. If you rent out your apartment a few times a year, how is this fair to your neighbors, who pay the same rent and never agreed to have a bunch of transient guests in the building?
I lived in a Manhattan rental building with a fair amount of AirBNB activity going on -- on any given weekend it seemed like at least one unit on my floor was being rented out. Many of the younger guests were completely obnoxious and disrespectful to common areas. This is an extreme example, but someone even urinated in the stairwell once. And this was a "luxury" building with a well-above-average rental cost.
Of course, renting out your place on AirBNB was against the terms of the lease, but it seemed like the management company never enforced this... which makes sense when you consider how hard/expensive it is to prove, and then evict someone, especially when they're a tenant who pays exorbitant rent on time.
>Most Manhattan buildings are large and have many units. If you rent out your apartment a few times a year, how is this fair to your neighbors, who pay the same rent and never agreed to have a bunch of transient guests in the building?
Do you personally get to vet all your neighbors? No you don't, and the results in pretty much no difference in how things typically play out. If anything, anyone who runs a respectable AirBnB has more information to go on rather than a simple question of will they pay rent.
My opinion is that a person who agrees to live in a building 365+ days is generally going to be far more respectful of the building and neighbors than a person living in a building for just a few days.
This has nothing to do with vetting neighbors. In a rental building, if you have a permanent neighbor who is a nuisance and is violating their lease, this is easier to resolve. For starters, you know their name, where they live, and the owner/manager of their unit.
> Most Manhattan buildings are large and have many units. If you rent out your apartment a few times a year, how is this fair to your neighbors, who pay the same rent and never agreed to have a bunch of transient guests in the building?
How is it fair if you let your druggie sibling come live in the house with you for the entirety of your lease?
It's a completely bullshit excuse, if the neighbor creates a problem, deal with it. If they don't, then don't.
Telling the neighbor what they can and cannot do because you don't like it is not going to be fun when they're allowed to do the same back to you.
> How is it fair if you let your druggie sibling come live in the house with you for the entirety of your lease?
Every NYC lease I've ever signed had a clause forbidding long-term guest stays. Besides, that's a persistent problem, easy and perfectly reasonable to report to management and have them deal with it.
In contrast, occasional AirBNB'ing (a few weekends a year per unit, say) is a lot harder to track down. There were 15 units on my floor, and maybe 4 or 5 of them would occasionally do AirBNB rentals. It's not like there was just one unit doing this constantly, which would have been a lot easier to report.
I also have to mention, you've now posted 3 different comments mentioning this hypothetical "druggie sibling" scenario. I've personally never encountered that situation, despite living in 7 different apartment buildings in 3 major east coast cities over the past 13 years. I have, however, repeatedly encountered disrespectful AirBNB tenants in multiple buildings. I don't really think these situations are even remotely comparable. There's no web site trying to profit from letting "druggie siblings" live with people, nor is there any major wave of this occurring.
> Telling the neighbor what they can and cannot do because you don't like it is not going to be fun when they're allowed to do the same back to you.
Well, since I never rented my place on AirBNB, never had long-term guests, and never otherwise broke major lease provisions... I don't really have anything to worry about there do I?
> Every NYC lease I've ever signed had a clause forbidding long-term guest stays.
That's a red herring, you can add the sibling as an occupant, the point remains.
> I've personally never encountered that situation
Well the reasonable conclusion is that people must not allow family to come live with them if they have druggie problems... /sarcasm
Or a reasonable person might think the point is that the neighbor has no right to insist that a family member cannot come and stay in the house.
You keep doing this so I'm going to end this conversation with you. When you decide to stop throwing out red herrings let me know and perhaps we can continue.
Leases tend to be very clear about the scenario you describe. Ditto for city and state rental laws.
Sure you can add family to the lease in NYC. I never said otherwise. But if your sibling is repeatedly violating the provisions of the lease, and being a nuisance to the other tenants in the building, you can both be evicted. A landlord would rather vacate a problem tenant than have multiple non-renewals due to the nuisance.
I mentioned that I've never personally encountered this situation because I sincerely doubt this is a common scenario here in NYC. Apartments are quite small in Manhattan. Most people have enough sense not to allow a sibling with a drug problem to live in their already-cramped living space long-term.
Regardless, I still don't see how any of this is comparable to transient AirBNB renters being disruptive to one's neighbors. In reponse to GP's claim that this law is only helping hotels, I provided a personal example of whole-unit AirBNB renters negatively impacting my quality of life, in violation of the lease and now in violation of the law as well. You're responding with hypotheticals about a completely different scenario (long-term guests and/or adding people to leases).
I don't know about NYC, but in SF, collection of any sort of hotel tax (or any attempt at following regulation) on these units is a joke.
If having hotel taxes and regulations are otherwise a good thing, why should hotel bookings be exempt if they are made through AirBnB?
If, instead of building a hotel, somebody rents several units in a building and turns them into perpetual AirBnBs, is that fair? What if they are also rent controlled units that the person is turning an additional profit on?
And of course, there are legitimate reasons why you might not want the unit next to yours to be a de-facto hotel. (Having lived next to one, it can be a little frustrating, since every night is party night if you're on vacation!)
>in SF, collection of any sort of hotel tax (or any attempt at following regulation) on these units is a joke.
This is incorrect. If a user on Airbnb requests a stay that qualifies for a Transient Occupancy Tax, Airbnb collects the tax on the transaction and remits it to the City of San Francisco.
If that arrangement were legal and accepted under leases, which it isn't, the value of a lease would appreciate significantly and housing prices would rise accordingly.
And what's to stop the landlord from putting that apartment on Airbnb permanently?
> What it disallows is having an apartment you rent out in full on AirBnB, either doing that exclusively as an income source or yourself staying elsewhere whenever you are renting it out.
How is that well-targeted? What compelling public purpose is served by preventing people from renting out their apartment while they're on vacation?
> Put in that context, the legislation seems pretty well-aimed at its goal of creating more affordable housing in the city.
I really disagree. You can't just ignore supply and demand—the affordability crisis in most popular cities is a testament to how terrible of a policy doing so is.
There are tourists who want to visit NYC and people who want to have short-term sublets. They're not just going to disappear—they're going to drive up the market price for hotels, which will induce the construction of more hotels (and thereby removing "affordable" housing from the market). The worst part is that hotels are vastly less efficient per-foot than AirBNB at fulfilling the needs of many short-term renters. So hotels will end up removing more capacity from the affordable housing market than AirBnB ever did.
The legislation does not allow me to rent out my apartment for a week when I go on vacation, a few times a year. This is by far the primary usage of Airbnb, for people who live in NYC.
Put in that context, the legislation seems pretty well-aimed at its goal of keeping up demand for hotels at the expense of average people getting to recoup a bit of their enormous rent expenditure.
> This is by far the primary usage of Airbnb, for people who live in NYC.
Any sources to research this claim? I'm of the impression the majority of available properties are people who make a living of renting out properties like a hotel.
You are measuring by the number of properties, I'm measuring by fraction of people. I'm pretty sure that my statement is self-evident. Laws can always be introduced, for instance limiting the number of days on Airbnb a particular unit can be placed.
It's the people who want to pass sweeping laws that penalize everyone, instead of something more targeted, who are obligated to provide sources and research.
As someone who uses Airbnb regularly I can assure you the majority are either people who use one empty room as a hotel or the whole place. I see very very few "I'm going away for the weekend / week / month" listings. The whole rating system rewards people who have consistent and frequent lodging available.
I'm renting an apartment in Brooklyn next week from someone who is going to be out of town for a while. Basically our trips overlap and so I get the whole apartment. It would seem that since the host wont be present my arrangement is technically against the law. It seems to me that it shouldn't be.
INAL and this is not legal advice. This is my understanding based on looking into this change a while ago (they have been lobbying NYC residents hard) but I haven't looked at what got passed.
Subletting is generally legal in NYC and lease provisions banning it aren't allowed in most cases. What isn't allowed is subletting for more than you are paying in rent. If the host was charging more than his rent it was already illegal to perform the sublet and it is now illegal to advertise the illegal sublet.
If he is charging the same amount or less than it continues to be legal to both perform the sublet and advertise the legal sublet on platforms like AirBnB.
You're allowed to charge a premium (since you paid for the furniture, utensils, utilities, cleaning, etc). The maximum amount of that premium however is limited by law.
If it is a condominium you can be sure that the by-laws of the building stipulate the minimum allowable sublet term. You can be guaranteed it won't be less than 30 days.
When I first moved to New York, I spent weeks living in an AirBnB place before finding a real apartment. Same thing when I moved to London. I could have found a place via other means (Craigslist, or pay tons of money to some real estate agent) but this was much better.
This will inhibit mobility and hurt newcomers to the city, especially in the young technology/creative classes. But what sort of politician would actually care, as long as they're not politically active in our jurisdiction yet, am I right?
As someone who happened to be a young adult before the advent of iPhones and AirBnB I can promise you that it was indeed possible for people to do things without technologies available since 2010.
I successfully moved to a number of different cities with neither money nor job prospects. It involved using the ancient human rituals of "using a telephone", "riding the bus", "speaking with other persons" and "walking around".
In the process I had to deal with some minor inconveniences and sometimes things didn't go exactly the way I wanted. The horror!
Yes, but these days, that kind of stuff is only something old or even the poor people might do. You're clearly old, QED! I, however, am a liberty loving rugged individual, so treating me that way is unacceptable.
Can't you just understand: what you're advocating is pretty much legal torture of high-income Americans on a site about Web 2.0 startups?!?!? /s
What folksinger is snarkily and rudely trying to say is that there are other short-term alternatives, such as motels. Also, any listings made by people physically present would have been legal.
I agree that it limits mobility but the law also protects residents from constant, disruptive behavior from serial short-term renters.
I have never lived near a serial short-term rental, but I imagine I would dislike it if I lived next door to one.
My understanding is that it doesn't change the legal status of rental situations, e.g. running an illegal hotel is still illegal. What it does do is make AirBnB responsible for making sure that the listings on its platform are legal. This seems reasonable to me, but its pretty obvious why AirBnB doesn't like it.
By making capital utilisation less efficient, and impairing the development of new capital that would be used for housing in New York (which would take the pressure off older housing, lowering prices).
Of course, if you're talking about ways that New York City makes housing capital less efficient, you're going to have a list some five miles long, so it's really just adding insult to injury, but one can still gripe about it.
I thought you were saying that this bill would raise rents, but it sounds like you actually meant that Airbnb-ing an apartment raises rents, is that right?
Isn't it more like 995k apartments for rent, and 5k hotels? The difference between 10% and 0.5% matters when you're arguing that AirBnB significantly reduces the supply of housing in NYC.
Depends how elastic the supply is. If those 1 million units, what if only 50k turn over each year? So 50k vs 55k units available could have a doubt digit influence on price.
You should't assume that airbnb conversions would turn over 20x as frequently as the existing apartments. So it wouldn't 50k vs. 55k, but 50000 vs. 50250.
Sure, there might be a big spike in supply on airbnb-banishment-day, but then those apartments get rented and we're back to approximately the place we started, as far as long-term rents go, only without airbnb the tourists and property owners are worse off.
1. There's regulation preventing landlords from raising rents too fast; often capping it at a much slower rate than the market itself is increasing
2. Once a tenant leaves, the landlord is free to increase the rent a lot more to catch up with the market
3. Therefore, if someone is Airbnb-ing an apartment they have lease on and living somewhere else, this decreases supply and causes other apartments to go up more in step (2) to make up for it
Maybe this is wrong? If so, can someone correct me?
Your understanding is incorrect. This only applies to rent controlled, and rent stabilized apartments. Most NYC apartments are neither of these, and rent stabilized itself has ceased to be effective in many cases.
The scenario you're describing is possible, kind of, maybe. Usually rent controlled apartments also have pretty strict laws about subletting, to prevent this exact kind of thing (and this is all legislation that predates airbnb).
Yep. As if we were dumb enough to believe any of the following:
“In typical fashion, Albany back-room dealing rewarded a special interest — the price-gouging hotel industry — and ignored the voices of tens of thousands of New Yorkers,” Airbnb spokesman Peter Schottenfels said in a statement. “A majority of New Yorkers have embraced home sharing, and we will continue to fight for a smart policy solution that works for the the people, not the powerful."
What, that their true colors are bog standard corporate PR suggesting without actually stating that their own interests are coterminous with all ordinary persons, but none of the ill defined elite?
In the Tesla and iPhone discussions people are furious that you don't "own" these things any more - Apple and Tesla put limits on what you can and can't do.
Here we are talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of property, and you can't rent it out if you choose?
So do you own it, or not? If I own it, I want to do what I want with it.
>The legislation allows you to rent a spare room in your house. What it disallows is having an apartment you rent out in full on AirBnB, either doing that exclusively as an income source or yourself staying elsewhere whenever you are renting it out. [...] If you are renting an entire apartment out on AirBnB full time, you are deciding to run an unregulated hotel rather than rent a traditional long-term lease.
As you acknowledge, there are things in between renting out an apartment full-time, and renting out a spare bedroom. E.g. renting your apartment for a weekend when you travel. This makes it possible for many people to afford to live in NYC.
>As you acknowledge, there are things in between renting out an apartment full-time, and renting out a spare bedroom. E.g. renting your apartment for a weekend when you travel.
Sure, but how does a lawmaker regulate and enforce "it's OK to rent out a spare room, or rent out an apartment while you travel, but it's not okay to only use the apartment as a hotel?"
What if someone travels 90% of the time - that's darn close to just running it as a hotel. Should there be some numerical limit? 50% of nights? How does the city check and enforce that? What if someone has a significant other or family member they can always stay with and are always willing to rent their apartment if someone is willing to rent it from them? Is that OK?
A strict "you must be present in the abode and renting a spare room" rule is over-broad, but trying to make and enforce a more narrowly tailored rule seems very difficult in implementation. With this rule, you can just check each ad - an ad will be allowed or disallowed on its face.
If you allow for occasional renting-while-traveling, you need rules for how much "traveling" is OK and you need a more complex system to monitor whether an ad is legal. Is it a legal occasionally-rented-whiled-"traveling" space or illegal because it is a too-often-occasionally-rented space?
It seems to me like this is best left up to individual building associations and landlords. Maybe it's time to deregulate hotels a bit too, since online reviews have corrected a lot of the information asymmetry that the regulations were trying to deal with in the first place.
>It seems to me like this is best left up to individual building associations and landlords.
That is to say "I think that this issue shouldn't be regulated" or "I disagree with this law." And it's fine to think either of those.
But if you decide that you don't want these unregulated-essentially-hotels existing (which the lawmakers apparently decided), how to craft that into law that is practical to monitor and enforce?
The legislation does a good job of creating a clear rule that can be implemented by scanning the advertisements. More complex rules that sometimes allow renters to use the whole apartment would suffer from more complex monitoring requirements.
Woah, wait. There are "many people" who can only afford to live in NYC if they rent out their apartment when they travel? I have so many questions. How much do they make? How much is their rent? How much do their vacations cost? How much do they make from airbnb?
While I typically would support a tech company, and this is not to say that I'm not pro-technology and want smarter legislation to keep track with technology advances, the opposition does have some good points.
Having only recently become able to afford my own apartment, it appears to me that this legislation is, at its core, designed for the purpose of renter protection. Housing prices are literally insane in metropolitan areas across America. (LA here). Illegal sublets are already endemic, and were I to own property, or even have a year long lease, the ROI from AirBnBs/subletting would definitely be enticing. I won't assert I'm a moral paragon, but there are many landlords less scrupulous than I am.
The problem is that, with AirBnB and sublets come ever increasing rent, eventually pricing huge numbers of people out, which drives down productivity and growth. Uninhibited illegal sublets/hotels create a weird bubble at the very bottom of the housing market, which serves to exert upward pressure on prices across the board, since if one room is now worth $800-$1000/month, a studio apt jumps from $1100 to $1300, and so on and so forth.
> The problem is that, with AirBnB and sublets come ever increasing rent, eventually pricing huge numbers of people out, which drives down productivity and growth.
AirBnB aside, the cities with the highest housing prices, and the highest recent increases in housing prices, also have the highest economic growth by far.
In theory, people like service workers will be driven out, the local economy will suffer, yadda yadda yadda. In practice, that has never happened. In San Francisco area, for example, rents have more than doubled in the past five years, the economy has boomed, thousands of new jobs were created, and there are still enough service workers, restaurant workers, municipal employees, etc. to do the jobs that need to be done. If you look at the most expensive cities worldwide, e.g. London, Paris, Moscow, Tokyo, etc., you will find similar situations.
If you want to argue for affordable housing on the basis that it is a social good, that's fine. But there is no evidence that high housing prices have driven down productivity and growth.
Except those service workers probably now have significantly longer commutes. Their quality of life suffers. I don't know how broadly your definition of service workers goes, but this affects teachers, police officers, firefighters, etc.
I don't think the parent poster would disagree with you. What they're saying is that the decreased quality of life for service industry workers hasn't lead to a negative effect on the economy.
I already addressed this in my original post. It seems obvious that the displacement of workers would hurt the economy. However, it does not seem to actually happen -- the cities with the highest housing prices have the highest growth of any cities in the world.
> What they're saying is that the decreased quality of life for service industry workers hasn't lead to a negative effect on the economy.
Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. High housing prices don't seem to hurt the economy. Quality of life arguments, whether they are right or wrong, are totally unrelated to that proposition.
The unfortunate thing is that common sense dictates that productivity should be going down with quality of life, but apparently, it isn't. Or at least, nobody has been able to demonstrate a correlation yet.
Quality of life can go down while excess productivity has been captured by corporations and distributed to shareholders.
As productivity went up over the last 40 years, we should've reduced the work week. [1] We didn't. And now we have corporations with trillions of dollars of cash they can't or won't invest [2], and tens of millions of workers who continue to slave away 40 hours a week.
As odbol_'s sibling comment states, most of HN's demographic doesn't see this despair or care.
You're abusing the law of averages though. Yes, productivity might be fine for the most "economically productive" members of society (e.g. programmers, middle managers, aka the privileged.) For everyone else, aka the people on minimum wage, their productivity and quality of life is severely hampered. But since if one janitor is forced to quit their job because the 3-hour commute is no longer worth minimum wage, they can just go find another person desperate enough to work for minimum wage. These people are often ignored and have no real public voice/outlet to let their plights be known. But of course, plenty of rich programmers on a Hacker forum don't think anything's wrong, because nothing's wrong _for them_.
> In San Francisco area, for example, rents have more than doubled in the past five years, [...] and there are still enough service workers, restaurant workers, municipal employees, etc.
> The loss is not to the area. It's to the people who could have gone there, but can't due to housing prices.
Since we are talking about the productivity and economic growth of the area, rather than the salaries and quality of life of people who aren't in the area, how is this relevant?
I see your point but I don't think we have enough data to conclude. SF rents have drastically changed in the last handful of years. Service workers still show up but by forcing them to either pay more for rent in city or forcing them out of the city to cheaper residence their quality of life decreases. Less time with family or less money for family, pick your poison. This is the problem with those service workers in this context.
Someone will always fill the gap though so I suppose my argument doesn't hold much either. If enough service workers leave big cities for cheaper living and shorter commutes these heavily populated areas will have to start paying more to incentivize people to work in downtown areas. So essentially its a supply and demand problem like any other.
Perhaps there is no argument here at all and it just sucks for some people who are less financially well off.
It's a shame it's come to this, but I'm sympathetic to NYC here. AirBnB had the time, resources, and advance notice to modify their policies and offerings in ways that allowed real homeowners to use the system but keep greedy land owners from running unregulated hotel chains.
AirBnB chose to keep the money hose pouring instead. They implicitly encouraged owners to operate in a way that violated the spirit of moderate, sensible couch sharing.
Agreed -- I even tried to contact them as the legal representative for our building to give them a chance to "fix" the situation and they refused to take down rental ads in our building after we stated it was both against building by-laws and NYC law.
"Although we are unable to evaluate private contract terms and cannot arbitrate these disputes, we will share your letter with the user responsible for the listing."
Gee, thanks. Notice -- no mention of violation of NYC law in the response.
Everyone usually frames this debate as compensating the little man instead of lining the rich pockets of the hotel industry. I have personally not seen this. I am a NYC condo owner and I do not know a single other condo owner that I have met that welcomes illegal short-term renters in their buildings. We enacted a $1000/day fine in our building against the owner on record if we catch someone doing this. We invested in real estate in this city and all signed contracts agreeing that only long-term subleases would be allowed (>= 12 months), and so we are upholding those contracts. Just because someone wants to visit the city and not stay in a hotel does not mean that all the other unit owners in a particular building want you there. It is not just a transaction between you and whoever hands you the keys. The last 2 Airbnb cases in our building were legal long-term subletters themselves listing the apartment on Airbnb without the owner's knowledge. There is so much straight-up illegal activity going on it's not even funny.
It's extra work for the management company / Board, but one of the primary drivers is that all the people in the building don't want a constant stream of people moving in/out. Expanding it to minimum 12-month leases means less disruption to people living in the building.
There is always a gap between someone moving out and the next person moving in; you need time to clean out the older renter and set up for the new. You have to do new paperwork, background check, etc. Every person you rent to has a chance of being a deadbeat; increasing your number of renters per year by 4x increases the deadbeat chance by the same amount.
Short-term renters do NOT treat the property the same as long-term renters, and renters in general treat property much worse than owners. It lowers the quality of life in the building when residents aren't on the same page.
I don't mean that I support NYC's blanket regulation, but any condo owner would have known the situation before they bought the unit. If they desired a income property they could have purchased elsewhere.
You would need to be away for at least 30 days and your prospective tenant would need to sign a lease for at least 30 days. Then, under this legislation, it's kosher, and would be governed by your own tenancy agreement/coop board/whatever.
Yeah, I'm not asking for an explanation of the law. I understand how it works, and that's the problem. It bans the usecase of allowing people to rent out while they travel, which wasn't the stated intention of the law.
The last Airbnb I stayed in was obviously lived in, but the fellow was temporarily out - probably with his GF. The one before that was a really nice spare cottage in the backyard of a couple grandparents. Both experiences were far better than any hotel, even fancy ones. I'm really bummed at this response to airbnb.
If Airbnb had rules regarding non-share rentals that restricted repeated listings of them they wouldn't have this problem. Yes this law is slightly heavy-handed in that it blocks someone that goes on a trip from time to time from booking their places out, but that is not the majority of listings on Airbnb. The majority of full apartment rentals are people that are running illegal hotels basically. This is hurting real hotels that have much more regulation, and decreasing availability of housing in a city that is getting more residents every year than the entire population of most other places in the USA.
Also when you are living in Manhattan, you do not want to have someone different in the place down the hall or above you every day. These people staying short term have no onus to respect neighbors. Airbnb knows that professional illegal sub-letters are the bulk of their business and is not stopping it. Renting a ski cabin out weekly is a lot different than renting out an apartment in the most densely populated city in the USA.
Our tiny town had creative citizens stop the only ab&b house on a residential street.
Tell an&b tenants they are not wanted and to state that in their reviews
Take all their street parking spaces
Call the police nightly to say strangers are in neighbors house and she is away
Eventually the city council ruled against the homeowner due to zoning (not a business)
The situation was very ugly.
Perhaps there should be an an&b companion list where potential an&b renters can see if the property is "friendly neutral or hostile" I would have used that
The way I see it is: you can either have a city where ALL the residents of the city can afford to live (esp. service workers, teachers, elderly folks on a fixed income, etc), or you can have one where those with the expendable capital buy up most of the available housing to use a short term rentals to increase their income further. I'd rather live in a city where many different kinds of people can find a place to live than one where only those with the most money can stay.
To be clear: I'd support density limits for AirBnBs without an outright ban and am totally fine with people renting out extra rooms on a short or long term basis. Unrestrained short term rentals seem to clearly drive up the price of property and end up benefiting mostly those who already have the means to own a place to live.
> This is an issue that was given careful, deliberate consideration, but ultimately these activities are already expressly prohibited by law
So basically the city/state failed to respond to AirBnB illegal activities in short period of time hence letting them thrive and built a multi-billion dollar business.
Would that be a key to successful startup? Same thing happened with Uber. So is there any other branch of industry one can try to disturb that would violate local/state laws but such violation would take decent amount of time to stop you in reasonable time before you are "worth" billions? (okay, other than selling drugs which most of us and Ulbritch know will put you in jail for a long time).
> In typical fashion, Albany back-room dealing rewarded a special interest — the price-gouging hotel industry
Wow, that's pretty strong allegations. Does he have any proof of such illegal activity? If so, did AirBnB did anything to report it? In all seriousness, I frankly doubt there is such a big monopoly so that its impossible to open your own hotel and compete price-wise with others.
> and ignored the voices of tens of thousands of New Yorkers
Okay well I can find millions or criminals locked in jails saying it should be fine to kill people - is that a good enough reasoning?
They also claim Cuomo action infringe on 4th amendment. Can someone stretch it hard enough for me to actually see it Peter's way??
What is the proper amount of short term rentals in a city?
Should a particular building be used for housing or rentals?
I know I don't know the exact answer, but the reality is that politicians don't either. These questions are better solved by pricing, the mechanism that actually directs resources to their most valued ends rather than political edict (which as we all know is influenced heavily by whoever is able to grease the most politicians).
Politicians can't react accurately and quickly to rapidly changing supply and demand. The market has an actual signal that does this rapidly and provides incentive to do so.
Anything that disrupts this is just another example of corrupt government benefiting their contributors to the detriment of real prosperity.
Agree 100%. I think that the city of New York has no business putting limitations on how a property (that you own) can be used and leased. If you have a community/association that's making those rules, fine... that's fair. It's fair because you agree to their terms prior to purchasing the property. If you rent a property and the lease explicitly disallows subletting, fine. That's fair too. Rules and laws should be granular, specific to their locality, rather than vast sweeping blankets.
I'm also in favor of zoning for residential and business, that makes sense. But there's a big difference between someone operating a high foot-traffic business out of their home, and seeing an occasional stranger walk into a residence every other day or so.
If there are no specific rules that a localized community has agreed on, then Airbnb should be fair game. Why should the municipal government make the rules?
> '“In typical fashion, Albany back-room dealing rewarded a special interest — the price-gouging hotel industry — and ignored the voices of tens of thousands of New Yorkers,” said Josh Meltzer, head of the company’s New York public policy.'
> 'New York City is the company’s largest market in the United States. The city’s hosts generated about $1 billion in revenue last year, and the company took a cut of that amount in fees.'
From this article, AirBnB wasted millions of dollars lobbying to go against the will of the people. Amazing.
The quote is wrong. New Yorkers value their safety. They don't want transients in their buildings. There are children, there are elderly, there are women. Perhaps AirBnB should have hired someone who lives in a NYC apartment. They would have explained the importance of safety to the AirBnB executives.
It seems impossible that executives of AirBnB do not understand that safety in apartment buildings is important. Perhaps their vision is blurred by the fees they make on the $1 billion in annual revenues.
There are laws in New York City that say (with good reason) that you can't just turn your home into a hotel. New York is simply enforcing the law.
If Airbnb really has the public support they claim then it should be easy to change the law. The reality is a lot (likely vast majority) of New Yorkers really don't want the status quo to change. The politicians know this and hence why they took this path.
Maybe this is good law in New York City because its so dense and everyone is stepping on one another, but its not good law for the entire, gigantic state of New York.
My cousin does cleaning and management of vacation rentals in the Catskills, in parts of New York that used to be vibrant but are now extremely economically depressed and taxed exorbitantly.
Forbid vacation rentals that violate noise ordinances, don't cast generalization blankets and act out of prejudice.
As someone who's spent the last 3 months living in AirBnB units and sublets in NYC and doesn't have any desire to commit to a year-long rental lease, this is disappointing.
AirBnB makes the market more efficient by increasing the supply of housing that otherwise wouldn't be available and provides more alternatives to signing a lease and wading through scams on Craigslist.
If NYC is serious about providing affordable housing, then this would at best be a temporary band-aid patch while they actually tackle the real problem - building more affordable housing. Of course the government isn't actually interested in solving the problem, so blaming AirBnB is more convenient.
I agree with this. AirBNB is being used for politicians to add to their perception of support for affordable housing. Yes, there are landlords that amass units to rent them out short-term because they profit more.
But when it comes to a short-term rental versus a hotel, are we going to shed a tear for the hotel rooms not rented out that cost 300+ a night?
The city had 8M residents in 2000, it has 8.5 today. AirBNB's impact on affordability is grossly exaggerated, given the host of other factors that lead to a high demand to live in New York City: the economy and quality of life being a main one.
If anything, the law should apply to people who do this on large scale. I find it frustrating that New York housing regulations, from the DOB regulations, procedure and housing code, to laws like these, sweep the little guy in with laws and threats of fines when the 'popular discourse' criticizes big landlords and large operations.
Without going into any detail, sometimes it's just easier to rent to friends and family or leave units vacant than it is to deal with some of the BS regulations that cost you as a landlord. One example is that tenant protections can cost you, a landlord, 6-9 months of unpaid rent legally if you have a professional con (which some tenants know how to be, milking a system while they await to be evicted). As another example, 2008 and esp. 2014 housing code requires sprinkler systems in buildings with three units and above. If you have a building that is large enough to have more than two units, you're better off keeping only two units because it'll be cost-prohibitive. That's one less apartment to help fix the undersupply. And the city makes this expensive by forcing you to use architects, contractors, plumbers, expediters and then getting all the various inspections; meanwhile you're subject to the same requirements as a big developer with large staff. So you're out 100K, what do you do? You either go the illegal route, or you have a 'storage area', or a 'recreation area'.
I'm not really thrilled about this decision. I honestly feel the real winner here is the hotel industry. We'll continue to face the pain of a lack of supply and a high demand.
You can still rent an airbnb for a period of over 30 days (so, 31 days) legally with these regulations. Do you find yourself wanting to move around more often than that?
I think this is a pretty good compromise all things considered - I've gotten very tired of people spending 72 hours in the apartment across the hallway from me and generally being nuisances the entire time.
as a tourist that really likes nyc, i can't stay for 30+ days and 15 days at a hotel is too expensive (as in, i can't cook my own meals at a hotel) this affects me a lot. i guess i won't be going back to nyc so soon.
Very surprised to see all the (or any) Airbnb negativity here. I've been living in an Airbnb for about 2 months now (as a tenant, not a host) and plan to continue doing so indefinitely. The experience is infinitely better than renting from your typical rental company (and at a comparable price, with Airbnb's monthly discounts), and I don't think I could ever go back.
Unfortunately, this just sounds like NYC is making it more difficult for visitors to come check out the city, which is regrettable at best.
Hopefully this bill does not also apply to long-term Airbnb rentals also.
Indefinitely? Are you sacrificing the rights and protections put in place for tenants? I'm not sure where you are located, but where I rent I have legal protection for stuff. Temperature control, eviction warning and so on. Seeking out a proper rental agreement with a landlord (not company, just a property owner) seems like a far better idea.
Honestly, I've never had to directly deal with the rights and protections put in place for tenants when I rented from landlords/companies (for the past ~6 years), and had experiences ranging from negative to "meh".
I've only had positive experiences with Airbnb (so far at least). I rent the entire home so things like temperature control aren't an issue, and in the two instances where 1) a host was unavailable to check me in on arrival, and 2) a host needed to end a contract early,
Airbnb went out of their way to rectify the situation (calling the tenant every 10 minutes until they responded for #1, and offering equal-cost-per-night lodging at a hotel of my choice for both #1 and #2). I would never expect a landlord to go through that, honestly.
FWIW, I'm located in the NL but I've also stayed at Airbnbs in the US and Canada, and have the next 7 months of Airbnb rentals (3 months per place) already booked.
I would definitely (honestly, not being facetious here) be interested in what rental rights I'm missing out on by renting through Airbnb, and how realistic it is that I'd actually need them outside of something crazy happening (I have insurance for most of those cases).
> “For too long companies like Airbnb have encouraged illegal activity that takes housing off the market and makes our affordability crisis worse,” she said. “They have sat idly by while unwitting ‘hosts’ are evicted for breaking their leases, unscrupulous landlords drive out tenants to profit off the short-term market, and tourists are put in danger by staying in unregulated, unaccountable, and often dangerous illegal hotels.”
I think the danger is exaggerated but otherwise, I tend to agree that Airbnb is perfectly happy to profit off of tenants who break agreements set by their city or community organization and play innocent about the legality. And now, in my city at least, units that are owned and operated purely as short-term rentals which in addition to making it less affordable for people who actively want to purchase a place, also disrupt residents. One condo building for example is pretty much known as a Airbnb hotel as residents often see visitors clogging the lobby with luggage and/or endure loud parties. There's something to be said when residents are delighted when Airbnb'ers have a crap experience so that they stop coming to the building.
I live in NYC and I can tell you that New Yorkers do not want AirBnB. We do not want transients in our apartment buildings. We want our safety. Many of us have doormen that keep people out.
There are children, there are elderly. The executives and the VC firms that fund them show absolutely no respect for New Yorkers who value our safety.
> "Cuomo’s signature underscores a concern from companies that operate within the “sharing economy” that New York remains unreceptive to newer technologies that threaten some within certain industries, such as the hospitality and taxi industries."
This quote from the article is false. We highly value Uber/Lyft/Gett. New Yorkers love high technology: we have the only 24/367 Apple Store in the nation. We have a 24 hour Best Buy. Same Day Delivery from a number of different vendors. ClassPass, MealPal, MoviePass, CUPS, the list is a long one and some of these firms were first started in NYC.
What seems clear to New Yorkers is that AirBnB executives do not value safety.
There's no way to not come off as snarky here, but you keep saying 'New Yorkers want this' and 'clear to New Yorkers' that. Do you have polls to back this up? Otherwise this rhetoric reads like a quote from a politician or talk radio. My question is, how do you know the majority of people agree with you?
Airbnb doesn't seem to mind saying that New Yorkers want airbnb because "thousands" of them say so. Doesn't seem hard to imagine there are a thousand New Yorkers who don't, justifying the opposite claim.
We all value our safety. Many, many buildings have doormen to keep people out to help protect safety. There is a lot of crime in big cities. I don't know anyone that wants transients in their building.
The people AirBnB is referring to are simply those who want to rent their places out for additional money.
I think AirBnB could care less about the safety of children, elderly, women, and others. I have seen no acknowledgement that people living in apartment buildings value their safety.
> I think AirBnB could care less about the safety of children, elderly, women, and others.
Well, I'm very happy to hear that you, living in NYC, do not feel threatened by transients. I wasn't referring to myself but children, elderly, and women.
If if physically able men don't feel threatened, there are others that should be protected from harm from transients.
EDIT: I see by your other comments that you don't even live in NYC! You are complaining about hotel rates > $60. Those of us that live here in NYC value the safety of protecting children, elderly neighbors, women, and our property from transients.
For short term stays, go to Union City NJ which is just across from the Lincoln Tunnel (42nd St). A simple priceline search shows $60 per day.
Please show sensitivity to others that value their safety and those of their neighbors.
This talk of "transients" is preposterous and, frankly, dubious. What do you think "transients" are? Roving bands of criminals?
Your comment is the most pathetic example of "think of the children" I have ever seen. Do you have any examples of material harm being done to children by Airbnb guests?
As someone in NYC then, you know that Union City, NJ is very close to Times Square by transit and has low-cost hotel rooms, so I don't understand your complaint. Transit-wise these hotels are much closer to Times Square than many places parts of NYC.
I don't know anyone that wants transients in their buildings and the threat to children, women, and children is a real one. Let people go to Union City, NJ and get their hotel rooms.
They are transients and one of the reason for doormen is to create a protected environment. We don't have that with transients. Is there a reason why they can't go to Union City, NJ and use a proper hotel/motel?
Honestly, the only people I know of in NYC that are for this are those that want to rent out their apartment, room, etc. on AirBnB which can risk the safety of their neighbors, esp. the vulnerable ones.
> evidence of actual harm caused to children....
I said children, elderly, women. These are all vulnerable populations. There is also the chance of theft once someone is beyond the doorman or is inside the building.
I am honestly baffled why anyone would want transients in their apartment buildings unless they were making money from the transients.
Incidentally, this crazy idea that AirBnB is trying to sell that is the unions and the hotel industry that only want these regulations seem to leave out inexpensive hotels that in places like Union City, NJ are very convenient to Times Square and are very inexpensive. These hotels are in a convenient location and they are inexpensive and available.
I am glad that this bill was signed because I'm tired of having people in my building who I don't know and do not trust. Everyone in my coop is vetted by the Board of Directors before living here - why should AirBnb users be any different?
Not necessarily. Many buildings including my own have rent-stabilized/controlled units that are still managed by the original owner of the building. The Board of Directors has little influence over these units.
Additionally, some of the people who have been caught AirBnBing are original members of the coop, so no vetting was required 30+ years ago.
Interestingly, instances of Airbnbing went down significantly after all residents were sent reminders that they could lose their proprietary leases if they were caught running hotels out of their respective apartments.
AirBnb can't be surprised, NYC is one of the most contentious markets for renters and landlords. There's far more tenants than potential AirBnb landlords. While the hotel industry may well have made campaign contributions to sway the legislature & governor, the fact is that rental regulations are the third rail of NY/NYC politics and anything that screws tenants, as the rise of AirBnb has, is bound to get slapped down.
Look, if you come into a highly regulated and highly personal market as AirBnb did in NYC, you simply can't be surprised at the reaction by politicians, if you are then you are incredibly naive.
Airbnb profits from high volume and turnover, just as landlords and Realtors get their cut every time there's a turnover in occupancy. Interestingly, this is the root problem at both ends -- from people living in poverty (Portland's sidewalk tent campers who get shuffled around), those suburbanites affected by the housing "crisis", and those who can afford to own in any upscale hip-n-trendy neighborhoods where Airbnb rentals are desperately sought. Those rooting for turnover are usually those who profit the most from it.
Sure, people travel and need to rent rooms once in a while. People like to rent while they're young and mobile, but the two use cases need very serious and separate delineation from each other. Airbnb is pushing them more into "overlap" territory. Airbnb's expansion into "subletting" was the kicker.
So, long story made short: it's an interesting economics problem I've been working on solving in my spare time, as a very long and iterated side project with Ecosteader (ecosteader.com). Some of the details emerging need a better format for communication; however, the most clear thing to come from my research is that people need to _own_, and they need to be able to transact with each other directly. Middlemen (Airbnb is the middleman here) taking significant commissions is part of the problem.
But the middlemen problem has sort of an obvious solution: to tax rental income so aggressively that it's just not an appealing source of investment to people who invest in rentals. Use the tax generated from over-inflated rents to build properties for sale, and/or figure out a way to use that money to grant-deed land on which people can build. This last option seems the more fun opportunity to me, and is what I originally had in mind building an eco- site.
The homesteading movement needs to come back, adapted a bit for the 21st century.
I don't see what the big deal is. AirBNB can turn normal citizens into landlords. The best hosts will actually take care of their apartment. So in theory the Free Market protects the interests of both hosts and renters.
Maybe? That's one possible way it can play out. NYC really tries to protect the landlord's interests rather than the tents. NYC would be a different place if normal people (who aren't millionaires) actually owned their places.
Free market could drive prices even higher than they are today. I don't know.
It's unbelievable how many people in this thread are supporting AirBnB with ridiculous arguments like it's not a business or the government can't regulate what you do with your house.
Isn't there a point where the quantity of astroturfing becomes counter-productive?
I've still not been able to figure out how in many cities I can rent a room in an apartment for less than a room in a hotel. How does the hotel industry not have huge economies of scale? Are the hotel taxes and cost of extra fire codes impacting the price that much?
Anyone know if it is still legal to rent one of your rooms on airbnb if you are also staying there at the same time? Like if I have a two bedroom apartment, can I still rent out one of them on a daily/weekly basis if I am staying in the other?
Wasn't there a study done that shows Airbnb hosts actually account for a small fraction of the homes? I'd really like to see these politicians back up these claims with some data. Where do they get this information from?
It seems highly suspect that this could cause a decrease in units on the market that is anywhere close to affecting the housing problems in NYC.
Whenever I see a politician throw out the word "senior" and "quiet enjoyment" I smell a rat. The more obvious answer is the hotels don't like this kind of competition (staying in an Airbnb is infinitely better than a Hotel) and have bribed these politicians.
Wasn't Andrew Cuomo in the center of all the mortgage scandal stuff years back? Can this guy just go away?
I escaped NYC and moved to a neighboring state, along the coast, in a tourist town in a relatively economically depressed area.
I grew up in this town, and it used to be vibrant and vital and full of young families. It has gotten older, as the younger generation has not been able to afford to take on the homes of their parents, as the job market is not strong.
I bought a waterfront three family house, a house that used to be one owner, and one or two tenants on the other floors.
I renovated the house, and furnished the other floors. It took me all summer, doing the work myself. I have been renting the other two floors out on airbnb and other sites. I love it.
I feel like I have reclaimed my house from other tenants. I own the whole house, yes I let in guests for a few days on the other floors, but they leave, and I can go back into the floors when they are not booked.
I can have a change of scenery, and I get income from this whole thing.
I love this. I don't want to rent to long term tenants. Its a house, but divided into apartments for each floor. I want to control it. I like taking guests but I dont want to sell a floor for a year.
It books well on these sites because its waterfront and in a tourist area. Its a lot of work. A lot of work. I have to scrub showers and toilets and make beds, and I only get a few hours in between guests many days. But the money is good and its a form of early retirment for me.
I don't see any externalities to the neighbors, in fact the neighbors are better off living next to a vacation rental than a multi family house.
In a multi family investment propery the incentives are all about putting in as little money as possible. In a vacation rental its all about making it look as nice as possible.
The extra margin of the vacation rental makes all the difference. Now I care about reviews, so now I want the outside to be professionally landscaped. Now I want the lawn to be perfectly manicured. I want the siding to be nice cedar shingles, I want it to look perfect.
Because people rate your house on the basis of whether or not its nicer than their house at home. If its nicer, they give you 5 star reviews and that helps your listing SEO, if its less nice than their house they give you 4 stars and that hurts your listing.
So if I lived in this neighborhood, I would want to live next to a vacation rental. It is a higher class of occupant. Instead of working class tenants that can afford 1000 a month, you get professionals that can put 1000 on a credit card 4 months ahead of time for their kids graduation weekend.
So its a form of gentrification. But its also a service to the community. In the spring, summer and fall months where demand is high I am doing short term vacation rentals. But in the winter months I am opening up a fully furnished place to people who may be between houses.
The working class renters have plenty of options in the less desirable, more inland parts of town. And those options will stay because the only reason I can get decent occupancy rates are because the house is waterfront and in a tourist area.
And at the end of the day this is my house! I want to be able to do what I want to do with it, and I like having short term guests. I like meeting all of these people. Its like international travel without having to go anywhere.
So I raise my middle finger to Cuomo and his lackeys, I support homeowners rights. The battle cry is My House! My House!
Punish people for bad behavior, not for uses you don't like. And maybe in a city where everyone is packed in like tuna in a can its impossible but one size fits all law is unjust.
There are plenty of communities in upstate new york where vacation rentals are completely appropriate. My cousin does cleaning and management for vacation rentals in upstate NY, and Cuomo just fucked her, a working class person running her own business in an economically depressed region.
I'm a little confused by your comment. Are you saying that you're running an illegal AirBNB rental? Because that's what this is targeting, people already breaking the zoning laws. Also, are you saying that your cousin will lose her job because it services people who are breaking the law? Because those are the only people affected by this law. Is that a bad thing?
NYC has in the past pushed state laws that just affect NYC. Gun laws in particular I'm more familiar with [state preemption - except for NYC where they can enact their own gun laws], but some taxing is specially allowed for NYC too. It's not unheard of for state-level legislators (from NYC) to push for something to the state either because 1) the state constitution doesn't allow a city to do XYZ, or 2) because the city government doesn't see eye to eye with the state representatives living there
New York City has very little direct authority, most (not all) City legislation must be passed separately by the State legislature and signed by the Governor to be effective law.
For example, the City had to request the State to lower the speed limit on City streets to 25 mph from 30 mph last year.
No it's not. Given equal pricing, I unequivocally prefer hotels.
But hotels in NYC are insanely expensive. Please tell me where I can find a hotel for <$60 a night that is not infested with bedbugs/rats/cockroaches/smoke.
Exactly what I came here to say. My partner, son and I are looking forward to sleeping in your spare bedroom, and cooking in your non-spare kitchen, as well as setting up a play yard in your non-spare living room.
What you are both alluding to is exactly why the AirBnB model falls apart in most situations. You want your own thing, but you don't want to follow the law and respect others in the building (that have signed contracts in hand disallowing the practice). Every other owner or legal sublet in that building wanted their own thing. That's why they bought a unit or signed a lease.
That's not at all clear. The cost to resolve civil conflicts is something both basic economics and the law factors into regulation all the time.
Further: two very common kinds of contract we're talking about are with the state itself.
The first and most obvious is zoning, wherein the state promises to reserve some piece of land for a specific use, and private entities purchase that land with the expectation that it will only be used that way. It's for this reason that you can't build a hotel anywhere you want.
The second implied contract we have with the state are the codes and regulations governing residences. Long before Airbnb, residency codes had tenancy requirements.
Finally, the law itself has something to say about people who enter into contracts in bad faith, deliberately misrepresenting their intentions or circumstances in order to obtain concessions: we tend to call that "fraud".
Well that is unfortunate. The people of NYC should not have to live with many places in their own buildings operating as illegal hotels. Why should New Yorkers have to tolerate illegal hotels with arbitrary guests in such a densely packed city? The residents do not owe people visiting a cheap place to stay. Would you like to have someone different staying in the place literally separated by a wall next to you every day or week?
If it is too expensive you have the option of staying somewhere outside of Manhattan. If not you have to just pay the price of visiting an expensive city and not put the burden on the residents.
I think there's a difference - the presence of a permanent resident discourages a lot of the bad behavior people complain about, and provides for a very clear path to accountability if something does happen.
Anecdotally, my building has had multiple apartments used as "airbnb hotels" over the couple of years that I've lived there, and it's been a fairly consistent source of annoyance. People coming in extremely late at night and not having a clue how to unlock the apartment while causing tons of noise, knocking on my door for assistance, etc.
I am 100% for this regulation - NYC is already an extremely expensive place to live, people renting or buying apartments with the purpose of listing them on airbnb only makes it worse.
> People coming in extremely late at night [...] while causing tons of noise
These are all symptoms that proliferate in dense cities and college towns even without AirBnB. I live in the downtown of a small city, and can't escape late night noise either. But you don't think there's a technological solution to the problem that AirBnB passively enables this?
What if, say, the city had an app that allowed you to report incidents, and then they could investigate and penalize based on reports of bad actors (as current law enforcement works, minus the app) rather than throw out the baby with the bathwater?
Of course people are always going to be loud, the apartment downstairs is going to throw parties that last late late into the night. Totally cool with that.
There's a difference between that and somebody in the hallway in front of my apartment door for 30 minutes loudly carrying a conversation while someone tried to walk them through opening the door at 3am. Or, worse, someone knocking on my door late at night asking to crawl in through my fire escape because they locked themselves out, and having no idea who the super is.
The building owner of my apartment actually just swapped keys for the door of the apartment building with key fobs to cut down on people making copies and using them to Airbnb their apartment, because she doesn't want people renting their apartments.
There is a difference from general noise of a city and having transient people coming in every few days. People that are on vacation might be up later, making noise later or worse there could be criminals coming in. Sure you may have a problematic long term neighbor, or occasionally your neighbor may make more noise, but on average you are going to have many more problems with random strangers staying at an apartment turned flophouse.
It isn't throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Why should taxpayer dollars be spent investigating many cases of these when it is already illegal to advertise illegal rentals. It is much more effective to stop the advertising and payment scheme for these illegal rentals first.
AirBnB can prevent the throwing the baby out with the bathwater if they simply restricted the amount of time and places that can be rented out. But they know they are making a large amount of money from professional illegal hoteliers with many listings that are exclusively used for rentals. They are the ones that got greedy and got the heavy handed response.
NYC is tough and expensive in many ways. Seems like they are trying to tackle affordable housing and consequently may also need to look at affordable hotel stays. I remember when I used to do field work in NYC, often for days at a time, and I would drive every day from Philadelphia, my home at the time. Awake at 4am and out the door to avoid getting stuck in traffic and then back down to Philadelphia at 7pm.
same with me. i can't get a spare bedroom with my wife. and i can't cook at a hotel (which makes our trips to the us less expensive, which allows us to either stay longer or spend more while in town -- and both are great for local business).
I rented my Manhattan studio for a month using a Craigslist post. It took less than 10 minutes to make the post, and the place was rented by the end of the day. I had no pictures, and five sentences describing my place. As another poster has already mentioned, Airbnb just made the process safer and more efficient. That efficiency has final affected the bottom-line on hotels, making this a political move. New York will never be "Silicon Alley" with moves like this.
Airbnb is great because it allows people to circumvent stupid, expensive, and counterproductive government regulation on hotelling. Airbnbing is vastly superior to traditional hotelling per dollar spent.
This is what people are talking about when they refer to "common sense" regulation or regulation to "protect consumers"; they mean taking economic and social autonomy away from people. Even if a given bill doesn't cost much when amortized over tens of millions of people, they cost a lot to society as a whole, and they start to add up. I don't care what your political theory about regulation is; it is extremely apparent from comparing Airbnbs to hotels that, at least in this area, regulations have made society worse, not better. I hope Airbnb beats this.
I am disgusted but not surprised. When I was commuting back and forth between SFO and PDX I had apartments in both cities. I was able to dramatically offset my costs by Airbnb'ing the apartment I wasn't in at any given time... this helped me launch my business and I'm so thankful for that! The first time this worked out it was an obvious win/win for me and the renter. Right after being excited my next thought was... "wow this really let's the little guy do a little better"... I'm sure this won't last...
At the risk of stating the obvious, if you're commuting back and forth between SFO and PDX to launch a business you are not the "little guy".
The "little guy" earns minimum wage and can barely afford to keep their own apartment, let alone rent out a spare one when they're travelling regularly between two cities. All AirBnB does is raise the "little guy"'s rent when the other apartments in their building become short-term hotels for tourists.
You should have seen these apts. Not fancy. You're right I'm not working at Taco Bell, but you almost certainly make more money than I do. I was able to live a multi-city life on a shoestring budget thanks to a narrow window provided by AirBnb. I'm disappointed others may not have that opportunity.
I regularly go to NYC for a month with my partner and son so that the grandparents can interact with their grandson. I always AirBnB a place near the residential neighborhood that my parents live in.
Because we have a young child, we prefer our own apartment, rather than staying with the grandparents, nor would the three of us be able to stay in "someone's spare room".
This new bill is absolutely terrible for us, because it limits us to staying in expensive hotels, for a month!
EDIT: There's no mention of 30+ days limit anywhere in the article as far I can tell.
Meanwhile, people who don't have cushy jobs that allow them to randomly move for a month at a time need apartments to live in (and also, a lot of them probably can't afford kids even if they want them). Complaining that it's now more expensive for your kid to get quality time with grandpa just seems overprivileged.
> Existing New York state law bars most urban apartment-dwellers from renting out their units for less than 30 days if they are not present.
It appears this new law is relating to the advertising of such rentals - presumably as a way to more effectively clamp down on those that were already illegal.
Month long stays should be permitted. The original law (that was passed a couple years ago) prohibited short term rentals for fewer than 30 days, but 30 days+ should be permitted.
"While it is already illegal to occupy a class A multiple dwelling for less than 30 days, this legislation would clarify that it also illegal to advertise units for occupancy that would violate New York law. However, online home sharing platforms still contain advertisements for use of units that would violate New York law. It rests with the city and state to protect communities and existing affordable housing stock by prohibiting advertisements that violate the law, creating a civil penalty structure for those who violate the prohibition, and clarifying activities that constitute advertising."
It adds a fine of up to $7500 if a host is caught listing their unit for less than 30 days, among other things.
I guess go off airbnb and contact the host directly? Does this bill make personal connections like this (especially without brokering through airbnb) illegal?
Are you saying I should first find a room on airbnb, and then make a deal that I am actually trying to rent the whole apartment?
Or should I go on craigslist? FWIW, Craigslist is an absolute non-starter - even though there were publicized incidents with AirBnB guests trashing the place, or hosts being shady, the Verified ID system on AirBnB does ensure some amount of traceability in case of incidents or fraud.
I'd be more interested in knowing how New Yorkers feel about regulating short term apartment rentals than how they feel about sharing.
I don't think I'm guilty of being a broken record if airbnb keeps misusing the word "sharing." Although I understand there can be some ambiguity in the word "sharing", the arrangement "you may rent my apartment out for a week if and only if you pay me $1,000" isn't anywhere close to this zone of ambiguity.
It is commerce. It is unambiguously commerce, it is a pure quid pro quo money for services transaction.
New York has passed legislation regulating commerce - in this case, the conditions under which someone may rent out property for under 30 days. Those laws aren't obsolete just because someone wrote a rails app where you can type in an address and click a "create hotel here" button. Also, commerce doesn't become sharing just because the quid pro quo financial transactions take place over the web.