They said they have found an existing relationship between me and the host. Mind you have no social media accounts, this was my first stay at an Airbnb, I'm from USA and this was in Medellin Colombia, I usually stay at Marriott hotels and I only went with Airbnb because the girl I traveled with suggested using it because it was cheaper.

It was awesome place, host was great, so left a fantastic review. It was taken down and I was called a liar. When I asked to speak with someone about why I'm accused of being a liar in my review customer support promised me many times I would get a call back. Never once did I receive a call back from anyone at Airbnb instead I would get an email that they had conducted a thorough review and their position still stands that I am a liar. I'm not sure what thorough means in their mind but since they asked me zero questions or confirmed no information with me directly it's impossible that they conducted any kind of thorough review.

Airbnb is a horrendous company along with all of these gig economy companies. They need to be regulated in the same manner as they're non-gig counterparts are. I can't imagine that any Airbnb executive actually stays at Airbnb places not with the kind of customer service that Airbnb offers.

Things are different on this side of earth, rest assured. I have paid extra every single time.

Further, there is always things like "parking available", but then either its not free of charge or always busy or its....public parkings.

Same with internet access. Available, if you pay and if its tourism months. And the internet you get comes from a router in the hallway and is shared and at times it seemed like it has the capacity for one concurrent user.

Airbnb enables hosts to publish such things in the name of revenue.

But if a host gets in trouble, they have a half arsed wannabe collection team which will drop them like a hot potato soon.

There are no reviews of truthfulness of the offers etc.

If you have had a good experience, then irs thanks to the host, not thanks to airbnb.

Online descriptions and reviews should be more regulated.

Google, for instance, keeps removing legitimate reviews from myself and others regarding a builder that rented / sold houses with horrible snagging problems, e.g. bursting pipes and leaky roofs.

I tell them its a separate service because not everyone uses it. So if I am not using say the pool or the gym then I shouldn't have to pay it.

The single time I paid the fee was when it included Internet service which I needed. I wrote the CEO of the chain after my stay arguing that charging extra for Internet is like charging extra for electricity or water. Never received a reply.

I’ve had so many bad experiences with Airbnb. It’s never like in the pictures. It’s always noisier, low quality mattress and furniture that looks good on pictures but isn’t functional or breaks if you touch it. I also feel like I’m living in ikea showrooms around the world. And given how expensive the cleaning is, it’s rarely passably clean. Moldy corners in the bathroom, dirt under the bed, chipped dishes…

And good luck trying to get Airbnb to help you. Best they can usually do (after you explain your case over from scratch because it’s always a new customer service person) is “alright we’ll check you out, you get a refund, and good luck finding a place for tonight out of pocket”

Never again. It’s hotels for me every time as well.

I like to search for newly built hotels as they usually offer the nicest accommodations.

I think the point was 'No -surprise- fees.

Edit: top context is “That is against AirBnB rules” and “refunded” i.e. AirBnB has explicit rules against surprise fees or bonds, and it can enforce rules.

I am guessing you just responded quickly but it is always good to spend time to try to “Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.” - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

And no, not until recently could you see the actual total prior to sunken cost of Reviewing your booking. That too, Airbnb finally implemented once the Biden administration compelled them by law - that is, not before making much fanfare about it with the pretense of them "doing it for the customers"

People criticize all sorts of things they don't understand. Our cleaning service charges us $280 per turnover. Separating the cleaning fee from the nightly rate makes our property more appealing for longer stays, which we (and our neighbors) prefer. It's not like a hotel, where the cleaners come every day; why should guests pay every night for a cleaning which will only happen once, after they leave?

People are annoyed because these fees are often sneaky or not apparent at first sight which makes the UX annoying.

The last 3 bedroom home I rented on AirBnb had a $500 cleaning fee. We were there 4 days. Its ridiculous, but it's becoming the standard on AirBnb.

Tourism taxes are per head, per night and generally Airbnbs are required to charge them as well (though they often don't).

A resort fee is a bogus surcharge added by hotels to "cover" advertised amenities, like if a cinema charged you a Dolby Surround fee after you showed your ticket at the entrance.

I can stay at a 5 star hotel for a $50 deposit on my credit card. I'll just do that instead. Like you said, its not even really about tying up the money either. I would put this on my AMEX which has no credit limit, so tying up $1,500 isn't really the problem, its the need to authorize a host that I don't personally trust to be able to make any claim they want to justify keeping part of that deposit. I have much more trust in Marriott or Hilton and they only need $50. In all the traveling I've done, I've never had them refuse to release a deposit in full. By contrast, I've met enough crazy AirBnb hosts, that i wouldn't trust them with $100, let along $2,500.

Cleaning fees are also ridiculous. I've seen a lot of $500+ cleaning fees. Come on! What kind of cleaning are you doing for $500?!

I don't really care. If people want to go to AirBnbs, then great. I've had some good experiences with them, but i've also had several bad ones. I don't like the risk I need to take each time with the host. I also am getting fed up with the calculating the "real cost" for each one when comparing them. I'd rather go to Marriott or Hilton where they treat me like a God. So I'm basically done with AirBnb at this point.

They want to charge you for potential damages, done by you or not, as well as wear and tear.

Never, ever put a deposit for them, not even by credit card.

And if you pay for the stay, always , always use a credit card, not a debit card. That way, you can pull the chargeback trigger on them.

A chargeback is their worst nightmare, trust me, it can have so many implications and hurt airbnb so badly if they are subject to chargebacks.

You can chargeback with a debit card, I’ve done it a few times myself.

Personally though I've come to appreciate hotels more and my experience is that you can usually find a decent hotel room for about what an AirBNB costs and I usually like going to a hotel better. (There was that one in Chinatown in NYC that the experience of finding it was somewhere between The Blade Runner and a James Bond movies, I'm not sure if that is a good review or not.)

Honestly, there was not much else it could do in the long term.

The number of travelers staying at an Airbnb versus a hotel is under 1%. This is clear by looking at overall inventory available. Even a decent market _might_ have 100 AirBnB listings, that same market will have several thousands (possible 10,000+) of hotel rooms.

Generally the opposite is true. AirBnb hosts will justify their nightly rate based on comparable hotels in the area. But the average Marriot for example isn't all that worried about the handful of AirBnbs nearby that they might be losing customers to.

Booking.com did that.

I do however always choose an apartment for corporate trips, but always via booking.com.

There's no good answer to this. Anyone that allows/relies on direct consumer feedback is at risk for one of the hardest problems that exist.

Personally, I want to know people's great and real experiences, or terrible ones, who wouldn't!? But, once you tie it to money, it's over.

Compare reviews on Steam to reviews on Airbnb. You'll quickly notice something, Steam shows you far more information at a glance. You get to know whether someone bought the game themselves or if it was given free to them, how many hours they played before the review, how many hours they played in total, their rating, how other people feel about that review, how many other products the user has, if the review was edited, and of course review text.

Airbnb's reviews has a scoring system that was generalized, and review text, maybe a translation badge if the review was translated.

Reviews work best when you are given as much information as possible. Without it, you might as well be relying on an anonymous 5 star system.

That's not a realistic solution.

If all the reviews were fake 5 stars but it's just the property's friends always leaving reviews then when you got there, you feel there's no way it's 5 stars. But less obvious is property manager says, hey i'll give you a 5% discount for 5 stars, when really the place was a 3-star at best.

Those shifts in star ratings are material in your personal decision making process.

Airbnb is incentivized to have higher scores because lower ratings might not push people to other properties - it might discourage them from booking all together. They need them to not be totally worthless, but score inflation is definitively in their best interest.

I don’t trust sites like Airbnb and I understand how sites have problems with review fraud.

If I posted with a unique signature then over time people could learn that mine aren’t fake.

Also would be nice to know that the Airbnb reviewer also rated a restaurant and some headphones, etc.

So you can basically collect people who review in ways that are useful to you and layer that over the web to rank search results, apartments, blenders, etc etc.

True but also one they’ve created for profit. They choose to ignore complaints about hosts to avoid losing their fees, they choose not to audit reviews, etc. There’s an entire industry of people who get paid to do mystery shopping to review customer experiences, which is quite effective but not free since you can’t automate it at scale.

This seems like it’s basically a VC playbook now: focus on growth numbers and assume you’ll be able to convey the shiny tech imagine until you reach market dominance, and avoid spending money visibly on “menial” jobs to support the image that you are about to be unbelievably profitable.

> hasn’t been implemented

I’m not going to evangelize what a correct stance on this is, but IMHO tipping is a big, not a feature.

Now I'm forced to expect my price to be 15-20% more expensive than the list...

If the industry moves to service included, then the prices will still be 15-20% higher, or more, than they are today. You will have removed the incentive for those that want to provide better service however.

Multiples of 5% calculations is pretty simple and keeps the brain sharp. It’d also be easy to show the price with tips, but dark patterns.

The incentive to provide better service for individual employees should be provided by their employer.

The incentive for the employer to provide better service to customers is competition with other service providers the client might choose.

Which is how it works in all the jobs that aren’t within the weird and arbitrary bounds of tipping culture.

Also this has been tried before, and was widely considered a failure. People don’t like surprise fees, inflated prices, etc. They don’t mind tipping as it gives them some control back.

My job also “tips” me. Every year if my manager likes my work from the previous year then I get more RSUs. If they don’t like my work, then I don’t get RSUs (and maybe fired). Tipping is everywhere.

Increased prices are what it should be, just as it is in every business outside of tipping culture. Tipping culture is not the same thing as increased prices.

> Also this has been tried before, and was widely considered a failure.

It works just fine in much of the world. It even works fine in the US where foe some things normally covered by tipping culture, a flat fee in lieu of gratuity is applied in certain circunstances (e.g., restaurants do this with largw parties quite often.) It works just fine in places with tipping culture in all the customer service jobs that are arbitrarily outside of its coverage.

> My job also “tips” me. Every year if my manager likes my work from the previous year then I get more RSUs. If they don’t like my work, then I don’t get RSUs (and maybe fired). Tipping is everywhere.

Incentive pay from your empkoyer is not a culture of tips from your employer’s customers.

The market said no.

> It works just fine in much of the world. It even works fine in the US where foe some things normally covered by tipping culture, a flat fee in lieu of gratuity is applied in certain circunstances (e.g., restaurants do this with largw parties quite often.) It works just fine in places with tipping culture in all the customer service jobs that are arbitrarily outside of its coverage.

That’s great, but it didn’t work in the US. Some of the larger corps ran the experiment for 4 years and when the waiters lost income they complained. You see, here tipping culture means they make more money.

> Incentive pay from your empkoyer is not a culture of tips from your employer’s customers.

It’s exactly the same. It’s lay I would not have received otherwise.

See what happens if you ask a bank for a loan with no credit history.

Of course these are only tangentially alike, but public history is an important way to distinguish organic reviews from AstroTurf.

You also don't need a social account to login, so how would Airbnb even know that user named "John Smith" on Twitter is you?

Many of them collect their data via third-party scripts so you should ensure those are blocked.

Effectively, you can't.

> Since when is a social media account required to leave reviews?

It's just as absurd when written this way. But, please, show me the exact place where Airbnb (or any other big company) says that a social media presence is required to leave a review. I'm waiting.

Edit: furthermore spam prevention takes all sorts of random signals in to account. Having no online presence other than a single stay in Airbnb certainly looks suspicious.

Nobody writes their spam detection algorithm as policy.

Nobody writes their spam detection algorithm as policy, but there is also no evidence whatsoever that social media presence was in any way shape or form used to make the decision here. Airbnb at no point mentioned it, nor would it have been something that crossed your mind if original commenter didn't mention it as a fact about themselves.

I'm not arguing that Airbnb does use presence/lack of social to make a decision here. I just objected to you saying

> Since when is a social media account required to do online business?

I interpreted that as you being outraged that Airbnb requires some form of social presence to do business. I felt you were exaggerating and responded by saying its just about the review. I meant that even _if_ Airbnb is checking this, it's not a big deal cause this is just one of many signals that could feed into spam detection and we're only talking about the _review_ not the ability to use Airbnb at all.

You raised a valid point earlier, I doubt they're actually checking this, my point is just that even if they are, who cares. OP looks suspicious by having no online presence at all and only one stay on Airbnb. That combined with the language in their review probably tipped the spam filters to say "hey it's probably safer if we don't let this review through, doesn't seem legit"

Huh? Airbnb has the entire transaction history that matters – proving that this specific user paid a specific amount of money for staying in a specific place for a specific amount of time.

Thinking that you need to prove "online history" (how would you even track this?) as well is absurd.

My theory on this is the same as usual – Airbnb outsources or understaffs their customer service department as usual; some stressed out agent closed the case without even looking at it. Making some noise and opening a separate case will probably work if you're bothered enough.

It's possible there's something more mundane, like not having a browser cookie when the review was left or something like that.

After that, they’ve already made the fees on the stay. Most people won’t be losing 20% or whatever to farm good reviews.

Why would the final and optional review step be the part where they decide to verify if the stranger staying in someone else’s house is a real person.

Implying that a "bot" or "puppet" is paying to stay at AirBnB's just so they can write salty reviews?

It is not really a big cost because you only really need to pay the platform fee (you control both sides of the transaction do the only real cost is the middleman).

Reviews are super important and it is hard to get booking when you have 0 reviews so it is not surprising that some hosts would spend some dollars for 3-4 fake positive reviews to kickstart their property (many people will bounce off the ad without at least a couple positive reviews, so it changes your business radically)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34219765

> Airbnb removed my positive review and accused me of being in cahoots with the host to leave positive feedback.

Reviews are an auxiliary cost to Airbnb. They need moderating and their Hosts complain and use up support time if bad reviews are let through. I suggest profiling users is a quick and cheap way they've done the sums on to weed out the easiest level of abuse (on both sides).

They're not going to lose any business until it affects you.

"We have a suspicion based on this data we don't have that you might not be a real customer so we're blocking your reviews" invites a whole lot more customer support time than "We're not accepting your reviews."

It is simply cheaper to be firm, however unfair it is when they get it wrong.

So just saying "regulate it like hotels" doesn't mean much.

Require Airbnb hosts to pay for a license, have regular inspections, etc.

And how does this help with reviews on airbnb.com?

These sorts of HN posts is often how change happens.

Edit: I should have expanded on my post a bit. It's quite obvious that the review was flagged by some ML model, most likely not because the reviewer is a liar but probably because the host has a high prior for shenanigans. Combined with the lack of social signals for the reviewer, I could see why an ML model might be overzealous. But back to my original question: nobody is being called a liar, why take it so personally?

That’s how you’re supposed to know where is worth staying and where isn’t.

If those can’t be trusted, then it’s an inferior B&B platform with doctored reviews that you can’t trust.

My advice to those reading this is just to get a hotel unless there is no alternative.

AirBnB was fine for a bit when it was cheaper than alternatives, but, in my experience, it’s now as expensive (if not more) as the hotels they’re trying to replace.

There’s usually a massively inferior experience when compared to Hotels the majority of the time. At least, that’s been my experience.

Reviews that you can’t leave unless other party reviewed you which self censors whenever there’s a slightest disagreement

See reviews for same places on booking.com and they are consistently 1 star less

There could also be bad faith from Airbnb as some comments frame it but I believe most of the time it's just a tricky business. Check ebay and you see the same issues or even worse.

In 2008-2011 on HN if someone worked at facebook you knew because they mentioned it so often.

Now you never hear anyone saying they work for Facebook because of all the negative externalities that Facebook and Instagram have had on the world that no one wants to be associated with them.

AirBnB is now in a similar situation.

When tehy first came out you would get lots of positive feedback from people about their service.

now that they allow whole home rentals and people are getting squeezed for living space and rising rents partially due to AirBnb taking those rentals off the market people have a far different opinion of the company.

Couple that with hosts are squeezing people with 100's of dollars in cleaning and other fees that dwarf the nightly rental costs.

Its hard to think of another company outside of Facebook that has blown all their good will so quickly and so completely.

You never hear someone claim to work at AirBnB anymore due to what the company has done to help ruin housing and rental markets.

Charitably I guess you could say that every company falls victim to the saying "You Either Die A Hero Or Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain."

AirBnB really just provided a modern online interface with some customer service stuff that papered over the bad stuff for a while. But like with actual bad construction, you can't hide the stuff forever so sooner or later the magic disappears.

In theory zoning is supposed be in residents interest to stop things like fracking from happening next to playgrounds (it doesn't but again that's another story). Cities follow zoning law to the letter when it comes to new apartments.

Airbnb repurposes residential zoned property as commerical hotels. If we're going to take zoning seriously this shouldn't be allowed.

https://youtu.be/bnKIVX968PQ

https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o

for me what I noticed lately is that in California it's impossible to have a quiet modern apartment because nearly 100% of modern apartment buildings are only allowed to be built on busy noisy high traffic streets. If you want a quiet street you're forced to buy/rent a house

I think it is, but construction companies are trying to savd a few cents, and they don't add proper noise insulation.

But if we take zoning seriously when it comes to new apartments then we should take it seriously when it comes to Airbnb.

We were contemplating what to do with this information as the listing is under "entire place" when a few days later we got an email from Airbnb saying that there was a price adjustment of +$395 for cleaning PER DAY. We had it booked for 5 days so we needed to pay an additional $~2000. That was more than double the original cost. Thankfully we were able to cancel and get our deposit back with just the automated cancellation, but we did get a nasty message from the host that we we reported back to Airbnb.

And I am very sure that's not the case 99% of the time based on my own experience. I'd be thankful if the kitchen counter is clean and there is no trash. That's actually not a low bar.

Twitter comes rapidly to mind

Also massively bloated as recently as a year ago. Loads of people working there who didn't seem to do much except tweak icons 2000 times, enforce DEI mandates, and hit their department's budget. Awful. Glad to see the deadwood getting cleaned out, speed enhancements, and new features being rolled out.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/technology/twitter-elon-m...

What's the speed enhancements?

The real solution is to tax each additional dwelling ~30,000$ (depending on area) to pay for the infrastructure to support it and then actually build that infrastructure.

The goal of such fees is to avoid subsidizing any specific type of development but as long as it averages out then it’s presumably fine.

It’s a job - for many people, especially with families, they are fine with that, and they don’t wrap up their identity with it.

The same happens in the defense industry.

I hear this a lot. I've always wondered if it was that easy wouldn't a lot more people be buying properties and airbnb-ing them out through local agencies ?

This is an interesting read about the market effects Airbnb has caused. They’re definitely moving prices and removing units from the market.

From what I've seen, short term rentals have negligible effects on the housing market. And restrictions on short term rentals have little to no effect on housing prices. It's just another scapegoat (like foreign owned housing) that people like to use because they can't accept the fact that the solution is to BUILD MORE HOUSING. (Reduce restrictions like exclusionary zoning and environmental/community reviews)

The city has passed laws to keep down the amount of temporary rentals so the balance has undoubtably shifted by now. A later analysis by the same bank (https://bnb-beheer.nl/blog/2019/03/06/prijseffect-airbnb-op-...) says as much.

Any solution that isn't "build a fuckton more housing units" isn't a solution at all. We need enough housing for permanent residents AND people who prefer to live in AirBnBs. Often the AirBnB people are wealthy tourists who spend a lot and stimulate the local economy, so kicking them out is a horrible idea.

"Rich tourists" are good for purely tourist driven economies, but most cities don't exist to please the whims of tourists, and most local businesses in a wealthy economy aren't targeting rich tourists either.

What actually happens is that family neighbourhoods are forced to deal with constant parties and drunk and loud tourists because some multimillionaire set up one of the rare available houses for his personal profit.

I'm sure there are people who enjoy living in AirBnB's but that's not what AirBnB is even trying to accomplish. Hotels exist and are regulated for good reason. Tourists are put in touristy areas where businesses want to attract tourists, also for good reason.

When dealing with a housing shortage, the local population is more important than tourists, unless there is no economy other than the tourist economy. Look at what happened to Venice, the city that exclusively exists because of tourists because of overtourism.

Amsterdam specifically wants less tourists.

They have a load of initiatives and policies to try reduce what they call "negative tourism" that are will just have the net effect of reducing overall tourism - the actual goal.

Similar issues in Venice and some other European cities.

Over tourism makes places less liveable for the residents who live - and vote - there.

If you live in a ski town or beach town then it probably has had far more effect than the locals looking to buy or rent would want. if you live in a small town with very little tourism then people may feel like you do that its a non factor.

New York city seems to think that 10,000 distinct places to live will come back to the market, is 10,000 units in New York "negligible" to use your wording?

I don't know but I'm guessing it will have some measurable effect.

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/28/1145709106/nyc-could-lose-10-...

https://reallifecomics.com/comic.php?comic=february-17-2021

I don't see the word Local anywhere on it and I honestly don't get the joke.

Kauai is one of my favorite Hawaiian islands and has one of the strictest short term rental regulations. I truly believe if short term rentals are free for all it would end up being a billionaire's playground (more so than it already is) with no locals being able to afford housing at all.

It changes depending on the location.

Some places e.g. Byron Bay in Australia have been significantly affected by short term rentals.

I've read people talking about how Airbnb screwed the host or the guest. But few people talk about how it screws the neighbors.

Our neighbors on the other side, unfortunately, own their home. This means I'm forced to live next to (depending on the day of the week), a live concert venue, a muscle car engine noise appreciation celebration, frat parties, and/or a farm (they had a goat for a week ?).

There's nothing anyone can (or will) do about any of these things, and no one's checking their papers to determine if ignoring the noise is your only recourse. The only way to attempt to improve the situation is show respect and hope it's eventually reciprocated. This is just part of living around other humans. The systems in place to mitigate these kinds of petty conflicts aren't taken seriously, whether the rental is long or short term, or the property tax kind.

Another problem is that HOAs are the worst possible size of a government. They're large enough that you're in the minority, but small enough that they don't have anything else to preoccupy themselves with but how you're using your own property.

I've heard that "just imagine what kinds of horrors happen without HOAs" argument many times over, but... I live in the Bay Area in a densely-packed but older neighborhood without a HOA, and I'm yet to witness the terrible consequences of my neighbors' supposed recklessness. Yeah, the houses are painted in different colors and picket fences have different styles and heights, but I think I can live with that.

Most people are reasonable. When you bump into people who are truly unreasonable, a HOA is unlikely to save you. How peaceful and pretty a neighborhood is depends largely on socioeconomic factors (not just wealth, but also the prevalence of problems such as addiction). It just so happens that many new and expensive neighborhoods have HOAs, but that doesn't mean that HOAs are to be credited for good outcomes - or that they will be able to prevent the decline of such communities if the economic climate changes.

Have heard about this from friends and family more than once.. it would be comical if it didn't impede their ability to live so much.

You may as well be renting from them. No, thanks!

HOA style Large grass areas and office park landscaping mcdonaldifies America and is a travesty for the environment and water use.

Select grass areas for actual usage are okay but HOAs default to grass everywhere and bland non-native landscaping. And beige everything.

But whether I cut my grass every 2 weeks or every 3 weeks, or god forbird I decide to have a vegetable garden on the southern side of my house (covenance says must be backyard)...that's HOA realm.

With who? I don't have a neighbor, I have an endless string of rotating strangers. I understand that bad neighbors have always existed, but that's not what's happening in my specific situation.

Anyone and everyone has potential access to the house 30 feet or so from which I sleep. Anyone and everyone at any time. It's a big change.

In the US, and California specifically, any kind of zoning change is met with pitchforks. If your neighbor tried to build an apartment and you didn't like it you could have easily held up the project for years.

Airbnb figured a way to rezone property without invoking the wrath of local busybodies. Kudos to them. But at the same time, if you live in a place that takes zoning seriously then Airbnb shouldn't be allowed.

This so much.

There's a neighbor on the street with a 'unique' house who decided the way she would make money is AirBnB'ing it to film companies. So...a weekend or two a month (usually Th-Mo), we would have 50-60 cars parked wherever they wanted on our narrow street and sidestreets. We would have vans and delivery vehicles block our driveways and sometimes the whole street for as long as they wanted. They would drive over lawns to position trucks because the street is too narrow for a 20+ foot cargo truck to back into the driveway to unload. They would film until 3, 4, sometimes 5 in the morning with loud noise, dozens of people and floodlights. If we said anything, they would mob us and start filming us trying to get us to lose our tempers. Whenever the cops showed up, they would shut down and play nice until they left, and then crank back up. And every one of them didn't get the required city permits until after we complained.

Lovely people in the film industry. /s

The city has regulations against such abusive behavior but not the resources to enforce, and no real recourse when the film companies basically gave the city the middle finger. They're going to be gone in a couple of days so screw those pesky neighbors. So we became the squeaky wheel to get some action. We eventually had to get a lawyer to get this shut down. And you bet there's a bunch of us at the city council meetings lobbying for better enforcement. It looks like we'll get some new regs passed with more teeth.

And, of course, AirBnB didn't care one bit.

Right?

Out of curiosity, do you own properties specifically to rent on short term rental sites?

I enjoy the fact that I get new neighbors all the time because, quite simply... in the past, I've lived next door to people I didn't like at all. When that happens, what can you do, move? This way, if there is an unruly renter, I just call the owner of the condo and they deal with it (only happened once in the last year). Worst case, they leave on their on in a few days.

This puts me off the idea of ever renting out my own place, because I would then have to choose between feeling like a sucker, or being a criminal.

So far most renters have been friendly or kept to themselves. Some were noisy, and some left dozens of cigarette butts on the sidewalk and street, and for the past couple weeks the place has been empty. No one has even come by to put away the trash bins.

The owner has over a dozen houses like this, and I really think it's a bad thing that these houses are not available to people who want to live in them.

Where I live now is area of all single family homes. One house on my street is also a full time Airbnb. There have been fewer issues, but there was one occasion where some people rented the house, threw a party in the house, shots were fired, and bullets went through a neighboring house. There have never been issues at this level in the neighborhood, so this was out of the ordinary.

Not all short term, full time Airbnbs are disrespectful. Not all long term, non-Airbnb neighbors are respectful. But IMO, with non-Airbnb neighbors, you have a better chance of working something out since they are there for the long haul.

Instead we have social mobility so that we can move anytime when better opportunities arise. That may be a good or a bad thing depending on which side you are.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/us-housing...

[1] https://www.stratosjets.com/blog/airbnb-statistics/

I could believe (and maybe someone in this thread has data!) that in some extremely over-constrained markets that units are disproportionately used for short-term rentals. But I haven't seen any numbers. And in those cases, you still should be building homes to solve the root cause problem.

Americans persistently seem to want to find any reason at all to absolve themselves of responsibility for the housing crisis. It's investors! It's short-term rentals! It's corporate landlords! But it's never the locals who oppose construction.

And my question remains, which is more valuable to society, short term rentals or homes?

You're also failing to process my point: that banning short-term rentals is an ineffective lever, not that it won't have an epsilon of impact. Yes, you will increase supply by a tiny amount relative to the shortage. It will have near-zero pricing impact because the magnitude pales against the problem.

https://time.com/6223185/airbnbs-empty-short-term-rentals/

"At the median owner-occupancy rate zip code, we find that a 1% increase in Airbnb listings leads to a 0.018% increase in rents and a 0.026% increase in house prices."

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mksc.2020.1227

PS: the author's own words contradict your claim that the effect is tiny, although again I think this is a serious undercount resulting from a poor model and ever worse availability of data nationwide: "This means that, in aggregate, the growth in home-sharing through Airbnb contributes to about one-fifth of the average annual increase in U.S. rents and about one-seventh of the average annual increase in U.S. housing prices." https://hbr.org/2019/04/research-when-airbnb-listings-in-a-c...