the early days of airbnb was basically this concept.
they didn't start out as a marketplace for unregulated hotels that destroy housing markets. that didn't happen until after they started cashing checks venture vulture capitalists.
So many people forget this origin. Air mattress in your spare room (in SF), iirc.
As much as I, personally, prefer a house when away - either with the family or as a couple - this is one of the drivers behind the crunch in housing. People can’t possibly afford to by a place to live when the competition is a wanna-be property “entrepreneur” who is going to get 2-4x market rent by doing short term rentals.
Originally my mum moved my brother and I into the same room and rented out the empty room for $40 a night. The cleaning fee was $20 and we still cleared $2,000 in one summer.
My brother and I each got a 5% cut and we bought ice creams from Safeway every day for a week until we got wicked stomach aches
What a crappy article, it doesn’t even say what he was charged with.
Beginning on an unknown date and continuing through on or about August 29, 2023, upon the highseas outside the jurisdiction any particular state or district, in international waters, while on board a vessel subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, the defendant(s) violated:
18 U.S.C. §2237(a)(2)(A) Obstruction of a Boarding
46U.S.C. §70036(b)(1) Violation of a Captain of the Port Order
Basically he’s being done for resisting arrest while at sea.
I just tested positive for the first time and thanks to the US FDA rule changes, I have to physically go to the doctor to get Paxlovid, putting more people at risk. Very frustrating.
I was with them until they banned more than 1 guests at a time. Are you a couple needed somewhere quick to stay before going to an airport or something? Go die in a fire. New York only wants solo couch surfers. People who want a friend along. A single person with a child. A family in a money crunch, anyone really can just pound sand.
That is a super bizarre and IMO indefensible position. If someone wants to host more than one person in their home for a short span why is does they city even care?
I’m also worried about how this could be abused. What if you legitimately take someone (or even two someones) in for a week, kick them out and then they report you for being “an unregistered short term rental”. This is going to be a shitshow.
Edit: alright I misread this morning. It’s 2. Still bullshit. Why have a limit at all with the other stuff. My same complaints apply now with one more person. It’s not like 3 people groups (aka 2 parents an a single child or one parent and 2 children, etc) are uncommon.
IMO hotels just don’t fill the niche of needing a cheap single night or needing to have a bunch of people for a long time. Traveling with my family got so much better when airBNB became a thing.
“Are you a couple needed somewhere quick to stay before going to an airport or something?”
Damn, if only there was some sort of established and regulated type of business where you could rent lodging by the night in New York City. I bet they could make a whole lot of money building big buildings full of rooms you can rent like that.
“What if you legitimately take someone (or even two someones) in for a week”
Do you make a habit of charging your friends and family that come visit you?
Airbnb is a lot better than a hotel for families: you get several bedrooms plus a full kitchen for a similar price to a hotel that only gives you two beds in a room. That kitchen will save a typical family $100/day over a hotel if they cook their own meals.
Damn, if only there was some sort of established and regulated type of business where you could rent lodging by the night in New York City. I bet they could make a whole lot of money building big buildings full of rooms you can rent like that.
As someone who has a big ass family, hotels fucking suck for families. When I compare my childhood vacations in hotel to what we do now in airBNB, we do airBNB every single time.
Do you make a habit of charging your friends and family that come visit you?
I have in the past when I was hard up for money because food costs for extra people can be great.
I read it in the summary, but I guess I made a mistake. I still think it’s ridiculous. Like why have a limit at all on who people want to host in their house?
Probably held a bidding auction between hotels and air bnb. The hotels must have had deeper pockets to buy up a piece of legislation in a democratic system. How good is freedom
New York City’s housing stock has only increased 4% since 2010, not nearly enough to keep up with its 22% increase in jobs. And from 2017 to 2021, New York City permitted 13 homes for every 1,000 residents in 2017
This is because of zoning restrictions preventing building. This occurs everywhere you see housing spiking, which distorts even the areas where building is occurring.
People don’t want “those people” in their neighborhoods or don’t want to lose their “neighborhood character,” or simply want to “protect their home values,” and so a persistent lack of supply is strangling the market.
Denying current renters an income stream, tightening the grip of the hotel market monopoly, and not actually freeing enough homes to impact the increase in demand, is not the solution.
That’s fair, but I think it’s not particularly relevant here.
Tourists should not be holidaying in people’s “back yards”.
It’s not about keeping out certain “types of people”, it’s about not wanting any people who have specifically come to holiday and treat the area like their playground.
And every Airbnb I know is run by someone who has multiple properties, and certainly isn’t letting holidaymakers live in their actual home.
I just don’t see how anything you’re saying is relevant to Airbnb??
Landlords are buying more houses and turning them into Airbnbs, hence less houses available and increasing prices for regular people.
The idea that it’s really benefitting regular people is just not the reality of the situation.
NIMBYism
the behaviour of someone who does not want something to be built or done near where they live, although it does need to be built or done somewhere
The area for holidaymakers are hotel districts. If you need to expand the actual hotel district then so be it, but don’t just let everywhere essentially be a hotel district.
We will never see lower home prices while NIMBYism exists.
I’m willing to bet you don’t want tall buildings with dense housing for low-income people on your street either, yeah? They’d ruin your view/the charm of the neighborhood/bring crime?
But turning half the units in that tall building full of dense housing into short-term lets that are a nuisance to the people who actually live there is okay in your book? Because, as you say, objecting to that would be “NIMBY”.
Airbnb is way more profitable than conventional letting. Why would anyone offer stable leases to poor people when they can rent out the whole place for higher rates?
In some parts of my country, it is becoming functionality impossible for families to rent a property for a stable term, because landlords want properties vacant over the holidays for short-term lets.
Yes, because you’re still adding net housing in those buildings.
I think AirBnB helps people pay their rent in NYC, because data confirms that people do in fact use it as bridge income
I also think AirBnB both is not the culprit here (a housing shortage is) and that building more housing solves the problem more neatly while also discouraging using housing as an “investment” which then discourages predatory housing practices.
Human beings will always respond to incentives, and right now the incentive is to buy housing and hold it because it will be worth more later. That’s a big problem.
Evidently AirBnB is not the only problem here, and building more residential homes is needed. But
discouraging using housing as an “investment” which then discourages predatory housing practices
is exactly what is happening here. If you can buy an empty property & rent it out to tourists for a chunk of money – with better returns than you can get on the stock market – people with capital will cheerfully do that. Except now with these rules there’s little point in them trying that in NYC.
Renters are free to continue to use AirBnB to continue to pay their rent (bans on subletting notwithstanding) as long as they’re still living in it at the time.
Long term capital considerations re. investment in real estate are a separate issue. Historically, housing has not performed like this.
Not if they need to pass inspection as hotels in NYC they aren’t. Renters already AirBnBing to make ends meet don’t have the money for fire doors, etc.
“Not having enough money to make what you are renting out safe for occupancy” is not an acceptable defence to renting out something that is unsafe for occupancy.
Approximately 18,000 Airbnbs in the UK do not have smoke detectors and nearly 65,000 have no carbon monoxide alarms, according to figures from analysts AirDNA.
Shocking. Safety regulations are written in blood.
We will absolutely see evictions over this and I’m very interested in watching this site lose their shit over and eviction increase in NYC in a few months
New York isn’t like other places - it is quite literally out of available land to build residential structures. NIMBYism may have an affect, but the overwhelming restriction in preventing new construction is that you’d have to raze structures to do so.
First 2 are aesthetic complaining or lack of density related. Third contains this gem that supports my entire stance:
For better or worse, Houston housing providers have to follow regulations for how they can use their funding and who gets access to resources. Aside from small tweaks in HUD’s language, these regulations have remained largely the same over the past decade. While other U.S. cities, under the same funding restrictions, implemented a patchwork approach and fell victim to poor planning or scant resources, Houston wagered that centralized decision-making could speed up the process.
6th link confirms it. Edit: 6th not 5th because 5th is broken and also proof you didn’t actually read any of these. You just googled for headlines that sound bad.
That’s irrelevant because net increases to supply still move toward closing the supply/demand gap, and people further down the chain just move into vacated homes as people move into the new ones.
It’s not happening because demand still outstrips supply by a huge amount. What is happening when building occurs is a mitigation of cost increases, but the production is not not enough to lower costs .
The thing about supply and demand is that it exists even if you don’t like it.
Apartments are not commercially zoned, and neither are AirBnBs.
Both should be added to mixed zoning. That would be dope. Stores on the bottom, or alternating floors, with very dense buildings above current height restrictions, is basically the ideal solution.
Apartments are residentially zoned. Hotels are commercially zoned (for good reason).
Turning residential homes into unregulated mini-hotels at scale depletes housing stock, and is a nuisance to residents.
This law effectively blocks residential homes from continuing to be used as hotel businesses operating out of residentially zoned areas, allowing residential units to once again be used as housing, and removing the nuisance to residents.
Please explain why you see this as a NIMBY net negative for housing.
Mixed use zoning is absolutely the way forward everywhere, but most especially for already-dense cities like NYC. “Nuisance to residents” is always, and will always, be a terrible reason to do anything. A nuisance isn’t a health concern, but a preference. Their preferences are irrelevant when the market is on fire.
This is not a big enough number to actually dent the housing shortage, and a not-insignificant number of these people are doing part-time rentals to make ends meet, which means they’re gonna get evicted. Meanwhile, the landlords people are bemoaning will simply rent their properties at the AirBnB rate to not lose income since the net housing has not meaningfully shifted.
I agree with your sentiments about multi-use, multi-story buildings. I am, however, a bit baffled as you how you seem to have confused New York fucking City with the suburbs. NYC is the most dense city in the US. In fact, a quick wiki search has the NYC metro area occupying the top 12 spots for density.
If you’re renting a place, and subletting your guest room on Airbnb… This doesn’t stop you, they specifically made this the default case. If for some reason you’ve got a 5 bedroom place or something, maybe consider finding some long term housemates, then. It’s not like there’s a shortage of renters.
I don’t know how I feel about this. On one hand: I dislike the trend of commercial companies buying up living space to turn around and rent it out to disruptive short-term tenants.
On the other hand: I don’t want to have anyone else present in my rental with me because that’s creepy.
They are trying to address housing shortages. The hotels might benefit, but so does everyone else because it effectively bars commercial operation of AirBnB. No landlords with 50 units etc.
This will not actually help with the housing shortage. It will even result in further evictions as some people lose the potential income of renting out excess space to get over the hump.
Like what, exactly? If you can’t afford a fire alarm or sprinkler system, you really shouldn’t be running a rental business. Hell, if you can’t afford a fire alarm, you have much bigger problems than whether or not you can rent a room to a stranger.
…which makes you a business. You’re making income from rentals. A landlord who has 500 units but can’t seem to fill them but once or twice per year for a weekend doesn’t suddenly stop being a landlord. And if they told me “I’m just supplementing my income” in order to get around installing fire alarms, I’d laugh in their face.
If you’re providing a commercial service to strangers, you should be able to ensure their safety, full stop. If you can’t afford to do that, you can’t afford to provide the commercial service.
What a cockamamie take! We’re not kicking these people out of their homes by forcing them to follow simple rules to ensure they don’t burn families of random strangers in a raging inferno. They’re still free to…y’know…have and live in their home.
By your exact same logic, if someone is making and selling meth out of their home in order to make supplemental income and bridge payment gaps, then by telling them to stop we’re effectively telling them “only the wealthy deserve a home, period.”
<span style="color:#323232;">Meth dealer: "But I can't afford my home without it!"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Me: "Um, tough shit. Stop it."
</span>
Is “people can’t afford to live” your “get out of jail free” card?
So people should be able to do whatever they want as long as it helps them pay rent, because them making rental payments ipso facto impacts housing availability?
Should a hair stylist require schooling and training? Yes, they put caustic chemicals on people’s heads which can cause sever harm.
Should police have more training? Yes.
This isn’t a good argument because the lack of police training has no bearing on the licensing and training of hair stylists.
Here’s the take you are trying to get people to say, if you cannot afford to own a home without supplementing income by provided room rentals which are potentially unsafe and do not meet the bare minimum of fire code, then you cannot afford that house. It doesn’t mean you don’t afford a house. Just that you cannot afford THAT house. And I make no mention of “deserve housing” because all humans deserve housing.
Putting people’s lives at risk to make a few extra dollars is unacceptable. You have no right to gamble with other people’s lives.
I don’t think that’s an ideal analogy. No-one sells meth legally.
It’s more like selling people food prepared in your uninspected and potentially unsanitary kitchen, and complaining about being told to comply with the food hygiene regulations that every licensed business is required to adhere to.
I find this viewpoint fascinating. Like arguing that trying to put out a burning building will hurt poor people trying to keep warm.
The housing market as a whole is the problem, one which AirBnB is exacerbating. That it locally enriches those renters able to find people willing to rent out their homes – which I’m guessing is disproportionately going to be people without elderly family members & kids – doesn’t mean it isn’t detrimental to the housing market as a whole, particularly at the lower end, and to everyone who rents.
If they can’t afford to sit on multiple empty houses due to increased AirBnB regulations, then they can always sell some of those assets back into the market. In fact, that’s the point of the regulation :P
The idea of some poor landlord barely scraping things together because their 50 rental properties (and thus millions of dollars worth of assets) are less profitable is preposterous
Judging by how hard they are attacking this thread (seriously like half the comments are them), I am going to say yes. I don't believe them denying it.
Units made available as short-term rentals must also abide by building and fire codes, including one that prohibits placing locks between rooms and having certain sprinkler and fire alarm systems on the property.
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.
Those struggling renters might not be struggling so much if other people renting out their apartments on AirBnB weren’t pushing up their rent by an extra 20%.
Housing markets have problems. AirBnB is not a responsible solution to those problems.
As mentioned previously, then they shouldn’t be housing others. You spend a small sum of money to make money, when I worked for the city of new York, all us engineers knew the saying, “regulations are written in blood” because NYC was one of the first cities to experiment with new housing methods and such. We were thus the first to witness the horrors of lack of regulation.
I wasn’t alive for the triangle waistcoat factory disaster. Will I learn from it? Yes. Will I force others to learn from it and protect innocent people around them? Also yes. Fire does not care about your class or situation, they happen and the steps to being protected are necessary.
If a person has extra rooms and can barely afford rent, they are occupying a unit that doesn’t fit their needs. They would be better served by downsizing to a smaller, more affordable place instead of heaping their financial problems onto the rest of society. Alternatively they could sublet the room(s) which would better serve their community instead of catering to tourists.
Host requirements start on the bottom of page 16. The requirements boil down to posting a fire exit diagram of the unit, keeping records, and not violating building or fire codes. Nothing in there that really seems that onerous, and is stuff that obviously protects the guests.
Oh look, here’s a list of fires that happened in buildings with short-term rentals, where egress, fire alarms, and sprinkler systems saved actual lives…
Yea you’re not really arguing in good faith here. You know fires happen and the lack of basic alerting systems is a concern. These regulations aren’t costing folks 10 grand to do. There is a cost of doing business and New York has stated this is that cost. Take it up with your state assembly if you don’t like it.
It is quite firmly my stance that none of the people barking up this “fire bad” tree are engaging in good faith at all, since none of these AirBnBs demonstrate undue risk worthy of their own fire code ordinances
Asking a person to install their own fire door to rent a room out is absurd.
Then I guess they shouldn’t be opening living spaces to other people for commercial purposes. Almost like doing that implies you have a responsibility to your guests
It’s the same as ride-sharing … which, when it started, was advertised as a cheaper alternative to taxis/cabs but that’s no longer the case.
I use taxis instead od ride-share because taxis are regulated and they have to buy licenses. Does this make them better? Not really, but they are contributing to the local economy through the tax base … and that alone does make them better.
I’ve stayed in plenty of Airbnb’s that the owners were on-site the whole time. It’s not bad at all. I even used Airbnb to rent out a spare room for a couple years and it wasn’t weird at all (except for the people who were much more comfortable with nudity than I was).
The time I visited NYC, the Airbnb I rented was a small apartment divided up into three rooms with other renters staying there. Same as if the owner was there, wasn’t a problem or creepy.
To be clear, the vaccines that are more protective against the dominant variant at the moment isn’t it yet, but prior shots should reduce symptoms and potentially viral load.
Would it be worth going and getting one of the old boosters just to re-up if the old one was over 6 months ago? Or would it be better to just kind of wait for the next one?
My wife and I are traveling internationally end of next month, so I asked my doctor. He recommended waiting for the new booster which should be available in about a week. He also suggested a flu shot at the same time.
The only “benefits” to local police are faster response times in emergencies and the ability to enforce nuisance ordinances. The former is not something you want from Bill’s Drinking Buddies and the latter would be better handled by county workers anyway.
Generally speaking: The vast majority of what cops do would be better handled by social workers and bureaucrats with a clipboard. And it reduces the likelihood of a noise complaint resulting in the ritualistic sodomy and execution of a dog and its owners.
Yeah, if they’re going to stick with traditional US law enforcement, county police are the best way forward. Sheriffs offices should be abolished nation wide
They’re not police in the way we regularly think of them. There are county police forces and there are county sheriff’s and while theres a decent degree of overlap in what their expected duties are, they aren’t the same thing. Sheriffs have very little, if any accountability to their community or oversight from local and state authorities. The only leg up that sheriff’s have in my view is that they’re an elected position. However, the way they’re structured makes that aspect even more ripe for corruption. Here’s a decent article breaking down the argument against sheriff offices. And a video about it if that’s more your jam
Excuse you, Mr. You’re-An-Invalid-Not-Capable-Of-Defending-Yourself? Your whole point is deeply insulting and offensive. Be civil and stop making it. See how that works? Anything can and is uncivil to somewhere at sometime. So don’t cry to me about your poor sensitive little feelings when you give not one single fuck for mine.
If he doesn’t have a gun and can’t fight, then he needs cops to protect him from people who do have guns and can fight.
No, the answer to not having a gun and not being able to fight is to get a gun and gain the ability to fight. If you cannot do that, ally yourself with friends and family who 1) do and 2) are willing to defend you, even with their lives.
That’s the only real answer because we’ve seen clearly that cops 1) legally are not obligated to protect anybody, 2) won’t, 3) are tyrannical and more interested in entrenching power over other people than doing anything positive.
Cops are not the answer to the human condition. Only friends and family are, really. Only you youself are, ultimately.
Is that everyone? No. I never said it was.
That’s clearly what you’re implying, or did you mean something else by your obnoxious threatening statement?
What are you talking about? It’s a fact of reality that people who can’t defend themselves need others to do it for them. There’s nothing ‘offensive’ about it. I don’t think less of anyone who can’t fight or doesn’t own a gun. Do you?
You’re actually just spewing nonsense at this point. Sorry, I’m going to block you.
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