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.
There should be no offsets. Either don’t pollute or pay a hefty tax proportional to the amount of pollution, those should be the options. If there are quotas, massively increased taxes past the quota, with no way of raising the quota.
Carbon storage should be an entirely separate matter, not something companies can buy into to excuse not optimizing what they’re doing.
Rich countries/politicians only pay lip service to caring about the planet. The most important thing to them is being re-elected, and that won’t happen if they remove subsidies for Big Oil/fracking projects or really invest in green infrastructure.
We can change that. They focus on the re-election issues they do because that’s what their voters seem to press for. They can’t read our minds, they have to rely on talking to us and polls and shit. They don’t care about these things though, they only care about what we say we vote for.
The democratic deficit, that’s the gap between what people want and what representatives do, is very high in the U.S.
As a climate lobbyist, this is 100% false.
The solution the African Climate Summit proposed is the ideal one - carbon taxes. Any politician pushing carbon taxes will get obliterated at the polls because Americans do not like paying taxes and especially do not like high fuels costs caused by paying taxes.
Someone throwing a paper cup out a window is only littering once. I’ll still football spike that cup back at them through their window. He doesn’t have to die in the ocean, he can die elsewhere if he wants to so bad, without polluting the ocean.
When Coast Guard officers told Baluchi they were cutting short his “manifestly unsafe” voyage, Baluchi threatened to kill himself with a 12-inch knife if anyone tried to apprehend him, and claimed to have a bomb aboard, which turned out to be fake, according to the complaint. Three days later, Baluchi—who authorities have intercepted in his Hydro Pod at least three times previously—finally surrendered
I know you’re being facetious but Florida’s mental healthcare system is abhorrently managed and funded. If it’s not the worst in the US we’re easily top 5. Especially for Baker Acts (involuntary admission to a psych facility), which he is. If you so much as blink at a cop or mention you’re depressed in the wrong way to a doctor you get locked up for 72 hours. It’s often traumatic, rarely does anything to help people in distress and leaves you thousands of dollars in the hole at the end of it.
This isn’t entirely true. More than just cops can place people under a baker act and they need to believe that the person they are placing under a baker act as a result of a mental illness is a threat to themself or others, or the person is incapable of caring for themself. And in the context of “locked up” it doesn’t mean jail and it is not 72 hours, it’s up to 72 hours.
That doesn’t mean cops don’t use it inappropriately but if it is obviously inappropriate once they see a doctor, a doctor can override it. On the opposite end, if it is a valid baker act that is still a threat to themselves or others at the end of that 72 hours, they can be l placed under another one with no limit on how many times they can be placed under a baker act. Tho a cop should never be in the situation to keep someone under multiple baker acts.
The rest of your comment about being traumatic and not helpful, yeah… that sounds accurate.
I’m an EMT in Florida. Cops and doctors both baker act people for bullshit reasons all the time. I had a lady that was suffering from a bad migraine, she told the doctor something to the tune of “it hurts so much I want to die”. Obviously being hyperbolic. She got baker acted. I have a thousand stories just like hers. Cops will baker act people for being drunk and they just didn’t feel like processing them at the jail.
I can’t think of a single time a doctor has overridden a BA. If the cop drops them off at the ER, they sit around until a psych facility has a bed open (that alone can take days because they’re often at capacity). If they take them straight to the psych facility, they get punted off to the ER for BS reasons for “medical clearing” which just means the nursing staff didn’t feel like taking on another patient and wants to delay it for as long as they can.
Because inpatient psych is so underfunded and understaffed, it’s far more likely than not the patients will stay the.whole 72 hours than not, and often times it can be longer if they’re “still a threat to themselves/others”. What “no longer a threat” means to you and I isn’t what it means to these facilities. They just pump you full of anxiolitics, antipsychotics, or sedatives and send you on your way in a couple of days with a followup appointment. The case load on the doctor’s at these facilities is so large people essentially have to stay the full time if they’re going to be cleared.
I could go on for days about the myriad of fucked up things that happen to these people who have the misfortune of being baker acted. It helps some people sure. But only in the sense that some of those people wanted to die and they’re so drugged out of their minds that they forgot they were suicidal in the first place. I’m being slightly dramatic but I hesitate to give this system any credit because it’s done far more harm than it ever will help
Just to be clear I’m agreeing with most of what you’re saying. And on the topic, I’m a Paramedic in Florida. Currently working for a ground agency as an advanced practice paramedic and hold a board certification as a flight paramedic.
From my original comment, yeah sometimes it isn’t used appropriately but you are oversimplifying the process. Now don’t get me wrong the process and system is messed up and has definitely caused harm but your experience isn’t the entire system. Do cops baker act people that are drunk? Yes, It happens but no competent law enforcement officer would baker act someone because they are drunk, they would place them under a marchman act instead. But that’s a different topic that is just as messed up but it’s not the same thing.
Doctors absolutely override them all the time for medical reason, I’ve had patients who were hypoxic in full blown CHF who got baker acted because they were talking nonsense and unable to care for herself. The cops thought it was psych issues, they aren’t medical. I get there and the patient was talking nonsense because her SpO2 was 70%. Same with sepsis and stroke patients.
This also extends to the “medical clearance” you were referring to. Psych facility are not medical facilities, some are both but before going for psych treatment medical causes of whatever lead to the baker act needs to be ruled out.
I am agreeing with most of your other statements, under staffed, under funded, high case loads so yeah people can just get loaded up with meds and sent on their way.
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