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CheeseNoodle ,

‘Company that made bank deliberately flouting zoning, renting and subleting laws claims it was all an accident’

killjuden ,

www.vidlii.com/watch?v=-WsMgmNsRuD

Phegan ,

I don’t think it was accidental

Snapz ,

This is a stupid light take, starting with the flowery version of their early 2010-ish “good intentions”.

Their “guarantee” insurance was notoriously difficult to actually access if needed. This was typical enshitification from the start, they just had to do a bit more early to gain public trust, until they reached critical mass and then flipped the switch.

The drug dealer gives you the first baggie for free, not because they are good dudes that care about you saving money…

demonsword ,
@demonsword@lemmy.world avatar

The drug dealer gives you the first baggie for free

We should kill this urban legend, this simply doesn’t happen in the real world

Kit ,

Sure it does. Or at least it happened all the time when I was in college.

Snapz ,

Not an urban legend, just not in your first hand POV - Many examples around crack in the 80s, Molly at raves, a bump of coke at a party… All followed by, “and hey man, if you ever want more, hit me up”

When you’re making definitive statements try to add “doesn’t happen TO ME…” or “IMO/IME”, otherwise you just sound like you base the truth of the entire world solely on your own hyper limited, lived experience.

Corkyskog ,

It’s more of “I am too poor to understand this concept”

aesthelete ,

Having some free drugs at a party isn’t the same thing as “the first baggie being free”.

I would be very surprised if you could just walk up to drug dealers on the street and get free drugs like the urban / astroturf / DARE / LEO myth suggests.

yokonzo ,

Can confirm this happened to me a few times, especially with dope, you don’t know what you’re talking about

Potatos_are_not_friends ,

It also never happened to me.

Or maybe it has happened to me a dozen times but I’d shout, “No way man! Drugs are for losers!” And hand him a DARE pamphlet and then I gained a reputation.

frostysauce ,

I actually was talking to a neighbor at my apartments 20 some-odd years ago. We got to talking about coke and he asked if I’d ever smoked it before.

“No…” So I followed him across the hall to his apartment and took a hit. “Whoa, this is fucking great! …Wait, when you smoke it isn’t it crack?”

“Yeah, it’s awesome isn’t it!? You know, if you want more I can probably find some…”

So, yup. I got my first hit of crack for free. I never thought that happened in real life before, either, and I’ve never had or heard of it happening since. Additionally, about six months later I stopped smoking crack.

Crack0n7uesday ,

I can’t believe people trust others enough to rent their house out like a hotel. I’ve already seen so many problems from this I can’t believe it’s still legal. My neighbor moved and they turned it into an AirBnB, some kids threw a party and left some trash out that poisoned my other neighbors dog. There’s a lawsuit, but the dog is still fucking dead.

Aermis , (edited )

What does some kids leaving trash out have to do with air bnb?

Edit: didn’t read about how Airbnb insured property damage. But still, it’s hard to be responsible for the actions of others.

bane_killgrind ,

Yeah that’s why inviting strangers into your home unsupervised is stupid.

technocrit ,

I don’t know if I’ve ever been in an airbnb that’s actually somebody’s house. It seems like they’re mostly “investment properties” that people rent out. I’m sure that’s great for housing. \s

erwan ,

It started this way tho, people renting a room or a couch in their home. Pretty quickly it became either full units or rooms in a share appartement with other AirBnB guests.

ILikeBoobies ,

Remember back before Airbnb when this was just a free thing called couch surfing?

TubularTittyFrog ,

why free when you can make money?

Tryptaminev ,

i mean couch surfing is guest and host being there and interacting with each other.

AirBnB is getting the flat for yourself for the time you rent it.

Couldbealeotard ,
@Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world avatar

A big part of Airbnb used to be spending time with a host. It has since turned into just landlord via app.

Tripp1976 ,

That’s exactly how airBnB started though. Then they moved to renting out the whole place and now we are where we are.

whoreticulture , (edited )

Uber was originally marketed as ride-sharing, too. Just an app to find people going the same way. Of course, I’m fairly sure that their current iterations was the plan all along as anyone with enough business sense to start those companies must have predicted that there would be people who take on Uber/AirBnB as a primary source of income. But sharing your house or planning a shared trip is much more palatable than “Landlords but Worse”.

ILikeBoobies ,

couchsurfing.com Still exists

But i can’t imagine as many people on there when they can just rent out for money

Potatos_are_not_friends ,

Not really. Couch surfing was only for a certain type of person.

kalpol , (edited )

www.insideairbnb.com

Just gonna leave this here. Pick your favorite city.

edit: guess we killed it. But there are a lot, a lot

Meltrax ,

Jesus. I can’t find an affordable apartment in Boston but “Blue grounds” is listing fucking 372 of them on Airbnb…

EDIT: so Blueground is the biggest property holder in almost every city? Or one of the top 5 in the places it isn’t #1. What the hell?

kalpol ,

There are whole 30 story apartment buildings which are managed and run like a hotel but with units purchased by owners for STRs. Crowd-sourced hotels. So might be that company managing a whole building.

power ,

I feel like the US is far down on the victims list. Look how they massacred my boys Spain and Italy

kameecoding ,

Prague city center is basically just airbnb flats now

KrankyKong ,

Same in Nashville. It’s a shame. I wish the government would regulate this more.

yopla ,

Any somewhat touristic city that didn’t implement some drastic restrictions has been fucked. In those places you can make from 2 to 10 time as much with airbnb as you can with a normal tenant so it becomes the obvious choice for a property owners. the only way to fix supply is regulation.

buzz86us ,

Maybe they should ban whole home AirBNB… i only ever do rooms.

Breezy ,

Theyd part out a hous into multiple rooms. I stayed at one airbnb that were 3 stories and each one was another airbnb, with a kitchen on the main level that had to be shared. No one used it for the 3 days i was there, but still.

bitwaba ,

You can easily regulate against that.

Yggnar ,

How

Fedizen ,

Through the tax code. If you have a short term rental property that’s not a primary residence: shazam busted. You’d need some kind of policing for it but you could force airbnb to make a filing on it as well which would make it possible to automate.

Tryptaminev ,

No regulation is worth anything without enforcement.

bitwaba ,

Sure. That’s step two. You gotta do step one first.

Tryptaminev ,

I agree. It wasn’t meant to be against regulations. Problem is in my city we have plenty of regulations to avoid repurposing flats for tourist rentals without a permit, we have regulations against systematically letting flats empty to be able to sell the house or flat at a premium etc. But we only have like three dozen government employees, who are supposed to oversee a city with more than 1.5 million flats and individual homes. So even if every one of them manages to check on 2 flats every day, they manage like 15.000 flats a year, which is already a rather optimistic estimate.

It is crucial to not only demand regulation, but also that enough resources are assigned to enforce them.

AdolfSchmitler ,

Just a little fucksy wucksy :3

ViscloReader ,

Oopsie doopsie

Kbobabob ,

Oopsie poopsie…

Because everything went to shit

gravitas_deficiency ,

“accidentally” 🤦‍♂️

It was - and is - entirely fucking intentional.

nucleative ,

There are a few things humans (and thus a healthy society) require for survival. Water, food, shelter.

When we start to point unadulterated VC backed capitalism at those resources, I think we give up something in our society and culture that we don’t actually want to give away.

I travel a lot worldwide and have used Airbnb quite a few times. However I’m now on the side of “Airbnb is evil”.

A couple years ago had a horrific experience in a villa and Airbnb customer support didn’t give a rats ass. Fortunately, my bank did and my credit card chargeback for $4,000 was successful. While I was going through that experience I came across a multitude of communities of travelers who have had equally horrific, oftentimes more horrific experiences with Airbnb where they’ve failed to step in and assist in any way.

Random dudes who own houses are on average unqualified in the hospitality business and not incentivized by maintaining a brand reputation. There are so many issues caused by shitty Airbnb hosts that hotels - real hotels - just don’t suffer from.

So now we have this situation where a lot of spaces are allocated to hotel businesses, more space is allocated to residential housing, And any random dude who can qualify for a mortgage can take a house off the market, fill it for 10 or 15 days out of the month, and keep both a domicile unused for a resident and a hotel room empty.

This is one of the few areas where I think hotel regulations are smart.

buzz86us ,

Yeah, but on the same token you don’t want to give hotels the monopoly… There is so much price gouging if they know some big event is happening in town. Plus many areas have fuck all for hotel capacity. I do AirBNB because I don’t have $150 every time I want to go to a city. I wish we’d have capsule hotels

WindyRebel ,

Are you implying that AirBNB hosts don’t do this price gouging as well?

Odd_so_Star_so_Odd ,

What you describe is just another example of poor urban planning + untapped market of public transport.

PresidentCamacho ,

Just had an Airbnb cancel on us in Japan 1 week before our trip… Won’t be doing that again after seeing how little Airbnb gave a shit

nucleative ,

I’ve heard a lot of people having this problem. Airbnb is next to useless, even with their guarantee.

Prices goes up, other hotels are booked solid, there are fewer options and travelers are left in the cold.

A big brand would be less likely to risk their reputation over $50 or $100/night difference if there’s some new big event in the area

cyd ,

US policymakers screwed themselves with crappy urban planning, leading to insufficient housing supply and bad transit options. Blaming AirBnB for high housing prices is like setting up a chain of dominos, and criticizing a guy who comes by and knocks it over. If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else, or the wind.

bobs_monkey ,

This is happening worldwide. It has very little to do with urban planning and more with lax homeownership restrictions that allows the wealthy and corporations to scoop up housing supply for profit.

cyd ,

“The wealthy and corporations” have choices of how to invest their money. If housing supply is sufficiently elastic to meet demand, they’ll find somewhere else other than housing to put their money. Ain’t nobody trying to corner the Chinese real estate market in 2024, for instance (*).

There are a few places where land shortages genuinely constrain housing supply, like Singapore and Hong Kong. But the US has tons of land; things are simply not well optimized. That, plus high interest rates due to fiscal/monetary mismanagement.

(*) Not saying the Chinese real estate market is worth emulating.

bobs_monkey ,

I’ll agree that there is indeed a housing shortage, but I don’t necessarily think that is what’s at play here. Capitalists will always park their money when they see an opportunity to make a return, regardless of industry. Housing has never really been an elastic commodity, it is inelastic in nature due to the time it takes to build and the fact that it is a reasonably sizable asset that doesn’t change hands at the drop of a hat (granted there are market products that contradict this, but I’m going to ignore them for the sake of this conversation). Further, they have always been marketed as an investment vehicle, albeit a long term one.

And while there is plenty of land in the US to build on, housing is only as attractive as it’s local market. Plenty of communities have popped up via ambitious developers, but fall on their faces when the demand is inexistent (California City being a famous example). Better transit options can alleviate this, but people are still drawn to geographic proximity to jobs, schools, entertainment, etc.

Homes in high demand areas fetch a premium because people want to live where they work and play without the commute. These areas are already well developed, and yes had their been more relaxed zoning laws, more housing stock could have been built. But, I would argue that many communities built 50+ years ago were built with the then current demand in mind, not the demand of today. Sure that could be pinned on developers and city authorities not having enough foresight, but I don’t really blame them for not being able to comprehend both prospects of an exploding population and the demand these cities currently see.

Short term rentals are tricky because no one is going to vacation to a suburb 30-45 min from an urban center or destination location, they want to be in the heart of the action. These properties present an ideal investment opportunity for these operators in that a) they purchase an appreciating asset, and b) they generate a short term return. It’s almost a guaranteed profit for them.

Cities saw this problem growing, and should have taken preemptive action. Yet they ignored it because they were listening to moneyed interests. Now that it’s become a full epidemic, it’ll be much harder to contain.

sudneo ,

Soil consumption is one of the many environmental problems we face. Polluting and consuming more soil to condition the market is nonsense IMHO. Governments should simply regulate more so that people vacationing will go to hotels and houses will be available for residents. This also addresses the issue of locals being pushed further and further away in the cities they live, which creating more houses doesn’t solve (it will just be the next round of isolated dormitory periferic areas, which have already tons of problems).

Short term rentals for houses was a very good and lucrative idea, but it’s harmful to basically everyone but the landlords who rent out houses there. As such, we should simply strongly regulate it to discourage it as much as possible, if not banning it directly.

barsoap ,

Governments should simply regulate more so that people vacationing will go to hotels and houses will be available for residents

Berlin did exactly that: You can rent out your apartment for IIRC 30 days a year, or while you’re also living there, if you want to rent out more you need a hotel license and tough luck getting one while there’s a housing shortage, least of all for a flat in a residential area.

But OTOH that’s all only taking the edge off there’s been decades of under-investment in social housing in Germany overall, and the little social housing that got built got built via attaching conditions to building permits for private investors, those apartments lose their social housing status after 20 or such years.

And it’s not like there aren’t companies who want to build, and build plenty – but they don’t because they can’t recoup costs, not in this market where every rich fuck who can afford rent already is living somewhere else: Building costs are too high. Some of that is building standards, permitting, etc, but the bulk of it is financing costs, that is, interest on loans for new construction is way too high. Getting at land is not always easy but there’s plenty of mechanisms such as municipalities having right of first refusal for any land sale (if they want to, that’s another topic). There’s really only one way out of this and it’s state coffers because the capital market certainly isn’t going to get less greedy.

sudneo ,

Agree. Social housing has been one of the first areas to suffer from cuts everywhere. It is a problem on its own, which short term rental makes worse.

The problem is that building is basically an irreversible use of land. It’s only recently that we started seeing land as a commodity (few centuries) and with the current state of affairs, it’s insane to leave it as such. Soil is too precious and too scarce to let market inefficiencies waste it. We should really explore all options before we decide to simply build more, especially in Europe where the population growth is basically null.

barsoap ,

The build more thing is in urban areas to accommodate urbanisation. Coming to think of it the 49 Euro ticket might actually reverse some of that because there’s tons of smaller towns, sometimes villages, with proper train connection to the next large city. Low prices drive usage which prompts higher train frequencies which, infrastructure permitting, takes even more pressure off the metropolitan housing market.

That said urbanisation isn’t in itself a bad thing – it makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons to not have a gazillion tiny villages, it’d just be another form of sprawl. Here in SH, if every train station we do have had a small urban core around it surrounded by village structures in cargo bike distance and then long stretches of fields and nothing, that’d actually be quite nice. The state was very good at doing that in the Hamburg metropolitan area, focussing development on a couple of axes radiating out from Hamburg but it should become more of a general pattern.

baru ,

If housing supply is sufficiently elastic

But it takes ages to build houses. You’re again blaming something that’s a given just to ignore that housing is a basic need. Obviously if the basic need is manipulated there’s loads of money to be made.

barsoap ,

Singapore actually has housing pretty much nailed down. If Singapore had US-style housing policies 95% of Singaporeans would live in Malaysia and commute because only bank execs etc. could afford living in the city.

…also Singapore would have zero green space left. It’d all be single family homes interspersed by parking lots. You can’t spit out a chewing gum over there without hitting a public park.

Uranium3006 ,
@Uranium3006@kbin.social avatar

You can't chew gum in Singapore at all, maybe this is why

barsoap ,

There’s exceptions for therapeutic uses (dental, nicotine gum) and you can also import small amounts for personal use. Chewing is perfectly legal, improper disposal isn’t.

Tryptaminev ,

Elastic housing supply is nonsense.

Once a house is there it is there. You dont just demolish it, and build it up again somewhere else.

The only thing that can be elastic is demand. And it is not because moving has high opportunity costs, people are socially integrated in the area they life, feeling at home is a crucial feeling for mental well being…

People renting/buying to life are at a fundamental disadvantage against landlords, who only care about the money coming in. Thinking of housing as a “normal” market like idk. headphones or something shows a lack of economic understanding.

cybersin ,

It’s both.

An example of bad urban planning is low density urban sprawl, which requires lots of resources for few housing units.

Less housing, price go up. High build cost, price go up.

TK420 ,

Updoot for wind because Mother Nature doesn’t give a fuck :)

cybersin ,

Blaming AirBnB for high housing prices is like setting up a chain of dominos, and criticizing a guy who comes by and knocks it over.

Yeah, and that’s exactly what they chose to do. They contributed to the reasons John Public can’t afford housing, and were rewarded massively for it.

If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else, or the wind.

Yeah, anyone can rob a bank with poor security, but we should still punish the guy who actually robs the bank.

Fedizen ,

Air BnB effectively pitted average renters and homeowners against the luxury hotel market. From a supply/demand standpoint its basically moving something like 10% of the rental market to the hotel market.

What this does is it means luxury long term rentals slot out the next lower tier of housing at higher pricing it slides down the economic ladder until a percent of people at the bottom is simply outbid for the reduced normal rental housing stock.

Its not airbnb’s fault the market shifted but it is a problem with the market as a result of blending the luxury hotel market with residential housing.

eran_morad ,

“Accident” fkn lol

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