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SF Evictions Surging From Crackdown On Airbnb Rentals
JoeyRox (2711699) writes "The city of San Francisco is aggressively enforcing its ban on short-term rentals. SF resident Jeffrey Katz recently came home to an eviction notice posted on his door that read 'You are illegally using the premises as a tourist or transient unit.' According to Edward Singer, an attorney with Zacks & Freedman who filed the notice against Katz, 'Using an apartment for short-term rentals is a crime in San Francisco.' Apparently Airbnb isn't being very helpful to residents facing eviction. 'Unfortunately, we can't provide individual legal assistance or review lease agreements for our 500,000 hosts, but we do try to help inform people about these issues,' according to David Hantman, Airbnb head of global public policy. SF and Airbnb are working on a framework which might make Airbnb rentals legal, an effort helped by Airbnb's decision last week to start collecting the city's 14% hotel tax by summer."
Socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor.
Do people really not read these things. No subletting is a common clause.
http://www.sfrb.org/index.aspx?page=1040
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
What is the logic behind that?
hey. kim jung il said you can't use your private property as you see fit. be glad the glorious leader allows you private property at all.
now pay up 14% for the pleasure of using your own property!
You can stay with a random SF resident.
Could be a furry, could be a militant lesbian. The only thing guaranteed, it won't be boring.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
It's the usual for tourist areas: You want to soak the tourists, who don't vote in your area, for as much tax money as you can. Thus the double-digit tax percentages on things that only tourists normally use, such as hotels.
Also restaurant taxes specifically aimed at sit-down places that 'tourists' normally visit more often, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
"'You are illegally using the premises as a tourist"
Tourism is illegal in SF now huh?
A friend of mine got a similar notice in Oakland last year. Shut down or be evicted. It's a shame. She provided a better place to stay than any reasonably priced hotel.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
The city of SF is not enforcing anything - it's the landlords. In SF, most units are covered by rent control, meaning most people are paying rents far below the market value. Landlord are prohibited from increasing rents or kicking out current tenets unless they violate their lease. So any lease violation, such as subleasing, can be used as an excuse to evict the tenet and get one that will pay the current market value.
"'Unfortunately, we can't provide individual legal assistance or review lease agreements for our 500,000 hosts, but we do try to help inform people about these issues,'
Bullcrap. If they wanted to actually ensure that their rentals were legal, they could do vastly more to ensure that. In NYC, for example, any whole unit rental (where the lessor isn't going to be there as well) of 30 days is illegal if the unit isn't a licensed hotel. If you try to post a property for a non-roommate rental in NYC, they could have the site simply say "Is this unit a licensed hotel? If not, then the rental would violate NYC law. Please confirm that the unit is a licensed hotel unit. Yes/No"
They don't even bother with this level of fig leaf.
Would it kill the submitter to put in one sentence that says what Airbnb is??? And yes, I know I can fucking google it, but what is the point of a summary if you are requiring the reader to expend effort by browsing around just to figure out if the story is worth reading?
It's nice that SF is keeping up the vibrant tradition of keeping those poors out of town.
These are the criminals our police and lawyers need to be expending time against.
for Air_Heads.
We don't need protecting from ourselves. We do not need a hotel tax. In fact, we don't need any taxes except sales tax. But as soon as it is allowed to collect taxes, government invents new reasons to tax. That's because government is in business for itself. We're just the suckers who pay for it
the context here is that rental rates in SF have skyrocketed in recent years, and if landlords can evict long-time tenants they can get the unit on the market for 4x rent.
Irrelevant. You expect your landlord to uphold his end of the lease, why should he not expect you to uphold your end of lease.
This sounds like predatory landlord practices.
It sounds to me like landlords enforcing the rental agreement. The agreement is between the renter and the landlord, not some unknown unvetted third party.
I'm not sure I want to live in a building where other renters are sub renting to random people on a daily basis. Seriously, these people need to get a hotel room, and if they can't afford a hotel room, well, what could go wrong?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
No, they aren't evicting you if you own it, that would be where fines or other sanctions come into play.
Good way for landlords being ripped off by rent controls to evict renters, though. I like it!
Is why i dont sublet my condos on airbnb, despite many who are risking it
SF and Airbnb are working on a framework which might make Airbnb rentals legal, an effort helped by Airbnb's decision last week to start collecting the city's 14% hotel tax by summer.
This is what we used to call corruption. Or, before that, "tribute to the king."
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
San Francisco isn't the first city to do this, Paris for example has had a similar law for years but only until 2010 started enforcing it. It's meant to drive tourism to Hotels for all the tax base benefits and to address the problem of affordable housing. AirBNB is a great idea but like Uber is allowing some cities to start abusing their citizens by preventing them from doing legal commerce that they can't control or tax.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Really. Can't rent an apartment there, can't rent a hotel room there, can't breath the air there without a trust fund. Godz forbid we should find a way not to pay the rapacious owners of San Francisco even more money. No, this is not the way the free market goes, Rand Fans. This market will never be "free". It's monopoly of space. Space is limited. There's too much money in the city. Prices go up. Eventually the place is full of empty apartments owned by capital funds and by Saudi and Colombian investors, as London has shown us. Free for whom? No the people who live there, damn it. They're peons now.
Capital funds are now rolling up the apartments into securities now, and selling them on Wall Street as investments. Of course, surrounded by derivative bets. No chance of a crash there, eventually. And the complaints of a reduction if not elimination of maintenance are of course rolling in, 'cause that's what an unfree market does: charge you more for less and less.
Don't care about the laws. Laws are bought by the owners of the city, and we duck around them as best we can. If you are rich enough, you ignore the laws and pay the fines if they catch you. Or just buy a new law, just for you. The law is a joke. Contracts are a joke. We have no power to negotiate a better deal, so the hell with it.
Don't see an end to the hoovering up of the peon army's piggy banks any time soon. Students now owe a trillion dollars in student loans that most can never repay in their lifetimes, and additionally they'll have to live in cars or trucks when the rentiers start enforcing the limits on the number of people living in a single unit. Don't want those poor people in your neighborhood. And "poor" is a relative term. The middle class are starting to understand that they are the new "poor" now, in some places.
Where the hell are people gonna live? This is amusing. SF might become a true Randian paradise. A lost cause for 95+ per cent of the population. New York used to have rent control, and that might have saved SF from the upcoming years of rage; but "free" markets are the rule now. Let's see what happens. Vomit on the buses? That's the beginning. We're replaying the 1930's. Gonna have to start getting those private security forces, rich people. (Odd thing: if you've money, you tell your private police what to do. If you don't have capital, public police tell *you* what to do)
End result, less money from tourists, visitors and job seekers looking for a place to crash while finding their bearings. The rentiers don't care; they're rich anyway. Also, the people paying 4000 - FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS A MONTH for their two bedroom can't make a little cash back. They can't buy the appropriate laws. Shrug. Lost cause here.
So don't live there, "problem" solved.
S.F. is one of those markets.
I wonder of the IRS will get into the game too. Rentals more then 14 days are taxable income (minus expenses).
For those of us who aren't in the real estate business, maybe you can explain. How is this a predatory landlord practice, when it's caused by the government enacting laws that say people need special permits to sublet for less than 30 days? Repeal the law and you remove the "predation." Isn't the problem caused by the city government "stepping in" and causing the practice to become illegal?
I get it that municipal governments want their hotel tax revenue. Presumably they would also like to have a "red shirt tax" too. That doesn't mean it's sane for people to support such a government, though.
Herre. Different case than renter-subletters.
This happens in all the massive cities where Progressivism rules. The progressive elites have all the money and make all the rules (huge piles of rules and regulations and laws and taxes which the filthy-rich can easily afford to have their employees deal with) and then, because they need their cheap servants close-by they allow schemes like "rent-control" which stupid dupes think is to benefit the poor and middle-class but what it actually does is give complete control to the elites. THEY decide where the rent-control rules apply, how many units are covered, what circumstances will allow a person to get (or force a person to lose) eligibility, etc; this is complete market manipulation - the very opposite of an Ayn Rand situation. If you are, or ever hope to be, middle class and the progs arise in your city, GET OUT while you still can; it will either go like NYC or SF and be a place where the middle class cannot really live, or go the way of Detroit.
I'm NOT a big Rand fan, though I do think she got a bunch of stuff right, but for the situation in SF to be in any way a "true Randian paradise" as you put it, there would be no zoning laws, no rent control, no minimum wage, etc (a situation which most young Americans have been propagandized to think is an express elevator ride to some secular form of hell...) but the truth is that such a situation would, of necessity, achieve a natural equilibrium (if it's too expensive to live there, the elites would either lose all their servants, have to raise their pay, or have to provide another solution). In the non-Randian paradise progressives (in BOTH parties) have been gradually converting America into since the 1940's, the elites still have all their power and money, but the burden of providing for their "servants" is pushed onto middle-class taxpayers (who fund all the social "safety net" programs, from subsidized phones, rent, and energy to mass transit and food stamps). The rich want their nannies, gardeners, pool cleaners, etc and can pay them sub-par wages because those workers (who would otherwise move to places where they could afford to live) are instead enabled to lead a subsistence existence supplemented by the "safety net" (which the elite always rig the rules of, to ensure most do not escape it)
And New York City.
Sycodon's too smart to let that happen to him. Only stupid losers allow that to happen.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
If SF is too expensive for you to rent and the reason are forces beyond your control or ones that you cannot overcome, then move. It is to your advantage, fighting the others and the economic factors driving the high expense is not going to get you ahead. You don't own a house, what is keeping you there? Obviously the overall quality of life you are receiving is not very good at all and from what I've been reading, it is getting worse. The US is a very large country with different things to offer. I've moved with my wife and two kids 5 times in 12 years, not just across the street either. 1000's of miles each time (Florida to Seattle and a few places on the east coast in between). I know a couple with a new born that just moved from SF to Erie PA. They love it.
to slowly remove the landlords face with a scalpel and nail that smug note to it after.
Utopias are VERY expensive. Big-government politicians of both parties have been buying votes for decades by promising this or that wonderful new service, or protection, or "helping hand" while avoiding being run out of town on a rail for the high tax rates all those promises naturally would lead to. Their solution has been to impose tax after tax and fee after fee on everything they can. The average person has his income tax withheld from his paycheck (so he never sees that money and therefore does not feel the sting of handing it over as he would were he in a dark alley being robbed) and then he pays numerous additional taxes on that already-taxed income every time he spends money... there's the sales tax, taxes on phone service, gasoline, movie tickets, etc and then there are all the fees (which are taxes, but being called "fees", are perceived differently as they are usually dishonestly put in place with promises the money will be dedicated to a specific cause) on things like luggage, "recycling fees" on TVs (the states do NOT use this money recycling TVs), and on and on it goes. Our politicians have discovered that they can raise taxes to truly obscene levels if they chop 'em up into lots of little taxes and fees and sprinkle them onto everything. A variation on this theme is to put certain narrow taxes on one group, like a particular industry or income bracket, and another narrow tax on another group, etc so that everybody has a bunch of little taxes on him that are not in-common with the taxes on everybody else (so each person has fewer allies for removing the taxes he faces, and other groups facing their special taxes are actually lobbying for his to go up as a trade for theirs going down - it's the old "divide and conquer" play)
Here's a hint: Money is fungible. If a politician says "let's put a small tax on {insert "bad" thing here} to provide money for {insert "good" thing here}", you can be SURE that the money the "good" thing formerly got will be re-directed to something else the politician wants to fund (probably to buy votes, or as a kickback to a businessman who funded his campaign, but CERTAINLY not something the public would have voted for) and the new revenue will fill the hole - so no net improvement will occur in the "good" thing. They've used this trick using the schools as the "good thing" and usually things like gasoline, cigarettes, booze, etc as the "bad" thing for DECADES. It'll keep working for them until the public wakes u
the power and reach of goverment unlimited? Somehow I doubt that's what the founders intended with the Constitution. Somehow the fucks in charge have spent 100s of years finding loopholes to control everyone and taxes were the easiest way. You can't run a constitutional republic when everyone in charge is an authoritarian. They'll find a way around any "rights".
But, but, but... whaaaa! He waaaaants to!
Yet another case of government knowing better, what we are allowed to do with our lives and properties.
And, of course, let's not forget the hotel-room taxes it is losing from this "illegal" activity — and all the salaries of the unionized hotel workers, who, like all unions, are dear friends of the big government these days.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Sad to see Republicans fuck over...
the people of SF. I know how much those people irrationally hate rent controls and have for decades tried to find a way to help the wealthy property owners in that city screw over then tenants. They finally found a tactic that works. Just like and accuse the renter of being an Air BnB fan, and the city cops will fuck them and throw then in the street. Yeah for the Republicans. They actually got a rare win in SF.
[facepalm]
See! *This* is what happens when you get in a hurry and don't pay attention when posting!
You forgot the /sarc tag, dude!
Details, man! Sheesh!
What could have been an accurate and snarky post with a good dose of schadenfreude tossed in with the /sarc tag included, now posted without that tag just makes you look like a low-information partisan talking-point tool with no critical-thinking skills.
This "toolness" does nothing but add noise and divisiveness, poisoning the well for having any kind of dialog.
Let's be careful out there, Slashdot posters! Don't let this happen to *YOU*!
Just your friendly neighborhood AC trying to help improve the quality of all these "could've been a +5, but fail" /. posts!
fsck san francisco...and beta.
Nazi motherfucker?
In addition to the fact that airbnb hosts are, in many locations, operating illegal hotels (under current law), liability is also a massive concern. Airbnb boasts about their insurance for hosts but if you read the fine print you'll see that when it really matters their insurance is worthless to you. If a guest trashes your place the insurance helps you out... but the real issue a host needs to be worried about is liability. Airbnb's fine print specifically excludes liability coverage. What if a guest is injured or dies on your property. Now you've got serious issues. Most property owners have liability coverage through their homeowners policy (renters can also buy liability coverage). However, if a claim is made the insurance company is going to tell you to take a hike as soon as they find out you were running an illegal hotel and that's the reason the claimant (or the family of the deceased) is suing you.
Unfortunately, it's an area the conservatives win on. Regulation is good. But so is democracy. So is allowing a myriad of solutions to a problem. If I want someone unlicensed and unregulated to babysit|hotel|taxi|massage|fuck me, I should be able to do that. By no means does that mean that no regulatory system should exist. Stupid fucking Americans turning everything into false dichotomies. It's possible for everyone to be able to do what they want, and for no one to be a dick. But neither conservative nor liberal will let that be 100% of the time.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
too much whitespace, and always a silliy picture
The market clearly wants to move in direction on this one. When the market is restricted in one area it flows out in another. So where will the money flow instead? AirBNB needs to assist in automatic tax collection.
We have the same problem in Spain. Millions of people bought homes here and have been subletting them to cover the cost. Then the hotel licensing law became enforced and this has helped depress the market even more.
This effects everyone including myself in a number of ways even though I don't own a home.
I am in Spain for 6 months a year, 2 months at a time. As a result of this 3 month law I have to live in hostels estranged from the local population. I want to buy a place but factoring in being unusable to use my home for what I want, such as renting out when I'm not there, I will only pay 40% less the previous prices.
This is really crashing the market even harder than it already is. People, the market are trying to come up with ways to survive and they're being crushed at every turn - just like like in Argentina.
There comes a point when people have nothing left to lose - I see a lot of homelessness and squatting now in the empty houses. People are ready to change these rules through violence.
With the financial switcheroo in the world this is only going to become more common. I suggest studying criminality so at least you are prepared when you finally can't play by the rules any more.
A blog I run for the wealth
The choice is yours the future is clear - you can chose good or chose to burn to death. Chose to win or lose and die. Its real freedom and a real choice. Its a true hypothetical vision or real hallucination of San Francisco and the Universe, pick one:
A) Over paid, under worked, black, real market bureaucrats who live large and plump when you cook 'em
B) Well-paid, Geeky, blooming better bus and uber car riding historians who never get in the way unless you're a legit taxi
C) Zero paid, hopeless, smelly, street people who contribute vomit and graffiti for a fair city life.
Not so fast ! Its a trick question ! Geek humanity won't possibly survive AynRandtopia if it can't get laid !
They city doesn't actually need or want your pittance tourism dollars.
And so the fuck what you can't afford to move/live there. I want to build a villa in Nice, but I can't afford to do that either.
Now stop fucking whining about being a peon and do something about it.
And no I'm not Randian, I'm pretty fucking far from it. I think the followers of that asshole like Greenspan are even bigger assholes. But I don't think wanting to live someplace gives you the right to live there.
I don't think there are actually any republicans in the city and county of San Francisco (and not many in the surrounding region).
The last time a republican carried any vote in San Francisco was Dwight Eisenhower in 1956...
By registration statistics, republicans generally place behind the combined registrations of all the third parties combined, but I don't think I've ever met one of 42,000/800,000 souls in SF that claim to be members of the GOP... I'm thinking they don't actually exist and the number is really all faked registrations by democrats with the intent to screw up the state-wide republican primary elections.
this is the opposite of capitalism, this is the state stepping in to _prevent_ basic capitalist action by ordinary people
How is this any different than renting a car and then renting it out to someone else?
Unfortunately, this is totally par for the course for city of San Francisco.
I don't think there are actually any republicans
Wat? If they weren't trying to destroy our city, why is our mass transit in such poor shape? Why is our city so damn car-centric? Why are cars fees so cheap? Why is the Bay so polluted? Why isn't rent control more stongly enforced? Why are there so many homeless people? All of those are things that Republicans support. While some of the people here that rule over us have Ds beside their names, they are DINOs to the core. For fuck's sake, there's even thousands of guns in this city. The Republicans are flooding the streets with them.