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New York Senate Passes Bill That Bans Short-Term Apartment Listings On Airbnb (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The New York Senate passed a bill on Friday that makes it illegal to advertise entire unoccupied apartments for short-term rentals on Airbnb. The bill is headed to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's desk for him to either veto or sign into law. The Verge reports: "The bill prohibits online apartment listings that last under 30 days and run up against the city's multiple dwelling law, which is designed to stop apartment buyers from renting out the entire space and basically turning their units into Airbnb hotels. First-time offenders would be fined $1,000, but a third infraction would be much costlier at $7,500. 'Let's be clear: this is a bad proposal that will make it harder for thousands of New Yorkers to pay the bills,' an Airbnb spokesperson told Tech Crunch. 'Dozens of governments around the world have demonstrated that there is a sensible way to regulate home sharing and we hope New York will follow their lead and protect the middle class.'" One of the bill's sponsors, State Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal, disagrees and claims that it targets "people or companies with multiple listings. There are so many units held by commercial operators, not individual tenants. They are bad actors who horde multiple units, driving up the cost of housing around them and across the city." She went on to say, "You should know who your neighbor is and what happens when people rent out their apartments on Airbnb is you get strangers," said told the New York Post. "Every night there could be a different person sleeping in the next apartment and it shatters that sense of community in the building. It also can be dangerous."
Be fearful! There might be strangers sleeping somewhere in a property near you.
I bet the hotels are lobbying for this. Airbnb is one thing that is pushing the cost of visiting New York down.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
If the law only targets apartments, and leaves owners of detached houses free to do what they want, isn't this creating a two-tier system favouring the already rich?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I've just arrived at an AirBnb apartment for a 2 week stay. When booking the place I was warned not to mention that I was in an AirBnb place as the locals aren't too happy with it. So I have been thinking about such apartments this week, and it seems to be that the hotels are missing out on an opportunity for renting out complete apartments. I generally rent a complete apartment and end up paying less that a hotel in the same area and being 2 or 3 notches of luxury above the hotel and don't have to worry about strangers wandering in every day to clean the place and poke around my belongings. Yeah I know about long stay hotels, but they are sad little things in comparison and don;t give me the same feel as staying in a furnished apartment for an extended stay,
On the other hand I have read all the sorry stories about AirBnb rentals where people have run everything from prostitution rings to wild parties from them. So I can see the benefit of local regulation.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
There is more than that. Hotels also charge taxes (federal/provincial and local) on each room and about 3% of the 16% tax goes to support tourism. As rental properties aren't taxable, but rooms rentals are, this is a 16% advantage an Airbnb rental has. And pretty good chance most people who rent via Airbnb aren't paying income tax on that either.
In Victoria BC, the city is trying to make all renters register and pay taxes the same as any hotel and there is outrage amongst renters. Many don't want to have to collect and remit the same taxes those they compete with must.....
I gave you a +1, but I have to undo it because commenting is more important.
Everything you say is true, and beyond that, the rental market in the first place does this same thing to the general housing market as well.
Investors buy rental properties to generate a passive income (i.e. get money in exchange for nothing), by exploiting an advantaged capital position (i.e. just by having more money to begin with).
That ability to benefit financially from housing you don't need for, you know, actually housing yourself, attracts people with money to spare into buying up more investment housing, increasing the demand and thus market price for housing.
That makes it more difficult for people who need housing to actually live in to buy, forcing them into the only other option left, renting, putting them on the receiving end of their landlords' passive income (i.e. they're the ones paying that money in exchange for nothing).
The real estate investors can then reinvest their rental income into buying more housing to rent out, and the renters, throwing all their money down a rent-hole, are inhibited from ever saving enough to buy their way out of that situation.
In this way, those who already have more profit off those who already have less in an ever accelerating vicious cycle; the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and while for those around the middle (i.e. those who've got around about just what they need for their own use, and neither can profit from their excess nor have to pay for their deficit) it seems like it would be simple to change from one end to the other with some good old fashioned hard work, in reality there is an invisible pressure away from that center, and for those starting far below it, it's an extraordinary effort to even approach that middle point in their entire lifetimes; and getting to far above it comparatively easy, for someone starting out around the middle already. Because being poor costs you money, and being rich makes you money, and rent is the engine that drives that process.
This whole process is much more visible in places where supply is unable to easily scale up with demand, and where demand is already high; people living in Bumfuck Nowhere where no one wants to live, surrounded by unending undeveloped flat lands to the horizon, might not see this problem as more than noise in their market data, but in places where the market is already crunched this process comes to life and makes it infinitely worse than it already would have been.
In the absence of a rental market, anyone who had more housing than they needed for their own use would have only one option to benefit from it: sell it. But nobody's going to be buying it as an investment property anymore if there's no rental market to profit from, so the only people buying would be those who need it for their own use. Which means if you want to sell it, you have to sell it at a price (and on terms) that people who need it can actually afford; that's how a free market works. Your only alternative is to not sell it and get nothing and have wasted everything you spend buying it. So in the absence of a rental market, the purchase price for housing would have to come down; conversely, the presence of a rental market artificially inflates the purchase price of housing.
And this critique doesn't just apply to housing rental, but to any kind of rental, including the rent on money otherwise known as interest; though, again, the supply and demand curves in a given market will make it more or less visible a problem -- nobody's going to complain about the evils of the DVD rental market (if such a thing still existed). But it's the places that really matter, like housing and other big-ticket items, where the problem really manifests, and those are... well, the places where it really matters.
Rent (including interest) is the problem with capitalism; which, n.b., is not a synonym for a free market. Free markets do not intrinsically lead to runaway concentrati
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
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