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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?
Renting an unoccupied appartment is not sharing.
Vancouver (and the lower mainland in general), has a similar problem that i assume new york does. Air BNB depletes possible rental stock. I am not sure low the new york vacancy rate is, but mostly due to foreign capital in-fluxing into the real estate market here, our vacancy rate is 0.3% (probably less now, things are only getting worse).
That said, I stay in airbnb pretty much every vacation i go on with my family as what you can get for the price blows hotels away (if there even are hotels in a destination). It's either that or camping, is really all one can really afford when you pay more than half of your salary into paying rent.
It seems that people are somewhat confused and think its like a "big hotel lobby" or something driving this ban on aribnb. It very well may be that people are trying to protect their cities from ever higher rents. Especially in popular cities where it is impossible for an average family to own a property. The cities become just a resort in this case, instead of what they should be: A place where people can live within an hour or two commute of their workplace affordably.
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The only thing that should be banned is the use of the word "sharing" when it comes to all of this sort of stuff. I'm paying you for a ride, or for a place to sleep. You're not "sharing" it with me! More hipster word-erosion.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Even smallish cities rely on a good bit of their development from this tax, which is often in excess of the normal sales tax rate.
Like the Uber service, this is a way to circumvent legacy fees to the municipality.
The hotel/motel tax in my town is used 100% for promoting tourism which brings in more people to use those hotels which airbnb benefits from too. The preferred solution to me would be maybe a revenue cap. If you make less than say $3000 per month then you're in the clear otherwise you need to register as a hotel. Another option would be a nightly stay cap like say 10 guests/month or 30 guests/month or even 100 guests/month. This would prevent businesses from using this loophole. The same could be said for lyft/uber, if you haul more than 50 passengers a month then you need to register, get regular inspections, have proper insurance, etc... This would still allow the casual person to do it without a bunch of hoops but gets them to do it properly once they are actually running a business. Many things already operate like this where certain regulations only kick in once a minumum size is reached.
When you're in a residential area with high owner occupancy, sooner or later you get to know most of your neighbors. Since people are likely to stay there a while (I think average house ownership is 7 years), you're gonna bump into them enough time that you'll get to know who's who.
It makes a huge difference: if something annoyed you, you talk to them, you compromise, and you're good to go for years to come (not always easy, but easier than having to redo it every year or two)
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
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
most of which have been very successful and have long waiting lists.
Wouldn't 'long waiting lists' mean that they're actually unsuccessful, in that they're not meeting demand? Not to mention that "the projects" have a long history of extreme violent crime rates and other criminal activities?
When you look at the actual numbers, public housing is quite efficient and provides good housing for less cost than developers do in the free market.
You mean, quite efficient at continuing the chain of poverty, because an employer sees an address in the project and looks elsewhere? Sad, but true.
Look, I'm not going to say that public housing is all bad, or that it can't be the most fiscally sound decision. What I am going to say is that I believe that the real way to ensure sufficient housing is to allow developers to make money. If they can make money building housing, they'll build housing. I'm not saying that you have to enable them to make a killing, but well, if you're not getting enough housing built despite sky-high prices, maybe there's a reason that can be adjusted?
I don't read AC A human right
The idea of AirBnB is a good one but AirBnB in particular is an unethical company that specifically allows hosts to falsely advertise and get away with it with impunity.
I've stay at 20+ places and one in 5 has lied about their listings. From claiming it's 1 bedroom but actually being a studio. Claiming WiFi but actually stealing it from a neighbor. Claiming to provide parking but not. The latest is claiming to be 1 place but actually be several blocks away. In every case AirBnB did nothing. In the last case AirBnB even claimed it was policy that locations are false. So you try to rent something in a nice/safe/quiet area and it's actually an bad/dangerous/loud area and this is actually official AirBnB policy
AirBnB really need to be taken down until they stop being blatantly unethical.