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Airbnb Hosts More Likely To Reject Guests With Disabilities, Study Finds (theguardian.com)
A study by Rutgers University has found that travelers with disabilities using the travel hosting service Airbnb are more likely to be rejected and less likely to be pre-approved. From a report: A Rutgers University study of nearly 4,000 requests for lodging on the home-sharing platform found that guests with blindness, cerebral palsy, dwarfism and spinal cord injury were refused at rates higher than people without disabilities. In some instances, hosts who claimed that their homes were accessible were also more likely to approve guests without disabilities, according to the research published Friday. The report raises new questions about the ethics of Airbnb's business model, following the #AirbnbWhileBlack scandal that dogged the company last year, centered on revelations that African American guests were denied access at disproportionately high rates. While traditional hotels must abide by anti-discrimination laws, startups such as Airbnb have been able to skirt longstanding regulations by arguing that they are technology companies and platforms that aren't liable for the actions of their users.
When you have a system based on individual discretion without accountability you'll find all sorts of bias.
Libertarians might argue that we shouldn't do business with people who are treating others unfairly. But in the same breath don't think we should monitor and report on the toxic behavior of private individuals. Without exchange of information how could their utopia of a free market really work?
My advice is to be an affluent able-bodied white male (straight or passing). That avoid quite a few problems in life, and gives you a little bit of an edge in society.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Most homes aren't handicap accessible. So I imagine hosts with houses with lots of stairs, etc. would have no choice but to turn away some handicapped people. Also, many people might fear that their home might even be dangerous for someone who's blind, deaf, etc. I used to live in a house that had a balcony with a low railing, for example. I sure wouldn't have wanted a blind person out there without someone to warn them.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Looking closer at the article, it appears that it didn't. Here's one quote that stood out:
Some hosts told guests in wheelchairs that they could come only if they had someone who could carry them up stairs.
Well...yeah. The host probably wasn't trying to be an asshole there, he was just being honest about the fact that his house wasn't wheelchair accessible. Do the study's authors expect every Airbnb host to put in handicap ramps and lifts on their stairs before they rent their house? These are private residences, not hotels.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It's not malice. Discriminating against our disabled countrymen is no one's goal... (okay it's probably someone's goal, but that sick fucker had a clumsy babysitter) perhaps it's just the increase in probability of a code violation that induces the bias.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
A fine enough idea in theory, but how many businesses receive tax subsidies or make use of federal funding in some way? How many can say they've never done this at all in the company's history.
Hardly fair to refuse me service when I can't refuse to pay the taxes your business dips into. Get rid of any and all compulsory taxpayer funded government support and then we can talk about freedom of association for businesses.
I'll play the devils advocate here:
These are private residences
And some are investment properties, rented out through Airbnb as sources of income. Should they be made to comply with ADA regs the same way all other small businesses are?
Have gnu, will travel.
Do the study's authors expect every Airbnb host to put in handicap ramps and lifts on their stairs before they rent their house?
Hotels have to do exactly that. It's part of being in the hospitality business.
But here's the real kicker: If Uber is any indication, if you rent out your house through AirBnB, and someone is injured, your homeowner's insurance won't cover it. And AirBnB's might not either, if it is determined that you rented it to someone who is disabled without making proper accommodations for their particular disability.
But if they consider not renting an upstairs bedroom to someone in a wheelchair when you have no wheelchair lift to be discrimination, then the entire study is nothing but propaganda. And that's an accomplishment: making an enterprise based on an illegal business model look like the victims.
This is why your idea is bad and you should feel bad for spouting such ignorance. Take this opportunity to enlighten yourself and maybe think a little before posting next time..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Good-bye
Regardless of your personal preferred theory of social behavior, the reality is the law dictates fair access in the market and for community life itself. Hotel or home operating as a business are the same under the law. Airbnb is at fault for allowing listings to the public without enforcement of legal requirements.
Yeah, it used to be like that. "Sorry, you're black, you can't use the toilet, there's one 50 miles down the road, bye". Fortunately we've come a long way since then. Not far enough, but even with agent orange in charge, let's try not to roll back too far.
How many businesses settle ADA lawsuits because it's cheaper than fighting them? Avoiding lawsuits to begin with by rejecting them seems understandable. Not everybody wants to install wheelchair ramps in their house.
The vast majority of businesses. Furthermore, such conditions should only apply going forward anyway, since the non-discrimination regulations also weren't backwards looking.
So, we can have freedom of association for all those businesses that never received taxpayer support? Like the vast majority? Great! That was easy!
Trouble is, without those laws, discrimination would just return to being rampant and overt (rather than still fairly rampant but at least a bit hidden.) That's why the laws exist in the first place!
I'm not saying that every single law is good or well thought-out, but assuming discrimination is no longer a problem and will continue to go away on its own without regulation is pretty naive. Both history and psychology suggest quite the opposite.
let alone making everyone bend to their issues.
But that's not how the law works. Anecdote:
They opened a new post office in my town. The parking lot immediately in front of the door is very narrow. A few diagonal spaces with a VERY narrow driving lane behind them. So they put a couple of handicapped spots at the corner of the building. Very wide, van accessible. Lots of room to back up, or drop a ramp at the rear of an accessible van. But some slob with a handicapped permit bitched because they were an extra 50 feet from the door. "Nope. My handicapped spot HAS to be the closest to the door." So they took them out and converted several diagonal spaces for handicapped use. You can't really park a long vehicle there. And you sure can't drop a ramp off the back of a van or unload a mobility scooter from a trunk. But now, fatso has the closest space. Never mind that, once inside the building, its a lot more than 50 feet to walk. So someone with serious cardiac or COPD problems would have to use a scooter anyway.
The problem with accessibility regs is that there aren't always good standards. You have to make an effort. But if someone doesn't think it's good enough for them, you get your ass sued off.
Another anecdote, similar to the one above:
A restaurant had a sidewalk/curb in front of their door. The curb rams were at the corner of the building, so that's where the handicapped spots went. Someone bitched "Not the closest spaces!" So the restaurant had the parking lot repainted to move general parking away from the front door. The handicapped spots stayed where they were (not going to jackhamer all that sidewalk out). Fatso still has to waddle exactly as many steps. But now at least, its the closest spot. So no lawsuits.
None of this shit makes any sense.
Have gnu, will travel.
How about a pharmacy that simply dispenses pills you need? How about the grocery store? What if all the water, electric, solar / gas / coal delivery etc, garbage collection, phone, or sewer companies are private?
Can they all just decide they don't like serving people "like you"? And you die for lack of meds, lack of food, lack of heat... whatever? Really? that's the society you want to be a part of?
"A surgeon that says "I'd rather let you die than treat you" obviously [...]"
shouldn't be licensed to practice medicine.
"I think I'm far better off taking my chances driving over to the next town than to have someone who wants me dead cut me open."
Whereas I think that its beyond unacceptable for the scenario to arise in the first place. The patients should not be shopping for a doctor that is willing to treat 'their kind' while literally bleeding out. I suppose they should comparison shop pricing too? Right? And read yelp reviews or something.
"In different words, your own example shows the utter folly of your political position."
I seem to recall an idiom like "Be aware of the log in your own eye before pointing at the splinter in someone else's." that applies nicely here.
"Trouble is, without those laws, discrimination would just return to being rampant and overt (rather than still fairly rampant but at least a bit hidden.) "
Good. That's honest.
I (like many landlords) aren't going to rent to a black couple or Muslim couple deliberately. I've never had a black guy apply to work for me, but I almost certainly wouldn't hire them if they did. Since the outcome is the same - it's "fairly rampant", and the discrimination happens anyway, lets' just be honest about it.
I've been on the other side of the equation - people who didn't want to rent to associate with me because I was gay, or because I'm Mexican. If they don't want to do business with me because they are (for example) anti-gay bigots, I have no desire to give them my money in the first place.
It would suck if I got punished for being honest.
It also sucks that you run a business that isn't handicap accessible, in violation of the law.
I mean, seriously, you sound like you think you should be allowed to rent suites with no windows in violation of the fire code as long as you tell people up front... "No windows".
That doesn't fly. I can't open a knick nack shop that doesn't have a handicap accessible bathroom in it. If I get a space that isn't suitable I need to resolve all that stuff before I can get a permit, before i can legally let a customer in the door. Why should you be able to start a small hospitality business and do NOTHING?
Oh right... because you didn't bother getting a permit to run your little hospitality business. If this ever comes to bite you in the ass, its not because you got punished for being honest, its because you ran a hospitality business without meeting any standards, and got around being detected for a while at least, by futher failing to register and get licenses and permits. Probably failing to disclose the airbnb income properly on your taxes... because if every other part of your little hustle is illegal, why not that too?
Who could have known that spending a few decades suing people left, right and center would make the rest of the people hesitant to embrace your group?
See that "Preview" button?
Get back to me when 'all those businesses that never received taxpayer support' have built their own infrastructure (private roads, not on the power grid, no internet connectivity, self contained septic and water system, etc.). Also, make sure the owners or their university educated employees all went to private schools (i.e. nobody from a state university or college).
The hoops you libertarians will jump through to justify discrimination.
What is your point? All of those things are paid for in taxes, not some magic money tree.
And businesses pay far more in taxes than citizens, all of their rates are higher.
Nice try, though.
Businesses pay taxes for that.
The excuses fascists like you make for their fascist beliefs.
So what?
Why do people think that overriding people's preferential associations is somehow an intrinsic moral good, enough so that it's sufficient justification for using the threat of imprisonment to force submission?
In the absence of discrimination law, suppose one person wanted to open a hair salon which only does black women's hair and another person wants to open a barbershop only open to men with blue eyes. I think the former would be more likely to survive long term than the latter - a possibly useful specialization that could find a niche versus pointlessly restricting one's customer base and refusing good money- but I see no moral issue with either of them. I have brown eyes; if the barber declines to cut my hair, I fail to see how I have a right to demand his services. Even more so, I can't see why I should be able to have him forced out of his business or taken to jail at gunpoint for his refusal to stop cutting blue-eyed mens' hair. To give me such a power to bludgeon people with would be patently unjust.
Consider the famous homosexuality anti-discrimination cases, such as wedding photographers or bakers who didn't want to do expressive creative work explicitly endorsing something they objected to and thought was not really a marriage. In these cases, it seems obvious to me that anti-discrimination laws aren't rectifying an existing injustice, they're creating one. The customers in question could have easily found others willing to take their money and give them the same services; instead, they were able to use the law as a weapon to bludgeon others for their convictions and deprive them of their livelihoods.
Unless some other factor changes valuations, economic discrimination is an unstable situation - the demand curve your business sees is higher if you are open to all customers, so businesses have an incentive not to discriminate, and if they ignore those incentives, they'll likely face competitors that don't. So if it has no value it generally only persists if propped up by law. If people judge it to be of value, why should that judgment be overridden at gunpoint?
Discrimination in the 20th century South wasn't primarily a matter of individual choice. It was a matter of discriminatory public institutions and Jim Crow laws that mandated discrimination in the private sector. Suppose those were effectively eradicated (and e.g. education and law enforcement were totally nondiscriminatory) but the Civil Rights Act of 1964 hadn't imposed anything on private businesses (or if Heart of Atlanta Motel had won its court case). Without unjust laws propping it up, I think most private business racial discrimination would have naturally faded away over the course of a couple decades. I also think some kind of more drastic short term action to hasten the process and start to make up for Jim Crow was desirable, but I am worried that the way we did it set us up for a permanent end to the freedom of association in the Western world.
How about YOU read! To everyone else reading, he's playing the "technically correct" card and leaving out quite a bit of details that make his argument facetious. The link is about the Dixiecrats. The parties swapped and have swapped multiple times since the 1st Continental Congress. Lincoln was a Republican technically. Does anyone honestly think a Republican from today would free the slaves? I sure as hell don't.
Why do people think that overriding people's preferential associations is somehow an intrinsic moral good
Most people don't. If you're a bigot then we're going to think you're a dick regardless of whether or not your prejudices are overridden -- you'll still find ways to express them.
What we think is a moral imperative is reducing discrimination on a systematic level. But any social "system" is, necessarily, made up of people and thus the burden of not acting like a dick has to be placed on the people.
The customers in question could have easily found others willing to take their money and give them the same services
Assuming they live in a place large enough to have multiple wedding cake bakers, and that there's at least one baker who isn't a dick that's free that day (well considering its a wedding cake, probably week+.)
There will always be some snowflake who goes off just on principle when they have other options, but there are completely valid instances when these laws are required in order to give gay couples (or interracial couples or any other historically discriminated group) their opportunity to have a good wedding.
discriminatory public institutions and Jim Crow laws that mandated discrimination in the private sector
Which only came into being as an end-around their being forced to free the slaves and similar anti-discrimination policies forced on them by the north that were removing black people as a cheap labor force. Jim Crow laws were enacted for economic rather than discriminatory reasons (they definitely were discriminatory, obviously, but that wasn't their primary reason for existing -- it just made them easier to sell to an already highly-prejudiced American south.)
Without unjust laws propping it up, I think most private business racial discrimination would have naturally faded away over the course of a couple decades
The problem is that what you think is just wrong. History tells us (and psychology mostly supports) that humans really, really like dividing the world into "in" groups and "out" groups, with skin color being one of the more obvious ways to do so since its very easy to notice and very hard to hide. Left to our own devices, we tend to get more prejudiced against the unfamiliar rather than less, at least on a societal scale (individual peoples' attitudes will vary greatly of course.)
I mean hell, even with all these laws and decades of slow progress toward acceptance, half of Donald Trump's election campaign was based on discrimination of one sort or another -- Mexicans and Muslims primarily but also hints of Chinese, Japanese, Russians (before half his staff got caught dealing with them) and whatever other group he thought he could safely attack on any given day. And the American people ate it up -- it gave them an excuse to dig up their long-buried prejudices. Which is both sad in its own way, but also blatantly shows that bigotry is still very much alive and not even buried all that deep.
Anti-discrimination laws are still very much needed.
What do you think this is, a free country? Have you read all the federal, state and local laws? Didn't think so. Don't feel too bad. Nobody else has either. Nobody.
Sometimes, even those who sign those bills into law.
I (like many landlords) aren't going to rent to a black couple or Muslim couple deliberately. I've never had a black guy apply to work for me, but I almost certainly wouldn't hire them if they did.
You just said that if you had the opportunity you would commit FEDERAL crimes. Employment and Housing discrimination is something the Feds usually take pretty seriously. You get caught, you'll get fined, if there's a pattern of such behavior, it goes worse for you.
don't be a bigot, especially since:
I've been on the other side of the equation - people who didn't want to rent to associate with me because I was gay, or because I'm Mexican.
You should know better.
The customers in question could have easily found others willing to take their money and give them the same services
You're forgetting two things:
1. Location. Depending on the location there might not BE another local photographer or baker.
2. Local Culture. And even if there was, they might be of the same mindset.
And why should the "mighty businessman" have all the power? What makes THEM more important.
Unless some other factor changes valuations, economic discrimination is an unstable situation - the demand curve your business sees is higher if you are open to all customers, so businesses have an incentive not to discriminate, and if they ignore those incentives, they'll likely face competitors that don't.
Not always, depending on local culture, because THAT is what happened.
Discrimination in the 20th century South wasn't primarily a matter of individual choice. It was a matter of discriminatory public institutions and Jim Crow laws that mandated discrimination in the private sector.
All those things existed because of the local CULTURE which IS a choice, One can choose to NOT be a bigoted asshole.
Especially those who sign those bills into law.
The "mighty businessman" is an individual deciding what to do with his or her own time and labor. I have absolutely no right to force the barber to cut my hair contrary to his will. I have no right to have him jailed for declining to cut my hair. It's not that he's "more important," it's that it's his time and his effort. It doesn't matter whether any other barber feels differently. It doesn't matter if he's the only barber on the continent. I don't have any right to demand his services any more than I have a right to enslave him.
Totalitarian restrictions on buyers' freedom of association are possible, they just haven't come up as much. If I'm selling bananas and the barber makes a point of only buying bananas from people with blue eyes, I have no right to confiscate his money and give my bananas as compensation.
You've completely missed the point about governmentally instutionalized discrimination versus private choices. I have a right, as a brown-eyed citizen, to equal protection under the law - e.g. to have my vote count just as much as someone with blue eyes rather than 3/5 as much. That doesn't mean I have the right to demand that private individuals never act differently because of my eye color.
What we think is a moral imperative is reducing discrimination on a systematic level.
Again, there's no argument presented for why this is even at all moral, much less morally required. As you admit, the method tried for "reducing it on a systematic level" in the relevant sense (the private sphere) comes down, eventually, to forcing individuals to jail at gunpoint for exercising their freedom of association.
When the barber declines to give me a haircut based on my eye color he has done me no favor but he has done me no wrong. That's true even if I live in a place where he's the only barber within a thousand miles. My desire to have "an opportunity for a good haircut" does not give me a right to force him to cut my hair or to force him out of business.
Your simplistic "history tells us and psychology supports" comes with no history and no psychological support. I'm not expecting a dissertation here, but systems like Jim Crow and apartheid or even medieval segregation of Jews had to be propped up by huge intrusive legal frameworks and constant enforcement of those laws to avoid natural erosion. When people have declined to associate with one another despite being free to do so and despite the natural incentives to do so, it's difficult to see why their value judgments should be overridden at gunpoint.
I happen to be of the opinions that Donald Trump is a sorry excuse for a human being, that Hispanic immigrants both legal and illegal have on the whole done vastly more good than harm, that the Muslim ban is both unconstitutional and entirely counterproductive, etc. But none of that has to do with private individuals' rights of association. Promoting interracial and intercultural understanding may be a just cause, but in the long run, a just cause is not served by unjust means. Attempts to repress objectionable opinions by trampling the rights of those who hold them tends to perpetuate those opinions.
That's right, mom and pop services replacing corporate, boring, but standard and guaranteed level of service such as taxis and hotels.
We all learned already about the ugly side of guerilla taxi and we keep learning about the same ugly side of guerrilla hotels.
I wonder if this could be fixed by disassociating the platform from hosts.
Abnb is not a hotel, it's just a software used by many shady private dwellings to score some side cash on tourists.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I guess the point is that a hotel, a commercial operation, would be required by law to be accessible. Airbnb thinks it and the people who let through it should be exempt.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
People lend their appartments, people decide to whom. People may be biased or racist. People are nevertheless allowed to decide whom to lend their appartments and other stuff.
So what?
And why is it a problem of AIRBNB's business model?
Looking closer at the article, it appears that it didn't. Here's one quote that stood out:
Some hosts told guests in wheelchairs that they could come only if they had someone who could carry them up stairs.
Well...yeah. The host probably wasn't trying to be an asshole there, he was just being honest about the fact that his house wasn't wheelchair accessible. Do the study's authors expect every Airbnb host to put in handicap ramps and lifts on their stairs before they rent their house? These are private residences, not hotels.
I agree, but... from the article:
The study further found that hosts who advertised wheelchair accessible homes approved 80% of guests without a disability, but only 60% of travelers with spinal cord injuries, raising further questions about the potential biases of Airbnb users.
It's one thing to say your place isn't wheelchair accessible. It's another to say it is, and then turn away people with wheelchairs.
I think you need to explain how it's propaganda, unless you're actually arguing it's a good thing that some AirBNB hosts are both unable to cater to guests with disabilities. It seems a massive leap to look at a study that says a certain type of business has a major problem with catering to certain types of client, determining the reason why they don't, and then claiming that it's "propaganda" when, in fact, you've just re-enforced the thesis of the study (by providing an explanation) rather than debunked it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Let's just stop being the devil and admit that ADA and all other similar regulations are impediment to individual rights. We are all born with the right to discriminate, then we discriminate in our daily lives and nobody bothers us. But god forbid should we decide to start a business and help some people we actually *can* help the government prevents us unless we take it upon ourselves not to discriminate against everybody else.
This is complete nonsense, a person has the right to discriminate (if not, then you should be sued by every business that you discriminated against, by every person you didn't offer a date, by every landlord whose residence you skipped, etc.)
MY OTHER COMMENTS
There shouldn't be any government 'supporting' anybody in the first place. Infrastructure is not a government authority, it shouldn't be involved in it, there shouldn't be public roads, public grids, public anything.
As to what exists today: get back to me when you stop discriminating against all those people you didn't date, all those businesses you didn't frequent, all those rental properties you didn't live in, etc. Then talk about how *OTHERS* must be forced not to discriminate but it's Ok for you, though you are actually using the same roads, the same utilities, etc.
MY OTHER COMMENTS
I'm gay and grew up with massive discrimination and no job prospects because of my sexual orientation. Of course, as a pampered and privileged American, you wouldn't know anything about that.
Eventually, I got lucky and managed to immigrate to the US, where gay people had built communities and businesses without the help or interference of government.
AirBNB is just like Uber ... they do not want to do anything but having some website/app and getting money for provisions. So i guess they do not care at all who has which skin color.
That's their business, go to a different doctor.
If you are bleeding out, and you are of an ethnicity that no nearby doctor is willing to treat, this means you would die. Do you accept death?
So, "affluent". How do I go about being that?
Paraphrasing Dave Ramsey:
Don't borrow money for your first car. Walk until you can afford a bicycle, and use that until you can afford to buy a beater car with cash. (I recommend a bicycle over public transit because entry-level jobs often require taking weekend hours when city buses are not in operation.)
Don't borrow money for your post-secondary tuition. Work in professions that do not require a degree until you have saved enough money to buy an associate's degree from a community college with cash. Then work in professions that require only an associate's degree until you have saved enough money to buy a bachelor's or higher degree from a state college with cash.
Don't borrow money for your first business. Work as a W-2 employee (or foreign counterpart) until you have saved enough money to start your own business.
most apartment buildings even here don't have elevators.
As I understand it, if you are leasing to the public, you have to either A. have an elevator or B. lease the first floor. Based on what you said, it appears most apartment buildings have chosen option B.
A classified ad offering goods for pickup would appear to satisfy accessibility regulations if the buyer can arrange to meet the seller outside the seller's door at a particular time. This outdoor workaround doesn't apply so well to an Airbnb listing.
The issue is that a lot of these AirBnB "hosts" are actually slumlords or wannabe hoteliers who are doing it as a business rather than to rent out spare rooms
Then change the law to phase in accessibility requirements for a property owner at a particular number of unit-days per year.
When the barber declines to give me a haircut based on my eye color he has done me no favor but he has done me no wrong. That's true even if I live in a place where he's the only barber within a thousand miles. My desire to have "an opportunity for a good haircut" does not give me a right to force him to cut my hair or to force him out of business.
Ideally, if you're going for a consistent light-touch minarchist legal code, there'd also be no law against "practicing barbering without a license" and therefore no "only barber within a thousand miles".
Unless some other factor changes valuations, economic discrimination is an unstable situation - the demand curve your business sees is higher if you are open to all customers, so businesses have an incentive not to discriminate, and if they ignore those incentives, they'll likely face competitors that don't.
Say for every 100 people in a particular market, 20 are of an ethnic minority, 60 bigots of the ethnic majority who refuse to eat in the same room as a minority, and 20 neutral people of the ethnic majority. A restaurant admitting no minorities could sell meals to 80 people, the bigots and the neutrals, while a non-racist restaurant could sell meals to only 40 people, the minorities and the neutrals. Without regulation protecting minorities from a majority of bigots, whom would a rational restaurateur admit?
The "mighty businessman" is an individual deciding what to do with his or her own time and labor. I have absolutely no right to force the barber to cut my hair contrary to his will. I have no right to have him jailed for declining to cut my hair. It's not that he's "more important," it's that it's his time and his effort. It doesn't matter whether any other barber feels differently. It doesn't matter if he's the only barber on the continent. I don't have any right to demand his services any more than I have a right to enslave him.
One significant difference is that laws requiring having short hair are not nearly as widespread as sit-lie laws requiring having housing.
Lots of people are exempt from ADA requirements. Pretty much anyone renting or subletting a house or apartment in the U.S. is already exempt from these requirements and has been since the ADA was passed. Only a relatively small minority of apartments (usually a limited number of units in large complexes) in this country are handicap accessible, along with a very small percentage of houses (usually made so at the expense of the owner).
It was understood from the beginning that the ADA was meant for public accommodations and businesses doing new construction, NOT for private residences (it would have never passed otherwise). The fact that someone is temporarily renting out their private residence via Airbnb doesn't change the fact that these are still private residences.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I don't think it's fair to call someone who occasionally rents out their house an "unlicensed hotel." I gather that existing "bread and breakfast" operations with 5 rooms or less are already exempt from the ADA. And those are certainly more akin to hotels than some guy renting out a spare bedroom or his house for the weekend.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Wow, I didn't realize that the ADA was that weak. In Europe anyone renting (we generally don't do subletting) has to make sure that the property is both safe (escape routes for fire, electrical standards etc.) and accessible.
There are a few exemptions but not many. The basic principal is that if you do any type of business beyond the level of car boot sale you probably need to ensure everyone can access it, with a few exemptions where it really isn't practical.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Smith college, a private institution, openly does not accept male students for admission (yet if you enter as a woman and change, that's perfectly fine). I have yet to see a straight male work at Victoria's Secret. Similarly, I've worked at a local gym for quite some time and when I expressed interest in working as a babysitter (I'm good with kids), in addition to my role at front desk, I was never given that role. Thus far only females have had it.
Harvard is proudly hosting a black-only graduation event while some UMichigan students are demanding a non-white safe-space.
It's only discriminatory if it applies to non-white cisgender males.
The hoops some people jump through to justify this.
Why should a hotel be required to put in wheelchair ramps any more than a house that's being rented out to customers? One law for everyone.
Then why is it so hard to understand the issue? To use one of your conservative tropes, if you don't want to play by the rules, then you don't get to play.
I'm not a conservative, dingbat. In fact I don't conform with your stupid one dimensional understanding of politics.
If there is any argument against this very rational and LEGAL position, might I remind you that it sounds like you'd like to be a special snowflake in a safe space. We know that couldn't be true, right?
The problem with ADA is that even if you fully comply with the laws, people will still sue you, even for really minor things like having a handicap sign a half of an inch too low (literally, this has happened.) In literally thousands of cases, businesses get sued by somebody who they can prove never even went there, but they settle anyways because it would cost more to fight it.
http://www.recordonline.com/ne...
Politicians and business leaders across America counter that ADA compliance cases are about extortion rather than equal access, because lawyers like Weitz often recruit serial litigants and seek reimbursements for $400-an-hour legal fees for boilerplate filings.
Clint Eastwood fought such a lawsuit and won, but it cost him more than he would have had to pay out otherwise:
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/...
Note this tidbit:
After only four hours deliberation, the eight-member jury agreed with Eastwood's attorney that Diane zum Brunnen, 51, had not actually tried to use the Mission Ranch resort's facilities in 1996 -- so she wasn't denied access.
However, jurors did find that the inn should provide a ramp to the registration office, a second disabled-access guest room and signs about access accommodations -- improvements Eastwood said were already in the works.
Anyways, it's not as if would be airbnb customers are SOL, they could always go to an actual motel.
Maybe not. I doubt that his own legal fees exceeded half a million dollars; quoting from the article you linked to:
And further; a classified ad for a single one-off sale of used goods isn't a 'business enterprise' in remotely the same way that operating an unused suite/apartment as a 'hotel' would be.
Just as I can sell a used car via the classifieds without a lot of 'red tape'. But if I start buying and selling cars and operating a used car dealership off my driveway and out of my garage... then its a whole other thing.
AirBnB is largely people pretending to be the former, while actually being the latter.
Lawyers demand stupidly high settlement amounts all the time, and they rarely ever get what they first asked for. They go through rounds of negotiations until either they have a meeting of minds, or if they don't then the court proceedings begin.
Having said that, going to court is risky for both sides, so in most cases they prefer to settle. In this case, Eastwood refused a settlement offer entirely and effectively said "have at me bro", and won.
Anyways, there have been a few times where some congress critters have proposed having a 90 day notice requirement for the ADA before the business can be sued, but all of the lawyers who sue for ADA violations have lobbied hard against it every time, including the lawyer that sued Eastwood, under the argument that there should be strict liability for this. I liked how Eastwood put it "The lawyers in these cases drive off in a new Mercedes, while the disabled person drives off in a wheelchair." In other words, if the lawyer makes say $15,000 in a settlement, the disabled person who they supposedly represent makes about $1,000. And these settlements happen ALL THE TIME, including against business owners who themselves are wheelchair bound, and in such cases, you'd figure "if the owner is wheelchair bound and has no difficulty getting around their business, then why are they getting sued for having an inaccessible business?"
BTW, for an idea of what strict liability is, it essentially means that there doesn't need to be any proof of mens rea or mental culpability. Read this, it's both highly entertaining and enlightening:
http://thecriminallawyer.tumbl...