Slashdot Mirror
What Airbnb Did To New York City (citylab.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: There are two kinds of horror stories about Airbnb. When the home-sharing platform first appeared, the initial cautionary tales tended to emphasize extreme guest (and occasionally host) misbehavior. But as the now decade-old service matured and the number of rental properties proliferated dramatically, a second genre emerged, one that focused on what the service was doing to the larger community: Airbnb was raising rents and taking housing off the rental market. It was supercharging gentrification while discriminating against guests and hosts of color. And as commercial operators took over, it was transforming from a way to help homeowners occasionally rent out an extra room into a purveyor of creepy, makeshift hotels.
Several studies have looked into these claims; some focused on just one issue at a time, or measured Airbnb-linked trends across wide swaths of the country. But a recent report by David Wachsmuth, a professor of Urban Planning at McGill University, zeroes in on New York City in an effort to answer the question of exactly what home sharing is doing to the city. [...] Their conclusion: Most of those rumors are true. Wachsmuth found reason to believe that Airbnb has indeed raised rents, removed housing from the rental market, and fueled gentrification -- at least in New York City. "
Several studies have looked into these claims; some focused on just one issue at a time, or measured Airbnb-linked trends across wide swaths of the country. But a recent report by David Wachsmuth, a professor of Urban Planning at McGill University, zeroes in on New York City in an effort to answer the question of exactly what home sharing is doing to the city. [...] Their conclusion: Most of those rumors are true. Wachsmuth found reason to believe that Airbnb has indeed raised rents, removed housing from the rental market, and fueled gentrification -- at least in New York City. "
People love to invent rules for other people. The more complicated the better. If it's not working, make it more complicated, until it starts working.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
. . . that restricts the supply of new housing, and has strong rent-control in place, and people are SURPRISED that property owners will find a way to to generate revenue, and then optimize that revenue ??
and I do wish we could get folks to understand that. Cities didn't limit hotels to "Preserve the Character of the neighborhood" or some other hippy crap. They did it to stop this kind of rent seeking garbage. People have to live where the jobs and rich folk know that. So they can pay damn near anything because they know they can rent it back to somebody and make a profit. Sure there are limits, but they're frighteningly high.
This crap should just be shut down. Just like this crap was shut down when I was a kid and we called it sub-letting.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
It's one of those inane things that's just used to complain. If well off white people are moving in to a neighborhood it's gentrification. If they're moving out it's white flight. I'm sure if they stayed in place long enough, some term would be created to castigate them for that as well.
... it was "white flight" when middle-class people abandoned crime-infested, poor, dirty urban areas, and it was deemed bad. Now that people are moving back into these areas and the crime and dirt and poverty are leaving, it's "gentrification" and it's deemed bad.
Why is this a bad thing? It is called capitalism. Should we build a moat around NYC and keep out all of the people willing to pay more for housing in order to protect cheap rents for people already inside the moat?
I really do get annoyed at people that try and use the government and legal system to force property owners into giving them below market rents. Haven't we learned that is a good way to turn decent neighborhoods into slums? In some cases rent control laws have reach such idiotic proportions that the landlord is actually paying the tenant to live in the unit since the rent doesn't cover the property taxes.
Let supply and demand function without interference in order to establish a market level price.
People love to invent rules for other people. The more complicated the better.
Fine. Ban all short-term leasing or sub-leasing of Apartments, Homes, or portions of an Apartment or Home on all Real-Estate, except for Commercial Units licensed as hotels.
Do you feel that is superior?
Let me see if I understand this:
ABnB works because ad-hoc rooms are cheaper than standard hotel rooms.
So people rush into the ABnB market, removing conventional apartments from the pool of long-term housing, driving up rents as the pool of apartments shrinks.
So if hotels are losing customers, why aren't they cutting hotel rates to be more competitive with ABnB? Hell, why aren't they slashing staff completely and converting some properties to ABnB only -- or becoming apartments?
Do we need to reduce regulation on hotels so they can better compete with ABnB?
Or is it some other thing, like hotels had successfully restricted competition and there was a practical shortage of hotels which drove prices too high?
Great, then the owners of those restaurants will have to pay their workers more!
No area is going to lose all of their restaurants, etc. There is always demand for services like that. Prices will adjust and employee pay will increase. Restaurant workers in NYC already get paid triple what a restaurant worker in Alabama gets.
I am intrigued at how people think to solve a problem of low quality rentals or too high rents you should legislate on completely orthogonal things like the length of the rental. If you want rents to be lower, legislate exactly that. It's called rent control. If you want rental properties to be nicer, legislate that.
However I don't think those are good ideas at all. Resist the urge to make rules.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
If you want rents to be lower, allow people to build more housing. Rent control doesn't fix anything.
Do you have ESP?
Milton Friedman on price controls
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Nobel prize winner Milton Friedman said "We economists don't know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can't sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you'll have a tomato shortage. It's the same with oil or gas."
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
That's what you do when you see a problem. You curb it. Hell, people "invented rules" about privatizing the commons, and we got an agricultural revolution. People also "invented rules" about having to serve black people the same as white people in a restaurant. Rules can be forces for good.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
you have a problem with "don't be a dick" you must be a Republican.
True. And that is because "affordable housing" isn't affordable to the poor.
That is a beautiful way to keep prices low! I kind of like how that reduces the incentive for people to buy speculatively. It's pretty dysfunctional how remote investors have distorted prices in the sf bay area, vancouver, etc.
Man, you really need that seminar!