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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. "
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.
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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.
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?
It's the Uber model. Hotels have to live up to all sorts of codes (fire codes, health codes, building codes, etc) and are inspected regularly. Airbnb homes, as private dwellings, are held to less stringent standards. Besides the cost reduction from this, the private homes don't have to pay for housekeeping, maintenance, front desk, and other staff, further reducing their costs. Hotels also have to collect and pay taxes that private dwellings may or may not collect and pay (there may or may not be local laws stating that they have to collect taxes, and they may or may not adhere to those laws if they do exist).
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
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.
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Rent control doesn't solve the problem because it actively discourages new development, which when you have a growing population leads to housing shortages. Legislating something doesn't alter reality or prohibition would have worked, there would be no litter in parks, and Wall Street would never do anything someone finds unscrupulous.
You also get plenty of cases where people who don't need rent control housing occupy it (and hold on to it) because it's cheaper. You also see even worse examples like the Congressman who was renting four separate rent-controlled apartments at the same time.
There are various schools of economics and they often squabble over policies and correct courses of action for many things, but rent control is not one of them.