Slashdot Mirror
Airbnb Sues New York City To Block User-Data Bill Over Privacy (bostonglobe.com)
Airbnb has filed a lawsuit against the city of New York over a recent law the city passed, requiring the home-sharing site to hand over information about its hosts. From a report: The company is hoping to avoid millions in losses when the law, designed to police short-term home rentals, takes effect this winter. The New York City legislation, which passed with a 45-0 vote, would require Airbnb to share the names and addresses of its hosts with the city's Office of Special Enforcement. "The ordinance is an unlawful end-run around established restraints on governmental action and violates core constitutional rights," the company said in a claim filed in New York court on Friday.
New York, which faces an affordable housing shortage, has struggled with how to enforce regulations to control Airbnb and other home-sharing services like Expedia's HomeAway. Regulators argue that short-term rentals, which can be more profitable than long-term leases, disrupt neighborhoods and drive up rents. The new legislation is designed to give officials enough information to catch Airbnb hosts who operate outside of strict home-sharing laws.
New York, which faces an affordable housing shortage, has struggled with how to enforce regulations to control Airbnb and other home-sharing services like Expedia's HomeAway. Regulators argue that short-term rentals, which can be more profitable than long-term leases, disrupt neighborhoods and drive up rents. The new legislation is designed to give officials enough information to catch Airbnb hosts who operate outside of strict home-sharing laws.
We prefer free markets as opposed to central control. Nice try NYC, kindly piss off.
Meh... NY should just revoke Airbnb's business license statewide.
We have Airbnb hosts in my building. Rental units, not owners. The hosts "break" our security gate so their "tenants" can gain access to the building. In doing so, they also let in the homeless folks who camp on our fire escapes, rooftop, etc. Packages disappear. Laundry room gets trashed. Etc. Fuck em.
New York, which faces an affordable housing shortage...
Have they tried building more housing? Of course, good luck trying to build anything of reasonable size in NYC. All the NIMBYs come out and shout things like, "but it will ruin my view of the skyline," or, "it will negatively affect the character of the neighborhood.
Same problem as in SF and numerous other places.
Obvious solution: advertise on Craigslist's "short-term/sublet" section, which is semi-anonymous, take cash only in payment. Guess the city will lose out on potential revenue that way, but that's the price it will pay for violating people's privacy.
i don't live in your country at all (i am from Europe) but how i see it REAL value of apartments is less than 10% of current one in cities like NY, remainder is pure price fixing ... )
both for land that is artificially inflated (compare price of 1 square kilometer in center of NY and in farmland in Arizona and you can easily add more land in most cities by allowing expansion of skyscrapers to suburbs),
artificially inflated by building code (i am not talking about safety features, those are really needed, i am talking about not being to build buildings above certain height or having to spend over 50% of space on garages, or having to build apartments of certain size ( we don't all need 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms)
artificially inflated regulatory fees/taxes/everything else not needed for building to be safe and functional and so on, just cost of building materials and workers is less than 10% of current market value of apartments in NY and other "heavily regulated" cities
i can easily afford apartment in center of NY (and pay for it in cache not credit), unlike most people i was lucky in life, but i would much rather buy 10 normal apartments than 1 price fixed apartment for that money,
its not question of being able to afford something, it is question of that being good value for money
Have you ever heard of any area of the country that was not NIMBY? I've lived in small cities with 500 people, to large cities with millions, and they all don't want to build new housing. They all want everything to stay the same as when they moved there.
It doesn't matter how much money everyone has: If you have five million people and housing for only 3 million, there are going to be people without housing.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
they're breaking long standing laws about sub-letting designed to control housing prices for residents. Those laws exist because wealthy people would buy up all the property during cyclic economic crashes and rent it back if they were allowed. There's currently a big problem with Chinese using foreign land to hide money from their corrupt government. They rent it out on services like airbnb. New Zealand just blocked them from buying land to prevent their countrymen from being extorted. But you don't really need the Chinese to buy up the land. Like I said, just wait for a few cyclic downturns when people are forced to sell homes for pennies on the dollar.
Once again a practice that was made illegal for a very good reason has become "legal" again because, hey, it's on the Internet.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
You can't build housing where housing is already, all the time. Some of those people have very defensible gripes, some places more population is unsustainable. NYC, SFC, those are very constrained areas. It's not all NIMBY.
Some of it is just common sense fighting against the economic swing du jour, it's not all planned out as well as it could be either - the same Libertarian bullshitters like Cubana fight those kinds of major redevelopments also.
What slashdot doesn't understand is these are AM radio non-intellects who just come here to shit on NYC and other urban cities because that's what brainfight/breitbart tells them to. They're a step above bots.
You can't build housing where housing is already, all the time.
Yes you can? It's called an "apartment complex." There's plenty of space for more housing even in Manhattan. Even in central Tokyo.
Cities are building office spaces, which attract people, without building housing. I would call it dumb but it pushes their property values up. If they wanted housing costs to be lower, they should have built more housing units.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You're doing two things - one, talking about centrally-macro-planned economics and development, and two, talking about places that are already at relatively high density compared to nearby areas. I don't know why this is hard.
The reality is a lot more piecemeal and has a lot more inertia, legally, in terms of planning for transport and EIR and on down, waste collection, parking. Yes of course, more physical units could be built, were this not so, instantly.
Snap out of it. The real world doesn't work like that.
You're doing two things - one, talking about centrally-macro-planned economics and development, and two, talking about places that are already at relatively high density compared to nearby areas. I don't know why this is hard.
It's not hard, all you have to do is build more housing. People commuting from outside will cause more traffic problems than people commuting five minutes to work.
Snap out of it. The real world doesn't work like that.
It really does: build enough housing and the price of housing will go down. We know how to build dense cities, it's something we can do.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You're being continually retarded. Your solutions require a market driver, 10-20 years to effectively accomplish, BILLIONS OF DOLLARS, tons of oversight and lawsuits to pay out and contractors to strike, etc.
It's not trivial. To say so is Trump level retarded, like winning trade wars.
If it were trivial, they would do it your way. You must have Trillions in the bank set aside for your low-rent housing, how generous of you. Write a big check, kiddo.
The reason you're not in a job of planning such projects is because you can't really comprehend how complex they actually are, in reality. They take a long time, they take a lot of investment.
And they take a suitable location. Do you also plan to buy the existing buildings you're going to knock down to build your ultradense expensive skyscrapers? Eminent Domain?
Brilliant. How many of those have you actually seen go through, over how many years?
Hmm? Oh you're saying you have no actual experience even thinking about this at length and were just blathering magic solutions like urban redevelopment were trivially easy, you do it all the time lol? As you were .
Your solutions require a market driver, 10-20 years to effectively accomplish, BILLIONS OF DOLLARS,
Well yes, actually, there is a market driver: people who are willing to pay billions of dollars to buy apartments. If apartments cost $500k each, then you'd need 2000 people willing to pay that amount. But there are more than 2000 people willing to pay that amount.
If it were trivial, they would do it your way.
NIMBY. People don't want to do it, it's not that there isn't a solution.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm 0 for 2 in being able to use Air BnB in NYC - in both cases sometime after I booked, they were told they had to shut down. One of them, a day after... I've sadly already given up on Air BnB in NYC, my heart goes out to those just trying to get a little extra cash to be able to afford living in NYC...
Hopefully Air BnB prevails.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The new legislation is designed to give officials enough information to catch Airbnb hosts who operate outside of strict home-sharing laws.
This sounds like governmental fishing when a court-issued warrant backed by actual probable cause is the correct way to go about this. It would expose anyone who is not operating "outside of strict home-sharing laws" to an unnecessary search.
Go ahead and show me a massive development like that in the US where someone is spending Billions to house low income people in urban major buyouts, I'll wait.
If you could do it, you wouldn't need to pretend in this longwinded spiel like a moron. You'd have something real to point to already.
This is a flaw in democracy: Only the people that live in NYC get to vote there. They people that WANT to live in NYC, but can't, don't get a vote.
Some economists believe that idiotic liberal NIMBYism in prosperous coastal cities contributes even more to inequality in American than idiotic conservative regressive tax cuts.
Your head is firmly wedged in your ass Bill. Your fakedick-economic theory is almost as rich as Trump U's Casino Management PhD program, you fucking idiot.
There was a project in San Mateo that got rejected because the city council didn't like it. NIMBY, That's how it goes. So what's your solution? Let the suckers live somewhere else? You don't care where as long as it's not near you?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The reality is a lot more piecemeal and has a lot more inertia, legally, in terms of planning for transport and EIR and on down, waste collection, parking. Yes of course, more physical units could be built, were this not so, instantly.
Transport planning comes from the city as it allocates new properties for development. I think you and phantomfive are talking about different things here: big buildings are built to last decades, sometimes 150 year hear in the West (Europe, US) and it is not realistic to expect those city centers to come down for a quick, high profile sky scraper housing development. Such a thing attracts the 0.5 percenters only anyway, and often pushes the surrounding real estate value higher.
The other side is the almost organic development of the sub-urban areas some countries like to do, with the inefficient building types chosen just for political or customary reasons. Something should be done about it, if possible.
They require the same thing from gun purchasers and that has constitutional protections, the chance that local judges will rule against the city is low.
Local governments are the worst violators of human rights. The amount of abuse by local feudal governments in the form of arbitrary taxes, dubious road laws, and outright gang-like collections on the road in the form of speed traps on interstate is astounding.
I'd rather share the data with with FBI rather than my city. It will most certainly use the data for evil.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Search Air B n B listings in your building if a concern and file complaints. Likewise for NYC , contract a firm to develop a program to scan and cross reference out of zone listings. NYC can request Air B n b to delist out of zone locations.
It's entirely understandable that large cities take matters in their own hands. Sites like AirBnB and similar are literally making the city unlivable in. Legislation is already being drafted to put a halt to this (and other tourist-related issues). AirBnB either plays along or gets it's business model destroyed. It's that simple.
NYC has, is, and continues to build more housing (and offices/buildings/etc.)
The problem is the only thing being built is 1) ultra luxury rentals with 2) a few token low income units.
It only makes the housing problem when you add a few thousand new units and they push the average rental price UPWARDS. The lower priced units raise their rent because...well...it's less than the new overpriced units.
And...repeat. Forever.
Oh, and factor in hipsters who take over neighborhood by neighborhood and pay obscene rent because it's a 'trendy place' and then abandon it and move elsewhere in a year or three. Then that area is left with greatly elevated rents and stores that no one else can afford but are stuck with the costs...
welcome to NYC. no place like it on earth - both for the good AND the bad.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
It really does: build enough housing and the price of housing will go down. We know how to build dense cities, it's something we can do.
Actually, NYC is the test bed for ultra dense 'modern' city life. I'd argue that we don't really know how to do it all that well...or else they wouldn't skimp on things like mass transit maintenance and accountability.
> build more housing
Ha! They are and have been. Guess what though? Virtually all that housing is more expensive than the existing rental units. No one is building a middle class, non-luxury apartment building. They're building ultra-luxury, ultra expensive high rises with a pittance of low income units as require to get their permits and variances.
Stop talking like you 1) know NYC or 2) understand housing markets in major developed cities
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
NYC has, is, and continues to build more housing (and offices/buildings/etc.) The problem is the only thing being built is 1) ultra luxury rentals with 2) a few token low income units.
Manhattan population is growing faster than they are building new houses, which pushes prices up. New York is in many ways an example of what not to do. You would be smart to leave there as fast as possible.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."