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.

Comments

Have they tried building more housing?

[El Cubano]

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.

Craigslist, the old fallback...

[b0s0z0ku]

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.

Re:Craigslist, the old fallback...

[Actually, I do RTFA]

What revenue do you think the NYC city will lose out on? Because it's trying to collect tax information that's the "people's privacy" being violated.

Re:You can't a homeowner how to rent his property

[ShanghaiBill]

We prefer free markets as opposed to central control. Nice try NYC, kindly piss off.

Nearly all jurisdictions collect transient accommodation tax. TAT pays for things like convention centers, tourist attractions, and advertising to attract tourists. It is unfair to make every resident pay for these, when most of the benefit accrues to hotels, Airbnbs, and restaurants. TAT is a fair, reasonable tax, as long as the pols stick to using the revenue for supporting tourism, and refrain from using it as a general purpose piggy bank.

The hotels already pay TAT. Why should the Airbnbs get a free ride? NYC can only enforce the law if they know who is renting what.

If you want a totally free market, there are plenty of remote locations that do not have TAT. Good luck getting renters.

Disclaimer: I rent a few rooms on Airbnb, and I pay TAT. But not in NYC.

It's got nothing to do with privacy

[rsilvergun]

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.