Forgive me if I don't simply take your word for that. It's not that you don't seem like a reasonable guy - I'd just like to use data rather than theorizing. The $10/year increase in rents correlated to AirBNB in the study are not exactly breathtaking in any case. It would not surprise me if each apartment generated $120/year in additional recurring revenue to compensate. It also wouldn't surprise me if it actually resulted in less revenue. This isolated datapoint gives us very little to go on, and isn't a very big number in any case.
I'd still consider renting to be commercial activity, even if it is allowed by zoning. I don't have a huge beef with zoning in general, but let's not pretend it is inherently fair in some way - it's basically NIMBY encoded into law... a way for people to protect their real estate investments. The only thing that makes it tolerable is that it grew out of a nominally democratic process.
If you want to really turn this into a semantic argument, I'm not interested in participating. We both agree that we are on the supply/demand curve, so whether demand went up or supply went down is not important. Let's move on.
Hazardous facility opening directly across the road.
You are playing a semantic game. It will still raise rents nearby as it creates new jobs. Yes, there will be both winners and losers - but in aggregate new economic activity will raise rents.
A better counter-example might be a giant robotic facility replacing a lower-volume manual facility, where the revenue might increase but total payroll goes down.
So maybe all of that is happening, but the point of my post is that we wouldn't know from this extremely limited analysis. All we know is that AirBNB increased rents in NYC by $86 over 7 years, or roughly $10/year. And that analysis is flawed because they make no distinction between part-time and full-time listings so they likely overstate the effect.
So I'm not making any judgements as to whether allowing AirBNB to operate is reasonable or not - simply pointing out that this study does not get us very far in that debate.
And in addition to this, people are not simply goods being rationally exchanged on an open market. They are often irrational, and most will fight change of any sort using any power they have available to them.
I'm a huge fan of free market capitalism. When you need a tool that will - on average - give you absolutely the most efficient market possible. It has allowed people to increase their standard of living to staggering levels.
With that said, sometimes pure efficiency and economic growth is not the end-all, be-all. Take food for example... at least for staples, this is definitely an area where you do not want wild swings in price or supply. You want a dampener, and a DC bias towards oversupply - even if on the whole we pay more for food than we would under a purely free-market system, and thus take a standard-of-living hit.
Housing has some built-in momentum that makes it a poor choice for an efficient market... for instance, terms tend to be a year - building in some dampening. Financing logistics and the realities of real estate make it hard for owners to quickly liquidate or add housing stocks. Responding to market demands with refurbishments has to be weighed against taking the unit(s) off of the market. And that's all before considering that people will resist change with their voting rights, organizational skills, and other powers they can muster. As you say, it's a very poorly-tuned system... wild swings and poor efficiency are built-in. Government interference probably still makes overall efficiency worse - but it's not as big of an impact as if the government regulated commodities.
Well, I'm a registered Democrat, but whether you "believe" in supply and demand or not - it happens. This overly-simplistic report, in fact, does nothing except demonstrate supply and demand. NYC has a perpetual shortage of housing in desirable areas, but it also has perpetual construction. I don't know anything about Seattle - and if this report were written about Seattle it wouldn't help my ignorance because the report is ridiculously shallow. I'd be floored if AirBNB didn't increase rents where it operates - that is basic supply and demand. The question is: "What else does it do?"
Supply didn't go down - warm bodies still inhabit the units. They are willing to pay more than the previous warm bodies - demand increased. Rent goes up.
It's a semantic game - both of us apparently agree that we are still on the supply/demand curve and it is behaving as expected. And that's my issue with this "report" - it restates a basic truth and does not make any attempt to bring us more data that would enable us to decide if this is a "good" rent increase or a "bad" rent increase. While there are always winners and always losers, rent increases by themselves are not bad as it just one indication of more economic activity.
So, I'm sorry for your personal situation. With that said, when you moved in you also drove the rents up. It's not like high rent is a new thing in desirable parts of NYC. Anyway, I'd need to know whether your situation is typical or not before declaring it a widespread "problem". It's possible that the increased economic activity of the entire neighborhood offsets the higher expenses that you personally incur.
The entire point of my post was to dispute that narrative. A tourist staying in an apartment is not an economic drop-in replacement for a "normal" renter. They probably spend a lot more money on - if nothing else - food. Without understanding other ways in which AirBNB affects the local economy, this becomes a very shallow analysis that - as you point out - merely highlights a blindingly obvious relationship in supply and demand.
Every type of economic activity increases rents... like, all of them. New restaurants - increase rents. Jobs increase rents. So you flood an area with tourists and the rents go up? OK, in isolation that sounds bad - but what did all of that tourism money do to the local economy? If rents go up, doesn't that also encourage investment in the neighborhood? How can you just look at this one statistic in isolation? Cities were murdering each other to get the new Amazon headquarters... what would that do to rents?
"Outreach", which I only just read about from this post, appears to be well-intentioned. But it takes things too far. It is fine to monitor yourself and your organization for bias. It is fine to engage in recruitment efforts meant to fix problems with bias.
With that said, the second you start discriminating based on race or gender in employment, you have crossed a line. You can have the best intentions, but you are now participating in exactly the same activity that you are trying to destroy.
Not as confusing as the Spark being gasoline powered. A reasonable person would expect it to follow in the footsteps of the other electrically-named cars.
Of course they run on AC - otherwise they'd need brushes. But it's not the kind of AC power that Nikola Tesla had to deal with (fixed frequency, sine wave). In fact, if you are presented with Nikola Tesla's AC and you want to control a brushless motor in the same way that Tesla (the company) is, your first step will be to rectify it to DC.
The nature of humans, especially the male of the species.
There is an element of that. I personally used to subscribe to "live and let live", but age has changed that. Now when someone says something that is anti-scientific and ignorant, I think of GMO labels, AGW deniers, and anti-vaxxers. This scientific illiteracy is having a direct effect on me and so I speak up - even if it's something as seemingly benign as someone spending their money unwisely on bullshit audio equipment without doing a proper blind test. I've long challenged my audiophile friends to listen to a record recorded to MP3 vs the record itself in a blind situation, and none of them want to take the chance that they might not be able to tell the difference after spending thousands on special gear. If they said, look, I know it's all bullshit but I like the tactile feel of records. I like the large album art. I like the distorted sound... I'd shut the hell up. But they are condescending as hell about it and seem to think they have something that is actually better in some objective way. They repeat bullshit about oxygen and breaking in and all sorts of other voodoo with no scientific proof behind it.
There is a good reason that the "cradle of civilization" was in an arid semi-desert region: blight and pests are of little problem only in those climates
That's a gross oversimplification... It won out because it happened to be where those future crops grow natively, where nearly every domesticable animal already occupied as a habitat, and where metal resources were close to or at the surface. Look at the lengths the Amerindians had to go through to domesticate corn vs. essentially stumbling upon pre-mutated wheat. Look at sheep, goats, donkeys, cattle, pigs, cats, dogs, honey bees, camels, and various domestic birds... all either from or available to people in the fertile crescent. Compare to what the Amerindians had across two continents: Llamas/alpacas, guinea pigs, a dog species, and some domesticated birds. Even China, which did pretty well for themselves, had a much shorter list. People in Australia had virtually nothing available to domesticate - flora or fauna... perhaps the emu, though it to this day is only semi-domesticated. Someone also apparently brought dingoes to the continent from presumably domesticated wolves.
Anyway, it's not just the climate that made the Fertile Crescent the "cradle of civilization".
I'm not certain if I can tell 4K from 1080p, but I can definitely tell UHD from HD. I only mention this because the two seem to frequently be paired together.
I just don't think that's true. A construction worker? Sure. But the construction, oil, and mining industries all employ geologists who are constantly evaluating sites and taking bore samples. They would absolutely notice something that doesn't belong. An archaeologist finding anything even remotely arrow-head like among older-than-it-should-be strata would absolutely make note of that. And of course we have loads of people looking for prehistoric animals of just about every age - they would certainly notice "alien" technology mixed among their other fossils.
And yes, rivers and whatnot move around - but highly trained people are already looking through sedimentary rock for oil, fossil fuels, and fossils. They don't need to be digging around modern rivers in order to know they've found a place where a river used to be. Sure, a tool-using dinosaur could have come in and out of existence very quickly without our noticing it, but if it actually developed into a "civilization" of even the most primitive sort I think there would be a bunch of tools left over. Certainly enough to notice in the fossil record. If they industrialized at all, we'd see evidence in the sedimentary rock of that period as well. If they developed atomic power or weapons, we'd see isotope evidence in the sedimentary rock.
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Have a nice day!
, if at all, doesn't even enter the equation.
Forgive me if I don't simply take your word for that. It's not that you don't seem like a reasonable guy - I'd just like to use data rather than theorizing. The $10/year increase in rents correlated to AirBNB in the study are not exactly breathtaking in any case. It would not surprise me if each apartment generated $120/year in additional recurring revenue to compensate. It also wouldn't surprise me if it actually resulted in less revenue. This isolated datapoint gives us very little to go on, and isn't a very big number in any case.
I'd still consider renting to be commercial activity, even if it is allowed by zoning. I don't have a huge beef with zoning in general, but let's not pretend it is inherently fair in some way - it's basically NIMBY encoded into law... a way for people to protect their real estate investments. The only thing that makes it tolerable is that it grew out of a nominally democratic process.
If you want to really turn this into a semantic argument, I'm not interested in participating. We both agree that we are on the supply/demand curve, so whether demand went up or supply went down is not important. Let's move on.
Hazardous facility opening directly across the road.
You are playing a semantic game. It will still raise rents nearby as it creates new jobs. Yes, there will be both winners and losers - but in aggregate new economic activity will raise rents.
A better counter-example might be a giant robotic facility replacing a lower-volume manual facility, where the revenue might increase but total payroll goes down.
So maybe all of that is happening, but the point of my post is that we wouldn't know from this extremely limited analysis. All we know is that AirBNB increased rents in NYC by $86 over 7 years, or roughly $10/year. And that analysis is flawed because they make no distinction between part-time and full-time listings so they likely overstate the effect.
So I'm not making any judgements as to whether allowing AirBNB to operate is reasonable or not - simply pointing out that this study does not get us very far in that debate.
And in addition to this, people are not simply goods being rationally exchanged on an open market. They are often irrational, and most will fight change of any sort using any power they have available to them.
I'm a huge fan of free market capitalism. When you need a tool that will - on average - give you absolutely the most efficient market possible. It has allowed people to increase their standard of living to staggering levels.
With that said, sometimes pure efficiency and economic growth is not the end-all, be-all. Take food for example... at least for staples, this is definitely an area where you do not want wild swings in price or supply. You want a dampener, and a DC bias towards oversupply - even if on the whole we pay more for food than we would under a purely free-market system, and thus take a standard-of-living hit.
Housing has some built-in momentum that makes it a poor choice for an efficient market... for instance, terms tend to be a year - building in some dampening. Financing logistics and the realities of real estate make it hard for owners to quickly liquidate or add housing stocks. Responding to market demands with refurbishments has to be weighed against taking the unit(s) off of the market. And that's all before considering that people will resist change with their voting rights, organizational skills, and other powers they can muster. As you say, it's a very poorly-tuned system... wild swings and poor efficiency are built-in. Government interference probably still makes overall efficiency worse - but it's not as big of an impact as if the government regulated commodities.
Well, except on the Barbary Coast and the Caribbean.
Well, I'm a registered Democrat, but whether you "believe" in supply and demand or not - it happens. This overly-simplistic report, in fact, does nothing except demonstrate supply and demand. NYC has a perpetual shortage of housing in desirable areas, but it also has perpetual construction. I don't know anything about Seattle - and if this report were written about Seattle it wouldn't help my ignorance because the report is ridiculously shallow. I'd be floored if AirBNB didn't increase rents where it operates - that is basic supply and demand. The question is: "What else does it do?"
Supply didn't go down - warm bodies still inhabit the units. They are willing to pay more than the previous warm bodies - demand increased. Rent goes up.
It's a semantic game - both of us apparently agree that we are still on the supply/demand curve and it is behaving as expected. And that's my issue with this "report" - it restates a basic truth and does not make any attempt to bring us more data that would enable us to decide if this is a "good" rent increase or a "bad" rent increase. While there are always winners and always losers, rent increases by themselves are not bad as it just one indication of more economic activity.
The Olympics is a competitive bid, and NYC bid on it in 2012.
So, I'm sorry for your personal situation. With that said, when you moved in you also drove the rents up. It's not like high rent is a new thing in desirable parts of NYC. Anyway, I'd need to know whether your situation is typical or not before declaring it a widespread "problem". It's possible that the increased economic activity of the entire neighborhood offsets the higher expenses that you personally incur.
The entire point of my post was to dispute that narrative. A tourist staying in an apartment is not an economic drop-in replacement for a "normal" renter. They probably spend a lot more money on - if nothing else - food. Without understanding other ways in which AirBNB affects the local economy, this becomes a very shallow analysis that - as you point out - merely highlights a blindingly obvious relationship in supply and demand.
Every type of economic activity increases rents... like, all of them. New restaurants - increase rents. Jobs increase rents. So you flood an area with tourists and the rents go up? OK, in isolation that sounds bad - but what did all of that tourism money do to the local economy? If rents go up, doesn't that also encourage investment in the neighborhood? How can you just look at this one statistic in isolation? Cities were murdering each other to get the new Amazon headquarters... what would that do to rents?
"Outreach", which I only just read about from this post, appears to be well-intentioned. But it takes things too far. It is fine to monitor yourself and your organization for bias. It is fine to engage in recruitment efforts meant to fix problems with bias.
With that said, the second you start discriminating based on race or gender in employment, you have crossed a line. You can have the best intentions, but you are now participating in exactly the same activity that you are trying to destroy.
Yeah, it's a terrible name for a terrible car. It's like calling one the "squeak".
Not as confusing as the Spark being gasoline powered. A reasonable person would expect it to follow in the footsteps of the other electrically-named cars.
Of course they run on AC - otherwise they'd need brushes. But it's not the kind of AC power that Nikola Tesla had to deal with (fixed frequency, sine wave). In fact, if you are presented with Nikola Tesla's AC and you want to control a brushless motor in the same way that Tesla (the company) is, your first step will be to rectify it to DC.
More than 12. There are 53 US nuclear attack submarines and 18 ballistic missile subs.
The nature of humans, especially the male of the species.
There is an element of that. I personally used to subscribe to "live and let live", but age has changed that. Now when someone says something that is anti-scientific and ignorant, I think of GMO labels, AGW deniers, and anti-vaxxers. This scientific illiteracy is having a direct effect on me and so I speak up - even if it's something as seemingly benign as someone spending their money unwisely on bullshit audio equipment without doing a proper blind test. I've long challenged my audiophile friends to listen to a record recorded to MP3 vs the record itself in a blind situation, and none of them want to take the chance that they might not be able to tell the difference after spending thousands on special gear. If they said, look, I know it's all bullshit but I like the tactile feel of records. I like the large album art. I like the distorted sound... I'd shut the hell up. But they are condescending as hell about it and seem to think they have something that is actually better in some objective way. They repeat bullshit about oxygen and breaking in and all sorts of other voodoo with no scientific proof behind it.
Haha, did I channel my inner Jared Diamond in that comment?
There is a good reason that the "cradle of civilization" was in an arid semi-desert region: blight and pests are of little problem only in those climates
That's a gross oversimplification... It won out because it happened to be where those future crops grow natively, where nearly every domesticable animal already occupied as a habitat, and where metal resources were close to or at the surface. Look at the lengths the Amerindians had to go through to domesticate corn vs. essentially stumbling upon pre-mutated wheat. Look at sheep, goats, donkeys, cattle, pigs, cats, dogs, honey bees, camels, and various domestic birds... all either from or available to people in the fertile crescent. Compare to what the Amerindians had across two continents: Llamas/alpacas, guinea pigs, a dog species, and some domesticated birds. Even China, which did pretty well for themselves, had a much shorter list. People in Australia had virtually nothing available to domesticate - flora or fauna... perhaps the emu, though it to this day is only semi-domesticated. Someone also apparently brought dingoes to the continent from presumably domesticated wolves.
Anyway, it's not just the climate that made the Fertile Crescent the "cradle of civilization".
Yes, thanks for the correction - that is what I meant.
I'm not certain if I can tell 4K from 1080p, but I can definitely tell UHD from HD. I only mention this because the two seem to frequently be paired together.
- but they're unlikely to be recognized
I just don't think that's true. A construction worker? Sure. But the construction, oil, and mining industries all employ geologists who are constantly evaluating sites and taking bore samples. They would absolutely notice something that doesn't belong. An archaeologist finding anything even remotely arrow-head like among older-than-it-should-be strata would absolutely make note of that. And of course we have loads of people looking for prehistoric animals of just about every age - they would certainly notice "alien" technology mixed among their other fossils.
And yes, rivers and whatnot move around - but highly trained people are already looking through sedimentary rock for oil, fossil fuels, and fossils. They don't need to be digging around modern rivers in order to know they've found a place where a river used to be. Sure, a tool-using dinosaur could have come in and out of existence very quickly without our noticing it, but if it actually developed into a "civilization" of even the most primitive sort I think there would be a bunch of tools left over. Certainly enough to notice in the fossil record. If they industrialized at all, we'd see evidence in the sedimentary rock of that period as well. If they developed atomic power or weapons, we'd see isotope evidence in the sedimentary rock.