Berlin Is Banning Most Vacation Apartment Rentals
citylab.com
citylab.com
* For short-term rentals (vacation homes) one needs to have a permit and pay taxes.
* Subletting your apartment without permission from the landlord is illegal, making a profit and not declaring it is tax fraud (and most don't declare them because then they'd also have to have a permit and pay tourist tax).
* The landlord has to grant permission for sublets (also whole apartments) if the tenant is temporarily moving out of town but wants to keep the apartment, but also here: no profit allowed. EDIT: The landlord has a right to review every single intermediate tenant - so he can refuse them (this basically rules out the AirBnB model in this scenario).
What really annoys people is that in the best locations there are lots of people who ignore the existing laws and the rest of society has to pay for that: by not finding an affordable space to live, by having to endure a new set of drunk neighbors every weekend who either party in the apartment or come home drunk and very noisy at 4am and who, understandably, don't participate in the house community (and yes, people tend to know their neighbors and even talk to them!).
But before adopting new laws it would have been much simpler to simply enforce the existing laws. Get all these folks who offer apartments on AirBnB 365 days a year and check whether they have all permits and taxes. Let them pay fines. Put them on a list of people whose tax-statements and books are checked annually (they do that with everybody else who commits tax fraud or just annoys the tax clerks).
Calling German laws too rigid is everyone's right, but it is also the right of German people to value diversity in their cities enough to protect it by those rigid laws.
However leftists love feeding the government even if it is a net loss for economic prosperity. They want to tax everything without understanding that taxes reduce economic activity.You certainly need a minimum level of taxation, but it's a religion with many people. Next time you rent a car, have a look at the various taxes. Then calculate how many taxes the car company is paying for that euro of revenue. The same transaction is ultimately taxed each time to money touches someone.
As far as subletting, that should be handled between the landlord and the tenant: that's a private contract and the government ought not have any say.
If there's a problem with 'drunken neighbors,' then that also should be handled contractually between the co-proprietors of a particular building.
Government intervention isn't necessary for any of this.
I remember reading an article about Barcelona and how it was actually losing money due to low-budget tourists: the city has to maintain/clean infrastructure for them, but they don't bring much income. Not sure how they tax their bars, but these people would just get wasted and puke in their parks, and the city has to clean up after them.
The correct solution is to fine bad behaviors (littering, public nuisance, overserving drunks, etc.) and instituting fees for operating businesses that directly contribute to the problem (for example bars, liquor stores).
That's forgetting the impact on the life of people who actually live there in the short term.
Of course it would be more expensive to police it, man-hours are not free. The obvious upside is that it would stop the unwanted be behaviors and not tax the good (tourism).
The is no need for prosecution, as fines are handles through an administrative process nor is there a problem to collect the fines within the EU (from where most tourists in Barcelona are) due to cross-border collections.
The plan would immediately have a ROI if enforcement costs less fines were less than the current costs for cleanup/maintenance. Furthermore current tourism/hotel taxes can just be changed to bar, liquor store fees and licenses, if need be and thus have zero net impact on finances.
Lastly, and most importantly, ROI should not be the primary metric when trying to change bad behaviors. The current situation externalizes the costs of bad behavior, whereas my solution internalizes the cost. Even if there was a real cost to my solution, it has a net positive benefit to the public good, and to society that's worth paying for.
> That's forgetting the impact on the life of people who actually live there in the short term.
What impact? Not many are likely object to less public intoxication and puking in the parks.
I'm not condoning any of the following, but: - you don't bring liquids to an airport - you don't go to Thailand to insult the king - you don't bring chewing gum to Singapore - you don't fly via the US due to the TSA - you don't overstay your visa
The point is, if you want to stop unwanted behaviors, you make rules and you enforce them, and eventually (most) people, even those that haven't been to your country, will know what isn't condoned and modify their behavior accordingly or stay away.
And that doesn't even factor in that the Soviet Union was remarkably less productive than the democratic West.
Jokes aside, a lot of holiday spots are popular regardless of the lack of locals. Paris without the French might not be the Paris you know and love, but undoubtedly it would still be popular.
> "The Berlin Senate’s ruling nonetheless reflects a general feeling across a city in which homes are getting harder to find: Berliners have had enough and they want their city back."
Translation: There is no pricing mechanism on rents in the city and it is becoming increasingly impossible to find an apartment.
While it's certainly true that AirBnB essentially allows landlords to flout the law, it's worth noting that the adverse effects of price ceilings on supply are the root cause of Berlin's problems and this will not solve the underlying problem of rents being far from equilibrium.
Dozens of cities around the world are suffering from rejecting capitalism of property and the consequences will be the long run slow bleeding out to locations more accepting of economic reality.
Even in the most expensive places to live - Bay Area, central Tokyo, Venice, etc - if builders could build to their hearts content and see rapid high-rise housing development (first to meet the wealthy demand, and gradually to meet all other demand that turns a profit) you end up with affordable low income housing and extreme growth for the whole metro area, which means prosperity.
IE, rather than holding back development and costing yourself tremendous fiscal gains, you let those happen and tax the fuck out of them to make life better for all those displaced. Use tax money from more unfettered capitalism to improve the situation of the poor, rather than holding back markets for the sake of the poor, who are then also worse off.
Let’s look at one of those deals in detail.
In 2004, Frank McCourt sold 23 acres of open
parking lots on the South Boston waterfront to
News Corp. for $145 million ... Two years later,
News Corp. sold the same land ... to Morgan
Stanley for $204 million. ... When the
BRA [Boston Redevelopment Authority] approved
the Seaport Square Master Plan, paving the way
for major development of midsize towers in 2010,
the land finally had real value. ... To limit
speculating, the BRA could have made Morgan
Stanley’s Seaport approvals non-transferrable.
But it didn’t.
Instead, over the next five years, Morgan Stanley
parceled out its 23 ... acres ... for a total
of $654 million. ...
After changing so many hands, ... housing, like
at Waterside Place, where a 598-square-foot
one-bedroom can be all yours for $2,685 per month.
When the people who are engaging in housing development are shaping policy to maximize short term profit, this is the result.
I don't have a clear understanding of how to prevent this from happening but my strong suspicion is that better government regulation needs to be in place that holds the public interest at heart.
Disclaimer: I live in the Boston area.
[1] http://www.bostonmagazine.com/property/article/2016/02/21/bo...
> Yakuza to thank for that
Your pithy one-liner isn't very enlightening. Could you elaborate?
Democracy tends towards chaos and deadlock. There are too many cooks, and they all want different things, and they all have roughly the same amount of power. Usually nothing happens, and when something does happen it's a half-assed designed-by-committee nightmare.
When you see government acting swiftly, purposefully, effectively and succeeding at something difficult and expensive, it's because an autocratic force (like a political machine, or organized crime) has bent the democratic process to its will.
For example, only Mayor Daley could have pulled off Millenium Park in Chicago. To get something like that done in Chicago's dysfunctional government, you need to own people at every level and in every department. Only the Daleys have built empires on that scale, and other mayors in other cities don't wield nearly as much power (even if their legal entitlements are the same).
Right to live where you are born? That adversely affects anyone not born in a central district.
It's certainly a nice thing to be able to travel and visit other cultures and countries. But the advent of massive international transportation combined with few tourism hotspots has created a tourism industry that can outprice locals, and thus destroy the cultures that created the artefacts they show to tourists.
Right to live where you work seems to be a good one.
temporary visitors.
If we generalise the "live where you work" to "stay where you spend most of your time, then it makes a lot of sense for the visitors to be housed in the centre. Otherwise you force a large amount of commuting on them. For course that doesn't matter much for each individual visitor because they are around only for a short time, but that's not the right metric. It means that Berlin's infrastructure is heavily taxed with all that unnecessary commuting by (every changing) visitors.
The thing is, it completely reverses the meaning of my point, which was based on concern priority, not transportation efficiency. To me, it seems important that people whose home, job and lifestyle/culture is at stake are treated preferably to people for whom the city is just a tmporary leisure.
By making sure that visitors don't effect too much locals, we also promote a kind of tourism which promotes hospitality, and which ensures that the object of visits is not destroyed by tourism consumption.
Indeed, the boundary between tourists and residents is porous. Capital cities attract a transient population from week end visitors to interns or workers who stay a few weeks, to summer visitors who stay a season, to students who stay for a few years, to proper residents who stay a decade or more. All of them are a source of ideas as well as a source of income for Berlin's industry. "Das ist auch gut so." Hence Berlin needs to cater for all. That includes providing substantial, centrally located living space (whether hotels or apartments) for short-term visitors.
It's not a very efficient solution (no one can move to the city for a job since you need somewhere to live within months then - not decades). It also needs very draconian rules to avoid a large black market in contracts.
There are no good solutions to this problem. If you are a socialist you argue that the lesser evil is inefficient queueing and if you are an economic liberal you argue that allocating via market prices is better and gentrification/segregation is the lesser evil.
> Right to live where you are born? That adversely affects anyone not born in a central district.
Thinking about it, this reminds me of the question of immigration. People usually say that one shouldn't be allowed to immigrate wherever he wants and/or that politicans are beholden to the people of their country, not the whole world. So .. what's the difference between a city and a country here? Why should the city council not put the wishes of those born there first?
That is a very weak position, do you actually believe things can be true because "People usually say that"? Either immigration between countries is wrong in some way that generalizes to immigration between cities, or you can't use the fact that immigration is by default illegal to support your position.
Not allowing unrestricted immigration between countries is usually a pragmatic consideration, that is related to how countries usually spend their money vs. how they earn their money. Social expenditure, for instance, is usually planned based on the amount of tax the state gets from an average citizen, importing a lot of people who will pay less in taxes means you either have to degrade the quality of service for everyone, or start discriminating between people when spending on them (which betrays the concept of welfare spending as a 'safety net' - it's supposed to serve people who can't earn enough to provide for themselves or their family). Sometimes anti-immigration sentiment is motivated by nationalism or racism, even to the extent that people aren't allowed to live where they were born, and it would be a shame to reproduce those ideas on a city level.
(The soil in Berlin is hard to build tall on. But money can buy engineering to work on this problem.)
Simply saying "be more capitalist" might work, but I'd say build more quality homes on all the scratchy pieces of land that exist round Berlin is an equally good option above firing people into the weird world of London property.
Finally the AirBnB/rentals thing is a result I'd guess of the massive number of people who hate having tourists traipsing through their buildings. My experience at least centrally was of large shared blocks of high quality flats and a lot of suspicion around strangers being granted entry to said gated communities.
As a result a property investment bubble feeds on itself and creates the london problem.
To reverse that you make it unattractive as a store of wealth and attractive as an active investment via renting it out. And you remove supply creation limits. You would decrease the unfair demand side by taxing them like a typical UK resident.
Also zoning policy usually doesn't help at all with typical height limits.
They bailed out all the banks to prop it up. After this help2buy (help2sell in reality) to have the govt underwrite risk when the banks stepped out.
This isn't capitalism.
They do it through the government by creating arbitrary regulations and barriers to entry.
We are already living in a world where the housing monopolies are enforcing their will on the population.
Getting rid of these regulations, and allowing people to build so many houses that the market price gets driven into the ground, is how we take the market back for the people.
Someone ELSE can come it, charge less, and get all the customers to go to them instead.
This is what allowing more houses to be built would do.
Thus preventing them from bootstrapping, or demonstrating profits to investors.
Except there are huge entry costs, and all that theoretical ROI disappears as soon as you enter the market, because the existing monopoly starts competing.
To make a profit, you need some advantage over the them, like efficiency, innovation or goodwill. If all you can do is exactly what they do but at market price, well... they can do that too.
If someone started building a whole bunch of housing in SOMA, do you believe that this ROI would disappear quickly, due to housing prices hitting rock bottom?
Do you really believe that would happen?
I live in Honolulu, Hawaii. Prices here are RIDICULOUS, but this is the last thing I want. At some point growth has to stop or we will lose what makes this place what it is.
The land value tax aligns the incentives right, so that the local administrations have an incentive to put the proper regulations in place.
But in the long run people are not going to just sit around collecting UBI. They can still work, but on other things. Society will develop new areas of interest in which it will invest the available money. The focus will fall on science, sports, culture and social projects, which are going to keep everyone busy and at the same time advance us even further.
As society changes, education will have to adapt to the new requirements. There will still be jobs, but in domains that perhaps now are not even imagined.
There are no pure market mechanism that would take care of these needs. I would not call a welfare state an epicycle.
TL;DR they're also placing tight ceilings on new development.
[1] This article is supportive but seems oblivious to the supply-side effects.
Maybe there is some other cause (e.g. everyone wants to live in a city now)?
Meanwhile many fewer homes are being built. The largest drop has been in building by local authorities, which used to account for almost half of all new builds before Thatcher brought things to a halt in in the 1980's by selling off social housing and preventing councils from investing the proceeds. (See: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n01/james-meek/where-will-we-live)
As real wages have stagnated for most people, multiple administrations have propped up demand through ever inflating house prices. People feel richer when their home goes up in value but this wealth is illusory, nothing new has been created, only a generational shift in capital as young people are forced to fork out ever more of their income in rent.
The private rental market in the UK is all short term lets, after the first year the landlord is free to adjust the rent. With council housing now largely gone it's an unanchored free market. Restricting supply (e.g. through difficulty obtaining planning permission) while demand increases does of course drive up rents.
Property prices are a function of interest rates and rents. Credit conditions come into play here in determining how much a prospective home owner or buy-to-let investor can borrow and pay for a property.
I agree loose credit is the primary cause. However that wasn't what my post was about, I was challenging the assertion that planning permission is easily gained. It's not.
Restrictive planning is vital for creating artificial scarcity. To ramp prices with loose credit you have to push supply below demand to create an auction scenario.
Increased demand with no supply = increased prices and low supply.
A city is one part market and one part enchanted forest.
This could be compared a bit to gentrification, in which I am reminded of Gertrude Stein's phrase "there is no there there" as well as, albiet more distantly, Marc Auge's concept of nonplaces.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Stein#.22There_is_no_...
Key facts:
* 10% of the users are offering more than one unit (so not just a spare bed)
* Average user rents out 1.3 units
* Top user is renting out 44 flats
Ferienwohnungen -> vacation home
Ferien -> vacation
Wohnungen -> dwellinghttps://www.city-wohnen.de/ https://www.thehomelike.com/?lang=en http://en.coming-home.org/index.php?l=en https://www.crocodilian.de/
Good luck with the search!
It's an important question though, mainly because it comes up every time people have a passionate, and perhaps legitimate, disagreement about what the law ought to be.
High school debates aside, I think almost everyone agrees that civil disobedience is sometimes completely justified. People also almost universally agree that breaking every law you don't like, simply because you don't think it should be the law, would not be justified.
So, where do regulations on short term rentals fit in?
My initial reaction is that this is an easy one. I don't think that regulations on converting a house to a hotel get anywhere close to the standard I'd expect for what wikipedia defines as a "active, professed refusal to obey certain laws, demands, and commands of a government, or of an occupying international power. Civil disobedience is a symbolic or ritualistic violation of the law, rather than a rejection of the system as a whole"…
That said, I would give the nod to people who would seek to violate some types of zoning regulations. It is certainly possible for zoning regulations (school districts, voting districts, and so forth) to reach vile levels of class and race discrimination. A lot of people, for instance, might want to keep a boarding house for migratory workers out of their district - a ban on short term rentals could accomplish this.
In the case of airbnb, I would see that as a bit of manipulation, though - in general, what I'm seeing is housing that used to be occupied by long term residents, especially children who cost a lot of money and don't pay rent, getting evicted and turned into a fun crash pad for tourists who would like to spend a while in the wine country or the left bank of Paris. I personally think that short term rentals are a real threat to neighborhoods like the french quarter in New Orleans, large sections of San Francisco, and, sure, Berlin.
In short, while I leave the door slightly open for meaningful civil disobedience to excessively restrictive zoning laws that curtail short term rentals, I don't see many of the current measures as coming anywhere close to the standard for civil disobedience.
You'll never get an airtight argument as solid as a mathematical proof on this, though. It just isn't like that.
Refugees usually don't have enough money to compete on the open rental market in Berlin's central districts. They can apply for "WBS" which can get them an apartment that is subsidized by the state (for which the landlord has to apply upfront) and which tend not to be in the center anymore but in low-income areas where landlords have an incentive to enter that contract with the state - they are sure that they get the rent every month on time in contrast to fighting for months to get rid of tenants who default on their rent.
250 applications coming in over night were already common 5 years ago. I remember that in 2001 I was seeing an apartment together with about 50 other interested people - the ad had been up since the day before 3pm...
This doesn't just happen in Berlin. I've lived in several German cities, Berlin included, and it's really difficult to find an apartment in _any_ reasonably large/popular German city (e.g. Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich, Köln).
It's a Germany-wide problem, that just happens to be most acute in Berlin. Unless you're really fast, super aggressive, or can leverage your network to talk to the people moving out, you'll have a difficult time in finding an apartment.
I know that some might argue that "build baby, build" is the solution. However, in an earthquake-zone (which I recall California is), isn't it risky to build skyscrapers and other large structures?
Governments are sometimes oblivious to general needs, but there must be a good reason why more housing-construction has not been approved in some areas.
(I'm thinking in densely-populated cities like Berlin, London and Paris, congestion and pollution might be issues they have to worry about also)
Earthquakes certainly aren't the reason for SF. It's the city's byzantine planning process, and NIMBYs and entrenched interests who get in the way of new development in the name of "not changing the character of the city".
Not in SF. If you don't occupy the place you short-term rent, during the time you rent it, you may only legally rent it for 90 days per year. What's more, if the place you rent is covered by rent stabilization, it is illegal to make more in rent per month than you pay to your landlord each month. That is to say that you can only legally cover rent through short-term rentals; you may not turn a profit.
> However, in an earthquake-zone (which I recall California is), isn't it risky to build skyscrapers and other large structures?
The Transamerica Pyramid [0] (and every other skyscraper in FiDi) survived the 1989 earthquake. So, I'mma say "No, not significantly more risky." :)
For a more recent example, the Salesforce Tower [1] is (reportedly) well under way to completion.
This raises the equilibrium for lease units: less units available, higher prices. Not to mention the fact that leasers are now competing against people paying higher nightly rates.
Berlin overall is an anomaly in Germany; during the Cold War division of Germany to BRD and DDR, living in Berlin was heavily subsidized, and that still shows up in the planning, the structures and the market. But the impact of a 40-year "siege" is going away now 25 years after it ended, and at the same time the capital has moved to Berlin, along with lots of administration and related jobs and businesses.
Seattle has a similar problem where we do have a large number of new units going up, but some places are still seeing upwards 50% vacancy after 3 years... because the new units aren't aligned with market demand. I'm talking luxury apartments downtown when the growing demographic is frugal-minded mid-20s/30s interested in neighborhoods 10-20 minute away from downtown. Even constructions in the right neighborhood end up being a net loss of desirable units when the rent is sky high.
So, yeah, more development might help Berlin, but it will be more effective when accompanied by rent camps and strengthening of social housing banks. Otherwise you are just feeding the bubble and exchanging one population by a wealthier one.
1. Remove density and height restrictions (e.g. "Berliner Traufhoehe").
2. Remove unnecessarily strict building requirements (e.g. "Daemmungswahn").
3. Remove legislation that is too tenant-friendly (e.g. "Mietbremse").
All three serve as breaks to increasing housing supply, the first is a legal impediment, the other two reduce investments.
Increasing supply outside of them, which would be easy because Berlin is surrounded by land you could build on won't change that. At least not without billions of investments in public transport infrastructure, maybe.
Any regulation like building requirements is probably federal, I doubt Berlin has any extra regulation. So there is nothing Berlin can do here.
Removing regulation that is too tenant-friendly isn't popular with voters, it's not going to increase the supply of apartments for students and poor people. This kind of regulation including but not limited to the Mietpreisbremse is also federal law and not something Berlin can do all that much about.
Even central Berlin is full of brown-field sites that could be developed -- Flughafen Tempelhof most prominently. If you go for Hong Kong style density there, a lot of housing problems would be solved ... Laws can easily be changed if there is political will at the local, regional or federal levels.
However, all this requires a bit of long-term thinking and planning, of which there is little evidence. Instead we get populist measures like "Mietpreisbremse" which hinder new developments.
Flughafen Tempelhof can't be developed, voters have voted directly against it. That law could be changed but to do so would arguably be undemocratic and it would certainly be political suicide for the forseeable future. This also brings up the important point of city planning, cities are more than just housing. You need to take that into consideration.
Also indeed increasing supply is about long-term thinking. You can't increase supply very fast and in this instance you can't increase it fast enough. This means you need something to slow down price increases in the short-term which measures like the Mietpreisbremse or banning AirBnB do.
Why exactly should they? I mean, I don't want to forcibly remove them, but there are many cities in Germany other than Berlin.
If one city is getting richer and richer, then the average price of an apartment goes up. More rich people start comming, because they see oportinity to do business there. At the same time poor people have a choice of moving to smaller, more affordable cities.
The biggest pitfall of a mankind is that we cannot grasp that the world is constantly changing. Life itself is a process of constant change. Just because your parents lived in Berlin and you were born in Berlin does not imply that things have to stay this way forever.
Trying to stop the flow of time and inevitable change is what makes us miserable.
Why hasn't anyone thought of this before!
people with low incomes should be
able to live in the city.
Get rid of the restrictions on height, and build 50 - 100 floors Hong Kong style, at least in the center.
Tempelhof shows the stupidity of the Berlin voter. The refusal to develop even a small part of the airfield was almost exclusively justified with fears of "gentrification". Congratulation voters, you have just voted yourself into higher rents. (Also, one could have a new "Volksbefragung", in the light of the dire need for more housing in Berlin.)
Doesn't really help getting more affordable flats on the market.
I'm not sure how familiar with the London property market. London is currently seeing a large amount of real estate being built, mostly studio, 1, 2 and 3 bedroom. Hardly luxurious. Prices are commensurate with London income levels. Otherwise people wouldn't live in London.
You also can't arbitrarily increase density of a city as you need infrastructure to go along with all those people. Not to mention that Berlin has many old buildings that are under protection, so you can't just demolish buildings and replace them with skyscrapers.
I don't really think this has much significant impact on the housing shortage and pricing there, but some part of the housing stock there is owned by people who don't actually live there, and who can afford to keep it vacant just in case they need to move in one day.
Most buyers of such property (whether private or investment funds like Deka-Immobilien or BlackRock Global Property or Brookfield Property Partner or one of the many others) do this as an investment vehicle with a particular risk/reward structure. They will absolutely have to rent out these properties, and indeed, when they fund property construction projects, as they have been on a massive scale in London in the last decade, they do so to cash in on rent.
I would imagine that a much bigger issue is old people who are in a care home or a hospital, unable to live in their old place, but not willing/able to give it away either.
At least over here (Finland) this is the major reason for "empty" apartments in central areas of cities.
I feel like most people are moving to the outer zones. Buying flats in zone 1-3 is obviously out of reach for most people, even for most developers not working in The City. From what I've seen, even 1-bedroom flats cost at least £310k near Seven Sisters (Zone 3).
I have to admit though that I was mostly looking for flats to rent, not for sale in the last few months so I'm not an expert.
£310k near Seven Sisters
Maybe it's good this way, because unless you realise that a property is a serious long-term investment, and that the target is to save for retirement, they probably don't have the financial maturity to make such a large purchase and should stick to renting.
Note that property always reflects income-levels of the working population. That's because they are the ones that buy / rent property. Rent and property prices are strongly correlated, because it's fundamentally a risk/reward trade-off: when you buy you take on a fair amount of risk: heating may break down, the roof may leak, you might not find tenants in time, tenants may ruin the property, not pay rent etc etc (From bitter experience I can tell you that "may" really means "will"). Tenants don't carry this risk, hence need to compensate for this risk transfer. That's why renting appears to be more expensive.
Focussing on foreign billionaires who buy-to-leave-empty distorts how the property market works. The real question is: what percentage of their income is the average person willing to invest in property / rent. This is remarkably constant.
Doesn't mean it "is" or "always will always be".
In fact, you undoubtedly live to some extent under the auspices of some form of central economic planning right now. Why? Because at some point it was realized complete lack of central economic planning is disastrous.
But you are really arguing against government controlled rent prices no? I tend to probably agree in most cases.
I tried to find the links where I saw this, couldn't. I'll keep looking.
What was it said about the Soviet Union? That they pretended to pay people and the people pretended to work? Well.....
The spontaneous order of an unregulated, freely configured economy, is the only way to utilize the vast volume of knowledge that is diffused throughout the population. Protection of private property and market rights is the absolute best way to both allocate capital for maximum economic returns, and maximize incentives for productive activity.
> Why? Because at some point it was realized complete lack of central economic planning is disastrous.
There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that was the reason. You're making a reckless leap of logic to rationalize and justify authoritarianism (central economic planning).
Property investors can decide to never build apartments in such cities.
Then you wind up with a shortage of willing landlords. (See NYC and SF).
Some folks don't think they need willing landlords.
Okay, strike that: some folks don't think they need MORE, not FEWER, willing landlords.
Rent control laws cut the supply to nothing. Willing landlords will NOT build and operate in these areas.
You may not like it that willing landlords are the other party here -- the tuple of (renter | landlord) --
but they are.
An analogy: cities use very high fines for parking in Disabled People's parking.
By removing the benefit to park in those spots (ie. fining people hundreds of $$) -- the supply of non-handicapped drivers parking in handicapped spots is cut, drastically.
Another example: The supply of willing bar owners selling drinks to young-looking people without checking their ID is small. The reason? BINGO, the city made it unprofitable for bar owners who fail to check IDs.
When a city tells Landlords "you're a pain, here -- making next to nothing" -- the supply of willing landlords drops.
The result of rent control laws is A SHORTAGE OF WILLING LANDLORDS. A SHORTAGE OF NEW APARTMENT CONSTRUCTION. CONVERSION OF APARTMENTS TO CONDOS.
Rent control REDUCES THE SUPPLY of apartments. When that supply drops -- like it has in NYC and SF -- what happened to rents? FREAKING HIGHEST IN THE COUNTRY! Because the DEMAND is still there, and growing. But the supply is dropping.
The cities with the STRONGEST RENT CONTROL -- have the HIGHEST RENTS IN THE COUNTRY!
Like hearing that? No? Then you cannot handle the truth.
Here's from the article:
The long term effect of these laws (rent controls, restrictions on AirBnB etc) is already clear. Sweden already has these policies. Just look at Sweden to see what the future holds.
Sweden has rent control. This causes the existing housing to be converted to AirBnB and rentals to be converted into condominiums. It also makes it more worthwhile to put investment money into owner-occupied housing than build new rental apartments, as owner occupied housing isn't subject to price controls.
Almost 90% of Sweden's local government areas now report a shortage of rental apartments. This includes countryside areas and small towns. Students cannot get into university because they cannot find housing, or have to queue for years.
In Stockholm, you have to wait for 10 years on average in a government queue system to get just the chance to apply for a rental apartment. It is a similar story almost everywhere else in Sweden. In 2013, one woman waited for 28 years to get her Stockholm rental apartment.
Berlin is already starting to see some of these problems with large crowds of competition for apartments at viewings etc
And by this simple observation, we have found the answer why the property owners wants to keep the rent control in place.
How do startups even afford to live there?
There are parties with hundreds of kids on the roof, weed smoked in the hall outside our apartment, a broken front door that can only be closed by smashing as hard as possible or not at all, stains all over the carpet outside the Airbnb, people breaking into our house because they're drunk, people buzzing every apartment because they've locked themselves out and it's 4AM. The place is a 365 day Airbnb, which is illegal, and Airbnb know that too and don't care.
AirBnB refuse to take any responsibility, even just to raise issues with the person running the BnB. They have even repeatedly said they can't find a listing by address - seriously, not that the address is wrong, but they they simply do not have the capability. We can't speak to the neighbor because they don't live there, they just rent out their apartment on Airbnb. They got journalists to write stories about how they'd soon have an app for neighbours last year - it still isn't rolled out in Europe despite all the press.
Love airBnB as a customer. 95% of guests are fine. 4% do stupid shit because they're drunk, which is understandable, but having continuously drunk 'neighbors' sucks. 1% are deliberately anti social. But the company absolutely does not give a damn about their impact on the people around them.
Tip for anyone else: call your police non-emergency number or your council. Avoid Airbnb support. They can't help and they won't take responsibility for the source of their income.
Nor should they. This is a matter for local police and regulatory enforcement staff. If the local district's enforcement forces are too feeble to handle the workload, then they should be beefed up until they can handle it.
If someone uses a kitchen knife to murder another human, the manufacturer of that knife is under no obligation to assist in any way with the investigation of that crime and the prosecution of the murderer. This is right and proper. This ever-intensifying cry to press private companies into service as investigative and police forces (rather than properly staffing and funding the relevant governmental offices) is deeply disturbing.
You can't know that and it by no means follows from what you've said. It's fine to describe your specific experiences, but not fine to cross into overgeneralized denunciation. Especially not to gin up indignation, which is pretty much the sole purpose of overgeneralized denunciation.
Other Airbnb neighbors may have a great time, but that doesn't mean I'm 'generalising' about them in a 'not fine' way when recounting my honest feelings after repeatedly dealing with them.
It's an odd coincidence my comment went from the top comment on this article to far down the thread in a single reload.
But it's not unusual for him to wade into conversations like this. What he's objecting to is an instance of a pattern that he has consistently been objecting to over the the last 9 months or so: commenters extrapolating the public policy intentions of organizations based on reporting about the behavior of those organizations. There's a term for that kind of reasoning: fundamental attribution error.
Given a couple minutes with the HN search bar, you can quickly find several other recent places where Dan has raised the same objections with respect to other companies.
I think "not attributing unproven intentionality to organizations" is a pretty good norm for HN to adopt.
That doesn't mean you can't make the argument that Airbnb is having a toxic effect on particular cities! It just means you can't make the lazy emotional appeal that Airbnb is run by people who don't care about toxicity.
I am recounting a year of direct personal experience, no reporting is involved.
I have yet to see any proof that AirBnB cares for anything other than to expand their reach and profitability. They'll partner with local governments to support tax collection, as its in their best interests (and costs them little but engineering time, as the tax is passed through to the customer/host), but its also in their best interest to disregard externalities such as that caused by less than desirable AirBnB customers.
EDIT: They're the less abrasive version of Uber. Disruption needs to be balanced with societal benefits. Your startup does not exist in a vacuum, and you are one piece of legislation or court decision away from being regulated out of existence. Behave accordingly.
Like this guy, just a day ago, where someone made a fake listing for his house and they won't answer him. https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/4h5yo0/fl_some...
Maybe it's the Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
Or it's just the New Economy. Twitter has 2300 employees. Microsoft, hardly the picture of perfect customer service, has almost 120,000. Guess which one you can get on the phone.
You can't get valuations of millions of dollars per employee if you have employees trying to do things like answer complaints. Dealing with complaints is money-losing business, not money-making business.
To me, I feel like you know you're in trouble on an HN thread when someone invokes that Upton Sinclair quote. There are very few conversations you can't shut down with it.
There's no substantive point about Airbnb or any other company that can't be expressed in the way my comment above is recommending. That ought to be obvious to anyone who reads it dispassionately and is familiar with HN.
I've been on Startup News / Hacker News for eight years, so I'm pretty familiar with the site.
> But the company absolutely does not give a damn about their impact on the people around them.
... because (a) you can't know such a thing and (b) it's corrosive of the kind of discussion we want here.
Reporting specific experiences is fine. Crossing into grandiose denunciations is not. Those add no information; their purpose is to gin up rage, which puts salt on the slug of thoughtful discourse.
> > But the company absolutely does not give a damn about their impact on the people around them.
As mentioned repeatedly, that's an honest impression from a year of constant engagement. I have in no way said it is AirBnB policy to not give a damn, simply that as someone who has attempted to engage the company about these matters, they appear to not give a damn.
> Those add no information
I very much disagree that the resulting impression does not add value, and HN would seem to agree, as evidenced by the HN community's reactions to your post.
People can and do post impressions of services on HN, and have for some time. Part of handling yourself properly is not only avoiding impropriety but also the appearance on impropriety: being told not to post my impressions of a company that is incompetent enough they've repeatedly stated they cannot match an address to a listing looks very poor when YC has a financial interest in the company.
Respectfully, you were wrong on this one.
Perhaps that's all you meant to say, but what you actually said went far beyond it in a way that is corrosive to thoughtful discourse, which is why I objected.
I am recounting my own person experience, so, very obviously everything is how Airbnb appears to me, and I'm sure you're intelligent enough to know that. And again, it's quite reasonable to say that based on those experiences, which I'd be happy to provide police reports, screenshots, and contacts at my local council, Airbnb absolutely does not care.
I really don't think Dan acted out of a conflict-of-interest, and in general I agree with the substance of his reply -- but a public chastising was out of place here.
"The new laws still don’t mean all Berlin homestays will disappear overnight. People will still be able to rent out rooms in their homes, as long as the rooms don’t cover more than 50 percent of the property’s floor space."
Title should be changed IMO.
Edit: actually, we've changed the title to that of the article itself, in accordance with the HN guidelines. Submitters: it's against the rules here to rewrite a title except when it is misleading or linkbait, so please only do so in those cases.