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Comment by tedmiston | Hacker News Reader

> David Campos, a supervisor who has been harshly critical of Airbnb, called the ordinance a "modest piece of legislation," according to the San Francisco Chronicle, adding "If you are a rental car agency, you have to make sure the person that you rent that vehicle to has a license before you rent them a car. That is exactly what we are asking the short-term platforms to do here."

This analogy is obnoxiously flawed.

rental car agency:consumer != (airbnb:host or host:guest)

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How is the analogy flawed?

Rental car agencies ensure drivers (who use the agency's cars) are licensed.

AirBnB is being asked to ensure hosts (who use AirBnB's platform) are licensed.

Driving car requires license for various other reason all of us agree with. I don't see why hosts need a license.

Also there is potential stupidity of passing regulations that people wont respect any ways.

You're being downvoted because you are not considering land use and zoning issues. Hosts need to register to ensure that they don't convert their properties into full time hotels in buildings designed for residential use.

But mostly the city wants to ensure they get paid and keep the lodging industry off their backs. Hotels pay occupancy taxes and want AirBnBs to have that encumbrance.

I have a property in an area that has it all figured out and I had to get it certified by an inspector, pay some fees, and submit occupancy taxes. Most skirt the laws.

Chicago did it right in my opinion by requiring AirBnB to manage and submit the taxes and fees.

The city is facing huge pressure from local residents because the price of housing has gone up dramatically in the past few years. Property owners taking rental properties off the market to turn them into unlicensed full-time hotels through Airbnb further reduces housing stock, in addition to forcing a bunch of negative externalities onto neighbors who have little recourse. Most local residents who aren’t themselves Airbnb hosts are on the city’s side here.

The hotel industry is certainly unhappy with Airbnb, but they’re far from the only ones.

Yes but citizens and activist groups aren't flushing policy makers and the city with money. They're enraged, and rightfully so in many areas.

My point was - if the city can get their $ from their policies they will enable airbnbs like Chicago recently did.

At the same time - Airbnb is just one small piece of the puzzle for the rise in housing prices. I don't understand why some people think they are entitled to live in an area in demand?

If someone wants to start scooping up real estate and homeowners are selling at higher prices, comps go up, everyone's values go up along with property taxes. That's how it works.

Now - homeowners whose values go up should be enraged about property tax increases. The city's budget shouldn't vary much from year to year, but if home prices go up substantially they get more property tax revenue. Why? And then if they go down - they don't help you out.

> You're being downvoted because you are not considering land use and zoning issues.

Don't care about downvotes but I care about arguments.

Uber and Lyft will check the drivers license even if government does not make it mandatory because a licensed and well experienced driver is in in the interest of Uber and Lyft.

I could not care less about "zoning laws" which serve no purpose to most sensible people and I dont see why AirBnB should give a damn about zoning laws. Also I would oppose government move to force these laws down people throats by forcing AirBnB hosts to have licenses.

>Hosts need to register to ensure that they don't convert their properties into full time hotels in buildings designed for residential use.

But that is the whole "innovation" in AirBnB. The very fact that AirBnB is cool because one does not have to comply the mountain of regulations that Motel 6 has to comply with.

I will be very happy to live in a residential property that is converted into defacto hotel through AirBnB.

There are two parties in the rental car transaction:

    Hertz <-> Driver

The AirBnB transaction has three parties:

    AirBnB <-> Host <-> Guest

While you can construct sentences that look similar for both cases, and the word "license" is used in both contexts, it's a fundamentally different dynamic.

The transaction is more like

Host <-> Airbnb <-> Guest

All the communication (and the billing) happens through the platform.

Agreed. I wanted to draw a circle, but I don't have the Ascii Art skills.

The post is about requirements on AirBnB when a property is listed. There is no guest involved when that happens. There is only AirBnB and the host.

"The AirBnB transaction has three parties"

That's incorrect. AirBnB provides a platform on which hosts can list their properties. There are two parties to that transaction.

In case you're talking about the subsequent 'rental' transaction, AirBnB is pretty clear that that's between the host and the guest. See section 5 of their ToS: https://www.airbnb.com/terms

You seem to ask us to pretend those two transactions are unrelated, but I don't understand why.

Genuinely curious why the agency:consumer::host:guest is flawed. (agency|host) temporarily allows use of their property by (consumer|guest) in exchange for money.

Under your analogy, the host has to make sure the guest is licensed, which is different from the law, which is about the host.

The agency:consumer ~= airbnb:host analogy makes more sense.

Driving a car is a complex and potentially dangerous activity, hence the license. A license to rent a place to sleep makes no sense.

Edit: Instead of responding to every single sub comment I will just add that car accidents kill 30,000 people a year. Whether or not you think AirBnB should be regulated, the analogy pairing their activity to the commonly fatal activity of driving is unambiguously on a different level. A more appropriate analogy is perhaps a fishing license.

Plenty of things can go wrong with a place to sleep. Bedbugs, for example.

The license is not to ensure you know how to host. It is designed to limit the impact of hosting on neighbors and the housing supply. People didn't sign up to live next to a hotel when they move into a residential neighborhood.

Licenses aren't just for ensuring competence (as in the case of driver's licenses). Sometimes, they're to make sure that the government knows about the people doing it (as in the case of car registrations), either to collect tax or to be able to find people associated with an activity. And sometimes they exist to limit the number of people who can do something (as in the case of liquor licenses in many areas).

In this case, it seems like SF wants to "license" rental activity in order to tax it, and it wants to tax rental activity in part to limit it. Zoning could do this, too, but a tax is more flexible on an individual basis.

This is especially meaningful in a city in the midst of an affordable housing crisis.

The license is to rent out your place. Does renting your property on a short term basis suddenly release you from requirements like making sure you have heat and water in the unit or meet zoning regulations? There's and argument to be made that this level of regulation is uneeded or causes more problems than it solves, but the regulation is still there and AirBnB I'd doing there best to avoid having it affect their business

See my post above

Hm. Okay, perhaps a better analogy might be the way gun manufacturers are expected to ensure they're selling to licensed gun dealers.

The analogy would imply that hosts should verify that guests have a license to rent. Last I checked, there is no license to rent.

A much better analogy would be a franchisor has a responsibility to ensure a franchisee has appropriate business licensure. However, I do not know where the liability lies in this scenario.

If that analogy (sensible, imo) is too much for you then pretend he was talking about GetAround.

To substitute a p2p car sharing service in place of car rental agency completely changes the meaning...

Driving a vehicle (your own or renting someone else's) is an activity requiring a license for the agency to validate.

I'm unaware of any place in the world requiring a license to sleep and eat breakfast.

It's the hosts they're talking about, not the guests, which would need licenses.

I'm fairly sure you have to have a license to serve breakfast as a business. You also have to be inspected by the health department. Same goes for running a hotel. That stuff all costs money, and it's not up to a private business (AirBnB) to determine how to enforce such laws, even though their existence does change the landscape.

It seems my phrasing was unclear. With "to sleep and eat breakfast", my intent was: a customer to sleep somewhere and eat breakfast there (as the end user), not for a business to serve that customer.

I made this point to the article's literal analogy of the car rental agency's need to validate a consumer to drive a car (as the end user). There is no license needed to sleep and breakfast.

You're phrasing was clear. The person making the analogy was comparing the drivers to the hosts.

> I'm unaware of any place in the world requiring a license to sleep and eat breakfast.

This was the third Google hit for "are hotels licensed": http://www.myfloridalicense.com/dbpr/hr/Servicesthatrequirea...

Restaurants, too: https://www.sfdph.org/dph/eh/Food/Permits/default.asp

Anyway, it's a completely bogus assumption that licensing is only about ensuring competence.

I said [of the guest]: "to sleep and eat breakfast"

Not [of the host]: to provide a place to sleep and serve breakfast.

The article's analogy uses rental agency <--> customer.

David Campos' poor analogy has pretty much zero relevance to the case at hand.

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