You mean they are worried about PROGRESS and INNOVATION in the lodging industry which gives consumers choice and funnels money away from the people who pay the lobbyists who pay them.
Seems like there's a better solution available here.
I'm saying that existing residential zoning laws are only effective when you can apply them to actual residents.
They fall flat if you have to chase people down (what, across state lines?) or if the fines aren't high enough to eat into an Airbnb revenue stream.
Which, is one reason why we have zoning laws in the first place - because the penalties and proxies in a commercial zone are different than they are in a residential one.
> but they're going to solve it with different, shittier laws that make less sense
Not sure how residents voting to ban short-term residential rentals in their community is shitty or senseless.
The zoning laws seem to be used only because cities are not even trying to properly police the already in place nuisance laws.
It depends on the laws. Some municipalities could have laws that are able to handle short-term rentals while others could not.
In a jurisdiction where the existing law doesn't address a problem caused by short-term rentals, a new law would not be arbitrary - in fact, it would be the exact opposite.
> The zoning laws seem to be used only because cities are not even trying to properly police the already in place nuisance laws.
If zoning laws are easier to enforce than nuisance laws, this could be an appropriate response.
If you're not affecting your neighbors, it's nobody's business what you do on your property, including letting other people live there. If you want to regulate, add some additional regulations about behavior that affects neighboring properties but isn't currently covered.
You say that, but there are currently many, many cities trying to get Airbnb to deal with their illegal apartments, and yet Airbnb is stalling on that (presumably because if you shut down their illegal apartments, their valuation would implode).
To your point, "affecting your neighbors" is a pretty tough thing to track down. Even if things seem to be going well, there's a difference between having stable neighbors who take care of the neighborhood and an unknown rolling of the dice every few days. If you have kids, it's an even bigger risk. It's very difficult to accurately judge just how much of an impact it has, which is why cities have set up zoning regulations.
Why should AirBnB want to help jurisdictions that are trying to shut it down completely under the guise of "illegal apartments/hotels"? It's an entirely different matter to help keep the residents of AirBnB rentals behaving well and not disturbing their neighbors, which seems completely reasonable.
> there's a difference between having stable neighbors who take care of the neighborhood
There's no guarantee that "stable" neighbors care either, and "take care of the neighborhood" would need to be a lot more precise to be either enforceable or appropriate. There's a reason we specifically looked for a house without a "neighborhood association", and several people I know who currently have such associations would like to get out from under them. Banning AirBnB does sound consistent with neighborhood-association-style politics, though.
Saying you want to regulate tenancy duration rather than behavior seems a lot like choosing to reject browsers based on User-Agent rather than doing feature detection. All tenants should behave well regardless of tenancy duration; any well-behaved neighbor should be equivalently fine regardless of tenancy duration.
> If you have kids, it's an even bigger risk.
"Think of the children!" does not increase the weight of your argument. You're talking very nebulously about risk. The previous comments were specifically complaining about things like noise and late-night parties.
Well, we need to be fair here. Simply because something is different, it's not automatically "progress" nor "innovation".
The lodging industry has quite a lot of regulations, put into place to protect the consumer. Airbnb kind of currently operates all on their own. You have no guarantee that you're sleeping in clean sheets, you have no guarantee that carbon monoxide detectors are working, etc.
Of course simply because regulations exist doesn't mean every lodging provider adheres to them the same - but it does provide recourse if caught. Applying the same regulations to Airbnb seems to be a net win for everyone involved (except Airbnb themselves).
And the sellers on AirBnB who don't want to deal with the complicated mess that will cause.
And the buyers on AirBnB who don't want to pay the prices that dealing with that mess will cause.
If you cannot guarantee clean sheets, working smoke detectors, potable water... then you really should not be offering your house as a place to stay.
Imagine a world where you fly halfway around the country, land, drive to your hotel, and discover body sweat stains on the sheets, the water is undrinkable, oh and sometimes the light switch sparks when you flip it.
The hotel says you will need to pay to "upgrade" those room features.
You complain to the hotel owner - who doesn't care... he has your money already and isn't interested in refunding it. He states you accepted the room's condition when you booked the room.
This is the equivalent of what you are advocating. This is flatly _not_ progress of any kind. It's a gigantic step backwards in safety and living conditions.
None of this even considers the other side of the token - the lodging owner. What happens if the rentee trashes the place and Airbnb refuses to reimburse you? Your home owners insurance won't cover anything if they realize you are renting to others for profit. You have no recourse.
Airbnb has refused to regulate themselves. There is no reasonable guarantee of anything for either side of the transaction. So now, the government is going to step in and do it for them.
No, this is certainly not equivalent. If you accepted shitty terms that's on you for failing to read, plain and simple.
> So now, the government is going to step in and do it for them.
This isn't even the sort of thing they're talking about regulating though - they're talking about doing ridiculous stuff like zoning, booking discrimination, accessibility, etc laws on these, nothing to do with the quality of the rooms at all but which certainly do increase the costs to the sellers.
We have zoning laws for a reason[1][2]. We didn't always...
We already know too many rentals in an area bring down property values (or stagnate them at best).[2] Rentals are rarely cared for with the same degree as an owner-occupied property. Adding transients to the mix is likely to exacerbate this phenomenon.
There are other reasons for zoning laws, as well. We cannot just throw all this out (forgetting the reasons they exist) simply because some company wants to make a profit.
[1] http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/Bloody_ZoningLaws.html
[2] http://realestate.findlaw.com/land-use-laws/land-use-and-zon...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/where-we-live/wp/2015/10...
You seem to disagree with zoning laws. However I'd bet dollars to donuts you'd start to agree when your neighbors sell their house and it's converted into a liquor store, bringing all the normal types that tend to hang around such places.
Airbnb is not a liquor store - but it's not a owner-occupied property either. It's a person trying to run a commercial property in a residentially zoned area. Your neighbors have the right to not have to put up with commercial buildings and all the things that come along with it.