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Comment by SmellTheGlove | Hacker News Reader

I think we agree. I said I was in favor of light regulation, I just don't want to step on an individual wanting to rent out their home. It's hard to draw bright lines from a legal perspective on what's OK and what isn't, and we need to think about that for sure. For instance, let's say I get an out of town job offer. I think it'd be fine for me to rent my place out on AirBNB by the week, especially since I live close to the beach. I'd have management headaches from weekly turnover versus just getting a long term tenant, but that's on me. But where's the line? If I bought the houses next door and did the same, that's probably less OK. But the key is light regulation, not protection of the lodging industry for its own sake.

If your goal is to keep housing affordable, you need more housing. Going after AirBNB (barring those running large hotel-like operations) isn't addressing the supply issue.

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> Going after AirBNB (barring those running large hotel-like operations) isn't addressing the supply issue.

What is the definition of a large hotel-like operation exactly? I have a friend who lives at his parents house, rents 2 apartments and then re-rents them out exclusively on Airbnb. He lives off the difference between the rent he pays and what he earns from re-renting on Airbnb, basically arbitraging the difference between the long-term rental and short-term rental markets in his city. His small hustle is no Hilton, but it affects the property market in a small way by taking two properties off the market.

Airbnb takes a lot of the pain out of running things like this, and enables a lot more people to do it on a small-time scale. Taken together, it will affect the market as much, or more than a few large operations.

Left unchecked, I think such practices will, in the long term, push housing (both rental and purchase) prices up while pushing traditional hotel rental prices down, so I think the interests of home renters/buyers are actually aligned with those of the lodging industry.

Increasing housing supply is one tool we can use to control housing prices. Zoning laws, when enforced properly, are another tool. This investigation seeks to address that second tool.

> What is the definition of a large hotel-like operation exactly?

No idea, but I'm thinking more of an absentee operator model with lots of rooms and properties. What your friend is doing is probably too small to impact the rental market, but in aggregate could be an issue if many were doing it. It's easy for me to say that I don't mind that sort of thing since I own a home and people like your friend would give me additional choices when I go on vacation, but the immediate community may think differently and I think that's where it needs to be decided. It's why I'm really questioning Federal regulation and involvement of a local issue.

Taking it to an extreme, look at a place like San Francisco. Someone there doing what your friend does would be impactful, yet the city itself won't permit enough new construction to solve the supply issue. Regulating AirBNB doesn't solve much there, and the city itself won't allow a solution to the supply issue. By regulating AirBNB, the city itself is actually taking additional adverse action on the supply issue rather than doing anything to mitigate - but that's their choice, their voters, their city. It's not my place to sit here in Maine and tell you that's wrong, but that is essentially what a Federal regulator does by proxy.

> It's hard to draw bright lines from a legal perspective on what's OK and what isn't

Not really.

If a community wants to ban Airbnb rentals and rewrites their zoning laws as such, the resulting line is clear.

It's only a gray area because the laws haven't caught up with the fact that Airbnb exists.

Is it, though? Do you just blanket ban AirBNB rentals in the area? Define that. Do you really mean short term rentals? Web-listed short term rentals? What's short term?

Then, consider who you're impacting - this is local so they're your constituents, after all.

Enforcement is a whole other matter.

Try this: Define your objective, then draft the statute.

EDIT: I'll add, I own exactly one home and have never rented it out by any means. I don't have a stake in this fight, but I am interested in the legal aspects.

The goal would be to catch people who buy a house, don't live in it, and continuously rent it on Airbnb. i.e., they are operating an unlicensed rental property, which is already often illegal.

Is it hard to stop people from occasionally renting their house on Airbnb? Sure, and you'd have a hard time writing that into law because it would be difficult to differentiate between someone who Airbnb's their house one week a year and someone who lets a friend stay at their place.

But it would be pretty easy to prove in court that the guy who owns the house next door doesn't actually live in it (this is probably key to enforcement), and has listed it on Airbnb a hundred times this year.

Maybe a lawyer or judge can chime in, but it seems like this would be provable in court.

I'm a lawyer. This isn't what I do (I work in tech), but it's very interesting to me from a regulatory perspective.

Renting a house that you don't and never live in isn't illegal, and I think it would be very hard/impossible to do that. You'd be butting up against some very fundamental property rights. If a jurisdiction requires a license, that's fine to require, but you probably couldn't deny one on the basis of AirBNB.

Listing it on AirBNB in and of itself really can't be prohibited. I think you'd have a First Amendment issue. It'd be commercial speech, which has a little less protection, but I can't imagine that going smoothly if you tried to clamp down on how a homeowner (or landlord) advertises his or her property.

This is the reason that the attempts you see now to regulate are based on short term duration. So far, regulating the duration of a stay and saying less than that is a hotel seems to be okay.

Enforcing it would be brutal. To start, who enforces it? And since it's local, what amount of your limited resources should you devote?

My parents built a shed in their backyard, and a zoning law required that it "look like" their house.

If that's enforceable, how could a prohibition on short-term rentals not be? What am I missing here?

I think residential zoning regulations violate liberty more often than not - but it's obvious that there's precedent for all manner of loosely defined and overreaching - yet, enforceable - laws in this arena.

A prohibition on short term rentals is permissible. I even said that specifically. It's the other restrictions, like listing on AirBNB, that I said you probably could not do.

> Enforcing it would be brutal. To start, who enforces it? And since it's local, what amount of your limited resources should you devote?

Couldn't you just set an extremely high penalty for breaking the law and then only enforce it against the most egregious offenders, as a deterrent?

Short answer - probably. Slightly longer answer - I'm actually not sure. It'd have to be set really high, and even then, collection might be an issue.

Let's deal with the amount of the fine first. It'd need to be huge, enough to erase the economic benefit of the rental activity, and then some to deter the attempt because the odds are you still won't get caught. Let's say you do something ridiculous like $50k per occurrence, just to keep this moving.

Anyone serious about doing this is going to restructure such that the fine becomes difficult to collect. Make the city spend $100k to get $50k from you. Individual property owner X creates Property Management Company Y. X leases property to Y. Y does all of the business on AirBNB. Y gets fined, goes to court, judgment sticks, so Y declares BK and dissolves. X leases to company Z, rinse and repeat. Literally a shell game until the city gives up or something bigger comes down, who knows, but point is you can frustrate enforcement efforts in protest if you're so motivated.

Then there's the question of the fine. I really don't know if there's a constitutional argument on an excessive fine or not in this case, but I think the Supreme Court left the door open on that. Kelco might be the case.

Please keep in mind, I'm just being an armchair analyst here. I'd be pissed off if my neighbor's house suddenly became a revolving door of loud campers. I'm just not realistically sure what could legally be done about it beyond restricting short term rentals. But then I'd just have weekly campers instead of daily.

> If a community wants to ban Airbnb rentals and rewrites their zoning laws as such, the resulting line is clear.

Somewhere there's a line regarding property rights and externalities, but I think we've gone way too far away from laissez faire in the US. Our towns are brittle and inflexible and the poorer because of it.

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