Santa Monica convicts its first Airbnb host under tough home-sharing laws | Hacker News Reader

Santa Monica convicts its first Airbnb host under tough home-sharing laws

latimes.com

126 pointslnguyen193 comments

Discussions under articles about AirBnB, Uber, et al. start to make me wonder recently - why is it so that so many people living in apparently advanced XXI-century civilization need to be explained that following the law is a good thing in general[0]? Like, you know, paying your taxes and not dumping externalities on people around you? How is that not obvious?

I mean - should I interpret it as a good sign, of people questioning assumptions to check if they still hold true, or is the society really going so bonkers that the very idea of being a law-abiding citizen is seen in negative light?

EDIT - added "in general [0]" and a footnote to clarify.

[0] - I mean not "follow all regulations blindly", but "follow regulations by default unless there is a very good reason not to".

not all laws are good. criticism should be encouraged, so we make the laws better.

Criticism is good, encouraging to break the law and glorification of those to do, in general, is not good in my books.

It does not work like this. People will not simply criticise new laws that they feel are unjust and then wait for changes.

They will simply ignore them. Lawmakers have to carefully consider this and they generally do it.

I suspect that if people weren't willing to break the law we'd probably still have alcohol prohibition. Making a law unenforceable is a very effective way of changing it.

Fair enough.

It's a whole lot more difficult to change/remove laws than it is to add them. Maybe not "technically", but it seems as if they gather momentum by being implemented, and relied on by a multitude of parties, that they essentially become entrenched.

Not to mention the fact that we don't hold people accountable for questionable outcomes after the laws are enacted. We're essentially stabbing in the dark, expecting to have a more "accurate" stab the next time around using previous experience. Social policies, and their results are inherently grey, and we should treat the laws that surround them as such.

While true, I don't think this is ideal. Nor should we say it's acceptable. Perhaps there are solutions like capping the quantity, length and jargon of laws as a whole.

Are you arguing that any law, whatever its content, should be followed unquestionably just because it's the law?

In the United States, anyway, disdain for laws you disagree with is baked into the culture. The American Revolution and the Civil Rights Movement are both all about breaking laws that were considered unjust, and popular entertainment is packed full of vigilantes breaking the law in pursuit of a greater good.

With that sort of mental baggage swimming about in people's heads, is it really any surprise when large numbers of Americans decide to simply ignore laws and regulations they don't believe are justified?

"Are you arguing..."

No, he didn't.

That's a big reason why discussions here go wrong. You either write paragraph after paragraph, closing every little loophole in your argument that someone can abuse, or people jump on to an outlandish, uncharitable interpretation and the subthread is toxic.

Yeah, though my fault I forgot to include the qualifier "in general" to "following the law". Of course I didn't mean "follow blindly every single regulation" - I meant, "follow regulations by default unless there's a very good reason not to".

Is that a typical attitude in your culture? I'm a lot closer to "follow regulations only when I agree that they're justified or when I fear the consequences of not following them" and I'm not particularly sure why - I've always felt that way and it doesn't seem like a particularly unusual attitude in my area.

Going back to the article - I might decide not to run an AirBnB unit if it was truly inconveniencing the neighbors, and I might decide not to run an AirBnB unit if I was afraid of getting fined a large sum of money, but I'd never give up my AirBnB units just because the local government said I had to. It would never even pop into my mind - I just wouldn't consider the regulation legitimate.

I wonder why we're so different. Education? Parenting? Stuff like this is so interesting!

Not sure if this is typical in my culture. Probably not to the extent of my personal attitude. I'm the weird guy who declared income from tutoring I was doing during my university years ;). I had two core sources for my thinking about those issues in my childhood - one was religious upbringing; I was raised in a belief that God likes it when you follow rules of secular powers unless they're in direct contradiction with the Bible. The other was growing up watching Star Trek, which taught me to assume things are better when people cooperate, bureaucracies can be competent, and rules that seem to make no sense to individual tend to have a lot of sense if you take a more global approach.

So this is where I come from. Even though I'm not a religious person anymore, over the years I thought a lot about the approach to the rules and oragnizations, and came to the conclusion that the society is better off if everyone follows the rules by default, suboptimal they may be, instead of rebelling whenever they feel like. Both because some rules are actually good even if they don't seem so, and for others, it's easier to change things when people are willing to cooperate and authorities aren't so busy fighting fires.

Back to the culture. For context, I'm from Europe, Poland. I meet a mix of various approaches. Some are law-abiding citizens. Most break laws here and there, but generally treat upholding them as a virtue and their behaviour as something not good, but done out of practical necessity. I don't encounter people glorifying law-breaking very often.

As for vigilantes from TV you mentioned in your previous comment, I like those shows like everyone else. Though I have to remind myself all the time that it's fiction - law enforcement isn't as incompetent as those shows always portray, and lot of the stuff heroes do aren't feasible in the real world. Then again, I'm still a Star Trek guy - I side with organizations made of good, competent, ethical people.

>The other was growing up watching Star Trek, which taught me to assume things are better when people cooperate, bureaucracies can be competent, and rules that seem to make no sense to individual tend to have a lot of sense if you take a more global approach.

Ah. Well a lot of other people were brought up, to so speak, with a more Firefly-inspired worldview.

"A year from now, ten, they'll swing back to the belief that they can make people... better. And I do not hold to that. So no more running; I aim to misbehave." - Malcolm Reynolds

Thank you so much for this awesome, lengthy, detailed reply.

Outlandish and uncharitable? Interesting, because I wasn't trying to be.

It seemed so obvious (to me, anyway) why people routinely break laws that I assumed the person I replied to came from a very different culture than my own, and I wanted to learn where the person's actual boundaries were. There are cultures out there that (from my perspective) believe some deeply weird things about the role of law and government in society, and it fascinates me.

I suppose I could've phrased it differently, but when I ask a question, it's because I'm looking for clarification, not because I've decided on an interpretation.

Are you arguing that any law, whatever its content, should be followed unquestionably just because it's the law?

In the same way that Airbnb, Uber and a lot of HN are arguing that 100% of laws and regulations should be repealed, 100% of government employees fired and everything turned over to a meritocratic free market which will instantly perfectly and permanently solve all problems.

If you want people to voluntarily follow the law, you must have laws that everyone respects. In other words they have to be reasonable for the subjects of the law.

You always have a choice to either follow the law or not to follow the law.

Both choices come with consequences that can be either positive or negative to you - it all depends on situation.

Somewhat true - though "everyone" is an impossible target. Majority, yes.

That said, part of living in a society is following the laws you don't like too. The cases where an upstanding citizen will decide to disobey the Man exist, though they are rare in a functioning society. What I find problematic is encouraging people to treat breaking random laws for no serious reason as a good thing.

> The cases where an upstanding citizen will decide to disobey the Man exist, though they are rare in a functioning society.

How does your contention account for speeding, jaywalking and marijuana use? Those are three examples that jump to mind of laws that are essentially universally flaunted in the US (and I suspect elsewhere). Is America not a functional society, or do we have almost no upstanding citizens?

There's no perfect society on this planet :). But you can thank those speeding for a significant fraction of avoidable traffic deaths you have each year.

So, the majority of traffic-related deaths in the US are all speeding related?

He said "significant fraction," not majority. In 2014 in the US, speeding was a factor in 28% of motor vehicle crash deaths.

http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit...

My point, if it was not clear - is simply that if you want a near complete (you'll always have strays) compliance rate - you need to have laws that the subjects are willing to follow - in another words, that they respect.

Consider this: We are all go through a roughly similar socialisation process in a society, meaning many will have a similar understanding that murder is bad, what privat property is and what I can and can't do with it and what freedom is.

Then the lawmakers pass a law that clashes with something that many believed in. In this case with property rights.

In such a case people will not follow laws without thinking about it, instead they will consider carefully the tradeoffs of breaking it.

People are not robots that follow new rules mechanically, the rules must be reasonable to them.

>Discussions under articles about AirBnB, Uber, et al. start to make me wonder recently - why is it so that so many people living in apparently advanced XXI-century civilization need to be explained that following the law is a good thing in general[0]?

The moral valence of the law has been corrupted by asshole laws designed exactly to dump externalities on people who didn't generate them for personal advantage, among other things. So when you've got asshole laws, it encourages asshole behavior.

I don't think it is even possible to simply "follow the law". There is such an overwrought, contradictory edifice of laws and regulations piled one on top of the other that no reasonable person could hope to even know what the law is.

Moreover, there are so many laws that are down-right wrongheaded, and everybody agrees about it, that it corrupts respect for the laws that are just morally grey.

>everybody agrees about it

Maybe everyone you know, or everyone you interact with. Especially if you're talking about laws that are largely based on morals (gay marriage, marijuana, etc). There are plenty of loud, outspoken supporters of even the dumbest laws.

I was thinking more about inane things like speed limits, jaywalking, archaic and outdated laws that have obsoleted themselves but remain on the books, stupid things like that, which everyone violates every day without a second thought.

For instance, there is an ordinance in the town I work in that it is illegal to back into a street parking spot. Why? No one knows, and it is rarely enforced, but technically can result in a non-trivial parking fine.

This is the Napster generation. We don't think all laws should be obeyed.

I don't think all laws should be followed either[0]. But I try to follow them to the best of my abilities regardless.

[0] - Since you bring up Napster; yes, I'm guilty of piracy just like everyone else and I'm in general opposed to the very concept of "intellectual property". I applaud initiatives like SciHub too, but don't encourage - or consider virtuous - breaking laws for personal profit at expense of society at large. So while it may seem so, it's not hypocritical. I think of SciHub as a Good Thing, while I consider my own past history with downloading video games as a small but bad thing. The stuff Uber, AirBnB and tax evasion in general does lands squarely on the bad side of this - ignoring laws for personal profit, local markets and society in general be damned.

Piracy isn't personal profit? You're acquiring something without paying for it. That has a direct effect on your personal bottom line, while depriving revenue for the content creator and the tax collector.

Piracy like the kind I admitted to doing in the past - yes, it is personal profit and it's bad in my books. Piracy like SciHub does is literally propelling humanity forward.

Unless it discourages future researchers from undertaking costly research.

So far the consensus seems to be that it enables researchers to do their work, by not having to bleed their budgets out on accessing tons of papers they need. Also, research doesn't run on dollars as a currency, but on prestige. Which requires one's work to be read by others. At this point a lot of scientific publishers are simply rent seekers - you have to pay them to get published and then they turn around and make others pay to access the PDF. But this topic has been discussed many times on HN, so I'll refer you to those threads - a good search keyword would be "Elsevier".

When our lawmakers are never held accountable, why would you expect anyone to take our laws seriously?

Because that's one of the most fundamental principles of living in a civilized society. I pay my taxes and expect everyone else to pay them too. I expect companies to obey food safety laws - otherwise I would be relocating to another country. Etc.

That's my point, you do it because you expect everyone else is doing it - but why would you sacrifice for a society that isn't sacrificing for you? I don't expect people to follow laws they don't like because not even the elite class that makes those laws obeys the ones they don't like.

What if the law is unjust? What if the government is corrupt? What if the people are corrupt and stupid?

Why is it that so many need the above explained?

What if the law feels unjust only because you're on a receiving end? What if government is corrupt in general, but not every legislation it produces is broken because of that? What if it's you who is stupid by failing to understand the greater impact of the law on society, only focusing on your own costs and benefits?

Those are questions that one has to ask oneself too when considering breaking a law. People don't speed or evade taxes because government is corrupt and people are stupid. They do so mostly because they're lazy and selfish. Dumping costs and risk on other parties is easy, but it's not a way to live in a civilized world.

Again, I'm not saying all laws are Words of God - just that there's a difference between breaking something out of necessity because it's unjust or totally broken, and breaking something to exploit it for personal profit / encouraging others to do so.

I flip this on it's head. I only follow regulations if there is a very good reason to. Often there is. Sometimes it's because the law is just and violating it would violate someone elses rights. More often it's because the enforcement is strict and the likelihood of being caught is high so someone will do violence to me if I violate it. But that's just being practical, I don't respect the law anymore than an armed thief, but I'll obey if it I may be kidnapped or killed for refusing.

Even if government worked exactly as it's supposed to, the law would be at best a reflection of the will of the majority of people. But I don't give the majority of people any benefit of the doubt for creating just rules, and why should I?

This assumes you know the reasoning behind every regulation, and the full effects of ignoring them, which I am not convinced of.

The government is not perfect (but what large group of people is?), but affecting change should be done by participating and from the inside, not by willfully ignoring laws that you don't agree with from the outside.

Maybe all these companies breaking the laws, or making it so easy to break the law makes people forget the law exists. Or because the companies are leading the way, they feel alright following their lead.

Santa Monica has become amazingly expensive, but the town has rent control that is even more draconian than SF. For example, unless the lease prohibits adding additional occupants, rent controlled units can be passed from one resident to another without much restriction, as long as original lease is in effect.

Ellis evictions require huge compensation sums.

As the result, available rental stock is minuscule and prices are rivaling SF. Due to this supply restrictions, what little AirBNB activity goes on, it actually impacts the overall market substantially.

Similar situation is in Venice (city of LA).

As a condo owner, Santa Monica makes me very uneasy - if I fall on hard times, I may have no choice but to sell, or risk never being able to re-occupy my own home again or have to pay an extortion to do so...

That's a great example of how policies backfire - the 'renter-friendly' laws make it incredibly unattractive to rent places and reduce supply, hurting renters.

Renter friendly laws also make it much less attractive to build new units, since they reduce the ROI in doing so.

If it wasn't for "renter-friendly" laws many renters would have had to move already or wouldn't have moved there in the first place. It's like saying that programming would be much better if we required everyone to have an engineering degree. It would, but it would also be a different set of programmers. People who got in to programming because it didn't necessarily require a degree wouldn't be very pleased.

Rent control is so bad that almost all economists are opposed to it, and they rarely agree so strongly about other topics.

The problem is made worse by unwillingness to grow the supply. The market is so distorted by NIMBYs and regulations, so you need some counterbalance, but Santa Monica has gone way too far.

The NIMBYism also backfires spectacularly - the old papermate factory conversion debacle is prime example here in SM.

Instead of getting a nice pedestrian street with more restaurants and a park, the factory is now being "renovated" and converted to half a million sq. ft. Of creative space (a.k.a. rows of desks packed like canned sardines) and will do more damage to traffic than the previous project and produce no new housing or affordable units, and absolutely zero utility for the surrounding communities.

Source: http://www.santamonicanext.org/2015/03/new-plans-filed-for-p...

I don't know much about the paper factory, but unwillingness to grow supply feels like a pretty common issue amongst larger cities. Where I live it feels rather protectionist, I imagine that applies in this case, too.

> The market is so distorted by NIMBYs and regulations

no regulation is just as bad as bad regulation. You want places where the population wants to live and can live. This is actually a very hard problem.

And the free market won't solve it. The free market just creates investment objects to earn as much money as possible. High-rises are extremely expensive and don't lower rent prices. They might offer even lower population density. For example the Eixample district in Barcelona has a higher population density than manhattan.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eixample

Manhattan has systematically reduced density through legal manoeuvres.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/upshot/forty-p...

"..do more damage to traffic than the previous project..."

Good. When I lived there I went to the city's meetings and pointed out that by moving TO Santa Monica I was able to now walk to my job IN Santa Monica, showing that housing can REDUCE traffic.

The public's response?? "BUT IT ALREADY TAKES HALF AN HOUR TO GET TO THE BEACH AND I LIVE HALF A MILE AWAY!!"

Of course, if you walk, cycle, or take expo it doesn't, but that city is a disaster of NIMBYism and closed-mindedness. They refuse to build housing as though anyone who can't live there is just going to jump off a bridge, as opposed to what they really do, which is live farther away and commute in..... increasing traffic.

It's similar to what is happening in San Francisco, but San Francisco has more displacement. You can't prevent people living in the city or commuting there, but people resist accommodating them.

Tech workers want to live in SF, but housing growth won't keep up. The tech workers usually make more money than the current residents, and simply outbid them for housing, thereby causing market rate rent prices to increase dramatically.

This is what people who protest luxury housing projects in SF are missing: the tech workers are going to live in the city no matter what. If you build luxury housing, they will take it. If you don't build luxury housing, tech workers will take the market-rate housing from the people who can't afford anything better. In some cases, they convert the market-rate housing to luxury housing, sometimes by combining units or getting rid of in-law units, which reduces the housing stock.

Of course, rent control in SF is not means-tested, so it's basically a lottery -- there are people making very high incomes living in rent-controlled apartments, and very poor people who have to live together and pay the market rate. It's an indefensible system, even if you otherwise are OK with rent control.

Protesting the Google buses is another example of shortsightedness. Who would rather have thousands of additional cars on the roads instead of a handful of buses? These people are going to get to work somehow, and they won't all fit on Caltrain and Muni.

I completely agree. I understand the sentiments of those who oppose new construction because hey, SF is an awesome place and whenever you change something you run the risk of destroying that character, but the reality is that change is coming one way or another and it needs to be addressed.

I actually lay more blame on the cities surrounding SF and down the peninsula though. How Mountain View can oppose new apartments with a straight face is beyond me.

Housing policy in the US seems to be designed for a period of 0 population growth and people who want to exclusively live in the suburbs. Additionally, nobody seems willing to point out the blindingly obvious contradiction in saying "high house prices are good" and "we need to address the problem of housing shortages".

Perhaps most galling is that people care more about having places for cars to sleep than for people. New buildings (more in Santa Monica than SF) are required to have obscene amounts of parking - room that could go towards housing humans, and not cars. After living in Santa Monica, I lived in a wonderful apartment in a delightful neighborhood for a year in San Diego, but it was expensive (by SD standards). Why? Because it's de facto illegal to build nice neighborhoods any more with cottage-style homes or apartments above shops nestled close to one another, because now you'd have to use as much space on parking as on housing. And yet, it seems people like these places, as evidenced by the high rents they command.

For what it's worth, while living there my wife and I were car-free for the first three months, relying on a 170cc scooter, car2go, and bicycles. After she got hit by a car commuting to her job which was in the middle of nowhere and poorly served by transit (but, I will say, surrounded by massive amounts of parking and on cheap land), we got one car, which we shared. SD law says our apartment would have needed two parking spaces if built now, which is comical.

I've been thinking about something like this recently, so I'm wondering if/how they account for wage increases always getting absorbed by rent increases[1]. Buy a house?

1. http://www.phillyvoice.com/does-raising-minimum-wage-raise-r... (among others)

A lot of people on minimum wage are students and minors living with their parents, who don't have their own apartment leases. Many minimum wage workers are already in subsidized or rent-controlled housing. Plus, most of the wage increases are going to be phased in, because everyone knows that raising the minimum wage to $15 all at once would be too great a change. It's also worth pointing out that only about 4-5% of the workforce earns the minimum wage nationwide. So I don't think the relationship between minimum wage increases and rent increases is very easy to quantify.

Furthermore, most of the predictions about negative consequences of minimum wage increases have failed to materialize. The explanation for this is one of the things that economists have no consensus on, and their disagreement has actually increased over time.

In any case, I find it very unlikely that a minimum-wage earner could afford to buy a house, even at the $15 level.

That's a question of supply and demand in housing. If you use a conservative 35% debt to income, then at $15 an hour, the mortgage + tax + hoa/fees should be at $910 per month. Not much, but if it's two income household, then it's $1820 or $200k plus purchasing power at today's rates.

In LA that will not get you much, but in many other markets it will.

> As the result, available rental stock is minuscule

Prove it.

I see this argument all the time, the idea that somehow a massive global rise in the cost of residential real estate in important urban centers is "caused" by rent control, rather than a huge increase in inequality, the rise of a winner cities take all job market, or something else.

I've lived in NYC for seventeen years, during which time rent stabilization policy has not changed much, but rental prices sure have. The (relatively tiny) core stock of regulated apartments is pretty similar to what it was when there were homeless encampments in Greenwich Village townhouses, yet people ignorantly shout "rent control" all the time.

So we're sure rent control caused this?

Is there rent control in London? What's happened there?

Are you sure the problem isn't Snapchat payrolls, or rising film profits, or globally suppressed interest rates, or restrictions on Santa Monica building permits, or maybe even Airbnb listings?

Why are you so sure? I have a degree in Economics and everything yet I'm quite a bit less certain.

There is no rent control in London, rents have been going up and up.

Only 10 year graph I could find is this:

http://leftfootforward.org/images/2015/02/London-rents-and-w...

At the same time, lots of property is being built and left empty -

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/21/tens-thousan...

London is hemmed in by the "Metropolitan Green Belt" which restricts building, and inside the belt housebuilding is very hard due to planning policy. House building in London is barely keeping step with the usual deterioration of the housing stock - let alone with the population growing by more than a million people in a decade.

> lots of property is being built and left empty

8,000 properties empty for more than 2 years is nothing in the big scheme of things. It is maybe 0.2-0.3% of the housing stock. In fact, this is amazingly low.

There used to be rent control in London, back in the 1980s, there was a very small market for rentals that were not living in with the owner. There has been a huge increase in rentals since, partly caused by inequality and differential availability of mortgages, but removing rent control did help (and adding shorthold tenancy contracts).

I don't think it is just rent control. You should know if you have a degree in Economics that if you release rent-control apartments to the market, they will seek the highest price they can fetch, but after a spike, the introduction of these apartments would dilute the market a bit. How much, I can't say, but certainly better than with rent control. And if you are from NY, you should know the difference between rent-stabilized and rent-controlled apartments.

I have friends who had a rent-controlled loft in Tribeca for over 30 years way before Bobby DeNiro and company stepped in.

My friends were both better off than I with one friend's parent subsidizing her to the tune of $20K to $30K per year many years after grad school too, so I rented in Brooklyn where I was born and raised below the poverty line. My friends were paying $875 per month at the time of exit in 2015, and it was somewhere around $450 back in the 80s even. They were able to take long vacations and return to their loft in Tribeca two or three times a year. A nice life if you can get it.

I had lived in Manhattan a couple of times before, Hell's Kitchen, 4th floor walkup before all of the restaurants, and what were called 'yuppies' moved in in those days ;), but I then rented in Chelsea in a rent-controlled building, and became very good friends with about 6 of the elderly tenants. My apartment was rent-stabilized ($925/mo at first). I also befriended the landlord. He was running this and two other buildings, and he showed me the humongous boiler and the cost to trash the old one, and buy and install a new one. He knew if he fell behind, and if he didn't fix it, he could have the city come down on him and the public call him 'slumlord' for freezing elderly people in the winter. Most of the elderly were paying around $375 to $425 (1993 to 1997), and the boiler removal, new purchase and installation for one that size was going to be close to $150K. A large percentage of capital expenditure among other systems in a building this size, including two full-time maintenance men/tenants. I knew of two other couples in their thirties living illegally in their grandmother's apartments who they moved out to the burbs with their Mom & Dad.

I could see both sides of the argument: The owner (don't like landlord) never tried to evict poor, old Ann, a former garment worker and WWII holocaust survivor, or the others. He looked for increases where he could get them to offset the long-term tenants paying so little. He had compassion (which is not Economics), but at the same time, he was looking at losses in this building cutting into his income. How come he has to support others and not be able to take sufficient self-interest to support himself and his family in any manner he sees fit? He knew about the others 'working the system'.

Emotional arguments sway most people in purchases and social issues, and not intellect unfortunately. Elderly people wouldn't be helpless and poster children for rent control in their eighties and nineties, if they had to find more affordable housing in their forties or fifties. The problem gets extended and worsens when the root cause is ignored.

It's complex. Rent control is part of it, but so are laws making it illegal to build nice neighborhoods by forcing urban sprawl, driving up the cost of existing nice ones

  * parking minimums
  * minimum area requirements
  * single-use zoning

Also, local owners have a vest interested in voting to prohibit ANY new housing since it increases the value of their asset.

Ugg. Vested Interest. Not vest interested.

How about people living in bigger apartment they do not need? Or keeping an apartment, they only use for a few months every year?

I lived in Prague when it had rent control. This was very common.

There are other causes as well. But this is not a race, even if rent control contributes only 10% to the problem, it still contributes to the problem.

I think it's clear there are a number of factors for the increase in rents. In NYC, globalization is a factor as an alarming amount of apartments are bought by companies or foreign investors. The apartments then sit empty. I think rent control and rent stabilization have an smaller effect. I say this as a rent stabilized renter. It can't be good if somewhat rent is 4 times less than some else's. I have a friend in a 2200 sf apartment on 5th ave and his rent stabilized lease is $2000 per month. Everyone else in that area is paying $15k per month. It's a common story in NYC. Also there is a huge demand and a huge wealth imbalance here and most everyone can't afford to buy. It's a very forced market.

He is renting 5 homes in Santa Monica? Does he own them or is he subletting?

Instead of having a law against short term renting it should just be one against renting for more than a total number of days in a year, say 90. That allows people who are out of town to rent but it not be a permanent hotel.

SF has a day limit (within certain conditions) but has no way to enforce it. Hence the recent actions to hold the platform accountable & AirBnB suing the city.

Yes, that sounds sensible, but I was surprised to read that the Santa Monica law restricts renting for less than 30 days for a stay for a whole unit. This would mean I couldn't rent my place for a week while I'm on vacation, which seems wrong to me.

Do people do that often with Airbnb? In my experience (I live in LA), almost all whole residence Airbnbs are long-term rental units that have been converted to short-term rental units

I think all of the AirBnBs I have been to (across a few cities in Europe on vacation), it appears that what happened was one half of a couple moved in with the other half, and, with a lease that they couldn't get out of, rented out on AirBnB rather than eating the months of rent for an apartment they wouldn't be living in.

There's some fraction of people who put up a listing and then temporarily stay elsewhere when it gets booked. This tends to happen in cities with plenty of rental inventory, as otherwise they just get booked all the time.

The "frequent business traveler" type is probably more likely to let out their space when gone than the "going on vacation for one week" type too.

I believe this is exactly the kind of thing the Santa Monica law wants to curtail. The argument is that neighbors dislike fly-by visitors who aren't moderated by the homeowner's presence.

Since Airbnb doesn't share data with the city, it'd be very difficult to enforce a number of days limit. Currently the city is just booking short term rentals through the app as proof of wrongdoing.

For what they are trying to accomplish (whether you agree with it or not), the law they enacted will probably work decently well.

If you own the place, why does your city or your neighbor have to have a say in how you manage your property? This is what I don't get. It's your place, you paid for it, it's yours. If they don't like what you are doing, then they should move. This anti-house sharing nonsense is just a ploy by the hotel cartels.

If you don't own the place, and the owner is okay with you subletting, again what's the problem?

This is one of the few things I don't ever get. Regulation on things that are not an issue in the first place.

Why don't I just buy the house next to yours and start a 100 seat restaurant? Maybe have a poolside bar in the backyard?

Anyhow, zoning exists for a reason. Hotels are a business. You can't run any business out of your home. If you do allow any home to become a hotel, you're opening a huge can of worms...

> Anyhow, zoning exists for a reason

Yeah, to keep out black people, poor people and other undesirables who cannot afford single family detached homes:

http://reason.com/archives/2014/04/02/zonings-racist-roots-s...

Also, to ensure that you must have a car to do anything at all. God forbid anyone build something like a corner store within walking distance.

Other reasons here: http://www.nimbyngo.com/

At least in Germany zoning laws are there to prevent businesses to intrude into residential neighborhoods. That means, I get to live in an area that is not "polluted" by noisy trucks driving up and down the street to deliver or collect goods - and so on.

It also means, I am restricted in what I do with my own property in such, that I cannot build a factory inside my home/on my ground for the same reasons.

Imho this is quite a reasonable policy.

Some other zoning laws in German communities might restrict me from planting some trees while forcing me to plant a hedge from a small list of pre defined plant varieties - just to make sure the neighborhood looks homogenous.

These laws do not make the slightest sense imho. Esp. as the allowed plant varieties oftentimes are not local but some stuff that is easy in handling and not that great for nature (no possibilities for birds to nest and such stuff).

I can understand the sentiment, but I think we've gone a bit too far with it in the US.

In Italy, where I lived, there were certainly residential areas, but they were very close to businesses - from our house we could walk 5/10 minutes and be at a coffee shop, supermarket, our kids schools, a tram stop, a bakery, and a few other things.

In the US, you have massive residential-only neighborhoods like this:

https://www.google.com/maps/@44.1036878,-121.3081349,1586a,2...

It's a car or nothing.

Philosophically, you can say they just designed it wrong, but I think you can also make an argument that sometimes it's best to evolve complex things, via markets, rather than attempt a big up front design and then rigidly enforce that.

Please, plenty of high density cities mix commercial and residential - still doesn't mean you can run a hotel or a restaurant in your flat.

Hell, even in suburbia where I (begrudgingly) live right now, there's a grocery store, convenience store, 5 restaurants and 2 bars within a 10 minute walk (and at least 3 liquor stores).

Isn't the illegal racial zoning of the past quite different from commercial/residential/tourist zoning of today? Or are they the same because they both contain the word "zoning" in them?

A lot of disagreement on this but it's basically true. Homeowners want to protect their investment and their comfortable lifestyle so they make sure local government restricts others from diluting what they have. If more houses could be built on the same sized sections, then poorer people would move in because they'd be cheaper. Poor people tend to be more of a disturbance to their neighbors so that would make the incumbents lose what they paid for when they bought their high priced properties in peaceful suburbia. Same goes for hotels which attract transient people that the existing property owners want to keep away.

This happens on many scales. We don't want poor strangers living in our bedroom, on our lawn, in our suburb or in our country. So we have trespass laws, zoning and immigration restrictions to protect us from them.

Please come over to Poland which has almost no zoning laws, and every other house has some sort of business in it - car garages, hair dressers, dentists - everyone runs their business out of their house. Your neighbour wants to open a sawmill in his garage? He sure can! And yes, people do have corner shops in their houses - amazing! Except that they get deliveries at 5am every day, so a 14 tonne truck is destroying your street and waking you up every morning - isn't it great?

Maybe in US it was done to keep black people out. But I seriously doubt it, not everything has to have a racial undertone to it.

There's a limit somewhere, but in the US we've gone well beyond it. The town I live in specifies the minimum number of spots driveways must have (2), and that kind of thing is not abnormal.

What would happen to all those people if they were forced to close their home businesses and rent an office somewhere else? What would happen to traffic?

That sounds fantastic. I'd take it over several square miles of asphalt hellscape, which is your typical American residential neighborhood.

So, note I don't take an opinion on either side, but one example of why it is a problem comes from some of my neighbors. They rented out their place on AirBnB. The people who rented it held a large party. Another neighbor went over to knock on their door and ask them to turn down the music. The renter took out a shovel and knocked the neighbor into a coma. Then the renter fled.

This problem would be unlikely to occur from the owner of the house taking these actions, given the liability and inability to flee as easily.

It's a matter of zoning. If an area is designated as residential, then the city can stop you from building a hotel there. From there, it's at least a little reasonable to consider that a house used as a rental unit with new, paying guests every night being a hotel by all but name.

> why does your city or your neighbor have to have a say in how you manage your property

zoning laws

Because there's usually agreements between neighbors about expected behaviour in the area. Things like "don't start yelling at 3 AM in the backyard", "Don't throw too many parties late at night", etc.

Of course what you do inside your house is your own thing, but when it comes to extra traffic/noise/trash, having the house be a bunch of short term people makes it much harder for social pressure to work.

Because we're living in a society, which means we trade some of our individual determination for things that society as a whole deems worthwhile. People are free to agree or disagree with individual policies, and make use of various avenues for making their opinions known, but it's pretty silly to feign ignorance of why things like property ownership are not completely unregulated. The concept of property "ownership" only exists at all because of the strong law-abiding society we are fortunate enough to live in.

> The concept of property "ownership" only exists at all because of the strong law-abiding society we are fortunate enough to live in.

That's the core point. There's no meaning to property ownership without a society that agrees on such idea and enforces it. It's not, and it never was, "I can do whatever because it's mine".

I don't know where this idea of absolute ownership right comes from. You don't have and never had that right, unless you can enforce it with deadly force on everyone who disagrees. There's no heavenly light that proclaims a person can have absolute ownership over stuff and others need to respect that.

Rights only exist in so much as they are recognized and enforced. Society is in a big part a mutual agreement to recognize a set of rights and laws, and a guarantee that others will enforce them if any member of society decides to forget about the rules. It outsources a lot of things you'd otherwise have to kill (or rather, get killed) over.

This same wording could be used against that argument:

If you (partially) own the (community), why does your neighbor have to have (more of) a say in how the community is managed?

It's your (community), you paid to live there, it's yours. If they don't like what you are doing, then they should move.

See, we expand this beyond the individual to a neighborhood wherein rules and boundaries can be set because this collective group that exists beyond the individual can be affected.

People should be held responsible for their actions, right? And you don't trust the individual doing the action's opinion on who they think is actually being affected, right?

This follows the same logic as having boisterous parties with loud music all night or shooting a pornographic movie on my front porch. Although, to be fair, in support of your argument, this was also the same logic which used to forbid black people from moving next door.

How would it affect your quality of life if I started processing hazardous waste out in the open on the property next to you?

That is why your neighbour has a say: Because what you do on your property affects those around you.

Yes, I chose an extreme example, on purpose to illustrate the point: there is some level above which almost all of us will agree that what you do on your property is a public concern.

It is then down to a matter of degrees: At which point does what your neighbour do cause sufficient nuisance to give you a say in whether or not they should be allowed to continue doing it.

The notion that those who don't like what you do on your property should move is just incredibly selfish - it implies that you put your rights above theirs, because without regulation what you do on your property can very well make it economically infeasible for your neighbours to choose to move even if they wanted to.

> Yes, I chose an extreme example, on purpose to illustrate the point: there is some level above which almost all of us will agree that what you do on your property is a public concern.

This is the crux of the question. I think it's very arguable that we've swung too far away from letting people do what they want with their property in the US, though.

Because what you do affects your neighbors.

Why should I have to move if you decide to no longer use your bathroom, and instead build a make-shift outhouse on your property line by my home's entrance?

Or you decide to rent to 4 families in a 1 bedroom/1 bathroom apartment?

Also, watch what happens to "your" property when you stop paying property taxes for a number of years.

There is also the concept of the "commons", which we share.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons

If you were advocating for separate planets, then yes, I would agree.

But we all know it goes far beyond that. Associations etc limit what color you can paint your front door! This principle gets its ugly tentacles deep. And every little rule tramples on the fundamental rule, Private Ownership. Freedom to do as we please with our persons and our effects. The death of 1000 cuts.

What are airbnb hosts doing that affects their neighbors negatively? I'm genuinely curious.

Because neighbors are scared shitless of their property values decreasing, and our society legitimizes this fear.

As a Santa Monica resident, I would love that.

When I got married my (large, greek) family visited for 2 weeks. I lived in an apartment at the time, and it was wonderful that could all rent a large house to stay in. Even today that would be useful for when groups visit over the holidays & what not, but it's imply not an option.

One concern residents have is they don't want to suddenly find there's a "party house" in the neighborhood. In their defense, this was happening. (Google [House of Rock LLC] if you're curious.) However banning AirBnB isn't the right way to address that, nor does it really solve that problem.

Unfortunately, I don't ever see the law changing. There's two unlikely segments coming together to support the law:

1) The hotels. An "normal" hotel here charges ~$400/night. High end easily goes for over $600/night. And don't even ask about rates in peak season.

2) The anti-development crowd. There's a very vocal segment that wants no new development & low, affordable rents. (If you're thinking "uh, supply & demand", that gets dismissed in discussions as a Republican trick.) They also tend to not like people new to the city. They saw AirBnB taking the limited rental stock off the market (which was happening). OP's proposal would address that, but at this point, you're not going to change this group's mindset.

Regardless of whether the law is justified or not, it should be very simple for Airbnb to force compliance to these laws. In other words, it should be simple for Airbnb to see a person having multiple properties within this district/city and not allow it if it's against the law, or limit the number of days a person can rent a properly out. However, Airbnb doesn't seem to do this.

Airbnb is a great platform, which I've used both domestically (in USA) and internationally, and I really appreciate what it offers. What I don't understand is the flaunting of laws by saying it's not their problem, that they shouldn't police their users and that their users are responsible for what they do. I can understand the argument, but it's not difficult to handle these cases and Airbnb should really do more (arguably their due diligence) to handle them.

At first, I think this would be just as complicated to enforce as US municipality taxes.

There are several taxes to be levied within a given state, with the rates changing based on county/city borders (see New York), regional cooperatives that span multiple towns but not the entire county (see Illinois), multiple taxing districts within a town (see Connecticut).

That doesn't even get into the fact of taxes that are levied just for your industry (see the extra taxes on your car rental bill for picking up at the airport, or Arizona's former shared rental facility recovery fee for recouping the cost of building a new rental car facility).

This was Amazon's argument against collecting state sales tax.

But taking on the opposite view for a second, and siding with you...

While it's complicated, all the incumbents in the hotel, rental car, and taxi industry that we're trying to displace for "not being agile enough", have spent the necessary man-hours to build the necessary components into their system to identify a taxable situation and properly deduct and remit taxes. They've hired own in-house staff and relied on external accounting firms to do their due diligence of regulatory matters (even to the extent of arguing against particular new taxes or tax increases).

Hertz, Hilton, and Greyhound all operate within these "heavily taxed" confines (in terms of effort, not absolute dollars), and communities/states have gotten used to their compliance, which in turn funds the various operating coffers of a municipality/region/state.

So yeah, why not expect the same from Airbnb?

Why can't we compromise a bit here? I don't think many people have issues with folks renting out their place for a few weeks during the year, but buying property and using it to attract vacationers to a residential area is very different. It can change the city by causing businesses to cater towards more tourists and to reduce available housing stock.

What if people could only rent out their primary residence for no more than half the year unless the property is exempt as a vacation home? Perhaps this could be a good compromise for cities to encourage Airbnb while effectively banning the practice of buying homes exclusively for Airbnbers.

It might still profitable to rent the house for the busy season and let it sit vacant the other half of the year. A friend who owns three VRBOs in Santa Cruz basically does that. (he's a decent guy but an opportunistic and terrible landlord)

Perhaps a lower limit then. No more than 10 weeks per year maybe. Or 8.

It is possible to think through the law and write it well to avoid that sort of situation. In this case, a clause stating that 1) a primary residence can only be rented out x days a year while the owner is not present, but may be rented an additional x days a year with the owner present 2) A secondary or vacation home can only be rented out x days a year with a minimum of x days between rentals, and the owners must be present at least x days out of year. 3) A non-primary or secondary home may only be leased out x days of the year, with longer x days in between. 4) A unit that would otherwise be a unit for longer habitation can only be rented out a smaller x times a year, and must be offered for long-term renting at competitive prices in between times. 5) All other residences being rented out must be registered and liscenced as a resort or a hotel and uphold the regulations of those. 6. All must register their rentings with the city and obtain the appropriate permits (simple stuff for single home owners looking to supplement income, of course).

How would the city practically enforce such a specific limit?

Force AirBnB to disclose data or else they'll be banned, and its users prosecuted with extreme prejudice?

SM could have a good start here. Also, if it would somehow force AirBnB to disclose the data, it would be a good precedent and all other cities could benefit as well.

Of course it ain't gonna happen, because it's not good for AirBnB business.

> Force AirBnB to disclose data or else they'll be banned

Banned from what?

From doing business in the area.

They already don't do that, though.

You'd need to force everyone to do & then the city would still have to consolidate all the data. Otherwise I could rent my home half the year on AirBnB & the other half on VRBO.

Santa Monica is also a big travel destination. I could probably rent my home out on AirBnB for the 3 summer months & cover my mortgage for the year. So arguably, it could still see a reduction in inventory.

Curiously, I grew up in NJ, where 40% [0] or more of certain shore towns are rented out at least part of the year. We vacation there and yet it doesn't seem to negatively effect the towns. There is mix of full time residents, part time residents, and 100% rentals, and it's the way it's been for decades. Yet Ocean City, Wildwood, etc are flourishing.

Considering these towns have been so rental focused for decades before Air BnB was a thing, it feels to me like the model works well for towns that embrace it. Am I wrong?

[0] http://www.deptofnumbers.com/rent/new-jersey/ocean-city/

Is 1,700 units at all meaningful for Santa Monica housing prices? Is it worth the city expending all these resources to stop what seems like a blip on the radar?

Population is 90k, average household size is 1.8. Suggesting that it represents ~3.5% of the housing in the city.

Market rate for a (very) modest 1 bed is 2k/mo. 2bed is 3k/mo.

I wouldn't call it a blip on a radar.

There are 50912 housing units in Santa Monica, 36657 of which are rental units [https://www.smgov.net/Departments/HED/eddContent.aspx?id=235...]. So 1700 is (generously) 4.6%. Not nothing, but how much really? It's complicated but extrapolating from a San Francisco analysis [http://www.sfhac.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Ted-Egan-Pre...] we might expect that 4.6% increase in housing supply would result in a 5.8% decrease in prices. For comparison, Santa Monica has seen about a 25% increase in rental prices this year [http://www.trulia.com/real_estate/Santa_Monica-California/].

Maybe somebody else will actually repeat the Egan analysis with Santa Monica-specific regressions and so forth. Perhaps the model itself could be improved.

Also, if there are so many people willing to pay so much to spend a night in Santa Monica, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing to have both long-term and short-term housing?

But it doesn't really matter does it? AirBnB is a political issue in all these places and the rabble don't care about your "data" or "logic." They are fed up with high prices and arrogant "disruptive" tech bros and they are ready to take action!

I stand corrected, thanks for the info! That's an interesting supply/price analysis. Airbnb really is moving the needle.

Well hotels are the short term solution.

Good numeric analysis, but a couple things don't sit well with me. First, 5% is a significant price difference when you're sinking up to half your income into housing (http://la.curbed.com/2015/12/10/9892338/los-angeles-rent-bur...), especially at the price levels we are talking about for Santa Monica rentals.

Second, AirBnB is more than a political issue and referring to people as "rabble" just because they disapprove of illegal rentals is pretty arrogant. I live in Santa Monica, work in tech, and absolutely do not want any of my neighbors renting their apartments on AirBnB. One of my neighbors did so for a while last year and the result was the entire complex repeatedly having to deal with unruly visitors being overly loud at night and trashing the common areas.

If you want to make money on rentals, buy a property that allows you to do that, and where everyone around you knows that's going to happen and can plan accordingly. If you don't want to do that, then you don't get the right to abuse your apartment complex or neighborhood just because you want to make some money. Treating AirBnB rentals like they have zero impact on anyone but the renter and owner is disingenuous and shows a certain level of selfishness with respect to the actual complexities of the situation.

My neighbor was pretty noisy when he first moved in. I had to ask him several times to quiet down and eventually after the landlady heard complaints from several others, he did. This isn't at all an AirBnB-specific issue.

I admit 5% isn't nothing. But if your problem is that rents are rising 25% pa in your town, a one-time decrease of 5% isn't much of a solution.

You're 25% figure is highly questionable. As you surely noticed when you got that number from Trulia, average rent in SM actually decreased from $4800 to $4600 between July 2015 and January 2016. You would need to see numbers going back more than 12 months to come up with a meaningful estimate.

Your 5% figure is based on a model purpose-built for San Francisco. In particular the number for elasticity of demand is likely wrong for Santa Monica. Considering how sensitive the model is to this parameter, it seems pretty iffy to present 5% as a meaningful estimate of anything.

So it took several times to get a neighbor to quiet down, then he stayed quiet.

Now imagine getting a new neighbor every week. Once he quiets down, there's a new one. That's living next to an AirBnB.

The same person is responsible every week. Take it up with the landlord. Before I was in an apartment, I owned a condo, and the bylaws prohibited short term rentals and even most long term rentals. No new laws are needed to deal with these old problems.

online rental platforms such as Airbnb could also be fined if they refuse to turn over addresses of rentals that failed to register.

This is the part where it is going to get funny, and which will pretty much help shaping the future.

So, they are going to fine an online rental platform conveniently located in Argentina that settles all payments in bitcoin?

As you can imagine, it will not make Airbnb any more popular if they "turn over" their users. In a version 2.0 iteration of the concept, the platform will just shut its ears for any of that. Of course, then they will be attacked through the payment method, but that is where bitcoin kicks in.

In order to make online things comply, you need to strangle their cash inflow. However, if you do not kill it, you will only make it stronger. Bitcoin is really the elephant in the room. Goverments are making lots of trade expensive or impossible unless they are setted in bitcoin. That is pushing the value of bitcoin through the roof.

Hence, the final shape of the system, adjusting its shape attack after attack, until it finally has become unassailable.

Except that property rental always have a final thing to attack: Ownership of the property.

There are certainly businesses that may become hard to force to comply with laws due to Bitcoin, but property rentals are far down the list, given that there are few things that are harder to move out of "troublesome" jurisdictions.

Rent control can easily be evaded by renting property through AirBNB.

Perhaps that is why rent controlled cities like Santa Monica are aggressively shutting down this loophole.

Jared can finally have his apartment back!

Wrong city, Santa Monica is in LA.

It's a bit of a tortured analogy anyways, since Jared was an Airbnb host, and in this case, the guy is fleeing California.

And that whole story makes me wonder how is that Aribnb is not overtaken by squatters in CA yet.

Ah, it is still so long until the next season. http://imgur.com/gVsJood

> As for Shatford, he’s moving to Denver this week, after 13 years of living in Santa Monica. He said he hopes people are more tolerant there.

Skeptical.

Um, tolerant of what? Is he planning to do short term rentals in Denver? If so, has he not looked up their regulations? Because it seems like Denver passed laws that would highly restrict what he was doing in Santa Monica: http://www.denverpost.com/2016/06/13/denver-city-council-con...

(Short term rentals are allowed in primary residences, but not for vacation homes)

He doesn't care about the law. He didn't care about it in Santa Monica. And he's completely unrepentant in that case. Naturally he's moving on to the next town to see if he can get away with it there.

Yeah we need snuff out the scourge of voluntary market transactions.

These transactions have affected parties that are not voluntary participants, such as the neighbours. That is the problem.

If tenants are disturbing neighbours the owner should be held liable, whether the tenant is a short term renter or a long term renter. Airbnb has an effective mechanism to ensure good guest behavior: ratings. There is no justification for discriminating against all short term renters to prevent neighbours from being disturbed.

The affected parties city governments are pandering to are those looking to rent long-term, and they have no legal or moral claim to renting someone else's asset, let alone dictating the rate at which it is rented out.

But neighbors don't get to rate the renters of the airbnb next door, so who will give them a negative rating? The business owner who does not reside there and is hoping for no repeat customers?

If the city can create a law punishing landlords who rent short term, they can create a law punishing landlords whose tenants disturb neighbours. Once the incentive is there, landlords using Airbnb will be sure to monitor guest behavior toward the commons/neighbours, and report misbehaviour in the ratings they give out.

But we already have a framework of laws governing the business of offering short term rentals. Why is creating and enforcing this new framework better than asking people who want to run hotels to just follow the existing rules? It doesn't sound simpler.

The laws violate human rights. People should not have their right to contract denied. Actions that infringe upon the rights of others, like damaging the common area of an apartment building, or creating noise pollution, can be justifiably prohibited, but not actions that are non-infringing and only deemed to be correlated with the infringing action.

In other words, prohibiting short term rentals is a form of repression.

You're completely wrong on every count. Your argument weirdly proposes a totally anti-democracy, pro-mercantilst point of view where citizens have no right to petition government for zoning laws that clearly disallow, for everyone, operating certain types of business in those zone. Short term rental is widely regarded as operating a hotel or b&b.

Claiming I'm wrong doesn't make it so. Your definition of democratic is the majority being able to violate the minority's rights. Your definition of mercantilism is also totally wrong.

>Short term rental is widely regarded as operating a hotel or b&b.

You say that as if it justifies repressing it. As if certain categories of voluntary transactions can justifiably be repressed.

I'm not sympathetic to the guy but he will likely find no friendlier clime in Denver than Santa Monica. Denver metro real-estate is crazy.

Is there an inner city whose metro area real estate isn't considered crazy against local suburbs?

Detroit?

>Shen, the prosecutor, said city officials received a complaint from someone who had rented one of Shatford’s properties. The woman was surprised to learn that she was renting a unit that was illegal and was uncomfortable with the situation, Shen said

Seems pretty ratty to report on something so victimless, especially after participating.

It's not victimless. Your neighbors are the victims if you illegally rent out your apartment/house on Airbnb. There are good reasons why zoning laws and rental contracts forbid these things.

Victims of what?

Victims of the type of abuses and zoning code violations that lead to Airbnb introducing a product feature to try to deal with the bad PR.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a45400/airbnb-anim...

How can someone be a victim of a zoning code violation? That's like being victimized by a school uniform violation.

Increase in noise, especially at odd hours. People on vacation keep wildly different hours than most folks who work 9 to 5. So you have the group who is on vacation basically in a "hotel room" sharing a wall with you on a random Tuesday night and you have to get up in the morning.

Additionally, "guests" have a tendency to do things like leave doors open or let people in they don't know to apartment buildings. And, unlike hotels, there's no one watching over the front door or security systems to make up for the increase in non-residents in most apartment buildings.

There's also the issue that "guests" have a higher tendency to break things. They're on vacation, they don't live there, they don't care is the attitude of a small percentage. If an apartment is rented out on Airbnb, sooner or later you're going to get some of them. And if they break the building's front door or trash the lobby... sorry, but Airbnb's insurance policy doesn't cover that. It only covers things owned by the Airbnb user, not common areas of an apartment building.

So, no thank you, I'd prefer that my apartment building was a proper apartment building where residents live here. As opposed to half apartment building, half unlicensed and unregulated pseudo hotel/hostel.

>There's also the issue that "guests" have a higher tendency to break things.

So discriminate against guests based on statistics related to members of their group?

That sounds familiar......

If there is a problem behavior, that behavior should be punished. Entire classes of people shouldn't have their economic rights limited based on a blanket characterisation.

Corporation's customer is not a protected class.

So because we haven't created a law designating some group, defined by the consensual behavior they have in common, a protected class, it's morally okay to discriminate against them? Also, you mention "corporation's customers", so am I correct to assume that you ascribe to a moral system that sees anything that is associated with corporations as immoral and fair game for mistreatment and discrimination?

I said "corporation's customers" because AirBNB is a corporation, don't read between the lines too hard.

Protected classes are not arbitrary, in most cases they are groups of people who are not self-selected. You can't easily change your age or skin color, but it is trival to use booking.com instead of airbnb.

Likening your right to party 0300 in an airbnb rental flat to civil rights movement is disingenuous.

You didn't answer my question. If you believed your ideology was morally right, you would not shy away from directly answering questions about its values.

Here's the question again:

So because we haven't created a law designating some group, defined by the consensual behavior they have in common, a protected class, it's morally okay to discriminate against them?

I have to gently remind that am not a subordinate to you of any kind and don't have to keep up with your agenda. That said I'm entirely fine with corporations, their customers and free markets.

It is not illegal to discriminate against a group not protected legally, and often even a moral thing to do. I discriminate against assholes all the time by not giving an equal weight to their opinion.

It is is not illegal to discriminate against them, but it is immoral. Renting someone else's property is not immoral. Threatening to rob (fine) or imprison someone for engaging in any kind of consensual transaction, including short term rental, is immoral.

The reason guests is in quotes is because it's a silly term used by people in the "sharing" economy... sharing being another misnomer. They're not a guest, they're a customer of a (generally) illegally sold service... note the fact that it is "sold" not "shared". The same way Airbnb disingenuously airs ads in NYC about families "sharing" a room in their apartment and cooking meals for "guests" occasionally as a way to make ends meet when, in actually, most of Airbnb's revenue in NYC is made from illegal whole apartment rentals.

Entire classes of people who illegally operate unlicensed hotels and put additional upward pressure on rental prices in the surrounding market in addition to inconveniencing and affecting the safety and quality of life of neighbors should absolutely have "their economic rights" limited.

The fact that the service is illegal is a human rights violation. Liberal ideology is authoritarian and human rights violating.

It's also against the terms of their lease... you know the thing they signed with the person who actually owns said property.

In your odd world view... the renter should be allowed to do whatever they'd like? Setup a chem lab. Start an auto repair business. Install a few factory machines and start manufacturing widgets in their third floor walkup.

It's odd that you think the only people renting places out on Airbnb are non-owner lease holders.

Anti-short-term-rental laws apply to owners who rent their property out short term as well. I'm only referring to this subset of short term rentals.

> There are good reasons why zoning laws and rental contracts forbid these things.

Could you please elaborate on those good reasons or mention an example or two?

Yes. The big ones are noise, littering, damage to property/common areas, parking reduction, increased housing costs for residents, and decreased community benefits (ex. it's impossible to get to know your neighbors and help each other out if your neighbors are different every week).

Short term rentals are often (though obviously not always) filled by visitors who want to party and have fun in the city with little regard for neighbors and care for property, as opposed to residents who want to have a nice, comfortable place to live. This results in an overall decreased quality of life for your neighbors if you start randomly renting out to strangers.

See other responses in this thread for more more as well.

How? If I rent to polite, responsible people, what's the problem? If I don't, and raucus behavior ensues, then follow the procedures in place for reporting disruptive behavior.

It's victimless in the same sense as tax evasion is victimless.

Come to think about it, the analogy is quite apt: someone hires a plumber to fix his leaking pipe, gets an invoice and sees no tax. He then asks the plumber to give him a correct invoice with tax because he doesn't want to be complicit in tax evasion. And you're now accusing him of ratting on the plumber who just wanted to save some money.

Help out your local plumber. Pay in cash.

edit: Seriously? These guys are elbow-deep in shit on a regular basis. Washington doesn't need to wet it's beak on that.

Apparently people have no idea how the handyman economy works.

We all pay our taxes here. Taxes are necessary for having the infrastructure that we have so that we can live in a civil society.

So it's victimless in the sense that dogmatic authoritarian "liberals" don't like it.

Well, the long-term effect will be that you will only be able to get a decent plumber on an anonymous online platform, at which you will have to escrow a sizable security deposit in bitcoin first. Making that kind of threats to any of the plumbers will just lead to the customer losing his security deposit. Online platforms are several orders of magnitude more efficient at enforcing anything than governments are. So, there you are.

That's a weak argument why bitcoins and anonymous trade are a bad idea.

(A stronger one will be raised after the first nuclear or bacteriological incident traced back to anonymous black-market purchases.)

> Making that kind of threats to any of the plumbers

Threats? Refusing to be complicit in a crime is a threat now? I hope society never goes that bonkers.

It's interesting as a thought experiment, but it assumes that all decent plumbers would be conducting their business in a Chinese-owned Crytocurrency (Bitcoin), via a website registered in Libya (ly) and hosted by the Russian mafia, rather than just coming clean and paying their damn taxes.

I have a creeping suspicion that you might be a sociopath. (edit: not meant as an insult. We tend to project our morals and biases onto other people, and the situation you're describing hinges on all plumbers and all clients being sociopaths interested only in their own benefit.)

Tax evasion seems to be like speeding - so many drivers do it, and rationalize away the fact that it kills people, that you're the "weird one" if you try to abide by the traffic rules.

And before someone starts telling me how traffic rules make no sense (a common rationalization), let me remind everyone that rules are there to be followed even if one disagrees with them and works towards their change, and moreover, in traffic law, just like in many other aspects of society, it's more important to have everyone follow the same set of rules than for those rules to make sense.

All social progress the last 70 years have been partially or completely based on people violating laws. Actually that is probably the case for everything progress since since 1776, the us revolution wasn't exactly legal.

Or are you prepared to say that the founding fathers, the people who ran the underground slave road, the people who got thrown in jail for womens right to vote, the people who did sit ins at white only diners, etc were wrong?

There's violating, and there's violating. Tax evasion, speeding, or ignoring vehicle insurance regulations isn't going to bring great social progress. What was done in cases you brought up can be called civil courage. What we're talking about here is nothing more than selfish people breaking laws for selfish reasons.

If law was meant to be broken on a whim, it wouldn't be law and we wouldn't call ourselves a society.

>something so victimless

victims are the poor people who are forced to moved even further out of the city, shutting them out of economic opportunities.

No, they're victims of the NIMBY neighbors as much as anyone. Who do you think is first in line to wring their hands if someone suggests building a duplex or a few apartments, that are slightly more affordable in an area like Santa Barbara? The same people complaining about AirBnB.

Look at how NIMBY's react to the construction of some apartments near a community college here in Bend:

http://m.ktvz.com/news/Westside-neighbors-hope-to-stop-COCC-...

No being able to afford something owned by someone else is no crime.

No, it's an effect.

It's not victimization. He had no right to rent property at a lower price than the owner can get from short term renters.

>>Seems pretty ratty to report on something so victimless, especially after participating.

I could say most white collar crime is victimless too. Should we just let all the stock brokers who embezzle money go since the only people they harm are billion dollar companies who can afford the losses?

Laws are in place for a reason. The city had a problem and is trying to curtail certain behavior. This is always the case - they find someone and make an example out of them and then hopefully it acts as a deterrent for other people thinking of doing the same thing.

Time will only tell if it's truly effective though.

> I could say most white collar crime is victimless too. Should we just let all the stock brokers who embezzle money go since the only people they harm are billion dollar companies who can afford the losses?

Except those billion dollar companies will keep forwarding their losses until it hits some poor schmucks at the lowest end of the chain. Victimless crimes seem to be less about "lack of victims" and more about distributing and diluting the harm until a lot of unrelated people get hurt a little bit each. The problem is that humans are not like atoms hit by photons, when you need an individual "harm" packet to exceed some threshold for it to matter. They're more like pressure in tank - every little bit of distributed harm adds up.

Embezzlement is not victimless.. Renting your property to a short term renter is victimless. So is selling illicit drugs to a consenting adult. You need to learn what distinguishes a victimless crime from victimful crime, because your example suggests you don't understand.

I can't seem to muster the ability to care. I guess this is supposed to seem like a win?

Diligently prosecuting serial renters while people who caused worldwide economic collapse commit economic crimes of thousands of degrees beyond this go free makes it difficult to muster empathy.

I'm jaded. Apologies.

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