What if it's not profitable to do that on its own? The "free market takes care of everything" argument is an idealistic position, not something based in reality.
We don't expect anyone who meets a homeless person to offer them a place on their couch. That would be unfair. And an additional incentive to avoid homeless people. We have (well, not everywhere but at least we aim for) a systemic solution. There are homeless shelters for example, sometimes run as charities, sometimes tax-supported (ie. everyone is required to chip in).
It's weird when we try to offload these problems on the first person who touches them.
Why do I have to bake a cake for a gay wedding if I do such for straight weddings? Because the people who want that requirement have won the level of support needed to have legal support.
Because they're massive rent extractors.
Rent extractors should subsidize most things.
... which means that the capital associated with "people living somewhere" is poorly allocated, and would be more profitable utilized as a nice hotel space. Capital utilization isn't just about the raw duty cycle of someone using that capital. You don't markedly improve your organization's capital utilization by running SETI@Home on idle computers, because SETI@Home is a worthless waste of cycles of little or no benefit to you or society at large.
> Uber cars can operate at much lower hours and mileage
Uber's more of the damage-cartels case, admittedly.
Well, the best utilization is the one with the highest utility. In an efficient market that's the same as the most profitable, by definition. The usual caveats apply: no two individuals can ever agree how to measure utility, a free market won't be efficient unless there are no barriers to entry (city zoning may be a barrier to entry), transaction costs are low (the cost of moving from one apartment to another in the rental market is high), and property rights exist and are enforced (including both the obvious property rights and the ones that would apply to all the externalities like neighborhood character but don't exist and won't be enforced for a variety of good reasons)
So yes, caveats. Obviously. There's a moral character to some of these things. One can argue that people living in houses in a big city is morally superior to people vacationing in those houses. (Is that a thing you'd like to argue? Please do explain why, if it is.)
But to the point before: is AirBnB a rent extractor? Pointing out that caveat apply to the measuring of capital utilization in the abstract is not a strong argument in and of itself. Do they apply here? If they apply, would you care to quantify the impact in dollar figures for a typical city? (I recognize this can be hard for moral injuries, but it's not always clear when the injury ceases to be financial and becomes moral.) And even if these caveats apply, how do they apply to making the case that AirBnB actually extracts economic rents? The main thing it seems to be doing is lowering transaction costs associated with doing a short-term rental, and they do have competitors (HomeAway, Wimdu, Tansler, FlipKey, just plain Craigslist, etc, not to mention that the homeowners face competition from substitutes in the form of hotels) so it's not quite obvious that they're the ones collecting on this economic rent.
If you have more customers trying to make reservations than tables to seat them, it is economically rational to seat the customers most likely to buy your more expensive items. We decided (correctly, IMO) that it is more important for society to fight entrenched racism than to enable business owners to make that particular locally-rational economic decision.
Why? Servers claim that black customers - on average - tip less.
I don't know how prevalent this belief on the part of servers is. And I don't know how much of a numerically accurate basis in reality it has.
But, as a thought experiment, imagine for a moment that there exists an identifiable group [black people, star trek fans, old people, dentists, ...] that are likely to lead a server to go home with less money at the end of the night.
There can be a really fine line between statistics/machine learning and "bias"/"racism".
Where it gets even more complicated is that there might be variables which are not expressed as "is the customer black" which ultimately predict/are highly correlated with the question "is the customer black" - but are also predictive of the question "is the customer profitable".
There's no line. Learning and bias are the same thing.
And that's the way we treated this in the 1960s. The government didn't ask Woolworth whether they had legitimate economic reason to refuse to seat those black college students, or whether their objection was based on them being college students, or because they only ordered coffee and not a meal, or anything else. As long as the effect of your policy was that you were discriminating on race, it became illegal. It doesn't matter whether you had valid reasoning based on race and economic status being correlated, or you were a card-carrying Klansman. A good-faith policy that discriminated on race is still illegal.
It seemed to work pretty well, and I don't think many of us regret the loss of ability of restaurateurs to make these particular economic decisions. The fact that we can now offload these decisions to algorithms (which aren't likely to be "racist" in the conventional sense) instead of humans shouldn't change things.
It's probably worth pointing out that the restaurateurs didn't have the ability to make those decisions; that was the point of the Jim Crow legal regime. Left to themselves, they kept wanting to serve blacks.
Many accommodations, if not federally mandated, simply wouldn't happen. For example, handicapped parking spots. People who use those spots are technically capable of using other parking locations as well, and the current handicapped parking spots are usually located in prime areas.
Maybe the government can offer a tax return bonus to cover it. And pump more money into fully general cures for all disabilities. I'm not against making disabled peoples' lives better, but focusing entirely on the supplier side is a mistake.
I find this a disingenuous interpretation of how certain disabilities work and how "curable" they may be. Certain degenerative conditions are hardly understood, or the treatment requires time and reasonable accommodations from society such as the need for ramps and wheelchair accessibility. I do not know a way for non-supply-side costs to factor in "being able to use a wheelchair and still function in society".
The cure for a lack of legs is typically prosthetics with extensive therapy. Incredibly expensive and labor intensive.
The cure for amputated legs while being poor is a wheelchair; not as easily managed without additional space when parked, and if there are no ramps up to your building, your business is effectively inaccessible.
But ramps cost extra money. So do wheelchair accessible curbs. You need more space in the isles, specialized bathroom stalls, special door handles, support for someone closer to the floor at your counters... Lots of things we take for granted today, but which didn't exist for many years before the ADA.
I'm kind of big on cyborg technology and other futurist ideas (like brain emulations). Varying degrees are expensive and not even available right now, but a large part of that is a serious lack of funding which in turn cuts business opportunities. (I would bet if society focused more efforts and money on general human augmentation instead of just helping the disabled, the disabled would come along for the ride since the non-disabled market is so much greater. As I touched on in another comment, the second-order effects often provide more value for these niche markets than targeting the niche markets directly.) While we transition to better tech that even the poor can afford we can still consider forced money bleeding, but I'd like to consider demand side solutions too.
The way we do currently is a social contract (enforced in law) that mandates exactly the point that you should serve everyone and are required to make accommodations for e.g disabled people.
Often the reason the regulations are there in the first place is because otherwise the need wouldn't be met.
That is the reality around you now