So if I have to stay in NYC for 3 weeks, I am screwed.
Thanks Cuomo, you just made me have to cough up double the price for a shitty hotel.
Thanks Cuomo, you just made me have to cough up double the price for a shitty hotel.
Some people prefer AirBnB so they can feel like they live in the cities they're visiting, this certainly sucks for them.
This didn't used to be the case, so you can thank Airbnb in part for finding a reasonably priced hotel room.
But hotels in NYC are insanely expensive. Please tell me where I can find a hotel for <$60 a night that is not infested with bedbugs/rats/cockroaches/smoke.
Further: two very common kinds of contract we're talking about are with the state itself.
The first and most obvious is zoning, wherein the state promises to reserve some piece of land for a specific use, and private entities purchase that land with the expectation that it will only be used that way. It's for this reason that you can't build a hotel anywhere you want.
The second implied contract we have with the state are the codes and regulations governing residences. Long before Airbnb, residency codes had tenancy requirements.
Finally, the law itself has something to say about people who enter into contracts in bad faith, deliberately misrepresenting their intentions or circumstances in order to obtain concessions: we tend to call that "fraud".
Those rentals were already illegal under state law. You are aware of this fact, yes?
If it is too expensive you have the option of staying somewhere outside of Manhattan. If not you have to just pay the price of visiting an expensive city and not put the burden on the residents.
Would you have the same argument if it were just friends inviting friends over every week? If not, why does the money make it different?
Anecdotally, my building has had multiple apartments used as "airbnb hotels" over the couple of years that I've lived there, and it's been a fairly consistent source of annoyance. People coming in extremely late at night and not having a clue how to unlock the apartment while causing tons of noise, knocking on my door for assistance, etc.
I am 100% for this regulation - NYC is already an extremely expensive place to live, people renting or buying apartments with the purpose of listing them on airbnb only makes it worse.
These are all symptoms that proliferate in dense cities and college towns even without AirBnB. I live in the downtown of a small city, and can't escape late night noise either. But you don't think there's a technological solution to the problem that AirBnB passively enables this?
What if, say, the city had an app that allowed you to report incidents, and then they could investigate and penalize based on reports of bad actors (as current law enforcement works, minus the app) rather than throw out the baby with the bathwater?
There's a difference between that and somebody in the hallway in front of my apartment door for 30 minutes loudly carrying a conversation while someone tried to walk them through opening the door at 3am. Or, worse, someone knocking on my door late at night asking to crawl in through my fire escape because they locked themselves out, and having no idea who the super is.
The building owner of my apartment actually just swapped keys for the door of the apartment building with key fobs to cut down on people making copies and using them to Airbnb their apartment, because she doesn't want people renting their apartments.
It isn't throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Why should taxpayer dollars be spent investigating many cases of these when it is already illegal to advertise illegal rentals. It is much more effective to stop the advertising and payment scheme for these illegal rentals first.
AirBnB can prevent the throwing the baby out with the bathwater if they simply restricted the amount of time and places that can be rented out. But they know they are making a large amount of money from professional illegal hoteliers with many listings that are exclusively used for rentals. They are the ones that got greedy and got the heavy handed response.
Residents get to decide on these matters through elections. Visitors do not get a say.
Do you think that is unreasonable?
NYC is tough and expensive in many ways. Seems like they are trying to tackle affordable housing and consequently may also need to look at affordable hotel stays. I remember when I used to do field work in NYC, often for days at a time, and I would drive every day from Philadelphia, my home at the time. Awake at 4am and out the door to avoid getting stuck in traffic and then back down to Philadelphia at 7pm.