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Comment by specialp | Hacker News Reader

Well that is unfortunate. The people of NYC should not have to live with many places in their own buildings operating as illegal hotels. Why should New Yorkers have to tolerate illegal hotels with arbitrary guests in such a densely packed city? The residents do not owe people visiting a cheap place to stay. Would you like to have someone different staying in the place literally separated by a wall next to you every day or week?

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.

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> Why should New Yorkers have to tolerate illegal hotels with arbitrary guests in such a densely packed city?

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?

I think there's a difference - the presence of a permanent resident discourages a lot of the bad behavior people complain about, and provides for a very clear path to accountability if something does happen.

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.

> People coming in extremely late at night [...] while causing tons of noise

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?

Of course people are always going to be loud, the apartment downstairs is going to throw parties that last late late into the night. Totally cool with that.

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.

There is a difference from general noise of a city and having transient people coming in every few days. People that are on vacation might be up later, making noise later or worse there could be criminals coming in. Sure you may have a problematic long term neighbor, or occasionally your neighbor may make more noise, but on average you are going to have many more problems with random strangers staying at an apartment turned flophouse.

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.

Why is it OK to burden one group of people (visitors) but not another (residents)? There's something missing in your argument.

>Why is it OK to burden one group of people (visitors) but not another (residents)? There's something missing in your argument.

Residents get to decide on these matters through elections. Visitors do not get a say.

Do you think that is unreasonable?

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