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Isn't "zoning" the primary reason why NYC real estate is so expensive in the first place? Controls that restrict the supply of housing is probably not a good thing if you're looking to make NYC real estate more affordable.

Actually it's mostly because NYC is a very very popular place to live. It's also because a lot of people with too much money are buying condos in NYC as an investment. Removing zoning laws will not change these things.

> a lot of people with too much money are buying condos in NYC as an investment

That would be OK, but renting for short term should be illegal? If AirBnb residents are noisy and disrespect the laws, call the cops on them. If owners don't pay their due taxes, call IRS on them. It's no reason to make it illegal to rent for short term.

I have used AirBnb in many cities on 4 continents and was always respectful to the locals and even tried my best to follow the specific recycling rules and such.

What I enjoy the most is the organic feeling of being in a real apartment vs being in a hotel room. Hotel rooms all feel the same, wherever you go. What I want is to experience the same perspective as a local, well, at least to attempt to do that, and that is because I appreciate the different cultures.

Banning short term apartment rentals would send a bad message to people who just want to appreciate your culture.

> If AirBnb residents are noisy and disrespect the laws, call the cops on them.

And what happens when that leads to calling the cops every weekend, for a different group of people?

I'll tolerate my neighbour having a loud party on his 25th birthday, or him accidentally banging his suitcase down the stairs at 5.30 when he's catching an early flight. I'll do the same, equally infrequently.

It's simply not fair to have that behaviour every fucking weekend, which was what happened when an apartment in the building was put on AirBnB.

Fortunately, the listing was removed the day after I sent it to the landlord, and the noise has stopped. I highly doubt any tax was paid on the income, which is also wrong.

Maybe AirBnb should allow neighbors to comment on disturbing behavior by tourists. Responsibility and consequences could follow a tourist wherever s/he goes.

Calling the cops on a noisy neighbor in NYC is pointless unless that neighbor is a business. The cops may pay a visit, but it the person starts making noise again, they can, they will, and the cops will not force the issue. They'll say that's for the landlord/condo association/coop board to sort out. Dealing with those entities can sometimes be extremely difficult, and can take a long time to sort out. A landlord can't evict someone without really good cause, and even then it can take a long time, during which the tenant can keep renting out over and over.

People don't want transients living in their apartment buildings for safety and other reasons. Unlike hotels in NYC, we lack the necessary security and also lacking is stringent check-in procedures that hotels have. We have doormen but they are not security guards.

It is true that NYC is a popular place to live, but the higher apartment costs are caused by zoning density restrictions and overuse of historic landmark status. These are "economic rents" -- a market failure that creates inefficient markets through use of politics by special interests -- in this case landlords that want to extract higher rents from tenants.

In general this is true (and certainly given that many HN readers live in the Bay area, it probably falls within people's personal experience), but NYC is not a great example. Parts of NYC have some degree of density restriction, but much of it (pretty much all of Manhattan, say) is among the highest-density residential areas in the US, and still very expensive, because even given all the density, there's a finite amount of land, which still means supply is constrained as compared to demand. Even given no density restrictions at all, some places would still be very expensive. Tokyo is another good example of this.

I live in Manhattan and while there is some density in parts of Manhattan, overall, the buildings are not very tall.

Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser wrote about this in his Op-Ed, Build Big Bill: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/build-big-bill-article-1....

Yeah, the buildings aren't very tall, but people are in them right now.

Before you can build a newer, bigger building, you first need to buy a large enough contiguous area from potentially several owners who don't particularly want to move. That adds friction and years of extra work to any new building, which will discourage new construction, lower supply and raise prices regardless of the zoning.

Unless you're proposing that the government begin seizing tracts of land in Manhattan on behalf of high-rise developers?

I don't think this is as much of a problem as you are making it out to be. If the east village, which is currently mostly zoned R8B[1] were tomorrow to be substantially upzoned (to say R10) you'd see lots of new construction within a year. There'd be so much money to be made that deals would happen.

[1] http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/zoning/zoni...

That's part of it. Another major part of it is that there are major zoning restrictions. Excessive zoning laws pushes up price. This has been demonstrated time and time again.

Although everyone has a different opinion on "excessive".

This is a fair point. My original comment should have been more specific: cities with above average zoning restrictions consistently see higher housing costs. A corollary of which is that excessive zoning also leads to higher costs, unless your position is there is no city with excessive zoning.

Isn't "zoning" the primary reason why NYC real estate is so expensive in the first place?

More directly, it's one of the reasons NYC real estate is so valuable in the first place. The way the city has managed density (and parks, open space, and its waterfront) has in general worked out pretty well, over the years. Which has helped the city thrive in ways that its direct competitors (such as Boston and Baltimore) have not.

You are correct that zoning density restrictions and overuse of historic landmark status create political scarcity of housing that benefits landlords such as Donald Trump to the detriment of renters. The landlords and allied special interests back laws that create "economic rents" -- additional profits not through wealth creation and efficient markets but through the market failure of creating artificial scarcity.

If AirBnb wants to make housing more affordable in NYC, they should lobby to remove these zoning laws that benefit wealthy landlords such as Donald Trump.

Have a look at a map. Geographic boundaries surrounding an 8 million person population is why NYC real estate is so expensive.

> short-term rentals in an area that the community has decided to use for permanent housing

It shouldn't be legal to tell someone who owns a home that they cannot rent it out. We're not talking about someone running a business out of their home, where the zoning laws actually apply.

> I'd rather not have the house next to me used for short-term rentals "shared" with those that don't give two shits about the community they'll be leaving on Sunday afternoon.

How about the ones who let that druggie sister down on her luck move in, she's ok because it's for over 30 days?

This is just whiny bullcrap from someone who wants to be able to control their neighbors.

> You also don't get to just decide not to follow the rules after the fact. One moved to a community, and directly or indirectly agreed to abide by the community standards.

We're not discussing a housing authority here. If you and your neighbors get together and decide the community cannot abide someone allowing another person to use their house for less than ... what 6 months? a year ... you write that into the bylaws, set out the financial penalty, and then you enforce it.

And that's your right.

But when these kinds of things become illegal across an entire state, there's a problem. This law should have never been on the books in its current form to begin with.

> It shouldn't be legal to tell someone who owns a home that they cannot rent it out. We're not talking about someone running a business out of their home, where the zoning laws actually apply.

Short term rentals are a business, by definition.

Parent made it sound like the government has a moral right to zoning laws. I would argue that zoning laws are more often abused than used properly.

The government does have a moral right to zoning laws.

We, as citizens, have ascribed them that right. And it is what protects me from having my neighbours run a brothel or smelting plant in their house.

That's not a "right", that's a power struggle. What protects the brothel owner from being kicked out of town?

By that definition so are long-term rentals, or even home buying and selling. A Colorado court has ruled that there's no substantive difference between a renter who rents for one month or one week.

subletting is legal, by your definition it would be a business and should be illegal.

Your definition is wrong.

Subletting is not short term, and is rightly considered to be largely governed by the same laws as those that apply to rentals since the uses are so similar.

I honestly do not understand the willful ignorance in this thread. Short term rentals is commerce. Everyone knows it's commerce. When you say you think it isn't (or you don't understand how it could be) you sound like you're denying the earth goes around the sun. This isn't even a particularly nuanced area of permitted use laws (zoning) or the appropriate role of government. You are all basically advocating for elimination of all zoning and/or pretending it doesn't exist as a totally normal type of regulation in the US (and all over the world).

Selling off my collection of stamps from my home or allowing my child to sell lemonade is also commerce, yet I am allowed to do it.

This is where the original poster went off the rails. Just because there's an exchange of money does not mean these laws do, or should, apply.

Of course they shut down lemonade stands. Especially if you tried to run a daily lemonade stand out of your front yard, staffed by people who don't live there.

And yes, authorities do shut down lemonade stands: https://www.google.com/search?q=authority+shut+down+lemonade...

I think it's silly, but there it is.

right, someone has done it somewhere. I knew that when I made the comment, it doesn't change the general applicability of the point.

They're legal because the government has not decided to make them illegal. If the government decides that your lemonade stand is a danger to public health, or that your stamp collection is a national patrimony and cannot leave the country, it will make new laws that enforce those decisions.

Or, they're illegal, but the law isn't enforced, so people feel they are legal.

It shouldn't be legal to tell someone who owns a home that they cannot rent it out.

That's not what relevant the laws say ("You can't rent your property, period!"). Just that you can't use a residential property as a de-facto hotel.

If you and your neighbors get together and decide the community cannot abide someone allowing another person to use their house for less than ... what 6 months?

30 days. The point is that short-term rentals have a very different character (in terms of impact on neighbors, and impact on property values) than long-term rentals.

This is just whiny bullcrap from someone who wants to be able to control their neighbors.

No, it's just life the big city. Though I agree that whether these issues should be of interest of the state (as opposed to municipalities) is very much open to question. Then again, the Empire State is known to be messed up (and to have lopsided control over) a great many things, in this regard.

It shouldn't be legal to tell someone who owns a home that they cannot rent it out

Your right to do as you please with your property ends where my property, and interference with my enjoyment of it, begins.

Or do you also think that if you buy some property straddling a river, you can dump waste into it and say "my property, nobody can tell me what to do with it" while making everyone downriver pay for the cleanup of what you did? Because that's the ultimate moral grounding of laws restricting property -- you don't own an isolated island in the middle of nowhere, you own property that's adjacent to and can affect other pieces of property owned by other people who also have rights.

> Or do you also think that if you buy some property straddling a river, you can dump waste into it and say "my property, nobody can tell me what to do with it" while making everyone downriver pay for the cleanup of what you did?

You can't actually own the land around a river, but I get the point you're trying to make regardless.

The point is, if they're causing a ruckus, report them and have it shut down. If they're not, leave it alone. And having multiple different vehicles in the driveway isn't causing a ruckus.

This is basically FUD. What if they do something the neighbors don't like!?! Then deal with it at that time, stop being thought police.

> It shouldn't be legal to tell someone who owns a home that they cannot rent it out.

I mean, a majority of our forebears thought it should. The original law was passed by a representative democracy. And so was this one. You're one of the (totally guessing) 48% of people that disagree. That's democracy. You have to live with getting out-voted.

> Because, personally, I'd rather not have the house next to me used for short-term rentals "shared" with those that don't give two shits about the community they'll be leaving on Sunday afternoon.

Why do you believe that guests wont give "two shits" about the community. This sounds incredibly xenophobic to me.

There's houses on Airbnb that are advertised as party houses. This has caused a lot of issues for the neighbors of said "party houses."

But you have to admit that these "party houses" are the absolute minority. Most offering are very restrictive in this regard.

Anyways, I was being sarcastic by using the tools of a leftie. (declaring the parent to be a xenophobe)

Do you perceive that your sarcasm was effective? Did it convey your point clearly and concisely, so that you can share your perspective and point of view?

Or did it do more harm to what is otherwise a legitimate viewpoint and possibly deserving of discussion?

Yes, yes and no.

I'm btw sure that many Socialists would actually agree that the statement undoubtably displayed hatred and xenophobia. He did argue against allowing people from the outside to come and live in his community because he by default perceives foreigners as not giving "two shits" about the community. This is obviously not true, you can't just declare that all foreigners want to harm your community.

OK, I would encourage you to reread the conversation. The HN consensus is clearly different than how you perceive it.

You may be absolutely correct. The HN Hivemind is frequently wrong.

But please use this as an opportunity for introspection, wherein you centralize the idea that the community of peers with whom you choose to associate, think you are an ass.

if you have a bowl of M&M's and 5% of those M&M's are poisonous, would you eat from that bowl ? Go ahead, eat a handful of them...

edit: Cleary comedy isn't my fortè.

Jesus, guy. Heap on another few solar masses worth of condescension.