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Comment by evanelias | Hacker News Reader

Most Manhattan buildings are large and have many units. If you rent out your apartment a few times a year, how is this fair to your neighbors, who pay the same rent and never agreed to have a bunch of transient guests in the building?

I lived in a Manhattan rental building with a fair amount of AirBNB activity going on -- on any given weekend it seemed like at least one unit on my floor was being rented out. Many of the younger guests were completely obnoxious and disrespectful to common areas. This is an extreme example, but someone even urinated in the stairwell once. And this was a "luxury" building with a well-above-average rental cost.

Of course, renting out your place on AirBNB was against the terms of the lease, but it seemed like the management company never enforced this... which makes sense when you consider how hard/expensive it is to prove, and then evict someone, especially when they're a tenant who pays exorbitant rent on time.

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>Most Manhattan buildings are large and have many units. If you rent out your apartment a few times a year, how is this fair to your neighbors, who pay the same rent and never agreed to have a bunch of transient guests in the building?

Do you personally get to vet all your neighbors? No you don't, and the results in pretty much no difference in how things typically play out. If anything, anyone who runs a respectable AirBnB has more information to go on rather than a simple question of will they pay rent.

My opinion is that a person who agrees to live in a building 365+ days is generally going to be far more respectful of the building and neighbors than a person living in a building for just a few days.

This has nothing to do with vetting neighbors. In a rental building, if you have a permanent neighbor who is a nuisance and is violating their lease, this is easier to resolve. For starters, you know their name, where they live, and the owner/manager of their unit.

> Most Manhattan buildings are large and have many units. If you rent out your apartment a few times a year, how is this fair to your neighbors, who pay the same rent and never agreed to have a bunch of transient guests in the building?

How is it fair if you let your druggie sibling come live in the house with you for the entirety of your lease?

It's a completely bullshit excuse, if the neighbor creates a problem, deal with it. If they don't, then don't.

Telling the neighbor what they can and cannot do because you don't like it is not going to be fun when they're allowed to do the same back to you.

> How is it fair if you let your druggie sibling come live in the house with you for the entirety of your lease?

Every NYC lease I've ever signed had a clause forbidding long-term guest stays. Besides, that's a persistent problem, easy and perfectly reasonable to report to management and have them deal with it.

In contrast, occasional AirBNB'ing (a few weekends a year per unit, say) is a lot harder to track down. There were 15 units on my floor, and maybe 4 or 5 of them would occasionally do AirBNB rentals. It's not like there was just one unit doing this constantly, which would have been a lot easier to report.

I also have to mention, you've now posted 3 different comments mentioning this hypothetical "druggie sibling" scenario. I've personally never encountered that situation, despite living in 7 different apartment buildings in 3 major east coast cities over the past 13 years. I have, however, repeatedly encountered disrespectful AirBNB tenants in multiple buildings. I don't really think these situations are even remotely comparable. There's no web site trying to profit from letting "druggie siblings" live with people, nor is there any major wave of this occurring.

> Telling the neighbor what they can and cannot do because you don't like it is not going to be fun when they're allowed to do the same back to you.

Well, since I never rented my place on AirBNB, never had long-term guests, and never otherwise broke major lease provisions... I don't really have anything to worry about there do I?

> Every NYC lease I've ever signed had a clause forbidding long-term guest stays.

That's a red herring, you can add the sibling as an occupant, the point remains.

> I've personally never encountered that situation

Well the reasonable conclusion is that people must not allow family to come live with them if they have druggie problems... /sarcasm

Or a reasonable person might think the point is that the neighbor has no right to insist that a family member cannot come and stay in the house.

You keep doing this so I'm going to end this conversation with you. When you decide to stop throwing out red herrings let me know and perhaps we can continue.

Leases tend to be very clear about the scenario you describe. Ditto for city and state rental laws.

Sure you can add family to the lease in NYC. I never said otherwise. But if your sibling is repeatedly violating the provisions of the lease, and being a nuisance to the other tenants in the building, you can both be evicted. A landlord would rather vacate a problem tenant than have multiple non-renewals due to the nuisance.

I mentioned that I've never personally encountered this situation because I sincerely doubt this is a common scenario here in NYC. Apartments are quite small in Manhattan. Most people have enough sense not to allow a sibling with a drug problem to live in their already-cramped living space long-term.

Regardless, I still don't see how any of this is comparable to transient AirBNB renters being disruptive to one's neighbors. In reponse to GP's claim that this law is only helping hotels, I provided a personal example of whole-unit AirBNB renters negatively impacting my quality of life, in violation of the lease and now in violation of the law as well. You're responding with hypotheticals about a completely different scenario (long-term guests and/or adding people to leases).

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