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> Now students cannot effectively sublet their apartments on Craigslist while out on summer break or study abroad, for a summer intern working at a company in the city

Incorrect. Sublets of 30 days or more are still legal, as they have been forever, and in fact are highly protected under NYC rent law, which requires landlords to allow sublets.

So your narrative is fiction. The law, which existed before the founding of Airbnb, and subsequent flaunting thereof, prohibits short term transient rentals. The only recent change is the prohibition on actively soliciting this illegal activity, not the already-illegal activity itself, thus making enforcement easier.

We can have a healthy debate about the short term sublet laws. Many NYC residents, myself included, will support the ban on transient rentals and improvised hotel arrangements, because it has severe negative externalities to other residents of the buildings in question, negatively affects the rental market, and violates community principles of land use and zoning.

Others, perhaps including yourself, will take the opposite view. And via democracy, following that debate, the law against short term subletting can be amended or retained. Needless to say if you're promulgating these views from San Francisco your preferences on the matter will be disregarded.

The only thing that's happened here is that the other strategy, the Silicon Valley end-around of just breaking the law and seeing what happened, has proven to be an ineffective means of changing policy. Good.

Thanks, I didn't remember the amount of days right; I thought it was a ban on longer rentals also. I'm glad that sublets aren't affected; that significantly changes my perspective on the law. It basically invalidates Airbnb's business model but changes nothing for preexisting common arrangements, such as month-long sublets. I appreciate your response.

> The only thing that's happened here is that the other strategy, the Silicon Valley end-around of just breaking the law and seeing what happened, has proven to be an ineffective means of changing policy. Good.

I think the outcome is a bit more nuanced than that. The lesson to be learned in this situation is that Airbnb provided terrible curation of its service while being instrumental in renters breaking the law. I don't think it's universally a bad idea to break laws one doesn't agree with, especially if they carried no significant consequences for all stakeholders involved.

Because Airbnb failed at its curation, the state of New York added teeth to the existing law. I still maintain that the primary use case for Airbnb, the sporadic rental, is a useful one for both guests and owners. The Airbnb rentals I've used in the past were mutually beneficial. Maybe I'm an outlier because I used the rental for non-malicious purposes.

> I still maintain that the primary use case for Airbnb, the sporadic rental, is a useful one for both guests and owners

Indeed. But it's not nearly as good for Airbnb's business model.

Is that not the vast majority of Airbnb rentals offered through the service, sporadic rentals?

As I read it, there's a point you made in the final paragraph that is kind of missed in the first paragraph.

> the state of New York added teeth to the existing law

> It basically invalidates Airbnb's business model

The rentals that AirBnB was listing that are illegal now were illegal before. The business model was predicated on that the fines were less than the cost of doing business illegally that AirBnB facilitated.

As I understand it, it shifted the scales to making fines more expensive, but that AirBnB in NYC was not necessarily a valid business model before the adding of teeth.

The business model priced in the risk of fines and the amount under the old regime; it was profitable. Now all the city has to do is scrape the frontend (or API, if there is one) and tally up the fines.

Am I missing something here?

The distinction I was trying to make was "facilitating illegal activities and snubbing those charged with enforcement is not a viable business model."

The risk / reward of fines isn't AirBnB's model, but rather the calculation of the people and landlords offering rentals and their business model.

I disagree. Airbnb has always had a really really simple solution to all of this: make it so people can file complaints about specific addresses without being involved in the Airbnb system. Airbnb lost the public support because they ignored externalities: so many people were adversely affected by living next to people who irresponsibly rented out their Airbnb. Personally in one building I had my lobby and elevator destroyed by Airbnb guests, as well as many loud party nights in an otherwise quiet building. In my next building I've dealt with noise and partying again. But I have effectively no recourse.

A system like this would vastly limit Airbnb's market: it would make it so landlords could easily tell when people were Airbnbing their apartments out, and thus would vastly shrink Airbnb's market.

I like Airbnb a lot. I use it when I travel, my friends use it when they visit me in NYC. But I am happy about this law because Airbnb chose short term profit over long term sustainability. The zoning laws that support hotels are there for a reason. And there was room for innovation there, but Airbnb has not been successful in traversing the space between the economic inefficiency and the zoning issues.

None of this even touches on the macro issue that Airbnb demonstrably increases rent prices.

It's pretty easy to figure the address from the map

And then go door by door to 100+ apartments in any one building?

Ask the Door man

Every building in NYC has a doorman?

Lol okay.

I know there's an Airbnb in my building. Didn't really care until a guest puked in the elevator and broke a beer bottle in the lobby. I don't know which apartment it's in.

How do you know it was a guest?

"I found this law problematic because it was written to make enforcement easy, not to address actual issues with serial short-term renting."

Those two things are very much related. It's all well and good to propose an exquisitely tailored law that only forbids exactly what is socially negative and nothing else, but if it is totally unenforceable as a practical matter then what good is it?

"At least with Airbnb, there was a rating system and an escalation/authentication path."

That's great for AirBnB's customers -- both guests and owners (or leasors), but did nothing at all for the rest of us living in NYC.

All other things being equal, I'd be happy with lower hotel prices in NYC. That's good for tourism, which is good for NYC. But I sure as heck don't want to trade off not being able to rent an apartment and be assured that the apartment next door isn't an unregistered hotel room used by a rotating cast of drunk tourists every weekend. If those are my choices, I'm voting for higher hotel prices every time.