The “Inside Airbnb” project has earned the home-sharing company bad press
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The review system is gamed and the whole things feels like a giant scam now. I never use it anymore and back to reliable hotel chains that guarantee some sort of quality.
If airbnb added a unique index to the SSN (or a two-column index with SSN and locality) would you consider that a TOS violation?
I did a crazy one week trip last January, every day sleeping somewhere else: Tel Hazor, Tel Megiddo, Beer-Sheva, Avdat - Mitzpe Ramon, Eilat, Petra, Amman, fly home. I do not drive. I do not read or speak any Semitic language. It was quite a trip.
I'm interested about why you mention not speaking any Semitic languages. English is pretty-well universally understood there - did you have any problems with language barriers?
No, this is absolutely not the case. I was there just over Christmas, and we did have problems to communicate with locals. Sure, the college educated all speak English. They don't work as bus drivers or at the gas station though. But these are the people I interact with the most as a tourist.
That is not to say that people aren't multilingual there. I'm sure they all speak two or three languages. Such as Hebrew, Arabic or Russian.
Israel isn't just Tel Aviv.
beginning of a new type of activism right here.
corporations manipulate the data. data activist or journalists are tasked with teasing out the bullshit in the data itself.
You don't have any right to say who comes and goes to your neighbours' properties, any more than they have any right to say who comes and goes to your property.
If you want to decide who gets to stay in a given house, you should buy that house. Otherwise it's none of your business.
Another example of the free market not working outside a very simplistic view.
I don't feel that ...
>There are rules for renting out appartments for good reasons. For example, it influences the worth of appartments around it, and it messes up housing costs in a broader area.
... is really an useful argument against free market as it fails to explain why either of those are inherently bad things.
As you move up the levels, the market becomes less free (easier to move to a different apartment block if you don't like the rules than to move to a different state) but becomes far better at protecting against the negative externalities (housing cooperative doesn't have the same enforcement capabilities as local or state governments).
Investment properties have incentives in place to not spend money on maintenance, not spend on upkeep to the extent the owner can get away with it.
With a vacation rental the incentive is to make it as nice as possible to charge a premium, and the rents support a higher level of finish and polish to a property.
I live right between two short term rentals and people come and go all the time, and I love it. I've met so many cool people, especially from Europe travelling in the US.
The house is kept up much nicer than the other multi families around it.
None of the guests have ever once had a party, made noise, left trash or anything negative.
If the new participant was offering a worse deal than the incumbents, nobody would trade with them. It is only because the new participant is offering a better deal than the incumbents that their actions change the market prices. And that's a good thing.
On further reflection, I still think it is the correct decision.
If someone wants to rent a property more badly than anyone else wants to (i.e. they are willing to pay more) then why shouldn't they get it instead of the others? This will push prices up, but that's a natural effect of allocating scarce resources to whoever wants them most.
I am not sure how you would find out whether I want to live on the street where I grew up more than, for example, a billionaire Russian oligarch, but I think that even if I wanted it one thousand times more I would remain unable to afford it.
It may be that many other people gave the oligarch some money to show that they, in some exchange, had a total want for said oligarch to live there more than my want, but this is a different claim implying a very strong assumption about the addition and fungibility of wants, making them indistinguishable from money itself.
Noise complaint is a valid argument up to a certain point. Of course, I don't want anyone to have a concert upstairs.
Don't get me wrong. I am no fan of Uber or Airbnb or many of the things they represent. However, we must agree that the ends do not justify the means. This is just one step away from FUD like "Oh, if we have Airbnb we might have {{insert trendy to hate -- black, Hispanic, Arabic, Chinese, Canadian}} people staying over for the weekend next door and who knows what they're going to do to me in my sleep". I think if you subscribe to this idea then we should throw the baby away with the bath water as well. Nobody is allowed to visit anyone in their homes. Absolutely no parties even if you own your home. Only the legal registered occupant may be present at any time (I guess we will add provisions for EMS and law enforcement).
I will agree with you the day I can get a fellow passenger kicked out of a train or an aeroplane for failing to quiet their devil spawn that won't stop wailing for over n hours.
I am not accusing you of malice but please realize that the anti-Airbnb rhetoric is no more of a "grass-roots" movement than the so-called "tea party movement". Yes, there are people with valid concerns. No, they are not the ones driving this train. It appears we share a common goal with "them" but we do not.
Why? I have a right to intervene if their behavior affects me (ie. noise) but I certainly don't have a right to decide what my neighbors do.
If my neighbors want to host a swingers' party next door, so long as it's quiet then it's absolutely none of my business. Similarly, if they want to do short-term rentals, so long as noise levels are kept acceptably low I don't see what say I should have in the matter.
The idea that Airbnb is "sharing" is cute, but these are commercial transactions we're talking about, specifically short term lodging rentals. This not a free speech or free association issue as long as that's the case.
Why not just impose a fine for noisy crowds? Problem solved no matter what the cause.
The commercial aspect of it is a red herring, as you'd be equally bothered by someone hosting frequent gatherings for their non-profit group.
A short term rental is residential use, just like a long term rental is residential use. In both cases the property is used by people to live and sleep in.
The question is does local government have the right to regulate the duration of a rental lease?
I would argue it doesn't, and it's a blatant violation of sacred property rights for a government to take that power.
The answer to problems of noise is to enforce noise ordinances. Guests will keep quiet if they are told that the town hands out $500 fines for violations of decibel levels after curfew.
There are simple market and incentive based solutions but so many Americans are so quick to jump on the "Ban! Regulate!" knee jerk train these days.
Because as we know, if there's one easy thing to get, it's "pay later" fine money from tourists. And if there's one thing that really sparks police springing into action, it's an urban noise complaint.
> There are simple market and incentive based solutions but so many Americans are so quick to jump on the "Ban! Regulate!" knee jerk train these days.
"$500 fines for violations of decibel levels after curfew" is a regulation - what twisted world is it where something involving the word 'curfew' isn't considered a regulation?
I say enforce the existing, narrowly tailored regulations before creating new, broad ones.
> narrowly tailored ... broad
Obviously enforcement of the existing broad regulations isn't working, so we should create new narrowly tailored ones instead.
This spin-doctoring stuff is fun!
Of course we can fine people that live in other jurisdictions as we do with speeding tickets, and no one is dragged off to jail and fines are not collected on the spot.
Are you aware also that tourists come from outside the country? Speeding tickets aren't particularly enforceable in that case.
I would like to see us come up with creative and tech based solutions for potential problems with vacation rentals, rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
There are a lot of good coming from vacation rentals, and a lot of people love them.
I am just very much against the idea that if any new thing inconveniences or even potentially inconveniences anyone in even a minor way, we should outright blanket ban it. And that is what the people pushing for punitive bans are saying.
Find solutions. Penalize bad actors. Don't practice group punishment. Screen guests with more and better data. Don't just ban the "other"
Similarly, the Indy 500 is exactly like a parking lot, they're both pieces of pavement with cars on them, only difference is the variation in speed.
In real life your examples are not the same. One is a residential building and one is a hotel. Those things are different.
Short term rentals are residential use from a zoning perspective. A vacation rental is not the same thing as a hotel. There are key differences. A hotel has a front desk and is open 24 hours a day. A vacation rental does not.
Its a home rental of a shorter duration.
[1] https://www.usmayors.org/resolutions/80th_conference/cdh08.a...
But you do. You agree to abide by certain rules when you rent/buy and your neighbors have every right to see that the rules you ALL agreed to are followed.
But I do have a say in what types of commerce are allowed to take place in my community, or my country for that matter.
And although I am normally a laissez faire capitalist, I would love to see Airbnb utterly destroyed through lawsuits and over-regulation. Why? For political reasons. The latest tactic of the left is to attack any commercial entity that has the temerity to express any pro-Trump sentiments. And I think the only way for the right to counter that is to employ the exact same tactic, a hundred-fold, against companies who publicly oppose Trump, or political agendas supported by the right. And Airbnb, led by the smug boy-billionaire Brian Chesky, falls squarely in that category.
There are numerous stories[1] of people's lives being turned upside down as a result of using Airbnb. I think televised congressional hearings are called for. And there are probably billions of dollars worth of commerce that are going untaxed as a result of Airbnb. I don't think a few click-through TOS agreements should shield them from responsibility.
As far as politics, you're playing that game of false-equivalence that I thought we'd kind of moved past. Pro- and Anti-Trump aren't just two teams with different uniforms.
I don't even know what that means.
I'm only advocating using the same tactics against the left that they use against the right.
I would love to see Airbnb's $30 billion valuation go all the way down to zero. That won't happen, of course, because even if their business were effectively outlawed in the US, they could still do business abroad. But it would sure wipe the smug off of some left-wing SV billionaires' faces if Airbnb were to become poison to future investors, and derail their eventual IPO.
How sweet that would be.
Qualities of unhelpful politics (both conservative and liberal):
- arguing against the extreme instead of talking to the center
- referring to a large group of people as if they were a single entity
Whether it's "unhelpful" or not depends on what you're trying to accomplish. I would like to see Airbnb go out of business, and its smug, leftist, billionaire SV investors suffer huge financial losses. I think a parade of tearful witnesses giving testimony to congress about the horrors of their Airbnb experiences would be very helpful to achieving that goal.
But so far, I've been all talk and no action.
And that's why it behooves all of us to act like we're all teams with different uniforms, most of the time, even when we secretly think the other guys are stupid and wrong -- only by tolerating our political differences can we have a workable society.
Have you ever lived next a to unit used for AirBnB? I have. After one incident where 8 college students partied the weekend away non-stop, I finally let the HOA know. They then aggressively enforced the building policy of a 28 day rental minimum.
That's what I meant by "aggressively enforced". I believe our fine is something like $2500 now.
"If a bunch of college students or emotional people moved in next door, you would have similar problems."
The main difference is those are actual tenants bound to the covenants of the housing complex. The issues with your neighbors are tracked and escalated.
Not being able to AirBnB your place is frustrating. If you have to go away for a few months due to work or getting fired or similar, it decreases the value of the unit. Most people's houses don't have these restrictions at a municipal level, but still would have to deal with noise complaints.
It's classic tragedy of the commons. Cities that are great to live in and also very attractive for tourists are obviously great places to rent out an apartment over AirBnB in.
But when half the city does that, then the whole character of the place changes and what was previously great about the city is lost. That is harm.
Luckily, cities have the power to regulate this sort of thing.
That said, I think it's a question of "why do we have zoning laws". AirBNB gets to profit from encouraging people to break the law, while the rest of us have to live with the decreased housing supply. If we had fewer restrictions on getting long term supply in place, or more effective restrictions on AirBnBs, I think there'd be fewer complaints. Right now it's super one sided.
That's not to say that those regulations are all necessary or helpful, but clearly the free market isn't enough in this case.
Same with Uber - it starts as a free-for-all, then you get stories like this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/05/11/uber-to-ban-c...
and they start introducing rules around it.
It sounds like you don't believe that residents in a particular neighborhood should be permitted to enter this legally binding arrangement.
This is a deep, fundamental disagreement between us, one that probably goes to the heart of how we perceive the relationship between an individual and the community.
Short term rentals are considered residential use in my town, and they make up the backbone of the local economy. A public forum was called and almost two hundred locals, many of whom have lived here for decades, spoke in favor.
Only two cranks got up and spoke against. There reasons were all about hypothetical harms and imagined worst case scenarios.
My town is a popular vacation destination for families and weddings. There are about 200 short term rentals and the two opponents were unable to come up with any actual examples of misbehavior, there was not one noise complaint, prostitution, drug use or any other worst case scenarios trotted out against AirBnB. There was a recent prostitution arrest at a local hotel though.
The difference between AirBnB and hotels, is that AirBnB runs an extensive criminal and sex offender background check on hosts and guests. They even check the terrorist watch list!
One opponent at first tried to say that an AirBnB house was hosting loud parties on weekends, and people were drunkenly sleeping in their cars and knocking on their windows. The newspaper ran this story prominently. It turned out it was the owner's young adult children that were throwing the parties when it wasn't rented to families on AirBnB.
My state has struck a deal with AirBnB to collect occupancy tax directly and we are contributing a lot in taxes in a state with a budget crisis.
Homes and rentals are still abundant and affordable, and our town gets all kinds of cool visitors that enrich our town.
I love AirBnB, my town has been doing vacation rentals for a hundred years but it has made it more popular and better. The new visitors are supporting a bunch of nice new and more upscale restaurants and bars. It's really revitalized this town and made it a much for fun place for young professionals to live.
Short term rentals started the revitalization, then new eateries opened, and next I hope we can attract a few tech companies now that we are a more desirable place to live.
Now this place is fun too, we have a nano-brewery opening up, hipster restaurants, new boat tours...
The town planner loves AirBnB because it lets the town use some slack housing supply like guest cottages and in-law suites to host visitors in the downtown area, where it would be impossible to build a new hotel.
And short term rentals bring in a different kind of visitor than the hotels ever did. People come and stay for a week with their family.
It's all really nice actually.
And a large majority of AirBnB hosts are women. AirBnB is empowering a lot of women to become micro real estate entrepreneurs and earn money.
When people support blanket bans, they are cutting off income and opportunity for people, mostly women.
Punish bad guests, have the police fine them. Towns make money off speeding and parking tickets, I see no reason they can't make money off the occasional guest violating a noise ordinance.
What elements make it 'extensive'? Also, what's the point in checking the terrorist watch list? Someone on that list isn't going to act in a way to draw attention to themselves before they're ready; it's not much of a check to brag about in terms of 'will this tenant behave?'
> The difference between AirBnB and hotels...
And that hotels have public liability insurance... and don't suddenly become unavailable because of the cultural origin of your name... and generally comply with public-safety legislation designed for short-term accommodation (like fire exits)... so on and so forth.
Clearly AirBnB offers enough benefits to its users to continue, but it's far from the rosy picture you're painting to society as a whole. If AirBnB was such a uniformly rosy proposition, then they wouldn't need to lie about their activities.
I stayed in an Airbnb condo once, and neither Airbnb nor the landlord ever knew my name. That's because the arrangements were made by a friend, and it was 4 people staying in an oceanside condo.
Did my friend violate the TOS by not providing them my name and SSN?
Firstly, there's the question of jurisdiction. If a resident of the stste of New York uses a server outside of NY belonging to a company outside of NY to rent out an apartment in NYC, does the state of NY have jurisdiction? What about NYC?
Years ago Amazon took the stance that sales were interstate commerce and they shouldn't be forced to collect sales tax on interstate transactions. They ended up caving to New York's so-called "Amazon tax" [1].
Airbnb seems to be taking the view that it's not their problem if individuals violate NY/NYC law. Personally I think that's purely a self-serving stance a bit like how Craigslist turned a blind eye to prostitution.
I believe that illegal hotels in a few cities are Airbnb's core business and the efforts of cities to enforce laws prohibiting such are an existential threat. I believe Airbnb knows this.
I also believe that Airbnb will ultimately lose this one.
What this PDF represents is at best misleading and data manipulation and at worse misrepresentation. If at some point Airbnb has or will respond under oath or to a subpoena with this information well that could be a crime.
Whatever the case I think this is going to take years to play out.
[1] http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/new-york-internet-sal...
More Uber/Lyft/taxi traffic at random hours of night - check
Strange people coming and going, pickups at all hours - check
Trash cans are never brought back from the street - check
Yard care - non existent Socialization - zero
There's 0 contribution to the neighborhood from an AirBnB house - I say this as a person who has no problem having a roommate in my own home. There's pretty much zero incentive for an AirBnB'er to give a shit about the neighborhood (I don't blame them).
This isn't an outlier. A lot of my friends live in houses that are pretty much crash pads (Arlington/DC area), and there's the same problem - when people only live somewhere for a month or two, they don't participate in the community.
I bought a house and lived in it with my wife at the same address for 15-or-so years, and wouldn't have recognized my next-door neighbor if I were to run into him at the mall. Why do accidents related to zip-code have anything to do with "community"?
EDIT. My other neighbor turned out to be a co-worker, in a distant group, and somehow was transferred into mine. He was a sucky engineer who spent all of his time politicking. I had little interest in spending time commiserating with him about office politics.
Nice enough neighborhood. Good schools. Not a lot of through traffic. People kept their houses and lawns up. But I don't know that I've ever felt any inclination to spend any time with anyone because of the accident of a street address numbering scheme. Am I alone in this?
It sounds like the owner/host is doing a poor job of selecting their guests. Have you talked with them first?
It's about cities like NYC that have less than one percent vacancy rates, where a couple of AirBNB related effects put upward pressure on rents:
1) A person can stay in an apartment they wouldn't otherwise be able to afford, pushing rents up (I personally know several people who maintain apartments like this, either by leaving for a couple days per month or maintaining an apartment after moving out of town.)
2) A full apartment stays off the market because it is being used as a dedicated hotel
Both of these make a difference in rent prices, though it's hard to say how much.
I'd be happy to see a ban on AirBNB while residential vacancy rates are lower than 3%. I love the service but not what it does to my already pretty unaffordable city.
Similarly, if we allow illegal immigrants to rent flats then that will also push rents higher. Should we attempt to prevent this as well? If not, why not?
There are lots of factors that impact housing supply and demand. Whether they should be regulated / stopped generally becomes a question once the public actively engages in discussing it (see foreign investment in the Pacific Northwest for an example).
Basically, if the public doesn't care, the politicians don't care. Since a pol's main incentive is to get re-elected, the issue has to become important to their constituents, otherwise it effectively doesn't matter.
GP wasn't asking whether it would be prevented, merely whether it should.
Maybe put another way, illegal immigrants are part of the community, so their presence in the housing market must be balanced against their role in a more complex system.
But if you are just asking about the nature of Justice, I don't have any thoughts on that.
If anything, the people who don't want to compete on price with AirBnB are the ones who are rent seeking.