Hacker News Reader

Comment by willholloway | Hacker News Reader

That's an apples to oranges comparison.

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.

View on HN

> 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.

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?

So you are saying we can't enforce our existing regulations, so the answer is to create new regulations.

I say enforce the existing, narrowly tailored regulations before creating new, broad ones.

So what are you going to do when tourists can't afford to immediately pay a $500 on-the-spot fine? Drag them off to jail? Are you really willing to jail people over a noise complaint? Your local Chamber of Commerce is going to love that.

> 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!

Thats a nice straw man you created there and then argued against.

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.

Speeding tickets are where the government holds all the information on the person. Fining a tourist AirBnBer requires getting a warrant to get information out of a private company. How much effort do you think is going to go into pursuing a noise complaint? If you're not on-the-spot fining, just how many resources do you think the police will throw at pursuing that?

Are you aware also that tourists come from outside the country? Speeding tickets aren't particularly enforceable in that case.

AirBnB has entered into tax collection and information sharning agreements with State governments. Can we not add a system for sharing information for legitimate police noise complaints? I think we can.

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"

> 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.

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.

The United States Conference of Mayors disagrees with you [1]

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com