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Comment by mandude | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of cities trying to figure out how to handle Airbnb -- Barcelona for example is cracking down on unlicensed AirBNB's -- and the reason is the resulting rent increases.

Like taxis and taxi cab companies taking their hatred out on Lyft or Uber, I do believe that technology changes economies and that this will be another example of a misled attempt to prevent a technology from changing a city's economy. I also believe that many times these preventative measures are led by lobbyists by the very industry that is being hurt by the technology, and in this case it's likely hotels -- but then blaming it on rent prices.

It'll be great to see where all this leads, but making it illegal and taking it out on owners or drivers is going the wrong direction.

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Not sure if ride sharing and home sharing are the same thing.

Ride sharing disrupted the cab industry, gives a large amount of the population access to cheap and plentiful transportation, and cars are plentiful too. The loser is the cab industry and the winner is the general population.

Home sharing is disrupting the hotel industry, but its customers are tourists and non locals, and housing stock is very limited. So city populations are going to be paying higher housing costs since they are now competing with entrepreneurs (serving tourists and non locals) for the same units. In theory, rents may continue to increase until they find a balance with hotel rates. Here the losers are hotels and long term renters and the winners are short term renters, property owners, and entrepreneurs.

Different economics at play here.

There's also the externalized cost of disrupting communities. AirBnB is significantly changing the dynamic of where these people live and they get nothing in return for it.

I find it interesting that people who normally are so pro-contract (you can contract away your right to sell a printer cartridge) seem to be in the other camp when it comes to dwellings (well of course you don't have to abide by the contract saying you won't rent it on AirBnB) or just silent on the issue.

I'm failing to see how this relates to contracts in reference to home sharing. When someone buys they're home, did they sign a contract saying"The undersigned agrees that nothing will ever change within 10 miles from the property."? Or are you talking about people renting against actual contractual prohibitions against short term rentals and subletting?

I guess my question would be why is the housing stock so limited? If there is a profitable use for new housing then you would think it would be built, unless something were preventing it out making it uneconomical.

It's pretty straighforward economics. Local landowners get to make the laws, and they have a vested interest in their houses being expensive. Sure, it means more mortgage debt and slower economic growth as cost-of-living strangles marginal businesses, but that's a cost that other people have to pay later. So, in typical Boomer fashion - fuck you, I got mine, have fun being up to your eyeballs in debt to us.

You got it. I was asking a leading question. What's needed is a (political) counter weight to that. Maybe as millennials get more squeezed by this, they'll become more politically active locally and push for reforms to this. But I'm a little depressed because they'll probably just reach for the same non-solutions or current political class reach for, like rent control and low income inclusion requirements.

Local activity isn't helpful, because the incentives work out much better for rent control and low income inclusion. Actually lifting the building controls that cause the shortage means pissing off the incumbent neighbors at your expense, for the benefit of people who either commute in or will move to your area in the future.

Current land-use regulation is in this really bad area, where the governing entities responsible are large enough to seek rents and small enough to avoid being responsible for their negative externalities.

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