At the point you are doing that with any sort of regularity you should be subject to licensing, insurance, etc.
Whomever downvoted me, you are telling me that you wouldn't mind a constant rotation of complete strangers taking residence in the apartment across the hall from you with no recourse for liability?
If you disrupt the neighbors with loud musics, wild partying, etc, you will pay a fine. All the neighbors have to do is sue you in court and it should be easy to prove it so.
That will kill many birds with one stone and eliminate vectors that allows people to choose winner and losers for political reasons.
You have never had experience in NYC Housing Court. I have. Keep dreaming, though.
It might be rather difficult to fix the courts, but it's lot better than adding regulations that probably benefit the entrenched business interests.
Even for small claims court, it's a pretty big burden to file suit. This regulation may not be the best answer, but let's not pretend that short-term rentals don't engender problems for the neighbors, or that all those problems can be ameliorated with more lawsuits.
Also, why is this problem engendered by only short-term renters? Can long-term renters, and even property owners be rude, loud, or obnoxious?
This law will do nothing to protect you from 'those' types.
You support increased government regulation, when there exists an existing legal process to handle such "problems".
A pretty big burden? It is small claims court for a reason. If you are intelligent enought to post and read HN, you should not be burdened by filing a small claims lawsuit.
At least now there is a process in place to deal with the owner of the property. Wait until the owner loses the property and vagrant squatters take residence.
Begin the burden, here: http://www.nycourts.gov/courts/nyc/smallclaims/startingcase....
Then make it less of a burden to file a lawsuit, and make it easy for people to prove and disprove that there was indeed noise pollution or whatever.
Of course, the state have a monopoly on the court system, so that might be a difficult problem.
We don't need new laws, as that will make more things complicated in a land that filled with overly complicated unclear laws.
Make it so that laws are as simple and understandable to the average citizen as possible. Make it so that competent judges are selected. Make it so that the system is efficient in handling out appropriate and fair judgement. Then make laws that make sense without allowing people to convert their dollars to political power.
In the first place, people shouldn't use the laws as solutions to every single problems that they might have.