"half of all Airbnb rentals that are conducted by only 10 percent of hosts, who earned a full 48 percent of all the revenue earned in the city last year. That’s some 5,000-people earning a combined $318 million. In contrast, the bottom 80 percent of New York’s hosts—the city’s 40,400 true home sharers—earned just 32 percent of all revenue, or $209 million, in 2017."
While I like the exploration of facts like this, I don't really believe AirBnB is important to rents in New York City. In spatial statistics it is difficult to really prove anything rigorously, and this study doesn't even try to go the distance.
"Applying Barron et al.’s national average ratio of exogeneity to New York City, this implies that, city-wide, Airbnb drove up rents by 0.8% in 2015, 0.4% in 2016, and 0.2% in 2017 (all for years ending in August). This is a cumulative 1.4% increase in rents over these three years attributable to Airbnb’s presence in the city."
So while it might seem like the study looked statistically at AirBnB's impact on NYC, in fact it did not. They just used a sort of rough rule-of-thumb from a national average. But the rule-of-thumb is useless in particular cities (suppose a city had one unit on AirBnB; would adding one more increase rents?), and isn't even from published work. The authors of this study are not economists or econometricians, and it isn't peer-reviewed and never will be.
Moreoever, you can use common sense:
"Airbnb has removed between"
(Dr. Evil voice)
"7,000 and 13,500 units."
New York City has 3.4 million housing units. While year to year housing production varies a lot, on average it produces that number of new units every few months: https://imgur.com/a/gnzUf The report also notes that these units are concentrated in the most expensive neighborhoods anyway. And NYC is only part of a much larger housing regional housing market. It simply strains credulity to think even the upper bound of 13K units has any impact---especially when you consider some of the people occupying such units would have letted or subletted in NYC anyway (the report notes many are long term rentals).
Of course, the real action is in zoning. NYC has seen some upzonings, but mainly massive, consistent downzonings over the past few decades. It is funny people worry about about supply when a private firm removes a tiny bit of it, but nonchalant when the government removes lots of it. Construction costs have also soared, and are now sure to get worse thanks to Trump's tariffs on steel, aluminum and canadian timber.