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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

Title should say: "Cities wreck travellers' holiday plans as battle with AirBnB intensifies"

Certainly the article's original title is both misleading and clickbait, but the idea is to change such titles to something accurate and neutral. I've taken a crack at it based on the contents of the article, but if someone comes up with a more accurate and neutral title we can change it again.

Or "Airbnb hosts fail to comply with regulations and accept reservations anyways, wrecking their guests holiday plans".

Or "Airbnb fails to properly warn travellers they're booking stays that potentially will have to be cancelled later".

Or, "Airbnb fails to warn travellers city plans to wreck their holidy plans."

It's almost funny that the city is engaging in rent-seeking behavior against renters. In this move San Francisco makes it clear that they believe they own your property and you merely occupy it on their whim.

> In this move San Francisco makes it clear that they believe they own your property and you merely occupy it on their whim.

In this move, San Franciso makes it clear that you can't change the use of a property without permission.

Right, the premise of this is that it's their and not yours. You have to get permission to use your own property how you like. Living in a city means giving up rights to the authoritarians who keep high population density centers from killing each other.

Living in a city is a big trade-off. More jobs, less liberty.

Zoning requirements and permits for operating hotels are not unreasonable.

Some people rent out a spare room now and again for extra cash, and some people have multiple properties that are occupied exclusively by Airbnb renters, essentially running an unlicensed hotel.

The latter can be extremely obnoxious if its your upstairs neighbor, not to mention the effects that being discovered by Airbnb real estate investors can have on a town or neighborhood.

Or: "Cities fail to properly regulate Airbnb, widely deploy sinister measures to discourage people from using it"

What would "proper regulation" be, and why isn't a registration and review system for hosts such?

(If it turns out it was the city's fault that Airbnb erroneously thought the registration was invalid, that'd clearly be an implementation failure, I agree, but still leaves open the question why Airbnb only reacted so late)

If only there was a way to make tourists and hosts pay for the inconvenience and externalities they cause, and put that revenue to the benefit of everyone in the city. I know, let's call it a tax.

As opposed to a rigid system of "designated uses" for private properties that prevents economic transactions depending on how much they inconvenience upper class and politically connected residents and competing hospitality interests.

If I'm living in a building and it becomes intolerable because of noisy transient visitors on a regular basis, a tax that goes to the city does me no good whatsoever.

If you are in a condo, your homeowners association should have rules about making noise, and the owners of the airbnb should be forced to take responsibility. If an apartment complex, your landlord should deal with it.

Or, and here's an idea, we can enact sane regulations like licensing requirements to prevent the negative externalities from happening in the first place.

Enacting sane regulation that does what it is intended to do and has no or few side effects is more difficult when you try to regulate each individual action some one could take that may have negative externalities, rather than regulating the production of the negative externalities.

Edit to add:

And by regulating local externalities at the local building level rather than the city level, you are more likely to have better regulations in regards to residents and owners wishes.

It happened in the last flat I rented. In the end we had to threat the owner with violence and property destruction, so finally he rented it long term to some guys.

It's sad to get to this point but nobody was going to do anything and I was no way willing to deal with that situation. One tourist even pissed in the elevator.

The situation was just not tolerable.

I suppose the ultimate free market solution is to deal with problems directly rather than involve government in any way.

One star - Neighbors will beat you with a baseball bat if you have a late night party.

If we get rid of zoning and residence/hotel distinctions how will we know who to tax without introducing oppressive measures like voter ID?

NIMBY

The woman added: “I called the city authorities and they confirmed my application, and the licence number I’ve been issued is what Airbnb requires, so that’s what I provided. But Airbnb still says the city rejected my number. Both sides are pointing at each other.”

Your first quote is wrong according to the article

Actually, no. AirBnb bungled the process. The host was able to rent.

I also found it weird that the PR nonsense said that “2 million” people are using the service and putting money in the pockets of “countless” hosts.

Hosts aren’t countless... so I wonder why they aren’t calling that out?

They probably don’t have data to count.

So technically they are countless.

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