What Airbnb really does to a neighbourhood | Hacker News Reader

What Airbnb really does to a neighbourhood

bbc.co.uk

67 pointsloriverkutya102 comments

How have we gotten this far into the comments without anyone mentioning the root cause here is a general shortage of housing in places people want to live / work / visit?

It seems to me that AirBNB isn't to blame for the overall lack of housing (and temporary housing aka hostel/hotel) options, rather it's just the most visible brand name competing for the limited supply.

Cities can ban it if they want, but I'd rather they focused on allowing more housing to be built.

It's not just a lack of housing. Airbnb is changing neighborhoods by creating increased demand for vacation friendly activities and turning some areas into an effective full time weekend. It's taking popular neighborhoods like the Mission in SF or Williamsburg in Brooklyn or the Gothic quarter in Barcelona and turning them into 365 day a year tourist parties. Any neighborhood with a reputation for being hip, having art, music, bars etc. is now half populated by Airbnb guests at all times.

And for many of us - we like having exciting nightlife options in Williamsburg or the Mission during the week. The solution isn't to stop neighborhoods from becoming lively and fun, it's to once again build more housing so that those who don't want to live in lively neighborhoods can move to another neighborhood.

> Any neighborhood with a reputation for being hip, having art, music, bars etc. is now half populated by Airbnb guests at all times

Why are there so few of these places?

They're generally unsustainable. Having a reputation means a deviation from the norm. Once their reputation is big enough, the number of newcomers to the culture will outstrips the ability for the culture to assimilate them.

Sustainability in the face of that requires whatever the culture is centered around to be the kind of thing that can both put up a facade that serve casuals and angry neighbors, while simultaneously maintaining an environment for the core that built it to retain momentum. And circumstance might just make that impossible.

There's a piece that covers this pretty well:

https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

Last posted on HN 2 months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17433487

That's a bit of a reduction. More like 'Any neighborhood in a world class city with a reputation ...' Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Kansas City could develop cool areas, but probably won't be overrun by AirBnB tourists.

That's right AirBNB isn't to blame for the overall lack of housing - but it is to blame for pushing people out of housing. Landlords can make much more money if they kick out all of their tenants and rent to people on AirBNB - effectively turning the property they own into a hotel.

The long term solution for this is to have more housing, but that isn't going to fix the problem that many face currently. I think the best course of action to take right now is to put laws in place that restrict AirBNB in some ways.

For example, this recently happened in Boston: https://boston.curbed.com/2018/6/13/17460760/boston-airbnb-r...

These new regulations makes it so that AirBNB "Hotels" would be impossible. Of course it /does/ screw over an individual that would possibly want to rent their apartment out while they're away, but I think the pros outweigh the cons. Namely, if you're able to afford a single person apartment in Boston - you're probably more well off than other people in Boston, so you probably don't need the extra income provided by AirBNB anyway.

Wait, how would this solve ANY of the problems mentioned in the article? Most of the issues they talked about were simply caused by having a bunch of tourists living with the people (in fact, 'over tourism' was one of the mentioned problems, along with harassment and loudness from guests).

Building more places for these tourists to stay isn't going to solve the problem of having too many tourists in a city.

AirBNB could not exist and all our cities would still have severe housing shortages. It's a scapegoat, the real problem is lack of supply, which is a zoning regulatory issue.

Zoning prevents building the stock needed (or things like making styles of homes like multi-family illegal), so AirBNB may be an irritation to it, but its far from the root problem.

https://www.dataforprogress.org/housing/

> Without abolishing apartment bans we are left with very little space in growing cities to place social housing. Let’s say we raise taxes on the rich as much as we dream, and set about to build social housing apartments. Right now, apartments – market rate or not – are illegal in much of the useable land in American cities (only 17% of Seattle’s buildable land allows apartments, for instance). Where will we put the new social housing if apartment bans remain? (And it will take years to build the social housing we need; in the meantime let’s at least build some places for middle class and working class people to live.)

My impression reading the article was that the primary problem is affordability and AirBNB units competing for housing space. The remainder, about the problems of tourism in general, seem like a pro/con situation that has always been an issue in popular tourist destinations, and AirBNB is just the latest highly visible participant in it. It seems likely that AirBNB has helped make tourism more popular, but that trend was already going strong before AirBNB and probably would be without it as well.

> How have we gotten this far into the comments without anyone mentioning the root cause here is a general shortage of housing in places people want to live / work / visit?

There is plenty of housing in many cities where Airbnb is detrimental to the quality of life. We have an Airbnb flat in our building and we had one in the last one I was in. In both cases we had breakins, damage done to the house, garbage left etc.

We're in a residential, non-touristy area. Both those airbnb flats in question were not welcome by renders or owners in the house.

Unless there wasn't, and now there is because of Airbnb. Or an existing shortage was exacerbated by Airbnb.

I understand what you're saying but that doesn't contradict my point. If the appearance of AirBNB suddenly causes a housing shortage than there was presumably a lot of pent up demand for hotel-type space in the market that was being artificially restricted by hotel regulations, and the regional housing supply was fragile in the face of increased demand.

Across the world right now most major cities are struggling in the face of growth, but it doesn't really make sense that they should be. I live in San Francisco where housing supply is critically low, but our annual growth rate is only around 1%. It's deeply concerning that our institutions crumble and in the face of a 1% annual growth rate.

hotel-type space in the market that was being artificially restricted by hotel regulations

is not the same as housing.

For a quick order of magnitude comparison, taking SF as an example - as near I can find, there are somewhere between 5k and 10k airbnb listings in the whole bay area. But to be very conservative let's assume 10k and assume they're all in SF itself.

Well between 2010 and 2015 SF added 150k more jobs than housing units. Meaning to get back to 2010 levels of affodability SF would have to add on the order of 150k more housing units (and that has probably grown even worse in the past 3 years since 2015).

Airbnb is unfortunately just a drop in the bucket.

The root cause is that in many ways, housing is subsidized and cheaper. Airbnb takes advantage of that to undercut the hotel industry.

People use AirBnB not just for the price. I've used it before to get a more authentic experience when traveling. The places generally vary a lot more in capacity (IE not just 2-4 per room). For a family with smaller children, renting out a small apartment for a weekend is much nicer than a tiny hotel room on the nth floor of some homogeneous building. I think many hotels can't compete because they cannot provide the variety of options that AirBnB provides.

I'm not alone in my dislike for hotels.

> Cities can ban it if they want, but I'd rather they focused on allowing more housing to be built.

Why not do both?

One is mostly helpful (building housing) and one is mostly detrimental (banning airbnb).

How is banning AirBnB detrimental to the housing problem if it's also contributing to the lack of housing supply?

Indirectly: AirBnB can make buying a house more affordable by providing passive income to the home owner that could in theory be used towards mortgage payments etc.

Banning Airbnb can be detrimental to the local economy, as well as the freedom for residents to do what they want with their property.

Since we can not all fit in "places people want to live / work / visit", the only viable solution is to change that. Other places need to be made more desirable. (as needed, add: cell towers, an airport, a high school, and a hospital) People need to move.

The problem is a tragedy of the commons. If you build a giant box in the Las Ramblas, you reap the benefits but worsen the neighborhood for others. If everyone does that, you have destroyed Las Ramblas.

I live next door to an AirBnB, in a building where maybe 1/5 of the flats have been converted to tourist flats. When I moved in 3 years ago there were zero.

I'm woken up by screaming drunk tourists as they come home at 3am on a Tuesday night. There are constantly people clattering suitcases up the stairs at all hours. People smoke inside the common areas instead of on the street. Of course, just generally feeling like you live in an illegal hotel is horrible. We're looking to move.

Then again, I have reservations for two AirBnBs next week on holiday in another part of the country. The difference is we have booked entire houses in the countryside, not city-centre flats. AirBnB is not inherently evil, but strict and enforced controls are definitely necessary in cities.

I love AirBnB as a customer, but hate it as a resident.

I, too, love externalities when other's bear the cost, and hate them when I bear the cost.

Which is true, but I think misses the point. It's not that AirBnB is in and of itself bad, but there are good and bad places to rent with respect to the neighborhood.

Consider something like the Outer Banks for North Carolina, where nearly all the homes are rented out for vacationers. There's an expectation and knowledge of what to expect from the neighborhood (for example, multi-hour delays on the weekends as move in/out happens).

That's a very different situation from buying a home in a neighborhood and then having every 3rd house turn into a hotel.

Heh. I am aware of the contradiction.

My point is not all AirBnB usage is equal.

So it should be okay for your use case but not others?

best comment.

Neighbours should have a hotline to Airbnb that they can call to report disruptive guests.

I've been thinking this for ages!

Makes me really angry when I think that the guests will receive great reviews from some faceless agency who never even interacted with them, whereas we as residents have to suffer for their behaviour.

Not sure if it's useful, but they have www.airbnb.com/neighbors

Yeah, I'm an AirBnB customer as well and I use it mostly for business travel because affordable hotels are usually located in the crappy parts of town, have nothing around them, and are generally not comfortable. In contrast I can book an AirBnB at 1 to 2 star rates and get a place that's within walking distance of coffee shops and running trails and stuff to do when I'm not working.

I generally don't stumble home drunk at 3 AM, but I sympathize with the neighbors of people who do.

To put it bluntly, I don't like competing with the entire rest of the world for housing in my city, and I'm pretty sure most other people don't either.

> my city

Your city? Interesting way to frame it. Maybe you were born where you currently live or maybe you moved there last year. Either way it doesn't really matter. Why do you feel the need to keep other people out of the city you currently live? The reasons that you live where you live are the same reasons other people want to live and visit. Why deny someone that ability to move or visit only because you got there somewhat earlier?

Residents get preferential price treatment to visitors because they provide societal stability. It's the same reason why state residents get preferential tuition pricing to out of state residents.

You give discounted state tuition because you don't want a state full of low-skilled dummies. You give residents an edge over tourists so you don't have a shortage of people to put out fires, cook food and remove garbage.

It's not hard.

I think it absolutely is hard. Almost everything in life is more complex than most people think. Even in-state vs out-of-state tuition. Kids don't have control over where their parents choose to raise them. Why should Kid A have to pay twice as much to get the same education as Kid B just because Kid A happened to live 3 miles on the other side of the state border? That can make you feel trapped, like you're stuck in whatever little hellhole you were born in (especially if you have non-supportive parents). I can understand why a resident discount makes sense, but at the same time, sometimes I feel like it should be backwards -- give out-of-state residents the discount -- just to encourage new young adults to get out of what they've known their whole life as "normal", and see that things don't have to be like they are. Move the example just a little bit to kids from Brownsville, TX vs kids from Matamoros, Mexico (also < 3 miles away), and tell me that the issue isn't hard.

To not be purely depressing, I'll present an example of something I think is a step in the right direction: At least some universities are good about giving out scholarships to low-income students that offset the difference between in/out-of-state tuition.

not hard as in to grasp the concept of why it should be that way.

Because I weigh my need to have a home higher than someone else's desire to be a tourist. I don't want my entire life subjugated to international market forces. Shocking doctrine, I'm sure.

Permanent long-time residents are what make a city what it is more often than not. Added to that, residents are contributing long-term to the local economy and paying taxes to a degree that temporary visitors are not.

On top of that: yes, his city. It's the problem with places like Hawaii where the locals who have been there for generations get told they have to eat shit because rich haoles can afford to buy up or rent all the land. I feel it's way less fair not to give preferential treatment to long-time multi-generational residents, just because a bunch of tech nerd mercenaries have no concept of laying down roots somewhere.

Assuming you live in the US (SF?) The American story is a story of migrants, whether from other countries or within the nation itself. People move for opportunity (though this is decreasing as the costs have gone up dramatically in the last decade)

Nobody owns the city, the city is a result of the people who live there at any given time. Renters and tourists pay plenty of taxes too, and they aren't riding the real estate lottery wave due to permanent long-time residents fucking everyone else over with zoning rules that are making the prices go insane.

Because of taxes. OP likely has been paying taxes all his life, his parents likely paying taxes all their life, and so on... in a way, the city belongs more to the OP than not.

You don't think tourists pay a ton in taxes? I live in one of these cities and there are a ton of taxes that are geared towards tourists. In many way locals benefit with lower taxes because of all of the tourist income.

We’d have to look at numbers to argue this objectively, but I highly doubt that a tourist spending 1-2 weeks a year in a city will yield more revenue to the local government than a resident living there 365 days a year.

That's a strange comparison to make. I highly doubt that the resident yields more revenue over that 1-2 week period than the tourist, or that the resident yields more revenue over a year than a year's worth of tourists.

This is the heart of the matter. it is also the heart of globalisation and the very heart of the internet - we should be very aware of the massive social dislocation caused by the globalisation of the food industry in 1870s following the first wave of refrigeration (ice in atlantic ships)

Globalization has nothing to do with this. The problem is that AirBnB reduces an already-tight housing supply by turning homes into hotels. This would be an problem regardless of whether the tourists were international or domestic.

Kinda ... globalisation is just a term for some change in the equilibrium in neighbouring markets that allow participants in one to take part in both. Could be transport costs, could be information changes.

I was thinking tourists == international, but the analysis and the name still is fair i think

Plus to be fair, America is a continent that thinks it's a country so ideas of international tourism are flexible ...

> it is also the heart of globalisation and the very heart of the internet

Except that real estate is intrinsically a geographic issue. Manufacturing and distribution aren't.

Distribution only exists because geography is a thing.

They used to be.

Ok. So does that change the argument in any way? Or are you just being pedantic.

[edit: yeah i'm being dumb. i felt the discussion was being derailed, but thats no reason to yell at strangers on the internet.]

Friend, why are you being so combative?

Maybe I'm just in a bad mood. I'm sorry for being a jerk today.

:ok_hand: been there

If you're taking ownership of the city, you also kinda have to take responsibility for the city's mismanagement of housing supply.

I still use airbnb when travelling because it's convenient but when I'm not travelling I can't stand it at all. (I do realize that I'm contributing to the issue by being a customer myself.)

Airbnb is probably one of the worst things that has happened to many places that were already tourism heavy. The bit of regulation that made stuff work somewhat was completely subverted by it and because of how quickly it became popular it's now almost impossible to put the genie back into the bottle as there are too many vested interests now.

Overall I can't get rid of the feeling that Airbnb is here to stay and it permanently made the world a worse place.

The legal side of AirBnB is bad enough, but you couple that with their shady practices and the outright illegal stuff that goes on and AirBnB as a whole is a plague. I've heard there are smaller alternatives that work fantastic, I don't know them by heart though.

It seems like there is a perfectly reasonable middle ground here — where households have the flexibility to rent out part of their primary residence, on a limited basis (either temporal or just part of the house), subject to clear and evenly enforced regulations. This is a pre-internet idea (e.g., casas particulares in Cuba in the 1990s) that becomes way easier/safer/better with a web-based platform. Personally, I find it massively more fun to stay in a typical home in a region that I'm visiting, and I can often find these on AirBnB.

Of course AirBnB is going to try to grow as much as possible to try to eat hotel revenues and develop new markets. But shouldn't communities have the right to combat the externalities that such growth entails?

The line to draw seems pretty clear. If you're renting out a portion of your primary residence (or a subunit of your primary residence like a basement apartment or guest house) then that's fine.

If there is no permanent resident in the dwelling and it's being managed by a 3rd party, it's a hotel and should be subject to all the regulations other hotels are.

Building codes already have a delineation for these different types of properties.

I suspect that partial apartment rentals are far less disruptive. It's full apartment rents that are causing issues.

I think this also comes back to over tourism. Travel is the new materialism. It used to be you kept up with the Jones by buying new cars, new jewellery, new houses. Now it's by going away, frequently and to the most exotic places, to prove how open minded and wordly you are. And it's killing the planet and many local communities. There will be a backlash eventually.

A lot of tourism is also cheaper because of cheap airfares/lowish fuel prices. Probably Airbnb can also make traveling a bit cheaper for those who use it. Economies of many of the countries in which and from which people travel a lot are fairly strong.

>Travel is the new materialism.

Maybe? I know there is the whole experiences over things mantra. Maybe that's in play. On the other hand, maybe there's less interest in big McMansions but the apartment/condo in a lot of major cities is--as can be seen in other comments--pretty expensive by historical patterns. If tourism were down instead, we'd be hearing arguments that young people who have fewer other obligations aren't traveling because they have no money.

In any case, I have trouble seeing tourism as a particular source of the world's problems.

"Travel is the new materialism."

I wanna argue with this -- I think some portion of the population has a deep-seated psychological personal need to travel for their own internal well-being rather than to perform travel for an audience as a status symbol. But I think there's a pretty strong case that especially with the rise of social media, travel's become much more tightly linked with attention and status.

But travel is relatively new idea to much of the population. We don't realise how little folk used to travel because those who did travel are disproportionately famous.

That's the NYC law, dating to pre-AirBnB times but now with new relevance. It distinguishes 'taking in a boarder' from 'subletting the apartment'. If you occupy the unit as your primary residence, you're allowed to take in boarders, defined as people with whom you intend to share the common spaces. So renting out a room in your apartment is fine (as long as you don't do some weird partitioning to make it de-facto a separate unit... you're supposed to be essentially welcoming a guest into your own household, even if it's a paid guest). But you can't do a whole-apartment sublet for periods shorter than 30 days.

The biggest difficulty here is enforcement. You can create laws based around how frequently a residence is rented or whether it's the full residence rented or merely part of the residence but then you need to actually enforce those laws. Is enforcement based around income taxes from the renter? Or reporting from Airbnb itself of what's available on the site? Do local governments have to setup a small team or even an entire agency to watch this stuff? Cities need to budget for this enforcement. This stuff is hard.

Even if every popular tourist city immediately passed legislation to limit Airbnb practices it could be years or decades before they figure out the details of making that policy into reality.

Berlin will be the testing ground here - the exact limitations you describe in your comment are imposed right now in Berlin. Whether or not AirBnB succeeds under these regulations will reveal how such a model will fare in other jurisdictions.

Here is where the rubber of “corporate responsibility” meets the road. So far AB&B has looked askance to the issues they bring to the table and have only taken token steps to mitigate what they have wrought on communities. They talk the talk all day long about inclusivity, implicit bias and any other terms du jour to shirk from confronting the gigantic mastodon in the room —the one sided effects their services have on lower and middle income shoppers of housing. Yet, where it matters, they fail to walk the walk.

Their inaction and continued ignorance of these issues does magnitudes more harm than their progressive efforts in their corp HQ which benefits very few people in comparison.

This is where the bullshit 'making the world a better place' philosophy of Silicon Valley is lacking. Their morals and guiding principles are fucking garbage. Facebook asserts that 'connecting people' is somehow an unambiguously good thing. I'd argue that in its ideal form, social media is neither good nor bad. In practice it's actually an attack vector for those who are willing to sow discord. Facebook will never be able overcome its problems until they decide they want to be a force of good in the world where good is defined by some actual values that are aren't bullshit.

Same goes for AirBnB. They act as if they're providing some sort of amazing benefit to society when in reality, the negatives are felt by far more people than those who take advantage of their service. It doesn't withstand much scrutiny.

How about Uber? Despite what Uber might lead you to believe, it wasn't really necessary in NYC if you were smart enough to know to call a car service if there were no taxis in your area. Now that Uber has come along, all of the old car service drivers are forced to use Uber and taxi drivers are feeling such intense pressure that they are suicidal. Honestly I didn't mind waiting an extra 5-10 minutes for a cab. Now I can't find taxis in my neighborhood because Uber has taken over. So we have the same people doing the same job but are being paid less because Uber's cut is higher. And the benefit to me is that I don't have to talk to a person and might get home 5 minutes sooner? So for me, it's basically a wash, for the cab drivers it's a negative.

What's really sickening is that we've let them get away with it this long. We were so enamored with all of these new technologies we never stopped to consider if all the 'disruption' was actually going to be a net positive instead of a reorganization of existing power structures.

Is Facebook responsible for people using it to browse their highschool sweetheart's page, and using messenger to try to cheat on their spouse? Is Tinder responsible for an increase in STDs, infidelity, or date-rapes that occur? Is Zillow responsible for someone finding a house that was foreclosed on because somebody got sick and couldn't afford to make their mortgage payments?

AirBnB lets you find available short-term housing on their platform, that's all it does. Any complexity that arises around that, as far as I'm concerned, has nothing to do with AirBnB, and everything to do with local governance (if you have a problem with it).

Housing markets are based off of supply and demand, like most things. If AirBnB suddenly alters the nature of what is supplied, why does that matter? The demand in a given location is based off of so many factors to begin with, should we become upset with everything that changes the nature of the housing market? What happens if there is a neighborhood that is completely crime-ridden, and new police station is added right outside. Suddenly the crime goes down, and the housing prices in that neighborhood increase substantially as it becomes safer to live in. Whose fault is it that the people who were living there when it was highly unsafe can no longer afford to pay rent? Is it the police station's fault? Is it the new tenants'? The landlords'?

I just can't understand why people are so averse to letting situations play themselves out. SV, for example, is refusing to allow new construction due to zoning laws, and all of the jobs that drew people here are no longer enough to counterbalance the monumental cost in living...so people are leaving. Natural equilibriums exist. What happens when an area becomes so oversaturated with tourists that it no longer retains what made it desirable? Japanese tourism in Paris has dropped 42% in the last few years. What happens when the lack of supply for regular housing makes it so difficult to find local housing, people working normal service jobs have to travel increasingly far to work in the area? The rates to do those jobs begin to increase, as they become less desirable, and the area becomes less desirable to visit as everything gets more expensive. Those people become more capable of moving back to the area as their rates have gone up, etc.

This need for platforms to take responsibility for everything that happens as a result of the transactions they allow individuals to make with each other is so unbelievably misguided. There isn't always a boogeyman.

> AirBnB lets you find available short-term housing on their platform, that's all it does. Any complexity that arises around that, as far as I'm concerned, has nothing to do with AirBnB, and everything to do with local governance (if you have a problem with it).

As far as I know AirBnB is allowing people in NYC to rent apartments for less than 30 days. Not only are they allowing this to happen they are the ones completing the transaction and profiting from it. This is against NYC law and has been around since AirBnB was founded. To make matter worse when residents are fined for breaking the law they are the ones paying the fine without AirBnB losing money. We all know AirBnb could follow local laws everywhere and not allow any of the activity to happen on their platform. If they can change local governance then good for them but they are clearly involved.

> I just can't understand why people are so averse to letting situations play themselves out.

If you are getting evicted by your landlord so he can turn your apartment into an illgal hotel, you do not have the luxury to let things play out. You have to find new housing immediately or become homeless.

Most people, especially those who are poor, live life on a more day to day basis. Your home is connected to your community: the friends who support you, the extended family who provide free child care, or the elderly and infirm members of your community whom you check up on. Being driven out of your home through no fault of your own, so that your landlord can run what amounts to an illegal hotel no less, is a crisis, not something to play wait and see on.

It's true that we will reach equilibrium in the long term, but to quote John Maynard Keynes, "In the long run we are all dead."

Airbnb is a zero sum game - what tourists win, locals lose.

Two of my coworkers are currently being forced to look for a new place to live in a tight housing market because their current landlord can make more money renting on Airbnb.

I've stayed in Airbnbs in the past (and appreciated the convenience), but I no longer will.

Airbnb is a zero sum game - what tourists win, locals lose.

I think you mean that "zoning is a zero-sum game." Since the 1970s, when zoning became more severe and restrictive, housing costs have increased substantially: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/12/27/why-did-cities-freeze-in-.... We know how to create a positive-sum game: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-14/californi..., but we've made doing so illegal.

You do know that Airbnb exists outside of California as well right?

I live here in downtown TO, and while we have a shortage of condo's, our condo has quiet a lot of Airbnb units. 1) This reduces number of units available for rent in the market, thus driving the price of available units up. 2) Creates a fucking terrible living conditions for people who actually live in the building. There was a long weekend where Airbnb guests literally broke elevator button because they couldn't get to their floor without their fobs. They throw garbage in the lobby, are loud af till 3-4am.

Same here,

The reason being that two youngsters, who illegally subletted their temporary lease, deemed it a great idea to run an illegal hotel.

It's a massive impact for the quality of life for the neighbours.

It's not zero sum unless the housing supply is fixed - the additional income from Airbnb can be invested in new housing.

But that additional housing can also destroy the character of existing areas. That doesn't mean we don't build, just that it has to be considered, which is harder to do when demand is increasing too quickly.

Sounds like preserving character is the real zero sum problem then.

Complaining about both the rapidly increasing housing prices as well as the loss of character in developed areas doesn't have any cognitive dissonance at all, though.

It's a balance, one that AirBnB is making far more difficult to maintain.

In Norway despite rising Airbnb hotel revenues increased. On a recent conference I talked with PhD students and they told me that without AirBnb they would not attend as travel expenses would be outside their travel budget.

Just having a meal in Norway blew up my travel budget ;)

>Two of my coworkers are currently being forced to look for a new place to live in a tight housing market because their current landlord can make more money renting on Airbnb

Isnt this economics? Travelers are moving money to your location. Your coworkers wont pay the increased rate, but travelers will.

Why are travelers looked down upon? New ideas, patronage in the city, and creating relations around the world.

Local homeowners win. Property values rise and you have the option of monetizing your house.

One impact of AirBnb is that it lowers the threshold for traveler affordability. Couple it with discount air carriers such as RyanAir or Southwest and the number of humans who can afford to travel increases dramatically.

For example, a quick survey of Chicago shows:

On TripAdvisor: 8 hotels with rooms under $100/night. Lowest room $79.

On AirBnb: 100+ listings, entire place, under $100/night. Many under $50.

In this way, AirBnb is an enabler for travel.

Moreover, you don't even need to look at discount airlines. British Air had a round trip from San Francisco to Milan for $650. AirBnb in Milan, entire apartment, start at around $30/night. Suddenly, 10 days in Milan can be had for under $1,500.

Economists might see the future for this situation: More air travel leads to cheaper fares. Cheaper fares leads to still more travelers. More travelers on cheap fares means more demand for AirBnb style housing. AirBnb prices get some upward pressure from added demand, bringing more units into the market. More landlords convert from long to short-term rental. Fewer long term rental means lower supply of long term and higher rents. Higher rents mean more people choose to buy, increasing demand for owned homes.

What it all adds up to: Without increasing the number of humans on the planet, you've increased housing prices by making travel more affordable.

/s Maybe we make the following rule: In order to rent an AirBnb, you have to AirBnb your home while you're gone. s/

AirBNB restrictions should be based on housing vacancy rates. In areas where either through poor zoning or historical preservation there is a restricted supply of housing AirBNB should be strictly limited.

However, if vacancy rates are high enough AirBNB acts as a nice pressure valve distributing residential and vacation occupancy without the expense of having to overbuild hotels.

What if the vacancy rates are due to untenable rent prices? I could see vacancy being artificially created this way.

If vacancy rates are high enough they create downward pressure on rent.

Yes, assuming AirBnb isn't more profitable than decreasing prices.

That may happen in a vanishingly small subset of instances, perhaps in developing economies where the housing stock of a desirable destination hadn't already been augmented by dedicated hotel space—since visitors would be so profitable. My guess it that any situation like that would be relatively short term, but could be handled with special case moratoriums.

Maybe I'm missing something but I have a hard time thinking of a situation where this would be anything other than a short term issue.

Rather than blaming the company Airbnb for a city’s ills, it may be more helpful to examine why it has popular support in the first place, while family-only zoning is declining in popularity. Short-term rentals in residences were already illegal in San Francisco and New York; they were legalized to allow Airbnb because short-term rentals have popular support from voters. Single-family zoning was designed 100 years ago to create neighborhoods of families who were protected from the nuisances of the lower-class apartment “parasite”s (Euclid v. Ambler) and lower-class houses that were used to raise chickens and take on boarders (https://www.citylab.com/equity/2013/07/it-time-bring-back-bo... or https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Government-Undermi...). I think exclusionary zoning has been so extreme in some cities that it is beginning to lose its support among the middle class, for whom it is now more necessary to use their property as a business rather than only as consumption.

Edit: Related point: In some places, it is ingrained in our culture since the 1970s that housing should be a good investment. Low property taxes (Proposition 13) and zoning restrictions are designed to increase the private gains to this investment (https://www.amazon.com/Homevoter-Hypothesis-Influence-Govern...). A small change of use to short-term rentals is perhaps the next incremental step for house investors. It sucks for people who want to use housing as only a peaceful consumption good, but in my opinion that ship sailed a long time ago in Closed-Access cities.

> My research has found as many as 90% of Airbnb guests have said they were "satisfied" or "very satisfied" with their stays.

For a perspective on the other 10%... checkout:

https://airbnbhell.com

Maybe locals would be more supportive of Airbnb if cities made deals with other cities saying 'your residents can stay in our units on a short term basis if ours can stay in yours'.

People from boring/small towns and cities would be left out of this though, since their demand to visit tourist destinations would exceed the outside demand to visit their area.

The result would be the residents of larger/more-attractive cities, who are free to stay in other major cities, seeing their advantage over the rest of the population grow, which in turn could lead to more people choosing to move to these cities.

I agree that AirBNB is enabling (and profiting from) this behaviour but what is essentially happening is people using AirBNB to turn on their own neighbours.

Have there been any government initiatives to educate AirBNB hosts about the impact of their actions?

The apartment vacancy rate in Vancouver is presently sub 1%.

People are illegally renting suites as Airbnb, taking up domestic housing stock.

It's illegal to rent suites for less than 31 days and without a business licence here, but they do it anyways.

Are any of those occupied by locals for whom it's the best housing they can find?

There are a great many of these that are 1BD/650 sq ft size condos and apartments that would otherwise be occupied by locals, at market rental rate for standard 12-month lease terms. But the owners of the condos are renting them out on AirBNB.

Or people are renting apartments for $1700/mo from absentee owners, and then illegally subletting them for less than 30-day terms on AirBNB and running the sublet as a business.

Levy taxes on the rentals.

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