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.
Why are there so few of these places?
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.
https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
Last posted on HN 2 months ago:
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.
Building more places for these tourists to stay isn't going to solve the problem of having too many tourists in a city.
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.)
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.
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.
is not the same as housing.
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.
Why not do both?