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Comment by ilikehurdles | Hacker News Reader

Property owners are responsible for the housing crisis. The city is at their whim.

But that’s beside the point, because this is a case about an unlicensed Airbnb. I don’t know what the laws are where you come from, but someone illegally turning their multi-tenant property in a residential neighborhood into a 24-hour motel isn’t someone I have any sympathy for.

Besides, Airbnb is no answer to the dearth of housing in any city. The lawyer is spouting facts. Those are 45 units that would be going to people who would live or work in SF and instead are used to price gouge visitors (relative to the going rent/mortgage rates) who want to save $50 on a hotel room.

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> Property owners are responsible for the housing crisis. The city is at their whim.

I don't know. Maybe this is just differing philosophies of government, but when I object to the government exercising an authority that only it has, I consider that to be directly a problem with government. Obviously it's useful to look into who else influences the government's decisions, but the direct problem is the exercise of power.

The local government is the will of the collective group of people who are governed by it. Maybe you're the home owner who would love to have your home demolished and replaced with a high rise, but the fact that you can't means your community doesn't want to be subject to that, and they've exercised that will through the legal framework where you, too, have a voice (albeit an outnumbered one). We trade authority to the government for it to stop you with legal means so that your neighbors don't stop you with clubs and pitchforks.

> The local government is the will of the collective group of people who are governed by it.

Perhaps it should be. That certainly doesn't mean that it is. Do the people of Flint want their water crisis?

> The local government is the will of the collective group of people who are governed by it.

That's awfully idealistic! Sure, it would be nice if that were true, as a pure expression of democracy, but I've never seen a real-world government which actually met that standard.

>gouge visitors

>save $50 on a hotel

how the hell can you simultaneously be gouged and save money?

what makes the long term resident more deserving than the short term visitor? why should the rootless pay a subsidy to the rooted?

I mean, that's a fairly easy question to answer.

The rooted pay taxes, provide stability to a neighborhood, and are invested in the upkeep of their properties.

They also tend to be better neighbors than a constant flow of random people who may not care whether they make noise, or disturb others.

I certainly would be incredibly peeved if I paid a million dollars for a unit and then the person down the hall turned their apartment into a miniature hotel and had random people coming in and out at all times of the day that I'd never seen before.

Beyond that, these units drive up rental prices, and avoid luxury taxes which can benefit locals to enrich the owners of AirBnB.

Visitors spend far more per day than long-term residents. I think there's a high likelihood that their overall contribution to the taxbase greatly exceeds the long-term residents per day of occupancy.

In other words, there's good reason to suspect that having a unit rented out to a succession of short term residents will produce more tax revenue for the city than having it occupied by one long-term resident.

As for stability, I don't think we're in any danger of destabilizing major cities from lack of long-term residents.

>>certainly would be incredibly peeved if I paid a million dollars for a unit and then the person down the hall turned their apartment into a miniature hotel

This should be decided by the contract you signed with your condo association when you purchased the property, not an arbitrary intervention in private contracts and property by the city.

Also, would it make any difference to you if the steady rotation of guests were not paying? If not, why not make the rule focused on the problematic condition, which is a large number of different people visiting/staying, rather than whether there was financial compensation?

It wouldn't matter if it was the condo across the hall or the house across the street. Just because you own a piece of property doesn't give you the right to do anything you want with it.

That's why we don't allow strip clubs next to schools. Because certain things should be in certain places and not others.

In this case, the people have stated by voting in representatives who've appointed officials who've created zoning laws that they don't want short term leasing without a permit in their residential neighborhoods.

And those tourists tend to contribute more to city coffers when they're not actively dodging things like luxury taxes.

Asking silly hypotheticals about people operating hotels for no monetary gain doesn't help your argument.

It's poor exercise of government power to prohibit a money-making operation, as a way to stop a subset of that money-making operation that has harmful effects. Better to target the harmful activity directly.

>>And those tourists tend to contribute more to city coffers when they're not actively dodging things like luxury taxes.

That's a different topic. My point was that there's no good reason to assume long term residents contribute more to the tax base, given how much more tourists spend per day of occupancy.

But to your point: who said Airbnb means dodging luxury taxes? And why ignore the loss in tourism when you wipe out the low-cost accommodations market provided by home-sharing?

>>Asking silly hypotheticals about people operating hotels for no monetary gain doesn't help your argument.

Remuneration from paying guests is not the only potential motivation for allowing a large number of people to stay at one's place in quick succession. The motivation should not be relevant if the problem is the quantity of people staying. Targeting remnunerated stays exclusively is biased.

When you bought a residential property, you agreed to operate it within certain levels of upkeep, within residential zoning ordinances, adhering to a list of rules the city imposes on you. You didn't settle a piece of land on some unclaimed frontier, and you don't get to change the rules your building, neighborhood, community, city, state, or country imposes on your property just because you don't like them. If you wanted to operate a hotel, buy property zoned for that purpose.

Good point. There is a case that house-use restrictions are consistent with voluntaryism given land is not man-made movable property. The community at large could reasonably argue it has a greater right to govern immovable natural property than the first person to homestead it, given the latter is not an act of creation the way the genesis of other types of private property is.

Anyway aside from the larger political question, I think it's more practical to leave these decisions to individual condo associations. No need to homogenize policy in a diverse landscape.

Either they're being price gouged or they're saving $50 on a hotel room. You can't have it both ways.

The hotels can gouge them harder, or the hotels can be worth the $50 price, etc

> Property owners are responsible for the housing crisis. The city is at their whim.

If a government wants your land & they have the cash to pay for it according to some calculation, they can force you to sell via eminent domain. [1] A property owner that pisses off the government may not be a property owner indefinitely.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain

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