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> ...as a country real estate provides a huge amount of our economic backbone.

I could do without the economy depending on real estate being a good investment.

Well, real estate is a very close proxy for "this place is worth living" which is a very close proxy for absolute population which isn't a direct proxy but is certainly a deeply contributing factor to all around economic growth/success. So while there are tons of policies we can tweak, and I'm sure there are horrible ones that create artificial bubbles, it's not really fully divorceable for the economy.

> Well, real estate is a very close proxy for "this place is worth living" which is a very close proxy for absolute population which isn't a direct proxy but is certainly a deeply contributing factor to all around economic growth/success.

When the government is primarily working on the numbers (real estate values, tax revenues from real estate) there's a perverse incentive to maximize the numbers rather than serving the needs of the entire population. SF is a great example of this--the real estate market is a disaster for the middle class, but it's fantastic for the landowners and the city. Indeed, it's in the interests of both of those aforementioned parties to drive out the middle class from the region and replace them with more wealthy buyers. The whole system depends on this happening or it risks collapse.

That day will never come - at least not without blood in the streets - because we've painted ourselves into a corner.

Money is created via bank loans. The largest bucket of loans in the US is mortgage debt -- and it's worth trillions more than any other type.

Should this source of newly minted dollars dry up, the US could very quickly fall into a liquidity crisis.

So, yeah, it's easy to shake our fists at high housing costs -- but what most people don't realize is that almost every dollar you've ever touched or earned was born in some other person's mortgage.

What about quantitative easing? I don't think those dollars were born in a mortgage.

Systems that depend on infinite population growth seem like a bad idea. Mayors of cities who constantly need to grow their population base to prop up housing prices, all the way up to countries who constantly need to grow their population base to prop up entitlements ponzis. At some point, you end up with an unstable system that will fail catastrophically. While you wait for that time, the average quality of life decreases incrementally for all (till the collapse, when the quality of life may collapse all the way to death for many).

Non-debt based monetary systems (gold, bitcoin, etc) will result in slower growth, since developers and governments will need to wait until they can attract enough saved capital to start their projects. This is why people turn up their noses at these systems. But is slower growth really such a bad thing?

> But is slower growth really such a bad thing?

Yes and no. But it doesn't matter, since countries are competing with each other. If one decides to forgo growth, it'll lose politically and economically against those who didn't.

I agree. It has to be obvious to those in charge that this debt bubble that every single country is blowing cannot continue to grow forever, yet no country has succeeded in halting or even slowing their debt growth.

They're trapped, as you say, by each other. None can get off the ride before the others do. They will all need to fail together in a worldwide economic collapse, or agree unilaterally on some sort of global debt reset.

But that's not how grownups should run a planet, and it will doubtless lead to a lot of human death. It's already lead to uncontrolled growth that has damaged ecologies, fisheries, and aquifers for thousands of years to come.

like allowing people to look up addresses and file complaints without being a customer

Complain to who, and for what purpose?

If your neighbor is breaking the law or violating the terms of their lease, complain to the city or to the property owner. Why are you dragging this platform into it?

I don't really want to live in a world where anyone on the internet can destroy my income via anonymous complaint. That seems really ripe for abuse.

For the same reason we drag YouTube into copyright complaints. You're correct in identifying that there needs to be some kind of fair balance here, but AirBnB makes a lot of business facilitating illegal transactions. I don't really think there are apartments in New York City in which running AirBnB is legal, for instance, and yet NYC is one of their biggest markets. But yes, they also have legitimate, legal business. The trick is it is very difficult for landlords to monitor their properties for this kind of behavior, and also difficult to enforce action against it (getting proof can be extremely difficult, for instance).

Because much of AirBnB's business is flat out illegal due to zoning, property laws, HoAs and leases, I think requiring them to provide a better system for accepting accountability for the negative externalities they create is reasonable.

> I don't really want to live in a world where anyone on the internet can destroy my income via anonymous complaint.

That's not at all what I'm suggesting. I'm suggesting an easy way for landlords and others to determine if a property they own or one near them is being listed on AirBnB. After that there are a ton of avenues for justice one could take, and it would probably include, along with government/HoA response, a procedure for forcing AirBnB to take down the listing given proof of ownership or something, similar to DMCA, but this is not an unsolvable problem by any means. It's one AirBnB is choosing not to solve because it would destroy their business.

You drag youtube with the DCMA because you don't know the location or person who did the 'upload', so the complaint has to start with the upload spot. The infringing object is also on youtube itself.

With residences you know exactly where it is, ownership is in a very well maintained database and it's not going anywhere. The infringing behavior isn't occurring on airbnb, but in reality.

Complain to your city / HOA, let some sort of due process happen and then have the city / HOA fine the homeowner out of existence until they comply. Expecting airbnb & other tech companies to act like government is not something you want to become a standard practice, because you lose your say in how that gov't works.

It's like forcing newspapers to remove classifieds because people are advertising stuff you don't like.

I agree with you that I think we need to be careful about asking corporations to be legislative authorities. I'd say this is very similar to the Backpage scandal in which employees were beyond reasonably turning a blind eye to very illegal, preventable behavior happening on their platform. Why not just allow people to involve the authorities in that situation as well?

What I'm proposing seems extremely reasonable considering AirBnB is, at least in NYC and other major metro areas, primarily used for breaking the law.

Here's the thing I think most people are missing: almost every state, city, municipality etc. in existing has laws against short term rentals. The reason for this is very clear because the issues have already been considered at the civic level. There's no reason to think that just because a platform emerged that makes this illegal behavior easier that the behavior has changed. Zoning exists for a reason. People don't want short term rentals. As far as I can tell the vast majority of AirBnB's business is illegal.

This is different from YouTube in that there is a very large legitimate use for YouTube. There is a legitimate use for AirBnB, it's just not $38B large. Asking them to make enforcement easier for externalities seems like a very reasonable alternative to heavy handed government regulation (ie: requiring short term rentals to be registered with cities, which is what cities are doing now to respond to AirBnB's lack of self-policing).

> Zoning exists for a reason. People don't want short term rentals

Zoning exists to separate industry from residential and also to separate middle-class households (people who can afford to use their home only for consumption, whose only animals are pets and whose only crop is grass) from the working-class (people who made income on their home by taking in boarders, growing chickens, doing home businesses, etc.) Middle-class zoning banned these working-class activities (see https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Government-Undermi...). I think it’s really tricky to separate who is harming whom in the modern day when houses are seen as an investment and there is insufficient zoning for working-class people, and where the norms of what a house is for may be changing.

Yep, I agree with a lot of your criticisms, but there are a lot of legitimate reasons to not want to live next to a hotel (or farm animals) that aren't about keeping poor people down.

Newspapers actually are forced to take reasonable steps to avoid allowing ads for illegal activity, and owners have been jailed for it. So if making Airbnb police their listings would be like making newspapers police their classifieds, it seems obvious that they should be required to do so. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/top-offic...

Having businesses help people comply with existing laws is not at all uncommon. Ever notice that retail collects sales tax on your behalf when you buy something?

There is a really easy way for landlords to find out if their property is available on AirBnB or similar services. Just search for the address.

No. You can't search for exact addresses, it will just show you available listings in the area. In my area, New York City, when I search my address I get hundreds of results. Beyond this there is the additional complicating factor of current availability. If it's only on AirBnB occasionally, no longer on AirBnB, or booked, it wouldn't appear using this method.

If I search my address, it puts a pin on the map exactly where my address is. I can then look for addresses that are very close to the pin. As far as I know, those locations are pretty accurate.

If you don't include a date in your search, I'm not sure why availability would be an issue. If it's no longer on AirBnB, then I'm not really sure what the problem is.

Can you add and remove listings from the search, while still keeping your ratings?

> If I search my address, it puts a pin on the map exactly where my address is. I can then look for addresses that are very close to the pin. As far as I know, those locations are pretty accurate.

In my experience they are often off by multiple blocks. YMMV.

> If you don't include a date in your search, I'm not sure why availability would be an issue. If it's no longer on AirBnB, then I'm not really sure what the problem is.

One problem is, for instance, if you are a landlord/neighbor who is trying to prove that your tenant/neighbor broke the lease agreement.

> Can you add and remove listings from the search, while still keeping your ratings?

Yes.

Beyond all of this, it's a somewhat laborious process even if it did fully work the way you described, and for a landlord who owns many properties monitoring could be a significant expense. This is the definition of a negative externality.

Maybe we should build a tool that makes this easier for landlords.

Really? When I search for my own address, I can recognize that the properties which show up are generally shown on the map approximately 1 block from their actual location. Since addresses are not actually shown for each property, if I were trying to check whether my apartment was listed, I would have to look through all the units available within about a block of the apartment's actual location, and be able to identify it from pictures of the interior, which may be very similar to the interior of other apartments in the building. It doesn't seem 'really easy' and is definitely not intended to work that way.

>>>I don't really want to live in a world where anyone on the internet can destroy my income via anonymous complaint. That seems really ripe for abuse.<<<

You already live in this world, because Yelp exists.

Additionally, no one is saying the complaints have to be anonymous, just that one should not need to be a registered user of Airbnb. It’s an important distinction.

> If your neighbor is breaking the law or violating the terms of their lease, complain to the city or to the property owner. Why are you dragging this platform into it?

So maybe the right solution is simply calling the police?

Occasional reminder that AirBnB was originally "growth-hacked" with a campaign of deceiptful and TOS-violating Craiglist spam, and your forum host and YC founder specifically looks to fund for founders who break rules (including laws) "that don't matter" (to the rulebreaker), on the advice of YC's current president.

If you succeeded, your underhanded tactics suddenly get re-framed in the press as fearless audacity and keen business acumen. If you failed, your underhanded tactics become a cautionary tale, and a reminder of why it<s important to remain ethical in business.

I would be interested in collating a list of these sort of issues (Which laws were broken by which branch of Uber etc?)

has anyone made a start?

I actually started to do something similar to this when Uber was Lobbying the state legislature of Texas[1] to preempt Austin's goals of regulating background checks and fingerprinting drivers, but never really kept up with it.

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[1] https://www.theregreview.org/2018/06/28/schriever-uber-lyft-...

Celebrating? HN is extremely anti-Airbnb.

Not really clear on your tone, but HN exists as a tech forum because it is developed and hosted by Y Combinator, which funded Airbnb in a seed round (which I believe they still have, and assume is substantially valuable). So there is the probably more of a complicated community dynamic than "HN is extremely anti-Airbnb"

To that same point, Airbnb investors include pretty much everyone who have also invested in other startup darlings: Sequoia, A16Z, Crunchfund, Google, Founders Fund, Greylock, SV Angel, General Catalyst, KPCB

Clearly, based on the comments on this article, that isn't remotely true.

As someone who lives in a city with one of the most severe rental crisis in the world, with a 3:1 ratio of Airbnb properties to rental properties: I earnestly hope they go bankrupt tomorrow and their founders are tried as accomplices to the violations of local law they facilitate.

* https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/nov/29/empty-dublin-...

wdewind was presumably talking about Fast Company, who are most certainly celebrating them.

Maybe, but AirBnB has also been held up as a positive story of tenacity and disruption in this community as well. It's probably gone on so long it's become a parody of itself, but people keep writing these articles because people keep reading them.

I also noticed they're talking about these new dwellings being smart/connected. I told my roommate if he ever got an Amazon Echo/Google Home device, I'd shatter it with a hammer and throw it in the trash.

Sears sold kit homes at the turn of the century (which arrived in train box cars and took 3 ~ 6 months to assemble), some which are still around today. I'd rather have something like that, which people can put together, without AirBNB doing a Google/Facebook style collection operation (I'm pretty sure they'll collect data they can sell to reduce the costs and gain a long tail profit).