Comment by wdewind | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wdewind | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com