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Comment by massivecali | Hacker News Reader

The same could be said for all foreign realestate investment where homes sit empty. (Granted that could be solved by a vacancy tax.)

But people already buy places and rent them out as income property. This puts a burden on renters and increases the incentives for builders to only construct larger apartments and homes. It raises the price for everyone and poor single people suffer the most.

Im not following how airbnb is worse than individuals who have profited off the community and neighbors since forever?

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Because renting != hotel. There is a huge different between how a tourist treats a building/apartment/neighborhood and a resident does. There are many good reasons why hotels have regulations. Mini-hotel platforms are not subject to the same things.

All of the laws regarding noise, littering, loitering, smoking, etc. don't magically vanish. You have the same recourse against a renter as you would a tourist.

> All of the laws regarding noise, littering, loitering, smoking, etc. don't magically vanish.

The guests do, though, which means when you call the cops again next week, it's a new person getting their first noise warning.

So these apartments and condos don't have rules where you just complain to management and they kick you (the leaseholder) out?

Plenty of landlords won't want to do battle with the lucrative tenants who've rented out half the building and always pay on time.

Nor do they really want to do all that work - evictions cost money, and are hard! - just to have another AirBnBer sign the replacement lease.

Simply not true, at all.

If only there were some way, a technology, even, of increasing the total number of units on a given plot of land, such that those who want to live in a city or visit a city wouldn't have to compete so vigorously for livable housing units.

Alas, we can only dream that such a technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_frame

Is your argument that tall buildings are not built in NYC?

They obviously are, but there are still not nearly enough. If you walk through lower manhattan you see innumerable 3 and 4 story buildings.

The interesting thing about AirBnb is not in the raw space consumption, but that it's driven down the cost of hotel rooms by changing what "hotel" means.

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