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Comment by frontloadpro | Hacker News Reader

Edit, it was shut down because my local area has a rule against bed and breakfasts that aren't located on a main road.

Our Airbnb got shut down after a year by the local government. It wasn't a safety thing, it was a competition thing. Our Red Roof Inn charges 60 a night, but we charged 80 a night.

Our reviews could make me tear up. People saying they had the best stay of their life.

Asking them what they wanted for breakfast, hot tub temp, Nerf guns, and chatting. People loved it.

But we stopped. Government....

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There are many cities in Europe where AirBnB and similar services are a plague for locals. I'm sure it's great for tourists though.

First we couldn't buy and we were forced to rent because wealthy folks would buy the real estate in bulk to rent it and/or use it as a speculative investment, driving prices up and making it unafordable. Now they don't even bother to rent it long-term to locals, they're better off putting it on AirBnB for tourists at a much higher rate. Try renting a flat long-term in Lisbon these days and tell me how it goes.

I obviously don't know your situation and maybe there was some overreach in your case but in some cities government meddling is absolutely necessary lest the place turns into a Disneyland resort for wealthy tourists.

Sounds like an easy solution. Raze all the vacant hotels that surely have been put under by the lack of demand as it shifts to Airbnb and make those apartments you can buy instead.

The hotels usually remain full. There's a huge pent-up demand for tourism.

Now you get it. Airbnb is providing a service there's a huge demand and need for, not some evil provider that's forcing something down people's throats.

You're being obtuse. It's simply a case of a tragedy of the commons, the commons in this case being available real-estate. Paris is already one of the densest cities in the world, if you add more tourist lodgings you have to push somebody else out.

Besides you make it sound like enabling more tourism is unambiguously a good thing. It's true that it has positive side-effects (mostly on the economy) but it also leads to degradation, overcrowding and, as we were discussing, an explosion of the cost of life for the locals. I often hear tourists complaining that they don't get an "authentic" experience abroad, how could they when the place they visit have been deserted by the locals?

The fact that there's a huge demand is irrelevant to it being forced on non users of the service. I.e. neighbors.

Guests may have loved it, but did the neighbors love it? Did the people looking for long-term rental housing who found it difficult to find long-term rentals love it? Did the people looking to get into home-ownership only to find that residential real-estate prices were increasing now that residential properties were semi-commercial properties love it?

> Did the people looking for long-term rental housing who found it difficult to find long-term rentals love it?

This is just passing the buck. If AirBnB is driving up rents you have a supply problem, not an AirBnB problem.

No, I don't think it's simply a supply problem.

As much as it pains me to use a reductionist metaphor, I'm going to. Suppose my community has a finite amount of resource X available to us that we need to live and and we only require 75% of that resource. A company comes along and offers individuals a whole pile a money to sell of their claims to the resource, so much so that the company now controls 90% of that resource. The company begins boxing up that resource and shipping it off to people who will pay more money for that resource. My community now has meet their need another way, and probably in a more expensive way.

Regardless of how the resource should have been managed, and what the authorities in my community should have done to ensure we had the necessary access to our resource I think I can still point a finger at the company say "If that company didn't exist they wouldn't control our resource."

Obviously the metaphor is riddled with unconsidered complexities but I use it as a way of raising the question of at least an ounce of culpability of the company.

If AirBnBs overtook 90% of the apartments in your neighborhood this example might be relevant.

> The company begins boxing up that resource and shipping it off to people who will pay more money for that resource.

Unless you live in Christiana this is probably already the case. AirBnBs tend to be in expensive neighborhoods.

If it were not the case that the resource was being shipped off and sold for more that would mean I could stay in an AirBnB for the same price as a pay for rent, which I can't.

That's pretty absurd -- you're paying a discount for being a long-term tenant with a legally binding contract (and no cleaning/daily upkeep). Would you expect buying a home versus AirBnBing one to cost the same over 10+ years?

The end product that consumes the resource may be different but the availability of the resource my community needs to sustain life is compromised when it's arbitraged.

What if landlords charging market-rent rate compromises your community? What you're saying only makes sense if you don't live in a capitalist society.

Exactly.

Well.. sure. I agree that AirBnB would be bad in a communist enclave.

What kind of argument is that though ? You should go to SF or NY and tell them it's just a supply problem, they probably haven't thought of it before.

Do you know the cost of destroying + rebuilding bigger buildings in a city center ? Much higher than closing a few semi legal "airbnb hotels". And that's if you can even build in the city at all.

That's exactly it. They have thought about it but the people who complain about AirBnBs are generally the benifitors of artificially reduced supply. Nobody is renting AirBnBs in Bensonhurst, they're in the WV or Chelsea. World's tiniest violin.

https://www.airbnb.com/s/Bensonhurst--Brooklyn--NY--United-S...

There are a lot of cities where apartments have become AirBnBs, caused great disruption to their neighbours, and driven up rents. This has resulted in people demanding that Something Be Done.

Are people using airbnbs as apartments? I don't see how it drives rent up. There's a finite amount of tourism/visitors so they should only be competing with hotels. What am I missing here?

Edit: downvoted for asking a question you disagree with? What is this reddit?

Isn't it obvious? People buy appartements in nice city centers only to rent them on AirBnb, causing all kinds of disruptions (local shops turn into tourist shops, etc.) and reducing the number of flats for locals. This is exactly what is happening in my neighborhood (France). It's terrible.

People are using apartments as AirBnBs. Whole-unit rental, keys on a coded box outside the door.

> There's a finite amount of tourism/visitors

Yes, but that could be much larger than the current level. A discussion in the context of Edinburgh: https://www.hotelmanagement.net/own/edinburgh-looks-to-limit...

AirBnB hosts in many cities are buying up apartments (or landlords who used to rent long-term are switching units to short-term rentals), reducing the supply and thus driving up prices for the remaining units.

Where tourism is, economic activity thrives. Local population grows. => there's a shortage of housing, especially in city center, where people want to live, and want to go. => there's a competition to own the land/housing between: people who want to live there, and people who want to rent it to tourists (lower investment than if you lived there and high+frequent demand). => there's also a shortage of hotels AND a temporary shortage of convenience (precisely where AirBnB thrives with VC money, in order to break and change the market - that's very intentional).

> I don't see how it drives rent up.

If entire apartments are made into AirBnbs, there's less apartments in the market which turns the prices up, what's so hard to grasp ?

And if Hotels close down due to AirBNBs there's more space for appartments where there once were hotels. If the AirBNBs take less space than the hotel they replace it's a win for appartments. If they cause more tourism it's a loss. What the overall effect is is far from clear, I haven't seen any thorough analysis on that.

It's naive to only look at one factor and ignore the others, yet that's often how far this debate goes.

Are hotels closing?

It seems very unlikely AirBnBs will "take less space" than a hotel. Hotels are quite space-efficient, given they're largely small, single rooms.

> There's a finite amount of tourism/visitors

It might be finite but it's exploding. Even semi remote places get crowded these days.

https://ourworldindata.org/tourism

Perhaps you should try stating the reason it was shut down.

Corrupt government.

Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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