Intermediary platforms such as Airbnb and Uber exacerbate cities’ housing problems and weaken worker protections.
Its interesting that this line has no support and just treated as fact for this article. Is there a source to explain the reasoning?
Its interesting that this line has no support and just treated as fact for this article. Is there a source to explain the reasoning?
Taking otherwise available rentals off the full-time rental market and moving the "up" the economic return ladder to AirBnB rentals makes the housing situation tighter for residents and would-be residents.
(I'm a happy user of AirBnB platform and am "OK" with the conversion of real estate to its highest and best use, but I understand the opposition argument and think it has some merit.)
My landlord kicked us out to run an airbnb fulltime after seeing how much a neighbour was earning. (Around New Years /Christmas you could easily bring in 2 months rent). Despite all this I hold no illwill towards Airbnb.
If any other basic need was chronically undersupplied due to government inaction people tend to riot, yet somehow housing gets a free pass.
* Airbnb flophouses are not obliged to conform to fire, health, or safety codes, and they don't pay taxes. Right off the bat, they're scads cheaper than hotels because they don't bear those costs.
* Visitors and residents have very different incentives. Tourists may wish to stay in cute residential areas, but they are not necessarily interested in being neighborly -- they're not particularly invested in the comfort and safety of the people around them, because they'll be leaving soon.
* People do a lot of gross stuff in a hotel that you probably don't want to encounter in your apartment building. Drugs, prostitution, loud parties.
No amount of "zoning" is going to make the commingling of apartments and hotels attractive to full-time residents, nor will any change in "zoning" make flophouses less profitable.
In most old cities, hotels, bed and breakfasts, hostels etc all exist in residential areas. And boarding houses used to be common in these same areas too.
For the most part I stick with hotels.
Because Airbnbs aren't flophouses. They're holding usually just a couple or family, maybe a dozen people tops unless the place being rented is a really big detached house. Expecting them to be held to the same standards as hotels is not necessary. If this lack of compliance is so dangerous, then why are letting people live in these places full time?
> Visitors and residents have very different incentives. Tourists may wish to stay in cute residential areas, but they are not necessarily interested in being neighborly -- they're not particularly invested in the comfort and safety of the people around them, because they'll be leaving soon.
Tourists also spend more money while on vacation, especially on small businesses like restaurants and bars. More importantly, they bring this money in externally. More tourism attracts the ire of residents that now have to deal with out-of-town people walking around their neighborhood, but I have rarely seen someone complain about negative economic impact of tourism let alone make a coherent argument about why it's bad.
> People do a lot of gross stuff in a hotel that you probably don't want to encounter in your apartment building. Drugs, prostitution, loud parties.
Plenty of people do these things in their apartments, condos, and houses, too.
> No amount of "zoning" is going to make the commingling of apartments and hotels attractive to full-time residents, nor will any change in "zoning" make flophouses less profitable.
Tourists generally don't want to visit residential areas. Airbnb-ing instead of renting a hotel is usually less convenient because the former are further from the city center. When I used an Airbnb in Iceland it was more of a hassle because I effectively needed to rent a car (and then subsequently park a car) to get to the center of the city. It was worth it because of cost. If there were hotel rooms available at the same cost of Airbnb then I would have used that.
However, the number of hotels is usually kept artificially limited. This drives up the cost of renting hotel rooms, which benefits hoteliers. This is the main reason why Airbnb is so much cheaper than hotels. Hoteliers don't want to build more hotels because that would drive their costs down and their expenses up.
Tourism is an economic curse similar to the curse of resources. It makes most unrelated economic activity less viable.
Got any source to back up this claim? Plenty of regions with strong tourism industries have other viable industries. San Francisco, LA, and New York are all heavy tourist destinations but no reasonable person would say that this tourism has made unrelated economic activity less viable. Same with London and Paris. Large tourism industry, but plenty of other industries.
It may be true that as other economic opportunities are exhausted, communities try to use tourism to bring in money to the community (e.g. Leavenwoth, WA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leavenworth,_Washington). Underdeveloped countries that don't have the ability to participate in many industries lean on tourism more heavily (especially eco-tourism since the lack of development is actually an asset for that industry) which makes tourism take up a larger proportion of their GDP.
But I am highly skeptical of your claim of a causal link between growth of tourism and inability to sustain other industries.
I think it's generally a good thing overall, but if I were a buggy whip manufacturer around Detroit in 1920, I wasn't as happy with my lot in life 20 years later...
[0] http://unevenearth.org/2017/04/is-tourism-a-poverty-trap/
The problem with this is that it makes masses of lawbreakers out of normal people. When suddenly lots of people are breaking the law, and they're not easily treated as an outgroup, the incentives about enforcing the law get complicated.
For instance, renting a room inside your home to visitors, while you continue to occupy the home, is perfectly legal almost everywhere. Often, there is little or no regulation to comply with. (For example, actual BnBs.)
But many, many, many of AirBnB's rentals are illegal flophouses. Entire-apartment rentals inside established buildings, or flophouses with 2-4-6-8 bedrooms rented to unrelated strangers, with a maintenance service that comes by to turn down the beds. Those are where the money are at.
Venice is as real a city as the Magic Kingdom. Because tourists ate it completely. There have always been tourists going to Venice, but since the jet age so many that all the old families that used to make it their home have been kicked out.
Probably the future is everyone not wealthy gets kicked out and put on the equivalent of an Indian Reservation. Enforced by rents, toll roads and congestion pricing.
Venice airport is comparatively small with 11'000'000 flights a year.
A lot of these places are lacking hotels because we don't want them there.
These are residential areas because we want them to be.
We want the tourists, the traffic, and the mess on the other side of town.
You're sort of acting like just because the market wants something it is right to do so and it's a failing of central planning if it differs in opinion about needs.
Property owners, who are also voters, have incentives for keeping zoning a problem.
https://emerging-europe.com/news/central-prague-does-battle-...
talk to any of the uber drivers where I work, so take it as you will, and many will tell you of passengers who use uber/lyft because the drivers are friendlier, arrive on time, and tend to drive nicer cars. the arrive on time and don't just drive off because you need to go where the taxi won't is very important. and it is people of all income levels using them
I'm not selfish enough to only think about my comfort, I want those drivers to be able to have some damn job security, because we're in the 21st century, not the dark ages.
tldr: residential population in the more attractive parts of town have decreased as much as 45% in the last 12 years. Activists staged protests of illegal Airbnb's by renting them, occupying them, and refusing to leave, all while filming their interactions.
0: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/29/the-airbnb-inv...