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Comment by baot | Hacker News Reader

Because local housing naturally has a limited supply making it a natural monopoly in addition to the fact that, since it's very difficult to live without housing, it is a one-sided market without alternatives.

So, as much as you'd like to pretend it's just a matter of personal freedoms, bypassing housing codes via the guise of a tech company just enables negative externalities that restrict the personal freedoms of others. And the 'others' are the people who actually live there, making them more important than you.

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Local housing has an artificially limited supply, actually. There's an absolute limit on housing per unit of area, but we get nowhere close to approaching that limit anywhere in the US. The real issue is zoning laws prohibiting building of new housing or favoring single family homes over apartment buildings creating markets where supply doesn't increase. If you address this and allow for building of higher density housing, prices will decrease and services like AirBNB stop being as big of an issue.

It doesn't help that local government politicians are frequently homeowners (and their constituents as well) that have a vested interest in keeping housing prices high. AirBNBs, apartment buildings, and high rises are going to negatively impact the value of their properties.

Not if there's induced demand. Areas without zoning laws have been tried, we usually tear them down.

Induced demand for housing, a thing that costs actual money to purchase, would just be an indicator that supply hasn't reached equilibrium with demand.

If large scale operations are what's being considered wrong, then why not target that specially? E.g, if you use short term rental on more than 1 property, then the taxation on the 2nd one is going to be larger and larger until it's no longer profitable.

For people with just 1 investment property, they will still be able to rent it out short-term as it is possible today.

That sounds like a lot of loophole-ridden bureaucracy to accommodate non-residents driving up the price of housing.

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