Hacker News Reader

Comment by chadmeister | Hacker News Reader

Look, I'm all for affordable housing, but when viewing this within the context of a looming recession and potential financial crisis I can assure you that the last thing you want to do is add in a potential amplifier to a housing market crash. Houses may get cheaper, but everyone is going to suffer in very difficult to imagine ways. Corporate debt markets are looking scary as hell right now. If you threw a housing market meltdown at it right now, we could easily be looking at something much much worse than what we saw in '08.

View on HN

A house is rarely used as an interesting business asset for generating productivity for the rest of the nation. AirBnB is like the height of how commercially productive a home can be. I would argue that the home is most interesting to a nation when it houses a family which is contributing to the economy.

What we're talking about is making the housing market more healthy, where health is viewed from the perspective of the nation.

There is inefficiency being absorbed by the system when very finite housing capacity is being used primarily by vacationers who already have a home, and now that terribly finite supply is being translated to mere vacation enhancement.

those are good ideas but imagine someone barely making ends meet on an "inflated" mortgage which then loses a lot of value. the bank expects them to pay back $250K but then their home value collapses down to its true price of $150K. you just created a situation where a household has negative equity - literally worse off than if they had never bought the home at all, and difficult to wiggle out of if they live there (very likely). that obviously has massive effects on their economic outlooks.

Yeah, this is absolutely a problem and people's homes being foreclosed due to this type of situation does upset me. But this is a side-effect of people making money off housing shortages, which is the root cause and due for a correction.

The people with these AirBnbs are no worse than the residents who vote for policies and politicians that create and exacerbate the shortages in the first place.

What will happen is that airbnb hosts with liquidity problems have to fire sell them to lucky speculators and then in a year or two after the speculator has made his profit, they go right back on airbnb.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com