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> NYC is plagued with what are essentially illegal hotels.

There’s a reason my building is currently half full, and it isn’t because everyone is out of town. If there’s any silver lining to this whole terrible pandemic maybe all the crooked rent-to-airbnb people will go bankrupt.

There are negative externalities to Uber too, such as Traffic and pollution.

That’s not so clear cut. The alternative to Uber is not just staying home or riding a bike, at times it’s driving your own car and circling for 30 minutes trying to find a parking spot.

Yeah, or taking a taxi or driving drunk.

I have literally never circled for 30 minutes looking for a parking spot. In every city I have been to people people use a parking garages of one type or another. Where exactly is circling like this common?

Where it's $4-6 for a few hours if you can find a spot, but a flat $20+ for a parking garage after the first half hour. So, Baltimore, DC, stuff like that.

Many NYC outer borough neighborhoods can be like that; there might not be any garages - or maybe there's only 1-2 which are always full. For example, in Queens, think of Jackson Heights, Flushing Main Street, or parts of Jamaica. I can definitely see spending 30 minutes looking for a parking spot in Jackson Heights on a busy evening if you aren't too familiar with driving in the area.

That’s quite localized in term of location and time of day.

Comparing the number of cars in NYC/DC/etc garages vs on street parking people are still mostly using company provided / reimbursed the garages down town. So, while some people in some areas may spend time circling, across all trips average circling time is minimal.

Note that I was very much not talking about downtown (Manhattan has garages). I was talking about mixed residential/commercial immigrant neighborhoods far from downtown. The places where ordinary people would go to shop for their country's authentic groceries.

> the reality is that neighbours of that Airbnb bear the externalities

What toxic waste, exactly, do Airbnb listing dump on their neighbours?

Professional Airbnb investors buy up whole properties, renovate them, run them as a hotel with regular cleaning and services provided. Their shot-term residents use the same amout of public transit, water and utilities services as long-term renters next door.

The only real inconvenience is that it's driving property prices up - but that's not an externality. That's just a reality of a market where some type of customers agree to pay a higher price for something, and it's price goes up for everybody. I don't see any reason why market should be artificially tilted towards long-term renters as opposed to short-term.

The issue is that of trust; if you have a full-time neighbor (renting or owning), you generally trust that they will respect the building/neighborhood, and over time will grow to trust them as people. They're more accountable. When you have random people flowing in and out every few days, that trust is not there. For example, Airbnb guests won't go out of their way to be sure to honor quiet hours... why bother if they're just there for a few days and don't have to deal with the neighbors on an ongoing basis?

I absolutely love using Airbnb and prefer it over hotels in nearly every place I visit, but I won't pretend it's somehow good for the neighborhood or neighbors.

It's hard for me to respond to this, because personally, in I don't think I've ever met a single neighbour and never had "trust" to any of them - and if there was a noise above a certain level, I just called the police to deal with it instead of going out of the apartment myself. "Trusting them as people" even sounds weird because I don't even know who those people are. I guess it's a cultural thing.

> Professional Airbnb investors buy up whole properties

Not in NYC. Here they violate both the law and leases/condo rules to Airbnb units they bought or rented under false pretenses. Airbnb knows this and doesn’t care. It’s not about the free market, it’s just another swindle.

>run them as a hotel

Unlicensed hotels, mind you.

>What toxic waste, exactly, do Airbnb listing dump on their neighbours?

There was a massive issue in my town where students would rent airbnbs and party, keeping neighbors up when they had to go to work the next day. Police were having to attend to more and more incidents.

Sorry but you are dead wrong. AirBnBs have a significant negative effect on the neighborhood, especially in highly touristic cities. People renting AirBnBs are much likely to be louder and less respecting than long-term neighbors because they don't have any incentive to care - they are just staying there short term and then leaving again. Making too much noise at night is illegal, but it is much harder to enforce that against tourists that spent a few nights somewhere than against a long-term resident of their own house.

In Amsterdam we saw this a lot, with "party tourists" staying in AirBnBs, getting home at 4 AM and then shouting and making noise constantly, effectively ruining the lives of the next-door neighbors. This is a huge problem, especially since Amsterdam has many old houses that do not block much noise. Imagine waking up three times per week at 4AM because your neighbors' AirBnB guests are shouting after coming home drunk/drugged from a party again. I bet you would not be very happy either.

Unlike in the US, though, thankfully the government has cracked down very hard on AirBnBs. It is now illegal to rent out your house/apartment on AirBnB for more than 30 days a year, and people renting our their apartments on AirBnB must pay high tourism taxes to pay for externalities. It is also only allowed to rent out your primary residence, you cannot rent out a second apartment or house. People trying to circumvent these laws are cracked down on hard and have to pay extremely high fines (more than €10K). Home owner's associations and rental contracts now also typically have clauses that explicitly forbid AirBnBs. Still, many people want to introduce more rules or even ban AirBnB entirely.

Free markets are a good thing. We can see the prevention of a truly free market through onerous zoning policies that prevent new housing starts in high-demand areas. Preventing people from building, or hosting short-term housing, is all impedance on free markets and their distortionary effects are worse than a VRBO guest that forgets to move the trash can to the end of the driveway. To counter your point, it's equally possible can have a long-term terrible neighbor -- maybe they are loud, or don't maintain their property and it's lowering your property value, and there isn't much you can do about it.

> Free markets are a good thing.

Out of curiosity, what do you think of net neutrality?

> Free markets are a good thing.

And yet a free market has never existed.

And look what's happened to the housing market. Look at homeownership rates for 25-35's now vs. 40 years ago. There are some issues.

Yes, but a lot of that is delaying marriage and having children. Some part of that is economic, some part is choice/culture.

And likely the one (the economics of education and health costs, largely) driving the other.

A lot of it is the fed lowering rates which increases the returns to existing capital and drives prices upwards. It's almost like the older generation is taking out a mortgage on the future of the younger generation.... Oh wait. No, that's exactly what it is!

What's happening in the housing market right now is the result of the free market.

Market forces made housing expensive at a faster pace than regulatory changes. There are simply many more people now in their 25s-35s than there were 40 years ago, more dual-income households, and more costs (i.e., college) associated with landing the high-paying jobs than there were 40 years ago when you could get a 6-figure job with full health benefits and a pension at a factory without being able to read or write.

> What's happening in the housing market right now is the result of the free market.

Absolutely not. A fundamental requirement for a free market is to avoid barriers of entry to competition as much as possible. In the real estate market there are way too many barriers of entry to be considered even remotely free:

- Zoning laws

- Construction permits

- Licenses (realtor, construction, architects...)

- All kinds of taxes

So no, real estate has never been a free market. The blame for today's problems lies with governments' intervention and regulation.

Edit: formatting

No it absolutely isn’t. Developers are not being allowed to construct high density housing. One of the last bits of local politics I heard before moving away from my home town was some drama about a developer not being able to build an apartment building because it would “mess up the character that the local home owners bought their property for.” This happens consistently across the US and many people say that’s why about half the homeless people can’t afford a place to live.

> "This lazy (and typically selfish) twisted version of "free market" thinking quickly erodes when, for example, I propose using my house that's next to yours as a tannery or a toxic waste storage site."

i'm down for a good "free market" critique, but this veers hyperbolically into nimbyism. everyone agrees that a tannery or toxic waste dump is inappropriate near residences. but having people stay, eat, shower, and sleep in a home is literally what houses are designed for. if you don't own the home, you don't get to choose who stays there (obviously if the renters are breaking the law, that's a problem, and you can report them to the police).

i'm also super-sympathetic to the need for (affordable) housing in most cities, but banning airbnb has a relatively negligible effect on that ginormous problem.

> everyone agrees that a tannery or toxic waste dump is inappropriate near residences

I think you'll find that's trivially untrue. It's fair to say the vast majority of people agree or even almost everyone. But to find one counterexample? I bet I could do that.

My point here is that the argument of "it's my home I can do what I want" is fundamentally flawed and all it takes is a trivial extreme case to debunk it. So when you move on to what's allowed and what isn't, what's good for the community, what isn't and so on, which is essentially what zoning is.

> but having people stay, eat, shower, and sleep in a home is literally what houses are designed for

So I'm supportive of people hosting other people in their homes, which, incidentally, NYC allows (as one example). Why? Because then the host is invested in that community and can police bad behaviour. When hosts aren't present, they have no such incentive.

In years passed, having long and short term boarders was commonplace. Many cities in the post-WWII era however essentially dismantled boarding houses and SROs (which were once where a significant number of people lived) and in some cases outlawed multi-family residences.

There are extreme examples of what can happen in an Airbnb [1] [2] [3]. There are countless stories of guests being stranded when hosts canceled at the last minute and scams such as bait-and-switch.

[1]: https://10daily.com.au/shows/10-news-first/a190520wykmx/poli...

[2]: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-03/airbnb-bans-party-hou...

[3]: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7818881/Airbnb-host...

the extreme case tivially falls victim to reductio ad absurdum, as shown previously.

you've positioned your overall argument as championing the community against an invading force (airbnb), but the claims so far seem to serve a very narrow constituency (and who is the constituency as you see it?). i'm eager to hear substantive assertions that favor the wider community, rather than a narrow constituency, regarding airbnb.

i'm open to the notion that airbnb is bad for the community, but the arguments haven't been convincing so far (note that scams and scammers reach far and wide).

I am unsure what to think about your free market comment. I think you should be able to do what you want in your own home as long as it is within the bylaws and zoning laws of your area. My property was bought as agricultural zoning. It means I can have pigs, chickens, cows, all sorts of things residential properties can not do. My neighbor is residential. I bought my property agricultural so I could potentially do all those things. When my neighbor bought his property if he was informed he would look at the zoning in the neighborhood and factor that into his purchase just like anyone else would. If he doesn't want a pig farm in his neighborhood he should not move next to an agricultural property because that is always a possibility. If you are zoned for a tannery why shouldn't you be able to do it they have to go somewhere?

I think the issue comes up when someone proposes a zoning bylaw that prohibits AirBnB and other short term rentals. Objections to this might hinge on the "it's my property, I should be able to do what I want" thinking.

The issue is how pro-Airbnb people rationalize it with trivially debunked arguments about "free markets" and "it's my house, I can do what I want".

Your case is different. Zoning allows agricultural where you are. Really no one has any cause to complain about that.

As an aside, people do complain about this sort of thing. For example, people will move to where an airport is proposed to be (eg Badgerys Creek, Sydney) or where an existing airport is (eg LAX) and then complain about the potential or actual noise to get restrictions on flights (or on building it at all). I don't have any time for these shenanigans.