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Comment by mathattack | Hacker News Reader

This seems counter-productive. Housing costs are up because of AirBnB. I’m not thrilled, but that’s the market. The market needs to reprice. Folks who bet on the market would get rich if the bet paid off. Let them sell their places, and someone else can rent them out in the future.

Call me callous but I don’t feel the need to bail out someone who charged me $500/night on a place with a $3000 monthly payment. I entered the transaction freely, and the transaction is over.

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Housing costs are not up because of Airbnb, they are up because of government regulation. If we wanted housing to cost to buy a house in the US to be $100k average, we could do it almost overnight by lifting regulations unrelated to safety. With existing automation tech (produce like industry instead of custom each time) we could get it to $50k. In 10 years we could make housing affordable if we had the societal will.

I think you can make many arguments that being more expensive is worth it (more free parking is an example of what is included in the price of a home today), but there is no technical reason homes cannot be very inexpensive. You can also argue it's a "feature not a bug" from existing homeowners, who work to reduce supply (zoning, NIMBY, etc).

> Housing costs are not up because of Airbnb

I think they are partially. In London, rents have decreased 25%-50% since COVID. Part of that will be reduced demand. But I have also seen a lot of rooms advertised for long-term rental that were previously Airbnbs.

We could certainly ameliorate this by building more houses. But here in the UK we're a lot more limited by available land space than you are in the US. And while there is limited supply it makes sense to prioritise making primary dwellings affordable over profit making for landlords.

>> Housing costs are not up because of Airbnb

>I think they are partially.

You're mistaking housing costs with prices. Housing costs are the input prices of components that entrepreneurs accept or reject to produce housing.

Such as: * price materials producers demand for their products (concrete, wood, electrical wire etc) * the labor prices, labor sellers demand (Carpenters, iron workers, etc) * the prices land owners demand to either keep land undeveloped or developed * the prices state agents demand to abstain from interfering with home building.

Consumption can't drive up a producer's input costs. Consumers may abstain from purchasing from a producer unless the producer meets different inputs ("I demand you only buy the labor of architects who live near me and not people far away").

"housing costs" can also refer to the cost to the consumer in order to obtain housing. I think everyone in this thread is talking about what you refer to as "prices" rather than what you refer to as "costs".

Depends on the zone. A lot of EU cities are having problems with AirBnB hosts buying up property, driving prices up and people out of their neighborhoods. In my city, once the pandemic started a lot of new apartments were up for renting long-term, and the most likely explanation is that these were tourism renters trying to cover losses due to tourism.

I live in a city where tourism is a huge part of the economy. Since AirBnBs took off, our hotel occupancy dropped off massively, and rents have gone up. Much of our government revenue depends on hotel taxes, which obviously not collected on AirBnBs.

Yes, we can build more residential properties (and we are), but I think it's a bit naive to assume that tourists leaving hotels vacant, and staying in livable housing instead wouldn't drive up rents for locals in the short term.

There’s already a massive industry around manufactured homes. Trailer homes are at the bottom end and “normal” looking ones at the top end. They cost about the same if not less than what you quoted. Most places I’ve seen them are rural areas.

Zoning and NIMBY issues are mainly a West coast problem. The South, Midwest, Southwest, and a good part of the Northeast are not even close to the West coast.

> Housing costs are not up because of Airbnb, they are up because of government regulation.

[citation needed]

I could have been more precise and said “in part due to AirBnB.” AirBnB increased the demand for housing (from investors) without increasing supply. So home ownership costs go up. Conversely they do increase the rental supply.

I concur with you that zoning and regulations definitely impact the supply quite a bit. (Mostly reducing supply)

Housing costs are up in low price areas. For example, I stayed in Kiev for a month because I can work anywhere. Did the same thing in Vilnius and other low cost cities. Digital nomads and vacationers from countries with high standards of living are pushing up property prices around the world.

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