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Comment by dalbasal | Hacker News Reader

I don't fall strongly on either side of these debates, but I'm kind of against the debate as a whole.

I just don't think that trade offs between short stay rentals, even airbnb hotels, and rental housing has much of a win in it for renters even if advocates get everything they want. It seems like a marginal, symbolic issue that sucks up a lot of attention without the potential for meaningful results.

Are bans on short term rentals going to noticeably affect housing prices of availability. If not, why are affordable housing activists so interested in this?

The whole thing feels like win hunting.

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It’s not just housing prices. It’s community and neighborhood. People want to live in a neighborhood with actual people, not a decentralized hotel. I say this as someone who has done short term rentals in Paris—it was nice for me, but I can see how annoying it must be for residents.

Exactly.

I live in a small five apartment building. Two flats were remodelled at the beginning of 2020 for airbnb. That did not work out because of covid. The owner of one flat then decided to live there herself and she is a nice neighbor (the other flat is still empty).

Exactly. The apartment complex I'm in rents out some apartments on AirBnB, including the one directly above me. The direct impact is only that it gets vacuumed far more often than a normal tenant would (between each AirBnB usage, about twice a week), increasing the noise. The indirect impact is that I do not have an opportunity to say hello to neighbors, ask how they are doing, send excess baked goods, etc. If a long-term neighbor is being loud, you can rely on that relationship to ask for quiet. If a short-term neighbor is being loud, you have no relationship with them, so you need to instead escalate to the management, who may or may not enforce noise limits at all.

Most short term rentals in apartment complexes are actually against the rental contract of the building. Thus you probably have a very strong hand when you deal with a noisy host. I would still be nice to stay friends with a neighbor, but if vacuuming bothers you and you ask the host to limit vacuuming to certain hours of the day he will likely jump to do your bidding. My 2c.

With lots of newer buildings they have apartments specifically dedicated to AirBNBs. They're managed by the apartment complex.

The way to fix that is to bring back effective covenants. Covenants were neutered in the US under the guise of the civil rights movement; the government explicitly wanted to stop people from deciding what kind of neighborhood they wanted to live in, because most people want to live with their own ethnic group.

I wonder if this argument holds less weight now that people in blocks of flats in some metropolises have less interest in interacting with their neighbours than decades ago -- in Helsinki for instance it is a faux pas to speak to one's neighbours, and some even claim that politeness demands you check through the peephole that the hallway is empty before going out, so you don't bump into a neighbour and make him/her uncomfortable. Plus, there must be a greater turnover of tenants these days due to study and job mobility, so why bother trying to build relationships.

Interacting with neighbors is one part, but it's also things like noise, and the businesses in the area (catering to tourists vs locals).

Like when the Amsterdam city center, in addition to made in china pot leaf trinket stores, all of the sudden was overrun with Nutella Ice Bakery waffel stores, peddling some vague idea that tourists have about waffles and Nutella being local culture, making these businesses completely irrelevant to locals.

>"I wonder if this argument holds less weight now that people in blocks of flats in some metropolises have less interest in interacting with their neighbours than decades ago -- in Helsinki for instance it is a faux pas to speak to one's neighbours, and some even claim that politeness demands you check through the peephole that the hallway is empty before going out, so you don't bump into a neighbour and make him/her uncomfortable."

What evidence is there that people in "some metropolises have less interest in interacting with their neighbours than decades ago"? I can't speak for Helsinki but honestly the behavior you describe sounds borderline pathological. I've lived in many cities around the world and would not describe that as common.

People don't want to live in industrial areas, or fully commercial areas either.

That's what "zoning" is for.

Maybe the city should just designate a zone / neighborhood for short term rentals and call it a day.

Apparently the travelers don't want that because they can't role play being a local. Though in Paris the hotels are, apartments and business are all mixed together in the same areas

Here’s an idea: have a tourist zone full of Airbnb-type flats. Fill it with coffee shops, bars, and pay locals to be there as extras.

Indeed. There's a neighborhood in New Orleans called the Bywater. Traditionally it has been a working class neighborhood. A large percentage of people who worked in the service industry lived and congregated there. They were largely displaced by AirBnBs and AirBnB guests who "wanted to live like a local." The endless parade of guests getting in and out of Ubers with their phone in one hand and a rolling suitcase in other does little to convey any sense of community and neighborhood.

I understand, but in context, I feel this supports rather than negates my original post.

I understand the "decentralized hotel" problem. But, this seems to come up with fiery enthusiasm in the context of housing affordability constantly. Ultimately, affordability is a bigger problem then neighborhood character.

No one gets this fired up about sidewalks, business licensing, speed limits, parking and everything else that makes up neighborhood character.

In a healthy housing market like the one I own a rental property in, long-term rental is a margin business while you have mortgage and taking to account wear and tear etc and encourages properties being kept in family friendly sizes and year round accommodation for people who need to live and work locally.

The airbnb model allows you to have much larger margins while the property empty for periods of time, promotes splitting properties into multiple smaller units to extract higher margin per sq ft and removes property from the market for locals.

Airbnb is a cancer frankly

I would support Airbnb if it encouraged the couch-surfing model more. As in, the owners live on the property full time and have an extra room or couch they'll willing to lend out, with extra amenities to make it worth some amount of money. Deviating from this quickly devolves into the current situation.

I am actually surprised how many properties there are like that on Airbnb, given that everyone I know immediately filters them out.

Yea, I've been mostly trying to stay in this sort of situation more now. There's times where I want the experience and spacial efficiency of Airbnb (A way to stay in a part of town close to friends/an event that don't live in a normal touristy area with hotels.) but I get that even if I'm responsible/quiet, it's not great to support the owners that aren't in the community.

I often find that the hosts who are renting out rooms/beds in their house are often far more interesting and fun people, and it's usually cheaper anyway. Obviously there's plenty of reasons that's suboptimal for a lot of people, but if it works for you, I'd recommend it.

I would push back a bit on a few points here:

- Airbnbs are generally concentrated in touristy urban areas - places that are pricey to begin with. Or spaces that did not make for good apartments (small mother-in-laws, basement conversions). Airbnbs are not displacing inventory on the low end of the market, and potentially bring new inventory to the market.

- Airbnbs rarely sit empty. The market is pretty efficient, and you can have the same occupancy year round, just at reduced rates (in winter months, it may even be cheaper than renting an equivalent unit).

- Splitting properties into multiple smaller units is a good thing. The fact that there are square footage requirements for apartments but not short term rentals is a zoning failure.

I think the takeaway should be that rental markets are very inefficient, and Airbnb reveals a lot of pent up demand.

Not GP. I agree with all of your points but I think it’s realistic for property owners to want to not live near Airbnbs. Especially on the lower end of the Airbnb market.

This is a nuanced issue, but as someone who used to famously defend Airbnb, etc, i feel the consequences are very real.

I was briefly in Amsterdam renting in an old wooden building (it was a nice place).

Anyway, the noise from surrounding Airbnb rentals just ended up wrecking it for me and I left the city as it was a city wide problem. Summer was just...noisy.

All night tourists were loudly coming and going, it really sucked and at the time it was a huge problem for Amsterdam residents.

The answer is clearly yes. Being able to convert apartments to short term rentals for tourists while bypassing the whole legislation in place does reduce housing availability. For example, you are supposed to build an apartment equivalent to the one you are converting to a tourism rental in a lot of cities in France. Airbnb does not enforce that and was a way for dodgy companies to bypass the law.

This won't force affordable housing issues which are a much bigger problem, but airbnb did create a gray market area and it does make sense to regulate it.

Central Paris is small-ish and fully developped.

The only way to increase the housing supply is to destroy old buildings (that make Paris what it is) and to build Hongkong-style towers instead (which nobody wants).

I see this a lot. People fight against the aesthetic of things they dislike rather than the cause of things they dislike

Let me tldr; it for you. AirBnB enables companies or individuals to buy up or lease small apartments in nice neighborhoods or building and turn it into a hotel. That pushes out people who actually need or want to live in that neighborhood. In addition, the AirBnB "guests" are quite frequently exhibit awful boorish behavior . I know of apartment buildings in downtown Toronto which became unsafe for families thanks to AirBnB guests. I would not have a problem if the AirBnB host lived in the same apartment as the one they are listing on AirBnB but that is not what is happening. Instead AirBnb enable unscrupulous people to set up hotels in residential neighborhoods without shouldering any responsibilities of a hotel. AirBnB is fucking cancer!

It's mainly to protect Hotels, bed-taxes, etc.

It's mainly to protect Hotels, bed-taxes, etc.

No, it's mainly to protect residents. The people who actually make a city a city. If you're looking for greed and cash, look to the Airbnb companies that operate hundreds or thousands of rentals.

Hotels are zoned into commercial areas so that they don't ruin residential areas. Airbnb flouts that.

There are places in Chicago where corporations that own fleets of Airbnb buildings bought up half the residential properties on a single block and turned them into Airbnb rentals. It destroyed the quality of life for the people who have put all of their money and time into the neighborhood.

This actually reminds me of big miners eating small miners when it came to mining cryptocurrency.

We used to have arguments about whether bitcoin is valuable if everyone didn’t have a chance to mine.

I guess such is capitalism.

Hotels are not "zoned on commercial areas" in central Paris. It's highly mixed.

The problem is really for residents of a single building when that building is pretty much turned into a hotel with people coming and going all the time because of AirBnb flats.

There is an element of truth, though, in claiming that hotels do not like the competition from AirBnb. Case in point, tourists love AirBnb.

The fundamental force at play in a place like Paris is the many millions of people who want to visit every year.

This is not a pro-AirBnB comment, I'm just pointing out gov't probably cares more about the money from hotels than "protecting residents". Same with Uber and Taxi/Transit.

If you live in a touristic city, it's not the main reason, no... But even if it were, how's that supposed to be an argument in favor of AirBnB?

Of course residents want tourists and visitors to stay in hotels or serviced apartments, and the city to collect taxes.

People were complaining that central Paris was unaffordable before AirBnb, and they will still complain after AirBnb.

Highly sought after locations will always be unaffordable to most, but politicians cannot admit this fact (at least publicly) so they will continue to discuss the issue ad vitam aeternam, and obviously pressure groups will have a job for life.

That being said, I think people mostly complain about AirBnb because it turns their building into a hotel with people coming and going all the time.

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