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Comment by vvarren | Hacker News Reader

I am the author and I appreciate your feedback. I actually wrote this piece to push back against the popular opinion that there’s a labor shortage due to “lazy people on unemployment benefits”. I don’t view asset prices skyrocketing as a healthy sign of the economy booming, instead I view it as all the rich people shielding themselves before inflation sets hold. And my argument hinges on working class people being unfairly priced out of their communities due to the skyrocketing asset prices. I also make an argument against the Airbnbification of real estate and how it is hurting the majority. I apologize if it seems that I am supporting the capital-owning class but it is actually the opposite. Let me know if you have any suggestions to clear this up on my article. (Edit) thanks for the edit that clears it up. I was worried you thought I was pushing a narrative when I’m actually pushing back against the narrative. Cheers!

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People like to hand wave airbnb as a boogeyman for real estate demand increases, but when you dive into actual numbers you find out it's less than %1 of units in the vast majority of cases. And buying houses to rent them out as 'revenue properties' has been around for a very long time, similar with airbnb style services in the 1800s.

If a %1 demand increase causes big price distortions in a RE market, you have much bigger problems in your city than airbnb, which is usually linked to supply control via restrictive and often corrupt planning boards putting up large barriers that you have to 'pay to win' to get past under the table, as has been shown recently in SF.

Fair point. This housing boom is largely caused by wealthy investors bidding up the price of single family homes, with AirBnb completely unrelated. There are also some urban-suburban migration dynamics at play. I mentioned AirBnb to point out that this isn't just a new issue. And while vacation rentals have always been a thing, they were formerly centered around vacation destinations. Now, they can be anywhere, and the internet makes it possible to browse and compare prices anywhere in the world. It is now economically feasible to own several vacation rental properties in small cities, which creates a pressure on supply for housing locals. And if you can earn a month's worth of rent in two weeks of AirBnb renting, the price of rent for long-term tenants is either going to go up or you are going to switch to AirBnb.

Airbnb has a much higher labor component involved, while renting a unit out long term is far less. It's definitely a tradeoff.

This comment makes it seem like you're using extremely motivated reasoning, and that any conclusions cannot be trusted.

I'll pushback against this point. I noticed that the popular discourse was all about unemployment benefits being the root cause of the labor shortage, when in reality the statistics said differently (i.e., stats from states which had ended unemployment). So I did research to find the true root causes, while I still fleshed out the counter-argument on unemployment. EDIT - also, i'm not a journalist this is just my personal blog and opinions so it's inherently motivated reasoning.

To be clear, I don't think you have any obligation to the public; it just seems like you were out to make a partisan point (and wanted to 'team-up' with the commenter you originally responded to in this thread).

> To be clear, I don't think you have any obligation to the public

Tangentially: I know that's a norm (or almost one) but I think that they do, and that we all do. We are all responsible for our communities. Their state, good or bad, improving or not, depends completely on our actions.

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