There is enormous demand for both temporary and permanent housing in many places, and to some degree it is fungible. If it wasn't Airbnb, some other agency or company would be servicing the need.
The only solution to the underlying problem is to allow construction to meet the underlying demand.
And the author's premise that short-term housing is more ethical than long-term housing just makes me think he has an axe to grind.
While I do think that allowing more construction would be great, there's probably other things that could help alleviate the problem.
1. Limit the number of units that can be rented by a single landlord in an area 2. Limit the proportion of units in an area which can be rented (maybe creates a sort of taxi-shield problem which might be it's own weird thing, but that's a problem for multi-property landowners, not single family homeowners). 3. (as OP suggests) limit the number of nights/year which can be rented to some number which would be very reasonable for a resident-owner who's out of town sometimes but very unreasonable for owner-investors. 4. Maybe some kind of hybrid approach - you can rent out space in your primary residence all you want, but your nth residence is only rentable 1/f(n)% of the time (for some reasonable f(n))
All of the above are presumably best implemented by governments rather than a well-meaning airbnb (who, even if they existed could presumably be overpowered by a less-well-meaning competitor)
Those taxes get paid by the renters, but they also reduce the profitability of the rentals (at least if they are competing with options that don't have those taxes).
Another option may be abolition of all commercial use of or non-private ownership of residential property in toto. Renting is illegal. Using it for your business is illegal. Apartments are illegal. Speculative ownership of housing is illegal. Housing prices implode, but you don’t have AirBNB tycoons.
I’m not serious, but “stop being greedy AirBNB or, boy, you’ll be sorry” isn’t much of a serious argument.
Anyway now the people that actually live in these locations can no longer afford to rent, let alone buy (again, the point of the article). If you don't see the problems with that (starting with airy concepts of 'community' and ending with your anger that there are no longer any nurses or teachers in your town) then you are even more of a wilfully ignorant passive-aggressive libertarian dork than the hacker news average (a bar which is set extremely high).