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Comment by difosfor | Hacker News Reader

Good riddance

Yeah… who are the owners of a flat to decide what to do with it, eh?

A flat owner is not an atomic actor. If you purchase a flat, it's under the implicit assumption that you or your family will be the only ones occupying it.

I live in Sweden and most "condo" associations (bostadsrätt) have rules regarding short-term hires and subletting. I imagine it is the same in the Netherlands.

> it's under the implicit assumption that you or your family will be the only ones occupying it.

Says who? This is a rather bold assumption to make and does not have any connection with the reality in most of the world.

My comments were made from my experience as a renter and condo owner in Stockholm, Sweden. I did speculate that similar norms were present in the Netherlands, but I must confess I have not studied the issue deeply.

>If you purchase a flat, it's under the implicit assumption

There might be such implicit assumption somewhere, but it for sure isn't a general one.

I for one don't have any such expectations regarding the neighbours in my condo. (I don't live in Sweden/Netherlands though.)

I, for one, am renting, so if my neighbors expected my landlord would live at the flat with his family - then my wife, my newborn son and I are certainly failing to meet their implicit assumptions.

In the UK at least, the expectation would be 50/50 that you are buying to let.

However, a six month minimum rental period is very different from having new neighbors every weekend.

If you purchase a flat, it's under the implicit assumption that you or your family will be the only ones occupying it

I also live in Sweden and that is a very Sweden specific assumption. Even just across the border in Norway that assumption doesn't hold.

Sweden on the whole is very anti small private landlords and have lots of laws making it basically impossible to make money by buying a few flats and renting them out, but that is also a pretty uniquely Swedish take on the property market.

Thanks for expanding, I do admit writing from a parochial perspective.

So how is there housing for people to rent? Does the government build and maintain all rental property?

No, there are private and council-owned landlords.

Can you explain more? That still sounds like you are able to "make money by buying a few flats and renting them out" but with extra steps.

No, the landlords in these cases own the whole building, not just a few flats. If you own the whole building then you can of course rent out the flats in that building. But if you just own a couple of flats in the building, then you generally cannot easily rent them out.

Expanding on 'dawg, it's generally only profitable to rent if you're a company devoted only to renting, and the regulatory regime punishes the landlord with only a few units. This is because rents are not market-based, but instead are based on "use value" (bruksvärde). A 19th C apartment in the middle of the city can theoretically be worth "less" from a rental perspective than a newly built apartment in the suburbs.

Any annual rent increases are set via a form of collective bargaining, and if a landlord charges more, the renter is entitled to their money back.

The upshot of this is that it's much more profitable to buy a rental building and flip it to the renters via a bostadsrättsförening (a bit like a condo) or to only build to sell.

You’d usually rent from someone owning an entire building. Usually a company but sometimes an individual.

> Sweden on the whole is very anti small private landlords and have lots of laws making it basically impossible to make money by buying a few flats and renting them out, but that is also a pretty uniquely Swedish take on the property market.

This is an extremely idealized version of the real situation - at least in Stockholm. Here, the only real cap on the number of apartments being bought for (often illegal) hire, is the spiralling cost of real estate. Many of my colleagues rent their apartments on the black market - which is often the only way to get a home within the city.

Official rental apartments generally have a waiting-list of around 20 years within the city-limits, and even needing to commute from far out in the suburbs a newly-arrived person will probably need to rent on the black-market. This is a well-known and documented situation.

Airbnb has definitely made the situation much worse in Stockholm - the supposed '3600' apartments are actually far greater in number, as can be seen if one switches off location-permissions in your browser, and take a look at available rentals in the area.

You're of course right. I should have written that Swedish law is very anti small private landlords and that legally making money by buying a couple of flats and renting them out is basically impossible.

In fact when I moved back to Sweden after working abroad for a few years after University I spend the first 18 month living in a illegally rented flat, so I'm painfully aware of how the system works in real life.

> I live in Sweden and most "condo" associations (bostadsrätt) have rules regarding short-term hires and subletting.

I don't know why you're using Sweden as a 'good' example of democratic control of Airbnb: the opposite is actually true, where the authorities are very well-disposed to people hiring-out their apartments, and see it as an opportunity to get more tourists visiting locations in Sweden[0] From the article in the citation:

"Politicians in Copenhagen want to introduce a maximum limit of 60 rental days per year via Airbnb - but Stockholm is choosing a different path and continues to welcome private rentals via the US giant. According to statistics from Airbnb, there are now over 3,600 listed homes actively offered as tourist accommodation in Stockholm."

In that article there are officials saying the same as you - that local restrictions put some sort of 'natural' limit on the number of Airbnb apartments - but the reality is that for people working here in Stockholm and trying to find an apartment to rent, the only option has now become Airbnb or the black-market in rented accommodation - effectively pricing normal people out of the market altogether.

As for these supposed restrictions on hiring-out apartments that are in the 'rulebook' of a house, it's perfectly easy to circumvent them. In my house in central Stockholm it's forbidden, but I often meet small groups of Italians, Spaniards or other obvious tourists coming and going in the communal areas of the house, and looking very sheepish at being seen - very obviously hiring an apartment illegally.

[0] In swedish: https://www.svd.se/stockholm-gar-emot-airbnb-trenden-inget-p...

Maybe it is starting now?

https://www.thelocal.se/20210916/swedens-first-case-against-...

> Yeah… who are the owners of a flat to decide what to do with it, eh?

How do you spell "externalities"?

Yea... who are the neighbors of those flats to decide to protest loud and rude tourists that disturb the piece and quiet of their homes, eh?

We already have laws against that.

And now we have a new law, I'm sure people were upset about the night time disturbances laws too

Exactly. Flat owners can't privatize their gains while their socialized their costs. If a factory pollutes, we agreed that it should pay for the damage and control it. Why it is so difficult to understand that we just want the externalities from Airbnb to be addressed?

The owners still decide what to do with it. They just decided to stop listing their apartments because now it's very conspicuous that they are breaking the law by not paying taxes, having proper insurance, safety conditions, etc. for such an endeavor. The ones who were operating legally still advertise their listings.

We have planning, zoning and safety laws for a reason. The owners of a flat can decide to do what they like within those parameters.

So you'd have no problem if your neighbours turned their flat into a brothel and a meth lab? Because that's the logical extension of your argument.

I'd have the exact same problem if the owner of the flat turned into a meth lab (or throwing loud parties or whatever) did pay all the taxes.

The problem is that the locals cannot find housing themselves. Laws like this protect the common people of Amsterdam at the expense of the flat owners inalienable right to exploit them

There are tons of limitations to what you can do with your property. E.g. you can own land but can't build a house if the land is not zoned for it. Even the meaning of property has changed over the centuries. It's no longer acceptable to own a human being, which was a contested idea not too long ago. It's the people that make a society that decide what they want the rules to be. Good for the people of Amsterdam that they don't accept man made "realities" on what can or can't be done.

If it's no longer acceptable to own a human being, that's going to be a problem for the gimp training and service industry in Amsterdam.

https://www.nobleprog.nl/en/gimp/training/amsterdam

>Gimp Training in Amsterdam

>Online or onsite, instructor-led live Gimp training courses demonstrate through interactive discussion and hands-on practice the fundamentals and advanced topics of Gimp and Gimpshop.

>Gimp training is available as "online live training" or "onsite live training". Online live training (aka "remote live training") is carried out by way of an interactive, remote desktop. Onsite live Gimp training can be carried out locally on customer premises in Amsterdam or in NobleProg corporate training centers in Amsterdam.

https://www.tripadvisor.com.au/ShowUserReviews-g188590-d1491...

>Different and enjoyable, but expensive

>Travelled to the Supper Club with my girlfriend and we had a great time. Waiters in gimp suits, rubber gloves upon arrival and comfy beds to lounge on while we ate, created a unique experience.

I'm pretty sure the waiters are paid competitive rates and are free to seek other employment. So comparing them to literal slaves is disingenuous.

But they're working for people, doing what they might not want to on their own free time! Slavery!

I dislike how some diminish this term, with such frivolous complaints. Yes, surely the waiters were hobbled. Or beaten to death. Or starved, worked 18 hour days, etc.

Totally similar!

I think those are two very different types of gimps.

They use AirBnD instead.

Mix ups like this are why I don't mention my experience with the GNU Image Manipulation Program[1] offline.

[1] https://www.gimp.org/

I might have more sympathy for the flat owners if they:

- had proper insurance on their properties to protect the guests

- maintained the property according to the health and safety guidelines proscribed by law

- had a license for their business activity

- paid the appropriate taxes for this additional income

Yeah! If a landlord wants to put up tourists in leaky slum houses for €250 a night that should be their right! It's their own fault for trusting an online advert, right?

Hotels have rules, regulations and need to be inspected according to hotel rules in terms of safety, hygiene and price rules. Rentals have rules and regulations related to basic standards of living, pricing, and again, safety and hygiene.

Airbnb allowed landlords to rent out substandard temporary housing, skirting around laws covering both hotels and rentals as well as relevant taxes. In part, they are responsible for the housing crisis.

Ownership isn't freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want, this is a first grade take on the topic.

Laws are voted for the interest of the community (ie. country) by elected officials (elected by the people), ownership, freedoms, &c. exist within these boundaries, or as a smart person put it a long time ago: "Obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom". It's always a battle of individual gains vs collective good, if we wanted to live like egoists cavemen we wouldn't have build organised societies.

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