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Honest to God, the founders of Airbnb should have been sent to prison.

That would have fixed much of this, it's point blank illegal to run a bed and breakfast out of your home. Now if you're my buddy, and you want to slide me $200 to crash at my house for a week that's fine, but if you add technology to it, it ends up destroying entire neighborhoods.

Ride-sharing is a bit different, since I'd argue the reduction in drunk driving deaths more than outweigh any negative side effects. It's amazingly easy to just call an Uber when you've had one too many. Countless lives have been saved already.

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> Honest to God, the founders of Airbnb should have been sent to prison.

This isn't how the legal system works.

If something is illegal, and you do it, it doesn't mean you always go to jail.

If something is illegal, and you finance other people doing it, it almost always mean you get a fine.

> That would have fixed much of this, it's point blank illegal to run a bed and breakfast out of your home.

Why? It's your home, you can do anything in it. Why should you need a license to rent out your own home for a few days? Does it physically destroy neighborhoods or just your perception of it? If so, why should anyone care?

> If so, why should anyone care?

It's not about 'why' care, it's about the fact that they already do care enough to have caused regulation.

>Does it physically destroy neighborhoods or just your perception of it?

Yes, it does. People buy homes for more than financial reasons. Living in a community of homeowners with neighbors you've known for years is a completely different experience than living in a revolving door community of renters. There's been a whole decade of news reports about Airbnb ruining neighborhoods and condo buildings, to the point that it's not even worth citing a particular incident.

So we should criminalize perfectly harmless things because it ruins your experience? It doesn't seem logical

It can't be perfectly harmless if it is ruining someone's experience. Its kind of like urinating in public...maybe it doesn't hurt anyone but it sure does ruin a lot of people's experience...and thus it is criminalized.

If there were more public toilets, there'd be fewer public urination. The law is there to catch the few that do it.

But if there's tonnes of public urination because there are no public toilets, then even tho the law says no, people are still going to do it. There's a demand to pee that cannot be stopped.

The idea that airbnb should be outlawed is irrelevant - the fact is that there's demand for it. This means there's a lack of short term rentals in the area. The demand must be satisfied, and so the price of it grows.

Isn't this like saying Walt Disney World shouldn't be able to sell tickets to out-of-staters? State residents who know each other could have a higher chance of running into each other at the park if it wasnt full of out-of-staters, and that could build valuable community.

I think it is fine to argue that the current rules about what you can and cannot do within a particular zoning classification are wrong. In the sense that so much US zoning eliminates retail from residential, I would make that argument myself.

However, there are actual rules, the rules exist for a mixture of good and bad reasons, and it has never been true to say "It's your home, you can do anything in it.".

>Why? It's your home, you can do anything in it.

No, you aren't free to do "anything" in your home, including provide commercial services if not properly zoned and insured.

>Why should you need a license to rent out your own home for a few days?

This is not what's happening in many places. AirBnB went from "a place to crash" to an amateur hotelier platform.

Because it's the law. Whether or not you agree with the law is irrelevant.

I think most of the answers to my question repeat this assertion, without really answering the "why?" part.

If you are a legalist, a loophole in the law is the law as well. So yes, whether or not you agree with the loophole is irrelevant

The law only applies to poor people. Rich people can and do ignore laws all the time. When corporations get involved they can just bully around all the local municipalities with size

It's because whatever you do in your house is affecting everyone around it. So you making little extra money is taking value away from everyone else in your neighborhood. The fact that you don't know anymore everyone in your block is hugely affecting safety and let alone extremes like your airbnb guests getting loud, throwing trash around, making parties etc.

In my area we have a legal agreement between all apartment owners that things like this are not accepted.

Let's take this to the extreme, do you think you have a right to set up a commercial kitchen in your home, and set up patio furniture for random people to show up and order take out?

Don't you see an issue of every single person decides to do this in your neighborhood, traffic being the first thing.

The other issue too, is most people are renting out apartments, and then Airbnbing them. Like, at that point it's not your property, you're just granted temporary permission to use it. Likewise, most condo boards don't want you to use your property as an Airbnb.

> Let's take this to the extreme, do you think you have a right to set up a commercial kitchen in your home, and set up patio furniture for random people to show up and order take out?

You can do this in Japan. Why shouldn't you be able to do this?

Japan doesn't have nearly as many cars per capita.

Regards you can't just ignore zoning laws because you feel like it.

We could change the zoning laws so that it isn't illegal, though.

One of the ways you can reduce cars is by zoning to allow greater density, which enables forms of transit which are more space-efficient than cars are. It's a chicken and egg problem, but people will be crying out for better cycle ways and trains and buses if housing becomes more dense.

Also, having commercial spread throughout residential areas reduces the amount of travel between areas, because you don't need to go far to get to the amenities you want.

It's a bit strange to give Japan's lower cars per capita as a rationale for this, when surely the reason there are fewer cars per capita is because people have access to their daily necessities without a car because of more permissive zoning.

> set up a commercial kitchen in your home, and set up patio furniture for random people to show up and order take out?

This already happens in my country. It's a great way to support entrepreneurship and small businesses. I can't imagine how authoritarian the country must be to criminalize this. Are you living in North Korea or Cuba by any chance

This seems to be pretty common where I'm living in Mexico and is also pretty great. But also everywhere is walkable and no one is driving their canyonero to go and pick up tacos.

I'm perplexed to see that you are afraid of random people coming into your neighborhood. In fact I'm more perplexing about the zoning laws in America.

What you mentioned is a very common thing in multiple countries - No one is afraid of random people coming into the neighborhood. (Neither do they all have guns to protect themselves).

Last summer in the midst of the pandemic, someone AirBnB'd an empty house a few streets over from us to throw a giant party. I know this because I could hear the music as though I were in a night club from my back yard. There were also cats with out of state plates parked all over the place. Our town is generally fairly lax on laws like noise restrictions, maybe because it's never been an issue and avoids involving the police in squabbles amongst neighbors, so apparently it was legal. Anyway, it was of no benefit to anyone who actually lived in town and a major PITA for everyone living in the surrounding blocks, so I can easily see how residents might choose to outlaw such rentals.

How would you feel if I paid your next door neighbor to store radioactive waste in their yard? What if I paid them to demolish their home and put up a giant flashing billboard facing your bedroom window?

Do you think it would impact the value of you property? Do you think that would be fair?

People care because it is a matter of justice, which is one of the fundamental precepts of society.

So what if a NIMBY pays to stop rezoning to high density in their suburb? Isn't it the same then?

If you account for societal benefits and not just the owner's personal gain then I don't think they are the same.

It's really just matter whether you view regulations as legitimate tool to curve/change behaviors that you think are detrimental to society.

Legislating morality has been an utter failure. And here you advocating for legislating not morality but your own personal feelings and experiences. I take an issue with the entitlement that other people should change their behavior to protect your housing prices

I disagree it has been an utter failure, first exmaple that comes to mind is lack of affordable health care in US compared to most western countries, and other less "controversial" examples: child labor and minimum age for marriage.

And no I'm not advocating for anything based on my own personal feelings, but if something is deemed as harmful to society, yes perhaps we need to pass legislation to minimize it.

But also all laws in some way or other are based on morals - who decided that stealing is wrong? Why isn't it just fair use of "free market" of force?

Did the law actually fix those issues, or did the electorate's views on those things change, and then the law was changed to reflect that? In a democracy, laws only get passed when you have a majority of lawmakers on board, which is generally a good proxy for the electorate's views on issues. The causation is not at all clear to me.

> Why? It's your home, you can do anything in it

You kinda can, but you don't get the type of legal protections a hotel or B&B that plays by the rules has.

Also like it's your home, but it's not your roads, cops, firemen, sewage system, power grid, courts... you wanna use all those services you have to play by their rules and there's a lot of rules and they don't exactly make a lot of sense.

Might as well eschew all zoning laws and turn your home into a junkyard or a industrial manufacturing facility by the same rationale: it is your home, after all.

Some people are consistent and are 100% okay with that as well.

I think people would be mostly fine with it if it were only "for a few days", but it's not.

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