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To be fair, housing and rental markets in some places are kind of pre-ruined. There have been plenty of (and doubtless will be plenty more) scammy landlords for short-term rentals.

AirBnB really just provided a modern online interface with some customer service stuff that papered over the bad stuff for a while. But like with actual bad construction, you can't hide the stuff forever so sooner or later the magic disappears.

Well, they're ruined because of zoning (and tax law but that's a whole other story)

In theory zoning is supposed be in residents interest to stop things like fracking from happening next to playgrounds (it doesn't but again that's another story). Cities follow zoning law to the letter when it comes to new apartments.

Airbnb repurposes residential zoned property as commerical hotels. If we're going to take zoning seriously this shouldn't be allowed.

Comparing it to a commercial hotel isn’t really accurate. It’s more like a bed and breakfast. Size of the property matters a lot.

In every city there are multiple hosts who buy/rent out entire apartment complexes and turn them into AirBnBs. That's a hotel, not a bed and breakfast.

Yeah but at that point it’s just plain old tax fraud.

AirBnB sux but zoning has arguably been a net negative on most societies in many ways

https://youtu.be/bnKIVX968PQ

https://youtu.be/CCOdQsZa15o

for me what I noticed lately is that in California it's impossible to have a quiet modern apartment because nearly 100% of modern apartment buildings are only allowed to be built on busy noisy high traffic streets. If you want a quiet street you're forced to buy/rent a house

why is california not allowing apartment buildings being built in low traffic streets?

Because then they won't be low traffic streets anymore

temporarily, sure. doesn't mean you can't build there?

100% agree.

But if we take zoning seriously when it comes to new apartments then we should take it seriously when it comes to Airbnb.

Is it possible to build proper noise insulation, which makes the house as quiet as the a house in a quiet neignorhood, to a newly built, modern apartment house?

I think it is, but construction companies are trying to savd a few cents, and they don't add proper noise insulation.

Where I live the zoning laws require better noise isolation for new builds on major roads, because this is such an easy way for investors to save money and screw tenants.

Not true in SF. Plenty of apartments are on streets that are not main thoroughfares. In fact busy streets are often primarily zoned commercial

Name any apartment complex on a quiet street in SF that's not in Mission Bay that's been built in the last 15 years

I don’t know any that were built in the last 15 years.

Where exactly in CA? I live in an apartment on a quiet street and the worst noise problem I have is the upstairs neighbors have a heavy dog that likes to jump around.

Population density too

A lot of the macrolevel complaints about Airbnb are trotted out because customers had shitty experiences. I still bring up their douchey bus ads in sf bragging about finally paying their taxes after years of dodging then not because that campaign directly effected me but because I have been personally burned by the company a few times and this anecdote helps communicate the global nature of the problem with the company culture that a few bad stays doesn’t always convey.

I've seen all the comments about cleaning fees but didn't really believe it until I was looking for a place to spend March break; it's completely ridiculous! How is it that they aren't capped as a % of nightly cost? This is like the outrageous shipping costs of old eBay.

you can now chose to see the totals with all the cleaning fees included.

And you still have to clean up before leaving.

Because an Airbnb listing is cleaned every time a new guest checks in, it doesn't matter whether you stay for one night only or 10 nights. It's a fixed cost to the host.

Then make it a % of a 1 night stay. A $150 cleaning fee is nonsense. It used to be 20-30.

How much cleaning fee depends on the local market price of cleaning. Depending on how big the place is, $150 is possible. In SF e.g. you can't find a cleaner with $20-30. Hotels pay less on cleaner labor because it's more efficient (cleaners are probably full time employees cleaning all rooms every day anyway). And why it would be % of night rate? Cleaning fee is flat for one cleaning service.

The owner can clean it themselves or the cleaning fee should be built into the overall price, you know, like hotels.

Only makes sense if the host is actually paying professional cleaning service, or doing it themselves at the level provided at those services, after each stay.

And I am very sure that's not the case 99% of the time based on my own experience. I'd be thankful if the kitchen counter is clean and there is no trash. That's actually not a low bar.

You've stayed in 100 Airbnb's and only one of them had a clean kitchen counter and the trash taken out? That's dedication to a service and also extremely bad luck.

All the vrbos we have been at were professionally cleaned. Maybe the low end is more scammy

It costs about 200$ to get my house cleaned so it seems like a pretty standard cost especially for a larger place.

We had a place booked on Airbnb near the end of the summer. Had a deposit paid, and the overall price was a bit steep, but needed to stay in the city at that time. Three weeks out we get an email with the "house rules" including disclosing that the owner would actually be staying in the house and would need to go through the main bedroom to enter and exit the property.

We were contemplating what to do with this information as the listing is under "entire place" when a few days later we got an email from Airbnb saying that there was a price adjustment of +$395 for cleaning PER DAY. We had it booked for 5 days so we needed to pay an additional $~2000. That was more than double the original cost. Thankfully we were able to cancel and get our deposit back with just the automated cancellation, but we did get a nasty message from the host that we we reported back to Airbnb.

> Its hard to think of another company outside of Facebook that has blown all their good will so quickly and so completely.

Twitter comes rapidly to mind

The difference is that Twitter is better than it's ever been now, while Facebook and Airbnb continue to deteriorate.

I'm sorry but I literally laughed out loud after reading your comment.

Laugh away, but Old Twitter was run by some pretty scummy people who allowed the FBI and CIA to backdoor the service. It was also a lot slower and broken compared to how fast it is now, especially outside North America (they recently added a lot more server capacity).

Also massively bloated as recently as a year ago. Loads of people working there who didn't seem to do much except tweak icons 2000 times, enforce DEI mandates, and hit their department's budget. Awful. Glad to see the deadwood getting cleaned out, speed enhancements, and new features being rolled out.

Added more server capacity? They just shut down an entire data center (they had 3, so that's a -33% reduction if you assume they're the same size.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/29/technology/twitter-elon-m...

What's the speed enhancements?

I'm told most of the rollout was data centers outside North America: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1608324539779551232

I don't think AirBNB is blameless, but so much of this could be avoided by simply building more homes to allow supply to meet demand. US cities have not been building enough homes for decades--this is the main driver of home values going up because scarcity drives prices up. The fact that the President, Congress, and most governors never really address this means it's not going to be solved any time soon. Even in California we do half-measures like upzoning that will take years/decades to have any impact.

Its not just the shortage, its the change in usage. I live in fear that one of my neighbors will become an Air BnB house. Instead of friendly people next door you can grow with, there will be a continual turnover of short term people, parties and clueless behavior.

“People next door you can grow with” how quaint. I feel like I’m listening to a Hobbit from inside the Shire who doesn’t know Mordor has taken over outside. A little boost of positivity.

Don't you know your next door neighbours?

Building more homes requires infrastructure to support those homes.

The real solution is to tax each additional dwelling ~30,000$ (depending on area) to pay for the infrastructure to support it and then actually build that infrastructure.

I’d go with a percentage instead of flat fee. Or some tiered structure to the flat fee. Some of these mega hosts own 40+ properties.

Either can work, but a 500k house and a 5 million dollar house are likely to need roughly the same supporting services in terms of schools and transportation etc.

The goal of such fees is to avoid subsidizing any specific type of development but as long as it averages out then it’s presumably fine.

These are Airbnb units we’re talking about, they’re unlikely to need many of those services (like schools). My goal is to reduce the amount of properties one can own without paying more than they’re worth. It should be prohibitively expensive to buy your 3rd property, as in 1.5x market price or more with the extra 50% going to cover local service expenses.

Is there a big tech company that people brag about working at anymore?

Apple(if they would be allowed to)

The Apple employees at the nearby Apple campus are very open about working there when you meet them socially.

Apple, knock on wood.

Google is still mentioned by some.

Eww, no.

Microsoft is mentioned frequently

People are generally fine bragging about where they work outside the bay area (and Seattle to a lesser degree). The stigma of Big Tech is somewhat localized.

It’s a job - for many people, especially with families, they are fine with that, and they don’t wrap up their identity with it.

The same happens in the defense industry.

I regularly see "disclaimer: I work in Google" in comments here. Also, "Why I left Google" is still (surprisingly) a somewhat popular genre.

> You never hear someone claim to work at AirBnB anymore due to what the company has done to help ruin housing and rental markets.

I hear this a lot. I've always wondered if it was that easy wouldn't a lot more people be buying properties and airbnb-ing them out through local agencies ?

Citation needed for the magnitude of Airbnb’s contribution to “ruining housing and rental markets”

You won't find one. The most cited article I've found shows that the most significant effect Airbnb has on rentals is a 0.5% rise in rental rates in Manhattan. It's not 0, but it's pretty damn close.

Yet my comment gets downvoted to oblivion because it questions the conclusion that everybody has jumped to

http://insideairbnb.com/reports/platform-failures-how-short-...

This is an interesting read about the market effects Airbnb has caused. They’re definitely moving prices and removing units from the market.

“Inside Airbnb” doesn’t sound impartial or unbiased at all.

> people are getting squeezed for living space and rising rents partially due to AirBnb taking those rentals off the market

From what I've seen, short term rentals have negligible effects on the housing market. And restrictions on short term rentals have little to no effect on housing prices. It's just another scapegoat (like foreign owned housing) that people like to use because they can't accept the fact that the solution is to BUILD MORE HOUSING. (Reduce restrictions like exclusionary zoning and environmental/community reviews)

Well I did hedge my wording because AirBnB has different effects in different places, so there is no global effect that can be measured.

If you live in a ski town or beach town then it probably has had far more effect than the locals looking to buy or rent would want. if you live in a small town with very little tourism then people may feel like you do that its a non factor.

New York city seems to think that 10,000 distinct places to live will come back to the market, is 10,000 units in New York "negligible" to use your wording?

I don't know but I'm guessing it will have some measurable effect.

https://www.npr.org/2022/12/28/1145709106/nyc-could-lose-10-...

“Locals”, heh.

https://reallifecomics.com/comic.php?comic=february-17-2021

Can you explain that comic?

I don't see the word Local anywhere on it and I honestly don't get the joke.

The joke (somewhat exaggerated) is that there are no actual local people who live there (i.e. in tourist towns which are small); all houses there are now Airbnb, leaving no houses for local people to live in. It follows that there are no such people as “locals”, which was the word used by the post I was replying to.

This analysis about the impact Airbnb was having on Amsterdam disagrees: https://www.ing.nl/zakelijk/kennis-over-de-economie/onze-eco...

The city has passed laws to keep down the amount of temporary rentals so the balance has undoubtably shifted by now. A later analysis by the same bank (https://bnb-beheer.nl/blog/2019/03/06/prijseffect-airbnb-op-...) says as much.

Ok, so ban AirBnB and more housing is available for people who want long term leases... but there's still a problem, because now we have a shortage of temporary housing.

Any solution that isn't "build a fuckton more housing units" isn't a solution at all. We need enough housing for permanent residents AND people who prefer to live in AirBnBs. Often the AirBnB people are wealthy tourists who spend a lot and stimulate the local economy, so kicking them out is a horrible idea.

> Often the AirBnB people are wealthy tourists who spend a lot and stimulate the local economy, so kicking them out is a horrible idea.

Amsterdam specifically wants less tourists.

They have a load of initiatives and policies to try reduce what they call "negative tourism" that are will just have the net effect of reducing overall tourism - the actual goal.

Similar issues in Venice and some other European cities.

Over tourism makes places less liveable for the residents who live - and vote - there.

Obviously the solution is "build a million extra houses". However, it turns out building a million houses takes time. Until the houses are built, get rid of the temporary housing meant almost exclusively for tourists this particular city doesn't want, everybody wins.

"Rich tourists" are good for purely tourist driven economies, but most cities don't exist to please the whims of tourists, and most local businesses in a wealthy economy aren't targeting rich tourists either.

What actually happens is that family neighbourhoods are forced to deal with constant parties and drunk and loud tourists because some multimillionaire set up one of the rare available houses for his personal profit.

I'm sure there are people who enjoy living in AirBnB's but that's not what AirBnB is even trying to accomplish. Hotels exist and are regulated for good reason. Tourists are put in touristy areas where businesses want to attract tourists, also for good reason.

When dealing with a housing shortage, the local population is more important than tourists, unless there is no economy other than the tourist economy. Look at what happened to Venice, the city that exclusively exists because of tourists because of overtourism.

> From what I've seen, short term rentals have negligible effects on the housing market

It changes depending on the location.

Some places e.g. Byron Bay in Australia have been significantly affected by short term rentals.

Maybe... though whenever I look closely it turns out that cities are suffering from structurally broken property markets, and short-term rentals are a convenient, highly visible scapegoat that puts the blame on something involving foreigners.

It depends on the locality. It is easy to forget even popular "tourist destinations" have their local population before they became so popular. Short term rentals have a very real effect on housing markets in such places.

Kauai is one of my favorite Hawaiian islands and has one of the strictest short term rental regulations. I truly believe if short term rentals are free for all it would end up being a billionaire's playground (more so than it already is) with no locals being able to afford housing at all.