I've read people talking about how Airbnb screwed the host or the guest. But few people talk about how it screws the neighbors.
Our neighbors on the other side, unfortunately, own their home. This means I'm forced to live next to (depending on the day of the week), a live concert venue, a muscle car engine noise appreciation celebration, frat parties, and/or a farm (they had a goat for a week ?).
There's nothing anyone can (or will) do about any of these things, and no one's checking their papers to determine if ignoring the noise is your only recourse. The only way to attempt to improve the situation is show respect and hope it's eventually reciprocated. This is just part of living around other humans. The systems in place to mitigate these kinds of petty conflicts aren't taken seriously, whether the rental is long or short term, or the property tax kind.
Another problem is that HOAs are the worst possible size of a government. They're large enough that you're in the minority, but small enough that they don't have anything else to preoccupy themselves with but how you're using your own property.
I've heard that "just imagine what kinds of horrors happen without HOAs" argument many times over, but... I live in the Bay Area in a densely-packed but older neighborhood without a HOA, and I'm yet to witness the terrible consequences of my neighbors' supposed recklessness. Yeah, the houses are painted in different colors and picket fences have different styles and heights, but I think I can live with that.
Most people are reasonable. When you bump into people who are truly unreasonable, a HOA is unlikely to save you. How peaceful and pretty a neighborhood is depends largely on socioeconomic factors (not just wealth, but also the prevalence of problems such as addiction). It just so happens that many new and expensive neighborhoods have HOAs, but that doesn't mean that HOAs are to be credited for good outcomes - or that they will be able to prevent the decline of such communities if the economic climate changes.
Have heard about this from friends and family more than once.. it would be comical if it didn't impede their ability to live so much.
You may as well be renting from them. No, thanks!
HOA style Large grass areas and office park landscaping mcdonaldifies America and is a travesty for the environment and water use.
Select grass areas for actual usage are okay but HOAs default to grass everywhere and bland non-native landscaping. And beige everything.
But whether I cut my grass every 2 weeks or every 3 weeks, or god forbird I decide to have a vegetable garden on the southern side of my house (covenance says must be backyard)...that's HOA realm.
With who? I don't have a neighbor, I have an endless string of rotating strangers. I understand that bad neighbors have always existed, but that's not what's happening in my specific situation.
Anyone and everyone has potential access to the house 30 feet or so from which I sleep. Anyone and everyone at any time. It's a big change.
In the US, and California specifically, any kind of zoning change is met with pitchforks. If your neighbor tried to build an apartment and you didn't like it you could have easily held up the project for years.
Airbnb figured a way to rezone property without invoking the wrath of local busybodies. Kudos to them. But at the same time, if you live in a place that takes zoning seriously then Airbnb shouldn't be allowed.
This so much.
There's a neighbor on the street with a 'unique' house who decided the way she would make money is AirBnB'ing it to film companies. So...a weekend or two a month (usually Th-Mo), we would have 50-60 cars parked wherever they wanted on our narrow street and sidestreets. We would have vans and delivery vehicles block our driveways and sometimes the whole street for as long as they wanted. They would drive over lawns to position trucks because the street is too narrow for a 20+ foot cargo truck to back into the driveway to unload. They would film until 3, 4, sometimes 5 in the morning with loud noise, dozens of people and floodlights. If we said anything, they would mob us and start filming us trying to get us to lose our tempers. Whenever the cops showed up, they would shut down and play nice until they left, and then crank back up. And every one of them didn't get the required city permits until after we complained.
Lovely people in the film industry. /s
The city has regulations against such abusive behavior but not the resources to enforce, and no real recourse when the film companies basically gave the city the middle finger. They're going to be gone in a couple of days so screw those pesky neighbors. So we became the squeaky wheel to get some action. We eventually had to get a lawyer to get this shut down. And you bet there's a bunch of us at the city council meetings lobbying for better enforcement. It looks like we'll get some new regs passed with more teeth.
And, of course, AirBnB didn't care one bit.
Right?
Out of curiosity, do you own properties specifically to rent on short term rental sites?
I enjoy the fact that I get new neighbors all the time because, quite simply... in the past, I've lived next door to people I didn't like at all. When that happens, what can you do, move? This way, if there is an unruly renter, I just call the owner of the condo and they deal with it (only happened once in the last year). Worst case, they leave on their on in a few days.
This puts me off the idea of ever renting out my own place, because I would then have to choose between feeling like a sucker, or being a criminal.
So far most renters have been friendly or kept to themselves. Some were noisy, and some left dozens of cigarette butts on the sidewalk and street, and for the past couple weeks the place has been empty. No one has even come by to put away the trash bins.
The owner has over a dozen houses like this, and I really think it's a bad thing that these houses are not available to people who want to live in them.
Where I live now is area of all single family homes. One house on my street is also a full time Airbnb. There have been fewer issues, but there was one occasion where some people rented the house, threw a party in the house, shots were fired, and bullets went through a neighboring house. There have never been issues at this level in the neighborhood, so this was out of the ordinary.
Not all short term, full time Airbnbs are disrespectful. Not all long term, non-Airbnb neighbors are respectful. But IMO, with non-Airbnb neighbors, you have a better chance of working something out since they are there for the long haul.
Instead we have social mobility so that we can move anytime when better opportunities arise. That may be a good or a bad thing depending on which side you are.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/us-housing...
I could believe (and maybe someone in this thread has data!) that in some extremely over-constrained markets that units are disproportionately used for short-term rentals. But I haven't seen any numbers. And in those cases, you still should be building homes to solve the root cause problem.
Americans persistently seem to want to find any reason at all to absolve themselves of responsibility for the housing crisis. It's investors! It's short-term rentals! It's corporate landlords! But it's never the locals who oppose construction.
And my question remains, which is more valuable to society, short term rentals or homes?
You're also failing to process my point: that banning short-term rentals is an ineffective lever, not that it won't have an epsilon of impact. Yes, you will increase supply by a tiny amount relative to the shortage. It will have near-zero pricing impact because the magnitude pales against the problem.
"At the median owner-occupancy rate zip code, we find that a 1% increase in Airbnb listings leads to a 0.018% increase in rents and a 0.026% increase in house prices."
PS: the author's own words contradict your claim that the effect is tiny, although again I think this is a serious undercount resulting from a poor model and ever worse availability of data nationwide: "This means that, in aggregate, the growth in home-sharing through Airbnb contributes to about one-fifth of the average annual increase in U.S. rents and about one-seventh of the average annual increase in U.S. housing prices." https://hbr.org/2019/04/research-when-airbnb-listings-in-a-c...
If you have a problem with noisy neighbours you basically must make a "noise diary" with date/time/description of the noise over a period of time before anyone will give a shit.
Even then, enforcement varies wildly. Seems to depend where you are, etc.
The best person to complain to is building management, but even then, they vary.
The next best thing to do (and the most German solution) is leaving passive aggressive notes on the buildings noticeboard.
What say should you have in how your neighbor uses their house?
You can live in an HOA with covenants that restrict renting, but that has their own set of problems.
What does having a say look like?
I lived in a town house association where the unit’s being rented were the source of noise, trash, crime, etc.
People renting often don’t care as much for the neighborhood/ locals and they can move on at will. And you'd be surprised how much random citizen land lords are terrible at just being land lords.
After the numbers of rentals were reduced (and background checks required) the neighborhood improved greatly. It was like turning off a light switch on noise, litter, crime, etc...
The issue is not Airbnb or not. The issue is guests etiquette and difficulty to penalize bad/loud/disrespectful people.
The people behind me have done it a few times. How can i tell they had "guests" over?
I find beer bottles, coke cans and garbage on MY property. There is the obvious noise from the late night "pool parties" as well.
Normally people dont care what their neighbours do, but when it starts to impact others, people start to care.
Neighborhoods have a lot of societal norms, my house has frequently been referred to as "the rental" even though I've lived here for years and the prior tenants also all had long runs here... even being a rental house in the neighborhood is considered strange here.