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Comment by jeremyjh | Hacker News Reader

I’m genuinely interested to hear what are the specific harms you have suffered due to this.

I used to live in a 4 unit apartment in SF. One of the units in the building was a full time Airbnb. On several occasions, the different Airbnb renters parked in the wrong spot in our small garage, which disrupted the parking situation for the non-Airbnb tenants in the unit. On another occasion, a renter got locked out of the front gate. I watched from my window as they bent the gate bars so they could open the gate without using the key. When I went down to the gate to ask them what they were doing, they denied damaging the property.

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.

Is it difficult to imagine? Living next to a regular long-term rental has some of the same issues, AirBNB short term rentals just magnify that. Personally, one of the best things I ever did to improve my quality of life was move to a newly constructed mid/upper neighborhood where all houses are owner-occupied. It's amazing how much better people act and treat their property when it's actually their own.

Yes, it can be difficult to imagine for some people, based on their lived experiences. Those who have observed little or no unwanted behaviours from short-term renters wild tend to assume "It works." or "It works the vast majority' of the time.". Some combinations of hosts, their rules, and guests can be successful and completely non-problematic. I, having lived some problematic places long before AirBnB existed, sympahise with your experience. I've been fortunate to see primarily successes.

Gee, how about having a parade of random people showing up at all hours of the day/night just to start? The erosion of community. Further commodification of housing so that only the rich and upper middle class can buy a house in any city?

That last point - that housing is too expensive - is not something that airbnb causes or can fix. That's a supply side problem and the solution is housing construction. It may marginally exacerbate the symptom by providing liquidity.

It removes liquidity from housing market, by repurposing flats/houses into hotels.

It's creating liquidity, just not the kind you value. It's liquidity of short term housing rather than long term housing.

Ok, then more accurately it’s moving liquidity. The next question is which is more valuable to society?

The United States is short O(10M) housing units[0], primarily due to anti-construction policies. Airbnb has O(100k) listings[1] in the US. Banning short-term rentals is a 1% solution. That's a policy distraction, not a useful lever to pull.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/us-housing...

[1] https://www.stratosjets.com/blog/airbnb-statistics/

There are plenty of empty luxury condos in every major city. They mostly serve as bank accounts for foreign investors. There's plenty of construction, just the wrong type.

Maybe so, but can you show any data that it's a significant or meaningful problem and not a visible scapegoat? The data I found (above) makes clear that deleting the short-term rental market would not even dent the housing shortage problem in the United States.

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.

Adding more houses to the market certainly will decrease pricing pressure. Nobody said banning Airbnb was suddenly going to make housing affordable but decrease prices.

And my question remains, which is more valuable to society, short term rentals or homes?

It's not a zero-sum game. You can have both, but you need to build enough to have it. Regulating the use of a thing is a mark of market failure. How would you feel if the government told you that you could only use a pencil for writing because that has more social value than its use in making a model log cabin?

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.

No, we have been ignoring your point because it’s one of those Econ 101 world views based on assumptions that have no basis in the real world and actual human behavior. You can’t look at the number of Airbnb rentals and conclude it’s not having a significant impact on the market simply based on the raw number of units. What we know from all systems theory is that a small portion of things has the majority of the effect. In this case, short term rentals are very likely setting the upper bounds of the pricing range.

https://time.com/6223185/airbnbs-empty-short-term-rentals/

Actual research suggests the effect is tiny.

"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."

https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mksc.2020.1227

Clicks on "actual research," finds the usual econometric voodoo. Even better, the use of instrumental variables to supposedly "isolate" effects. Totally representative, I am sure.

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...

It's amazing how lazy the supply siders are on this argument. Of course there's no good data-- real estate interests fight to prevent that data from even being collected. You only have to drive around major cities at dusk and see how many units have no lights on for weeks on end to recognize the magnitude of the problem. There may be data from Vancouver BC and other places that have passed vacancy taxes to address the issue. Further, the amount of construction resources that go into building luxury condos and other useless units are resources that CANNOT be used to build good housing. There is a limited supply of labor and supplies for that.

Liquidity for short term housing is valuable to who? Do you think most people here or otherwise care about speculators? We don't.

I think the ownership is not encouraged anymore.

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.

Moving every time a better opportunity comes up is a privilege enjoyed by a small section of the population. The vast majority of people move rarely, and when they do move it's usually within the same locality.

Even for people who can, family (spouse, kids in school, nearby relatives, etc.), friends, and so forth tend to make moving cities a pretty significant decision at some point.

It's a cultural issue. Give it 1-2 generations and people won't care that much about nearby relatives, friends etc.

Th trend line has been toward significantly less mobility relative to past decades--though you'd probably want to correct the numbers for demographics given that 20 somethings move the most (as one would expect).

Exactly-- the number of young people still living at home has surged in the last decade. This is not surprising given that "starter homes" are one of the main targets of housing speculators. People who would buy their first house rent longer, driving up rental rates and putting the transition from family to independence further out of reach for many.

Without home ownership you are throwing away a large portion of the money you may make in your life. Even if you move frequently it still makes sense to buy so long as you’re not hitting the tip of the market.

A cabin across the street from me was an AirBnB rental: very loud parties all weekend, running long after midnight. Then COVID came, and now AirBnB has gone down the toilet, so the problem has not returned. Yet.

does the town/city not have noise ordinances ?

Good luck finding a bylaw officer to enforce it, I've made many complaints in my city only to be told there's only one person and they never showed up... and this is in a city of 700k.

curious where you're located? AFAIK Airbnb now banned all parties but it's hard to enforce

Aside from the annoyance of the lifestyle of tourists vs residents, you miss out on having a normal neighbor who you can build a relationship over time with. Our neighbors keep a key, water plants while we're away, babysit our kids, generally look out for each other.

Airbnb greatly contributed to the housing shortage in Vermont.

Is there some unbiased literature you can share that demonstrates this conclusively?

Long-term rentals getting converted to short-term rentals in a constrained, inelastic market drives up prices, prices are set at the margin. You don't publications for that, that's just a basic fact.

If it’s a basic fact then surely there is literature that backs it up?

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