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Comment by screwturner68 | Hacker News Reader

If people want to be in the hotel business buy a freaking hotel, there are plenty for sale. If you want to be in the rental business buy and apartment building, there are lots of apartment buildings available too. All these people doing Air BnB and Renting out their old house is what is skewing the market and fucking things up for everyone -the city, home owners, neighbors, hotel operators, renters and vacationers. I'm glad NYC has rental laws like they do I really wish more cities had them and actually enforced them, a lot of this bullshit would end quickly. Until them people will have to live next to unlicensed hotels, subsidize their neighbors business and generally get screwed over so Air BnB can take their 30%.

Anyone that bitches that the rent is too high, here's your starting point, all those Air BnB rentals are driving the long term rental market up significantly. Adding 20% more units to the market would save you a ton of money.

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> If people want to be in the hotel business buy a freaking hotel

NYC is somewhat notorious for recently disallowing all new hotels. You could not enter the hotel business in NYC if you wanted to.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/nyregion/hotels-tourism-n...

https://therealdeal.com/new-york/2022/12/09/how-special-are-...

Well, being picky and strict, parent said "buy a hotel" not "build a hotel". I guess buying an existing hotel doesn't count as a new one ;)

To be clear, I doubt any existing operator is selling. Without the possibility of any new competition, they will be able to start jacking rates up as demand grows (see demand growth forecasts in the articles).

> fucking things up for everyone - [...] vacationers.

Huh? As a frequent vacationer and user of Airbnb (I'm staying in one right now, as it turns out), Airbnb has made vacationing so much better.

I get to stay in a larger variety of neighborhoods and locations. Kitchens are usually standard (good luck finding one in most hotels). There's more space if I want to stay with family or friends. Prices -- even in places where Airbnb hosts are required to pay local hotel taxes -- are much more varied and, in general, better (and when I do decide to choose a hotel for whatever reason prices are often lower due to competition from Airbnb). I could go on...

> Anyone that bitches that the rent is too high, here's your starting point, all those Air BnB rentals are driving the long term rental market up significantly.

I hear this a lot, but fail to see any hard evidence that killing short-term rentals would fix this problem. I don't doubt that short-term rentals are contributing to housing unaffordability, but there are much better solutions than banning them. Which brings me to:

> Adding 20% more units to the market would save you a ton of money.

Agreed! I've been saying that for years. Please, build 20% more units, and I think prices will indeed go down. Hell, don't stop at 20%, even. If there's demand, build!

> I hear this a lot, but fail to see any hard evidence that killing short-term rentals would fix this problem. I don't doubt that short-term rentals are contributing to housing unaffordability, but there are much better solutions than banning them. Which brings me to:

The market for long term rentals doubled in Dublin during the pandemic due to lack of tourism. If you can't see how bringing all that supply (over 1000 units) back to the market won't help long-term rentals, that's on you.

AirBnB is a cancer to cities and locals, and needs to be banned for good. Tourists aren't locals, they're not entitled to live like them, especially at the locals' expense.

> hear this a lot, but fail to see any hard evidence that killing short-term rentals would fix this problem.

Well the city of Halifax just banned airbnb in some areas and there was a flood of houses both on the market to sell and for long term renting. Clearly AirBnb is taking some long term rental stock away from the market, that can't be up for debate.

if your point is that banning airbnb won't fully fix housing and therfor we shouldn't ban it, well that's an awfully high bar. What is clear is that banning airbnb will help improve the long term rental market.

AirBnB got me an apartment for awhile in a top-3 US city because I had horrible credit and bad rental history. I don't have such issues in the cities with pretty weak tenant protections, but in places like NYC strong tenant protections make landlords nervous to rent to anyone who may take awhile to get rid of, so people end up relying on AirBnB etc.

It's not purely a bunch of tourists or whatever taking up this housing and driving out the locals.

When I first moved to SF with no history, I got a couch in SF for $10/day on Airbnb. Top notch experience!

That's great, I also had good experiences with AirBnB early on.

This seems to have become a standard practice in VC-backed firms, a process clearly documented here [0] by Cory Doctorow (article covers much more than just the title-mentioned Tiktok).

[0] https://doctorow.medium.com/tiktoks-enshittification-bb3f5df...

Many friends and families enjoy staying under one roof. Hotels and apartments rarely offer that to even 2 families of 4. Add in Grandparents and you’re looking at 10-12 capacity. That’s 5-6 hotel rooms and typically nowhere to cook or sit at a table together to eat or play a game.

Many houses sit empty when their owners are away. Why not use that space to house travelers without having to build more hotels?

I think most cities have it backwards trying to regulate the hosts. Hosts aren’t at the property and aren’t usually awake at 1am when issues might occur.

The renters cause the issues, so regulate the renters. Cities could mandate a 25-50% deposit that’s refunded if no noise/parking issues occur. Whoever put the deposit down will likely be at the house and self-policing their group that they invited.

Makes more sense than blaming hosts when most bookings are “instant book”, or even if they do vet, it’s likely just a quick text chat or going off of previous AirBnB ratings (which many hosts rate 5/5 so the guest will return).

This is true. But there are also people who buy up properties for AirBnB aren't trying to resource-allocate their own homes like Cloud/IAAS-style and try to use it for purely 100% hotel-like purposes. In doing so they're raising up the home prices, cheating out businesses that pay taxes for being legally allow to hotel, and cause problems for other homes that don't want a hotel in their backyard.

Cities can solve this problem through zoning.

Sedona does it well. Every HOA gets to decide if they are a tourist neighborhood or not. Short term rentals are either allowed or banned and you know that going in.

There are many homes in tourist towns that are designed to be vacation homes. Sometimes they are 5+ bedrooms, or are located inside a resort area. Families don’t want to live in those homes and they’re not conducive to long term rentals either.

Tourism zoning allows those homes to not sit empty and be taxed appropriately, while keeping short term rentals away from residential zoning areas likes parks, schools, etc.

Instead you have cities passing dozens or hundreds of pages of regulations that makes no one happy. It’s led to lots of lawsuits, complicated enforcement and more bureaucracy.

Simple is better. Another option is to allow anyone to rent, but cap it at 30-60 nights per year, or only during peak tourism months. It‘s enough income to supplement a homeowner’s mortgage, but not enough to make it a profitable investment opportunity.

I don't know enough about zoning laws to have a strong stance on this matter.

It seems like to me that the people who purchase homes specifically to run an AirBnB business seems to espouse "f@#! you, I got mine" attitude which is super contagious and toxic.

> cheating out businesses that pay taxes for being legally allow to hotel

I have zero sympathy for this part of your argument: hotel zoning is just a legally-allowed monopoly, with all the bad things that usually comes with.

And do note that, in some jurisdictions, there are now taxes specifically covering short-term rental activities. No "cheating" going on there. And any municipality that hasn't enacted such a tax... well, that's their oversight, then.

You can have zero empathy for my arguments... but one still should be following the law. I dislike how zoning happens in the US (NIMBYism, et al.) but I still follow them to the best of my ability. These AirBnB folks are outright disregarding them.

We can disagree about laws but not following/enforcing laws because you disagree with them (for most part) is a recipe for disaster.

There is a home on my block that has a permanent vacation rental sign in the front yard. I talked to the owner the other day and she literally said "this is our vacation rental". They literally only own it to rent it out. This is in a residential neighborhood in Seattle, a city with unreasonably expensive housing. I frequently use AirBnB when traveling. Only once in my life have I stayed at an AirBnB that is actually a primary residence. All the others are full time short-term rentals. AKA Hotels.

The solution to unaffordable housing is to build more housing. I think you'll find if short-term rentals were banned tomorrow, rents and home prices would not drop much, if at all. Sure, maybe there'd be a short-term drop in home prices while full-time Airbnb hosts offload their properties, but it won't last.

Building more housing in places where there is demand is the only way to reduce housing prices. We don't see that happening because homeowners like the high cost of housing, and vote down new development. Homeowners tend to have more political power since they're a bit more fervent about this sort of thing than renters, many of whom won't be living in the area long enough to care. Unfortunately, those renters who do want to stay, and perhaps even want to own their own home, just don't have the political clout to change things.

I agree we need to build more housing and in places like Seattle that means denser housing as well. A single family home in the city is a fantasy. But there’s really no reason to ever sell a house here when you can just rent it out. Just building more is only part if the solution.

I’m not saying we should just ban short term rentals. I’m saying we should make all rentals ruinously expensive unless they actually provide some economic benefit. If you aren’t providing housing to low income renters that truly can’t afford a home then you don’t get to buy more houses. Just destroy the incentives to hold real estate through taxes.

In Europe there are "apartment hotels" which offer exactly this.

Here are some examples: https://www.visitberlin.de/en/hotelthema/apartment-hotel

AirBnb is really great for families, in theory. I’ve had many great experiences with it.

The problem is it is now polluted with grifters, and you don’t want to take a 15% chance that your place will have cockroaches, require digging through 8’ of snow to get to the front door, or have frozen pipes (all these have happened to me with Airbnb).

Even worse, I feel that it went from a 5% bad rate to more like 35%.

I call bullshit to your bullshit. You don't know that AirBnB is skewing the market. You just see the market sucking, AirBnB existing, and went with a Post Hoc Ergo Proctor Hoc. There are so many things skewing the housing market. The rules on commercial mortgages, large corporate landlords engaging in cartel pricing, perverse incentives, wealthy people foreign and domestic buying space to park assets but not doing anything useful like renting it out or living in it, the list goes on and AirBnB is at the bottom. AirBnB provides an invaluable service, filling the niche of flexibly scaling housing for when its too long term for a hotel and too short term for a lease. Its the go to option for when you need to patch over a living situation issue just long enough to find a real place. AirBnB doesn't remove housing from the rental market because AirBnB is a rental market.

AirBnB absolutely removes housing from the one rental market that matters - long term rentals. This is quite easy to see, as well as its influence on supply and thus pricing. In 2020 the number of long term let's available in Dublin doubled thanks to tourism shutting down and landlord switching. Sadly that's likely all been lost now.

Short term lets are nowhere near as important as long term ones, especially vacation rentals. They're actively harmful often, especially with the way AirBnB takes supply from the long-term lets.

Wait a second. You're using the 2020 pandemic and the massive system shock it caused on (among other industries) tourism as a proxy for the impact of tourism in particular on rental availability and then extrapolating it further to the effects of AirBnB in particular? As opposed to the gigantic obvious other system shocks that happened in 2020 which also had a massive impact on housing and commuting patterns vis a vis work from home and mass exodus from urban areas in general. Pray tell have you ever tried to reject the hypothesis AirBnB is the cause of housing problems? Have you looked and failed to find data in that direction at all?

*Propter Hoc

The idea that there is an arbitrary split between hotels or other rentals is, well, arbitrary.

This is the same nonsense as NYC's yellow cab vs black car licensing and regulations.

Let people make businesses how they choose.

The split would be zoning and operating a business in a residence. Hotels usually have fire escapes, inspections, etc. Also parking, expected noise, any number of things my house doesn't conform to, and doubtful most of the Airbnb's do either.

I've lived across from nightly rentals at a resort, I expected it, so no complaints to the late night partying etc. But my current neighborhood I have no expectation the house next door is going to suddenly start hosting huge gatherings every weekend, and I expect it to stay that way.

Anecdotally I see the opposite. My long-standing neighbors that own houses throw insane, loud, all the way until 5am parties and since they've lived there forever they know the police, code enforcement etc and can get away with anything. They magically have everything trimmed, cars moved etc exactly 1 day before inspectors come so that nothing bad ever happens to them. Short term renters in the neighborhood don't have such connections and can't get away with such things, someone calls for a noise complaint and they're fucked.

This sounds similar to what I hear when people oppose building housing in general: people expect their neighborhood to stay exactly the same as when they bought it. That's not how the real world works, though.

If you live in a city, you have to deal with noise, full stop. That's one of the trade offs of dense, urban living. Certainly there are limits to what you should have to put up with, and that's what noise complaints to the police are for. Police aren't doing their job? Well, maybe you should find a way to force them to, instead of trying to restrict what other people want to do with their property. Or move to a building or area or whatever with a neighborhood association that disallows short-term rentals.

Why should a business property with a bed be any more or less safe for human life than a residential property with a bed?

If fire escapes are necessary, they should be required in both cases. If they are not, they shouldn't be. Are hotel guest lives (or resident lives) worth more or less than the other?

Generally, commercial code is stricter than residential code, in everything from plumbing to electrical. I think the idea is that heavier use and providing service to others make the tougher scrutiny worthwhile.

Apartments are generally bigger than hotel rooms -> there's more people in an equivalent size building that is a hotel -> need better fire exits.

These make sense but how much of it is just retcon? I think "this is the way we have always done it" that got enshrined in code is much more likely.

Condo buildings aren't that much different than hotels in terms of density and usage.

Quick google says

> The average size of a newly built apartment in the United States, as of 2018, is 882 square feet. https://getflex.com/blog/average-apartment-size/

> The average hotel room size in the US is 300 square feet (around 28 square metres). https://www.siteminder.com/r/hotel-room-sizes/

The problem with ignoring hotel regulations and renting out residential units is the existing tax, zoning, and building codes don't account for AirBnB. It should be ruinously expensive in tax terms to rent out a residential unit full time. Those units should be used to house people, not to literally extract rent. Residents should have a choice to say what they want to be surrounded by.

Are you saying that the tenants in an Airbnb doesn’t constitute “housing people”? Where do you draw the line then?

Airbnb has many problems and is a disgraceful company especially nowadays, but one thing they did well is to add significant flexibility to a legacy industry full of gatekeepers.

I draw the line at long-term housing of local residents. Anything else is a hotel.

A vacation rental is not housing people.

AirBnB adds flexibility for new rent-seekers. It doesn’t address housing affordability and in some cases actually makes it worse.

Except that Airbnb hosts are indeed required to pay hotel taxes (or taxes enacted specifically for short-term rentals) in some jurisdictions, and yet... it's still worth it, financially. And, what do you know, prices are often still better than staying at a hotel.

Sorry, but I don't see it. Short term rental laws in NYC are crazy strict. How is "buy a building" any different than "buy an apartment".

What will happen to hotel prices then?

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