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Comment by ETH_start | Hacker News Reader

From my perspective, as a proponent of the moral right to private property and free association, the great thing about Airbnb/Uber/etc is that they offer a non-political means of opposing and circumventing politically instituted restrictions on market exchange.

I believe public opinion will always be an insufficient guarantor of these rights, due to inherent cognitive biases and over-simplifications (in effect, ideological narratives), in addition to susceptibility to special interest public relations campaigns (e.g. right now, the Hotel Lobby has effectively manufactured the entire mainstream narrative around Airbnb: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/technology/inside-the-hot...) so we need means of fortifying rights in the face of a hostile political climate.

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I hardly qualify as a libertarian, but I have had many good vacations that I could not have afforded without Airbnb.

I understand that some guests are not as courteous as I am, and that I have been reasonably lucky in not having a bad rental experience, but the same holds true for any other hotel stay as well.

It seems to me that a better course of action than outlawing property owners from using it as they please is to provide the essential enforcement to ensure that the property owners do not impinge on their neighbors' enjoyment of their property, not outlawing specific uses all together.

Airbnb opens up tourism to the middle class. The problem, IMHO, is that society views travel as a non-essential luxury, when in reality, it will evolve to become an essential mode of life in an increasingly globalized world.

You affording vacations is less important to cities and to society at large than locals bring able to afford properties without bidding against parasitic landlords.

> locals bring able to afford properties without bidding against parasitic landlords.

The problem here is the landlords, not airbnb. Even if that didn't exist, you'd still have parasitic landlords and they'd still try to take renters for everything they're worth.

Landlords maximizing what they can charge is normal behavior in an economy, and when concurrent with a free market, leads to a maximum amount of housing supply being created due to people chasing profits by building homes.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, the markets where normal profit-seeking behavior in the landlord business is prohibited, via rent control, see housing become comparatively extremely unaffordable and/or hard-to-acquire. See San Francisco:

https://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentControl.html

The problem is AirBnB. Landlords are regulated with zoning and other practices; people buying up individual apartments and turning areas intended for long term rentals into hotels are the problem, and this is entirely the result of AirBnB et. al.

If there's enough demand that all of this is causing housing affordability issues, then the right answer is always to build more housing.

I am certain that banning short-term rentals will not solve housing affordability. And no, "but it will help a little" is not a valid counter-argument.

Do we know that for certain?

Travel gives people crucial exposure to other parts of the country and world.

Moreover, getting a job in a city often requires being able to get temporary lodging in that city due to the discrimination non-locals face when applying for jobs.

With tenant protection laws and rent control, the available stock of rentals can be extremely small, making it harder for people with poorer references to find shorter-term leases. Short-term rentals provide a means for these individuals to acquire the temporary housing they need to pursue job opportunities in other cities.

Given most of the productivity growth is, due agglomeration effects, accruing to just a couple megapolises: New York and the San Francisco Bay Area[1], short term rental stock can be a means of expanding opportunities for people not privileged enough to not already live in these cities.

[1] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/mac.20170388

If your comment made any sense you would also want to be outlawing hotels. The room sizes are equivalent - - in fact, several of the airbnbs I have stayed in are in hotels.

Is the probably really parasitic landlords or parasitic governance?

It’s not even that AirBNB is often cheaper, but personally it’s more enjoyable to experience a place like a local and not through yet another cookie-cutter hotel in a downtown business district. Staying in a hotel is like traveling to a different country and then eating at McDonalds.

Some people love that kind of thing. They want predictable, pre-arranged experiences. Personally I hate it with every fiber of my being.

I hate it, but I love having a place to live more, and giving other locals that chance. AirBnB directly ruins this for many locals trying to live in an area, since landlords can easily make more via AirBnB, removing a lot of supply from the market. It's just plain entitlement "I should give to live like a local, who cares if they can't afford housing? I'm gone in a week anyway!"

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