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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

I also see a bunch of fabricated stories about how Airbnb is the reason why housing is unaffordable, with the implication that if short-term rentals were banned, housing would somehow magically become affordable overnight.

I got news for y'all, though: the only thing that solves housing unaffordability in places with demand is... building more homes.

Don't get me wrong, Airbnb as a company has and causes a ton of problems, but they are not the cause of housing unaffordability.

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I dunno, considering that Dublin has more AirBnBs for let in a five km radius of city centre than, at one point, there were houses to let in the entire country. That's a problem, especially during a housing crisis. AirBnB is a cancer, as are the entitled tourists who feel they should live like locals at the locals' expense.

1. AirBnB couldn’t have more available properties simply because it is a subset of all available properties.

2. Not sure what calculus you used to determine that they live at the locals’ expense. Surely people paid for their properties and local products including paying VAT.

1. That's a poor argument and completely irrelevant. There's a massive difference between short term and long term lets. AirBnB has more short term rentals available than long term ones in the entire country. That's a problem even if it's a 'subet' of all available properties.

2. Oh they pay a little in tax. Not the same as depriving locals of places to live near where they work affordably, and pricing all but the highest earners out of a home in general. Not to mention it pushes locals further and further out of the areas near jobs, and even then it's more and more expensive. Longer commutes, higher rates, it's all a net negative on the actual residents of a city. Nobody benefits but the entitled tourists and the rich landlords, who are insulated enough by their money to not see or care about the societal harm they cause.

1. I think it is a good argument because it exposes the incoherence and false dichotomy of the statement in question. It isn’t even clear to me what rate of short term listings to long term listings would be indicative of healthy economy. Is it a problem? How big of a problem it is? What are its real causes? I think that would require a real econometric study instead of data “quote”-mining.

2. Oh, so there are also “the rich landlords”, who stand in opposition to “locals”. Who else do we have? Politicians and construction companies. All of them seem to partake in that grand conspiracy of lack of xenophobia to serve entitled foreigners through legal means. If only they could learn about Blut und Boden calculus of not harming locals…

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