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Comment by shagie | Hacker News Reader

Tenants putting the apartment up on Airbnb and not using the property themselves. That could run counter to other laws in NYC and have the property owner at least partially liable if they are complicit or didn't take action to prevent their properties from being used as short term rentals.

https://www.nyc.gov/site/specialenforcement/stay-in-the-know...

> Under the NYC Administrative Code, property owners are responsible for ensuring their properties are maintained in a safe and code-compliant manner at all times. Property owners can and will be issued the violation for any illegal short-term rentals at their property -- even if it is conducted by tenants.

Even aside from that, short term rentals can generate more complaints from neighbors and increase wear and tear on the property.

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These issues arise anytime you have rent control and units with a large disparity between the legally-allowed rent and the market rate rent. Some tenants will want to capture that value (e.g., by subletting to a market rate tenant and living somewhere else).

Yep, except now it's all of NYC that has the "property owner on the hook for any short term rentals".

Rough math... let's say a doorman costs $200/day ($70k/year). 20 units in the building. This would amount to $10/day/unit and thus a rent increase of $300/month for everyone.

For a one bedroom rental, that would represent a 15% increase (on average) for rent increase (based on https://www.apartmentlist.com/rent-report/ny/new-york ).

Note that the long term sublet isn't necessarily a problem - it's the situations where someone is renting out their apartment for less than 30 days and are not occupying it themselves during that period of time.

So now that the property owner is going to be issued a violation if there is an illegal short term rental, how does the property owner prevent that? Note that it is legal to rent out a bedroom of a 2 bedroom apartment on a short term basis if the person who holds the rental lease is there the entire time.

I agree. With long-term subletting the tenants are just cheating the system to the detriment of the landlord, but short-term subletting can actually get the landlord fined by the city. I don’t know which is a bigger problem, but I do know that dealing with violations can be a nightmare for landlords even if the violation is cause by the tenant.

I believe the violations would be the larger concern by the landlords. A rent controlled property that is transferred represents a known loss that can be mitigated (and it's not worse than it is today - rent controlled).

Violations represent an unknown amount and are unbounded, cannot be controlled for and cannot be mitigated easily or inexpensively... though that's part of the article (if you could do face recognition as a landlord you'd be able to alert someone about suspicious activity at apartment XYZ) that would otherwise represent some significant expenses (that would be even harder to do with rent control).

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