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Comment by cycrutchfield | Hacker News Reader

Why should you get a say about what your neighbor does with their property or what guests they have stay over?

An apartment building is owned collectively and with that comes a set of rules. In most places you aren't allowed to be a nuisance, even though you own a share of the house you don't get to dictate or do whatever you want just because you own something. Your property is just a part of a larger property, respect others or get the fuck out.

It's a pretty simple arrangement that one gets into when they purchase an apartment.

Why do you assume that guests that stay over are a nuisance?

If you host a few guests a year, for a few days, and they are your friends or people who you might trust, no issue whatsoever.

A never ending cycle of tourists staying for 2-10 days as your neighbours? That's definitely a nuisance over time, very improbable that churning through 50-100 groups of different people per year won't create issues to neighbours.

If you don't see how it could be an issue I think only if you lived in a touristic place, neighbour to AirBnBs, to actually understand. I say that not to provoke you but because I feel it's hard to empathise when it's not your day-to-day life. Just this year I experienced that when staying at a friend's place in Lisbon, I shared it on another HN thread:

> As an anecdote: a month ago I stayed a few days (5-7) at a friend's place I was visiting who lives in Lisbon, just on his floor there are 4 AirBnBs (owned by the same person). Not only it was a nuisance with noise for most of the days I was there it was also a nuisance to have drunk British girls banging on your door at 02.00 in the night when they don't remember the fucking apartment they are supposedly going to. My friend mentioned it's not uncommon for that to happen, or to have a gag of people show up to a party in one of the apartments. Other people living in the building have complained to AirBnB, to the police, to the housing association, nothing really happens.

So sounds like the bug is lax enforcement of noise ordinances? Not sure why it makes a difference whether the drunk and noisy houseguest is a short-term renter or a friend of the owner.

A friend of the owner implies the owner is a neighbour, someone who you can eventually talk about the issue in the house. It makes a difference as there's a greater degree of social bond (and consequently shame).

Are you being obtuse on purpose to not give up on a flawed argument?

For the same reason I have a say about zoning and ordinances and just about every other thing that affects my property and my enjoyment of it.

My question is why should you have much of a say about those things as well. Smells like a NIMBY

If it's a residential property, it's a residential property, not (what is effectively a) hotel.

Again: it’s not your property, so why do you care about their guests staying for 1 night or 1 month? Seems like a rather artificial distinction.

I live within walking distance dozens of short-term rentals in a very small town.

The difference between having dozens of neighbors with families, children, and strong ties to the community and not having those neighbors and community connections is in no way artificial.

Some reasons I care: schools that decline with population loss, the lack of available/affordable rental homes for local residents, the effects on local retail and service businesses, the tendency for hurried visitors to drive at unsafe speeds while staring at their phone for directions.

Problems that you do not experience remain real problems.

So basically instead of thinking about how you can better accommodate visitor demand and respect property owners’ rights, you would prefer to regulate your “small town feel” back into existence.

It seems your passion for this topic is such that you are attributing to me things others may have said in this thread (or elsewhere).

I’m just drawing some reasonable inferences from your list of complaints. If you feel I’ve misrepresented your position, feel free to correct me.

Because it's an apartment building with shared space, shared resources and shared investments. If your neighbors plot is a residential plot, he cannot build a pig farm there or a nuclear power plant. If your neighbors apartment is an apartment, he cannot have a shooting range, a bar, a strip club or a hotel there. There's a difference between occasional guests and airBnB, the same as there is a difference between a friend who helps you fix your car vs someone who regulary fixes cars for money.

As long as the property owner registers their short term rental with the local government and pays their taxes, and as long as their guests are respectful and don’t cause any trouble, why do you even care?

I think I get your perspective (but also you should really understand that your arguments are just going unidirectional instead of building a healthy dialog), but it made me wonder what really went wrong (or changed, depending on your perspective) from Hegel's utopian egalitarianism to how communism was implemented in practice a century later. I guess people just tend to "adapt" legal and governance theories built with perfectly good intentions to their advantage and then things go awry.

It's a limited resource being misused. It is in the interest of the locals for tourists to stay in hotels and apartments to be available for long(er) term rent for the locals. Barcelona was one of the first cities to ban short-term rentals (under 31 days), and hopefully not the last.

It’s only “limited” because housing has been made artificially scarce by local governments operating in the interests of property owners by restricting new builds in order to keep housing prices high. In regions and countries that have allowed enough housing to be built to actually meet demand there is much less hand-wringing about short-term rentals.

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