What does a world without Airbnb look like? | Hacker News Reader

What does a world without Airbnb look like?

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17 pointskelnos49 comments

I’m skeptical of the claim that short-term rental clampdown is the main factor influencing NYC’s $300-a-night average hotel room rate these days.

It seems likely also to have to do with the decision [0] to convert 20% of the city’s stock of hotels to shelters even as demand rebounded post-COVID. Primarily the stock on the cheaper end of the market.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/25/nyregion/hotels-prices-mi...?

I agree with this thinking. Funny the city is using short term housing as long term shelters, but then bans using long term housing for short term rental because that distorts the market so! Hypocritical, yes, but the winner of the hypocritical scenario is the local citizen, and the loser, the tourist, which is typical of NYC and many other cities.

> but the winner of the hypocritical scenario is the local citizen, and the loser, the tourist, which is typical of NYC and many other cities.

We aren’t talking about war crimes, so yeah this all sounds completely normal and kind of a truism?

Why would or should a local polity put the interests of outsiders ahead of those of its own citizens, especially with regards to housing?

Because people don't always understand the whole picture when it comes to their interests.

Perhaps it's a city where tourism is incredibly important for prosperity. Maybe making things harder on tourists will result in problems for local businesses, or lower tax revenue that impacts the services the city can provide to its residents.

And maybe not -- but it's plausible, and city officials need to take this sort of thing into account.

is that a problem...? should a city not prioritize its citizens over random vacationers?

>"There are many groups for whom hotels as the only option simply doesn't work," she says. "While the hotel industry has done legwork to be accommodating to families, the room layouts and prices don't work for the majority of families (especially those with 2+ kids) trying to take short breaks to cities. There has to be a way to balance the goals of the city while still catering to this segment of travellers – it's a huge loss to parents who want to introduce their children to the world."

As someone who occasionally travels with his two children: this ignores pricing completely. The second you need a family-sized AirBnb you might as well go for a hotel; at least here in Australia family-sized rooms are cheaper in hotels than on AirBnb, where you generally need half a house. I'd rather my children live in a world where they can afford rent.

If your kids can't afford rent, that's because your city/county isn't building enough new housing units. It's not because of AirBnB.

The way I see it, AirBnB is simply taking advantage of the fact that, in many cities, there's too few hotel rooms, and the prices are much too high for various reasons (excessive taxes, lack of supply, etc.). It shouldn't be cheaper for an individual to buy a whole house and rent it out on a per-day basis (esp. at the crazy prices houses cost in those same places) than for a person to just get a hotel room for a few nights from a big company that's built a large building full of separate rooms for this specific purpose, but it frequently is. That means something is deeply wrong with the market. The problem isn't AirBnB, the problem is the local (or national) government and its policies and regulation.

Or, private equity buys up all the homes and rents them or AirBNBs them (or both) and then uses their massive asset equity to buy more homes. This natural pressure raises the prices, and thus their asset value which lets them acquire more and more. Build more houses? Feed the beast.

FIRST prevent housing investment in all forms. Then build more homes.

Sorry, economics don't work that way. If you build more houses, and build them more densely, it increases the supply. If corporations buy them up, they're still competing with each other and won't be able to raise the prices too much. They're only able to keep raising prices because supply is limited, so stop limiting supply.

You don't need to ban housing investment. We don't have any such laws here in Japan. The only reason they're able to treat housing as an investment in other places is because of a lack of supply. Here, there's lots of supply, because the laws don't forbid development the way they do everywhere else. There, housing values increase over time because of the shortage. Here, housing values decrease over time: buying a house is never a lucrative investment, just a way to avoid rent increases (or having to move), to have control over your own home, because you think the land might increase in value (maybe they're going to build a new subway station nearby in 10 years), etc.

> they're still competing with each other and won't be able to raise the prices too much.

That only works if (a) there are multiple companies rather than one doing this and (b) they are operating independently and (c) there is a surplus of housing available;

Take away any of those scenarios and there is not real competition, and thus they charge what they want.

> there is a surplus of housing available

That's the entire point. You need to satisfy demand. If you have more demand than supply, you are always going to have housing unaffordability.

> Take away any of those scenarios...

Not really. Even if there's only one company that owns a lot of the housing stock, they can't just set prices wherever they want. People still have the choice not to live there, if the pricing isn't to their liking. And if there's equilibrium, or a surplus of housing, landlords have to meet renters on price.

(Certainly the ideal is that you have many many landlords, rather than just one, of course.)

Imagine that: if you ignore all the government regulations that are put in place to protect people, you can provide a cheaper service.

I am shocked, shocked I tell you.

Government regulations aren't there to protect all people, they're there to make house prices go up infinitely by artificially restricting supply. And also to protect white people from Black people (redlining).

counter examples: FAR 91, FAR 101, building codes for fire and electrical.

almost every one of these regulations exist because somebody/company screwed up. yes, there are abuses like regulatory capture, but generally somebody messed up.

need further convincing? look into the history of housing over the past 1000 years, London fires and Cholera epidemics from public wells come to mind.

What does any of that have to do with AirBnB? If a house isn't safe enough to be used for short-term stays, it's not safe enough for anyone to live in.

> Government regulations aren't there to protect all people,

I gave examples of regulations that protect people. Existing houses are safe enough to AirBnB or live in because of regulations.

There's also plenty of government regulations (at the local level, mainly involving zoning) that prevent building new housing, because existing homeowners want to keep property values high. How is that protecting peoples' safety?

Zoning is the least of your worries about keeping new housing from being built. There is an unwillingness to raze older buildings or industrial brownfields and turn them into housing. At least around here, there are many "undesirable" properties on bus lines, within reach of the city services, that would repurposed as housing sites.

There's an unwillingness because those aren't zoned for housing (or the kind of housing that developers want to build there).

In the US at least, the practice of owning and renting a home isn't something that Airbnb invented - it's something people have been doing for many many decades. And while it might have been a reasonable critique that Airbnb skirted regulations in its early days, the practice is almost always heavily regulated where it is allowed today.

I can't speak to the US but in Australia rentals are also heavily regulated.

Just because they didn't invent something doesn't mean they aren't also abusing the system.

protect some people (sometimes at the expense of others).

Eg the regulations limiting the amount of doctors has harmed millions.

It depends on where you're going and I'll usually price both, but in the US I've usually found that a full-home Airbnb with two bedrooms is as cheap as an acceptably sized hotel room, with the added benefit of an easier checkin and checkout, no next-wall neighbors to worry about, and a full suite including kitchen and living room.

The only time lately where a hotel has made more sense for us has been when we're intentionally choosing the cheapest possible motel because we're arriving late and leaving early (a stop on a road trip).

Edit: I should probably clarify that my kids are light sleepers and won't go down easily while there's movement in the room, so the standard cramped-quarters 2xQueen arrangement that hotels offer isn't really viable for us for a longer stay. We need a space where the adults can go while the kids go to sleep.

Yup, agreed. In many places I'll end up with a 2- or 3-bedroom Airbnb for only myself and my wife, and it's comparable or cheaper than a hotel. So much more room, and a full kitchen, to boot. Rare that a hotel room even has a microwave, let alone a stove, oven, etc. in a dedicated kitchen space.

The point of that quote seems quite clear to me: an Airbnb with 2+ separated rooms is qualitatively different than an extra large hotel room.

I think a more important question is what is the value in "catering to this segment of travellers"? The article goes into that near the end, but it doesn't benefit me to have tourists come to my city. Whereas living next to an AirBnB does impose costs on me.

> it doesn't benefit me to have tourists come to my city

Not sure where you live, but generally tourists allow for a greater amount of restaurants, bars and cultural institutions than the same size city without much tourism. Not to mention hotels! Those things are employers and tax payers which helps the local economy. Often they are in core areas subject to business improvement area (BIA) levies that pay for public events and public art.

In short: tourists can be annoying but they generally are positive.

> it doesn't benefit me to have tourists come to my city

That's unlikely to be true. Any city with tourists benefits from increased economic activity that helps fund city services through hotel or short-term rental taxes, as well as tourists spending their money in the city and paying sales taxes.

Cities with a healthy tourist economy can also support more museums, bars, restaurants, and other kinds of amenities; without tourists there just isn't the customer base to support as much.

I think you're talking about cramming an entire family into one larger hotel room vs. renting an entire apartment/house, right? The thing is if you need two or more rooms, then renting an entire house/apartment often becomes substantially cheaper (I just checked for Sydney, Australia, and it's the case there), you get much more common space, and also the ability to cook/wash clothes.

There are some caveats - the hotel has daily maid service, but most people don't need a maid to clean their room on a daily basis. The AirBnB one time cleaning fees make it so that the longer you stay in the AirBnB, the cheaper the cost of the stay is on a per-day basis.

Barcelona has a population of 1.6 million people and Spain has an average household size of 2.5. This means that the 10k rentals that will return to the housing market will house about 25k people, or 1.5% of the current population of Barcelona.

That's not nothing, but it's pretty clearly not going to make a substantial impact on housing prices.

Exactly. The problem there is the same as the problem in every city where housing costs have gone way up: they aren't building enough new units. It's really as simple as that; it's a simply supply-and-demand issue. And generally the reason they aren't building new units is because of zoning restrictions.

So destroy demand for uses that are discretionary instead of non discretionary. Vacation travel accommodations aren’t a right, and tourists aren’t part of the local electorate.

Airbnb isn’t going to magically put more supply on the market, only cause existing supply to be used for short term rentals. The benefit of a ban need not be extraordinary to justify, only a net positive.

Why do you need to regulate it at all? If you allow land to be used for hotels or housing equally, and don't slap huge taxes on hotel rooms just to pay for sports stadiums, then the market will sort things out and it won't be cheaper to stay in an AirBnB instead of a hotel. It works fine here in Japan: AirBnB isn't a big thing here except maybe in rural places not well served by hotels.

Because it is the right of the local citizens and community to choose to do so if they deem the action to be appropriate. They do not need to justify the bans to anyone outside of their community or voting boundaries.

The evidence is robust that “the market will sort things out” is not accurate. Capital and regulatory evasion will always move faster.

So if the local citizens ban minorities from living there, that's OK with you?

This is not a good faith argument, minorities are not a type of housing. Someone’s holiday is not a protected class.

Your argument is bad-faith.

Localities vote for zoning regulations, which have the effect of increasing housing prices and keeping (generally poorer) minorities out.

Can you explain how that is relevant to short term rental bans and voters supporting them?

My whole point is that short-term rental bans aren't going to fix the fundamental problem, which is the lack of housing supply. It's just a feel-good measure to make politicians look like they're doing something useful, and sticking it to the tourists makes angry locals feel better. The parent comment I initially replied to showed how the math doesn't work: adding housing for ~25k people in a city with 1.6M people isn't going to make some huge difference in housing costs.

If you want stable housing prices, the answer is very simple: copy Japan. Stop restricting the construction of new housing units, and fix the regulations so housing developers can build more units for people to live in. It's the same story in cities around the world, except in Japan, because all these other places want to restrict the supply of housing, usually using the argument about local voter's "rights" and their prerogative to make regulations restricting housing. This is exactly what the NIMBYs in the SanFran bay area have been doing, to "protect" their property values, and the result is astronomical housing costs.

But that is the problem with your point: it is unlikely that any locale will copy Japan, and increase housing supply in the manner you describe, hence why it isn’t a solution.

“You just have to do what no one else will do except this one example.”

Then they can sit around and wonder why they're having so many housing problems, and all the social and economic problems that stem from that. The solution is simple, and from what I've read, some places have done some work towards loosening restrictions, with good results.

Then those people and their cities are screwed. They can make lots of noise about banning Airbnb or foreign real estate investment or whatever, but none of that won't solve their problems. There are only two possible solutions:

1. Build lots and lots of new housing, and then supply will meet demand.

2. Find ways to make your city crappier and less appealing, and then demand will drop, making the existing supply sufficient.

And that's it. There are no other solutions that will work.

San Francisco, for example, seems to be opting for #2, though even that isn't working too well to drop prices. (And I say that as a homeowner here.)

SanFran is definitely choosing #2, but the problem for people wanting affordable housing is that there's a ton of inertia that affects real estate prices, so it could take decades to make housing more affordable, unless some kind of collapse event happens. The bay area is still a huge employer in the tech sector, and companies can't just pick up and move on a whim. There's been some action to move away from that area (and California in general) over the last decade but most of it hasn't gone very far for various reasons. So people are still earning huge salaries, and paying enormous sums for rent in the area while having to put up with feces on the sidewalks and boarded-up stores, and this could go on for a long time.

But there's probably a lot of other not-so-well-known mid-tier US cities where they don't have the huge inertia provided by the tech sector, and are going to turn into relative ghost towns much faster, as people look for more affordable places to live where there's also good jobs in their sector and a lifestyle or local culture they favor.

> but none of that won't solve their problems

But none of that will solve their problems, I mean, of course. (I'm well outside the edit window, sigh.)

You're missing the point: shutting down short-term renting will not really move the needle. What's usually the case is that even if you put those 10k units (or whatever) back on the normal long-term rental (or buy-to-occupy) market, prices will stay roughly the same. You need to build 100k new homes (or more!) to actually reduce home prices. The demand will not even be remotely satisfied by banning STRs.

Existing homeowners don't want new housing built, because it'll reduce their home value. Homeowners tend to vote more than renters do, and tourists of course don't get a vote. Airbnb is a convenient bogeyman to distract people from the garbage zoning laws and barriers to development already in place.

The problem is pretty much always NIMBYs.

I'm not missing the point. I'm asserting that if locals want to ban short term rentals, they can, and there is nothing anyone outside of the jurisdiction can do about it. Arguing over whether the bans move the needle is immaterial, although you are free to complain about it, as it is the only recourse available.

I'm not sure what the point of your argument is then. Locals can vote for all kinds of things, smart or dumb. They could vote on whether to ban the color purple on storefronts, for instance, though (IMO) it would be a stupid law to pass. This discussion is about AirBnB and housing prices, so just loudly proclaiming "locals can vote for policies they want!" isn't productive here at all. The entire point of this discussion is to argue the merits of these initiatives.

I travel places with one or zero hotels. Remote areas near skiing or parks, the other option is not going.

Also I’ve found even if a hotel is a bit cheaper we can save hundreds by cooking ourselves. Especially with two teens. This is doable in some hotels but not well.

The insane cleaning fees and chores are the downsides and requires me to be vigilant. For places I go a lot, I connect with the LL offline and do it privately. ToS be darned.

No more long list of chores to do when I go to my hotel?

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