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Comment by shiroiushi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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