As far as I can remember AirBnB didn't cause the 2008 financial disaster that really sealed the fate of homeownership in America for the next decade for a lot of Americans.
AirBnB has provided an avenue to generate income for small business owners in rural communities. Urban areas are struggling because they aren't building more.
BUILD MORE. How difficult is it to understand that?
What I said was rather more specifically qualified than that.
The thing that's "ruined communities and destroyed the dream of home ownership" is the incapacity of the community, "where they were brought up", to actually change and accommodate increasing demands.
In reality these individuals from these communities are using Left rhetoric to advocate an extremely conservative position. That is for the community to remain as is, in the exact way such people were "brought up", such that no progress, no change, no additional value is added to the communities.
What ends up happening because of this confused policy is that the individuals in these communities both lose out on their hometown, the community ends up changing, and it becomes impossibly expensive for everyone in the community. IE the worst of all options.
Instead. Build more. Build vertically. Build better infrastructure. Provide for local residents an opportunity to "buy-in".
This kind of cloaked conservatism, masquerading itself using leftist rhetoric ends up being confused from a policy POV.
There are rural/tourist-dependent communities that had an adequate supply of housing when the only visitor accomodation was licensed as a hotel/motel/inn/B&B/hostel. They didn't need a lot of extra, but some slack to accomodate tourist season workers, and occasional new arrivals.
Then AirBnB came along and converted not just the slack, but some residential property that would otherwise have been available for long term lease, into much more profitable short term rentals.
Income at licensed residential stays sometimes drops; short term and long term housing options either vanish or are reduced; problems begin to occur that were not present before.
None of this is in any way dependent on the failures caused by zoning, permitting and housing policy.
This story has been repeated at tourist locations across the world.
AirBnB was fundamentally a message to anyone with residential property: you can make more money with it as a short term rental than via any other use. This is why in many locations we've seen new construction of residential property intended solely for short term rentals. Nobody wanted to build that stuff when it was only going to be LTR; AirBnB changed the game.
The complicating factor (which they miss) for a tourist region is that if your "product" is (in part) Small Town Charm, or Rural Character, then you can't build, baby, build without destroying the economic underpinning of the entire community. I wish my hometown had allowed for more hotels (like, decades ago - they were horribly regulator-captured for ages), and had the wisdom to restrict STR before it became such a thing.
For anywhere with a non-tourism based economy, however, I think they are correct: increasing supply is the only possible solution.
It only occurs to me upon writing this that areas without any existing tourist infrastructure are becoming tourist-dependent on the basis of STR, which might be the worst of both worlds. Those places need to allow hotels and (actual) B&Bs, before they ruin their communities through STR-tourist dependence.
Americas are a lot bigger than the USA, and the unicorns had a disruptive effect wider still.