I admit I am biased, I usually hate staying in hotels and when I'm traveling I often want to be near family, so a house or apartment nearby where I can walk is better than a hotel where I have to drive.
> It’s funny how China has basically the inverse problem as America. We subsidize demand and restrict supply. They subsidize supply and restrict demand.
We really should reconsider how we structure our policies
The issue with short term rentals is that they are self-reinforcing on the upside, where large deltas in housing prices disincentivizes long term leases, which encourages more short term rentals, which raises housing prices by perpetuating the shortage.
I think people should be allowed to operate a B&B if they want to, but they should be in the business of operating a B&B, not of side income while waiting for an appreciating real estate asset to mature.
Housing should be used as housing, and when it has become traded as a HODL asset, the market is not serving the public.
The way to solve the solution is to legalize density. Scarcity business models collapse when the marginal return approaches the marginal cost of production.
Since that’s not happening, we ought to not let people just jump in and out of the short term rental business, because it is self-reinforcing on the way up and on the way down. I think it’s good policy to reduce bubble prone industries where possible because the downside risks are non-trivial to the community.
That you agree would make you one of the crying NIMBYs, it would seem.
> a walkable residential neighborhood
You see the contradiction in your logic right?
As someone who owns a house in one of those "walkable residential neighborhoods" the reason they feel so pleasant is precisely because virtually all the people living there have lived their a long time (most people on my block have been here ~20 years). This means there is a community that keeps the local shops alive, people know each other so that they know who does and doesn't belong which keeps them those places safe (I can't overstate how important this is), people raise their children there so they remain active in local politics and work to ensure policies that continue to make these areas nice, and, because they have invested a lot in that area, their homes are all beautiful.
The houses in my neighborhood that are AirBnBs is painfully obvious, and thankfully remain quite few in number. The parts of my city that contain higher density of housing for "full time nomads" are notably worse, and often have much higher number of other "nomads" (mainly itinerant homeless). I've lived in other cities in some beautiful, historic neighborhoods, that are effectively ghosts of what they were given that a critical number of the apartments don't have permanent residents. Still pleasant for a stroll, but you can feel the void of a living community of residents.
I can give you plenty of examples of places where people owned their houses for decades and it’s still crappy.